Commodity as transcendence

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A commodity, in the 'society of the spectacle’ is an object raised in and through its preparedness for exchange – its abstraction from the sensuous human activity of which it is the product – to the status of an idea. Marx’s chapter on commodity fetishism in Das Kapital defines commodification as a form of transcendence.

Tthe clearest statement of good fetishism’s purpose and method is the brisk ultimatum: ‘No ideas but in things.’

This does not mean that there should be no ideas at all. It means rather that ‘the poet should recognise things as the necessary condition for ideas.’

For instance Literature can often be about the reobjectification of the object, and is itself such a reobjectification

What is the logic’ whereby an ‘everyday object’ candle sticks for instance, becomes, through the accretions of history, a ‘cultural thing’.

;Look at those candle sticks they are quite beuatiful' is to enter into  the utopia of reification.

A friend of mine visits her neurasthenic old buddy on the windswept Kent coast and observes her
piling up of bric a brac, she returns to London  in wild gusts of despair as she reports on this piling up of ‘shabby and battered’ objects: brandy flasks, matchboxes, pen-wipers, ashtrays.
She does not say this but she is reporting on the grotesque nature of commodifacation the fetishism of objects.
But if we did not fetishise objects some say it would be the end ‘end of the imagination’: to a time when the things have no ideas left in them. But to reach that - the absence of the imagination, Stevens this itself would have to be imagined.