Allegory and Alienation

Abstract

Allegory has always been a fitting vehicle for depicting the psychological experience of alienation. It conveys the commodification of labour-power, whereby human activity is represented as an autonomous, self-reproducing symbol. Aristophanes and John Bunyan use personification to illustrate the reification of subjectivity produced by wage-labour, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and John Milton employ allegory to depict the postlapsarian condition, while Baudelaire and Goethe revive ancient allegorical techniques to reflect on modernity. The commentaries of Aristotle, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Frederic Jameson provide a theoretical tradition that interprets allegory as the aesthetic expression of exchange-value’s autonomous agency. Today’s economic and ideological hegemony of finance capital means that the twenty-first century can accurately be called the ‘Age of Allegory’.