Materialism is an anti-idealist and anti-essentialist position which criticizes essentialist abstraction and reification and the formalist reduction of substance to forms and relations. It is realist in that the world is seen as having a recalcitrant being of its own which resists our intentions. Materialists (sometimes called cultural materialists) emphasize such things as the textual representation of the material conditions of social reality (such as poverty, sickness and exploitation), the socio-cultural and historical contingency of signifying practices, and the specificity and physical properties of media and signs (suppressed in the transparency of dominant codes of aesthetic realism).