Reification (Marxism)

For other uses, seeReification (disambiguation).

In Marxist philosophy,reification(Verdinglichung,"making into a thing" ) is the process by which humansocial relationsare perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

As a practice of economics, reification transforms objects into subjects and subjects into objects, with the result that subjects (people) are rendered passive (of determined identity), whilst objects (commodities) are rendered as the active factor that determines the nature of a social relation. Analogously, the termhypostatizationdescribes an effect of reification that results from presuming the existence of any object that can be named and presuming the existence of an abstractly conceived object, which is afallacy of reificationofontologicalandepistemologicalinterpretation.

Reification is conceptually related to, but different fromMarx's theory of alienationand theory ofcommodity fetishism;alienationis the general condition of human estrangement;reificationis a specific form of alienation; andcommodity fetishismis a specific form of reification.

Georg Lukács

The concept of reification arose through the work ofLukács(1923), in the essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" (1923), in his bookHistory and Class Consciousness,which defines the termreification.Lukács treats reification as a problem of capitalist society that is related to the prevalence of the commodity form, through a close reading of "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret" in the first volume ofCapital.

Those who have written about this concept includeMax Stirner,Guy Debord,Raya Dunayevskaya,Raymond Williams,Timothy Bewes, andSlavoj Žižek.

Marxist humanistGajo Petrović(1965), drawing from Lukács, defines reification as:

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a 'special' case of alienation, its most radical and widespread form characteristic ofmodern capitalist society.

Andrew Feenberg(1981) reinterprets Lukács's central category of "consciousness" as similar to anthropological notions of culture as a set of practices.The reification of consciousness in particular, therefore, is more than just an act of misrecognition; it affects the everyday social practice at a fundamental level beyond the individual subject.

Frankfurt School

Lukács's account was influential for thephilosophersof theFrankfurt School,for example inHorkheimer's andAdorno'sDialectic of Enlightenment,and in the works ofHerbert Marcuse,andAxel Honneth.

Frankfurt SchoolphilosopherAxel Honneth(2008) reformulates this "Western Marxist"concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power.Instead of being an effect of the structural character of social systems such ascapitalism,as Karl Marx andGyörgy Lukácsargued, Honneth contends that all forms of reification are due to pathologies of intersubjectively based struggles for recognition.

Social construction

Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will."However, some scholarshipon Lukács's (1923) use of the term "reification" inHistory and Class Consciousnesshas challenged this interpretation of the concept, according to which reification implies that a pre-existing subject creates an objective social world from which it is then alienated.

Phenomenology

Other scholarship has suggested that Lukács's use of the term may have been strongly influenced byEdmund Husserl'sphenomenologyto understand his preoccupation with the reification of consciousness in particular.On this reading, reification entails a stance that separates the subject from the objective world, creating a mistaken relation between subject and object that is reduced to disengaged knowing. Applied to the social world, this leaves individual subjects feeling that society is something they can only know as an alien power, rather than interact with. In this respect, Lukács's use of the term could be seen as prefiguring some of the themesMartin Heidegger(1927) touches on inBeing and Time,supporting the suggestion ofLucien Goldman(2009) that Lukács and Heidegger were much closer in their philosophical concerns than typically thought.

Louis Althusser

French philosopherLouis Althussercriticized what he called the "ideologyof reification "that sees" 'things' everywhere in human relations. "Althusser's critique derives from his understanding that Marx underwent significanttheoreticalandmethodologicalchange or an "epistemological break"between his early and his mature work.

Though the concept of reification is used inDas Kapitalby Marx, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in the earlyThe German Ideologyand in theEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

See also

• The Secret of Hegel
• Character mask
• Objectification
• Caste
• Reification (fallacy)
• Hypostatic abstraction– Formal operation in mathematical logic
• Immanentize the eschaton– Pejorative term referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world.
• Hauntology– Return or persistence of past ideas

Further reading

• Arato, Andrew.1972. "Lukács’s Theory of Reification"Telos.
• Bewes, Timothy. 2002. "Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism" (illustrated ed.). Verso.ISBN1-85984-685-8.Retrieved viaGoogle Books.
• Burris, Val. 1988."Reification: A marxist perspective."California Sociologist10(1). Pp. 22–43.
• Dabrowski, Tomash. 2014."Reification."Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought.Blackwell.doi:10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0875.
• Dahms, Harry.1998. "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas."Current Perspectives in Social Theory18(1):3–62.
• Duarte, German A. 2011.Reificación Mediática(Sic Editorial)
• Dunayevskaya, Raya."Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities."Pp. 167–91 inThe Raya Dunayevskaya Collection.
• Floyd, Kevin: "Introduction: On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge," inThe Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism.Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
• Gabel, Joseph.1975.False Consciousness: An Essay On Reification.New York:Harper & Row.
• Goldmann, Lucien.1959 "Réification."Recherches Dialectiques.Paris:Gallimard.
• Honneth, Axel. 2005 March 14–16."Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View."The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,delivered atUniversity of California-Berkeley.
• Kangrga, Milan.1968.Was ist Verdinglichung?
• Larsen, Neil. 2011. "Lukács sans Proletariat, or CanHistory and Class Consciousnessbe Rehistoricized?. "Pp. 81–100 inGeorg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence,edited by T. Bewes and T. Hall. London:Continuum.
• Löwith, Karl.1982 [1932].Max Weber and Karl Marx.
• Lukács, Georg.167 [1923].History & Class Consciousness.Merlin Press. "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."
• Rubin, I. I. 1972 [1928]. "Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value."
• Schaff, Adam. 1980.Alienation as a Social Phenomenon.
• Tadić, Ljubomir.1969. "Bureaucracy—Reified Organization," edited by M. Marković and G. Petrović. Praxis.
• Vandenberghe, Frederic. 2009.A Philosophical History of German Sociology.London:Routledge.
• Westerman, Richard. 2018.Lukács' Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued.New York:Palgrave Macmillan.