Reification (Marxism)

György Lukács

The concept of reification arose through the work of Lukács in his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", collected in his book History and Class Consciousness (1923). 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 of Capital (1867).

Those who have written about this concept include Max Stirner, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek.

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

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 the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse, and Axel Honneth.

Frankfurt School philosopher Axel 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 as capitalism, as Karl Marx and György Lukács argued, 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 scholarship on Lukács's (1923) use of the term "reification" in History and Class Consciousness has 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 by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to 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 themes Martin Heidegger (1927) touches on in Being and Time, supporting the suggestion of Lucien Goldman (2009) that Lukács and Heidegger were much closer in their philosophical concerns than typically thought.

Louis Althusser

French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized what he called the "ideology of reification" that sees things' everywhere in human relations." Althusser's critique derives from his understanding that Marx underwent significant theoretical and methodological change or an "epistemological break" between his early and his mature work.

Though the concept of reification is used in Das Kapital by Marx, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in the early The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

References

References

1. [[Gajo Petrović]]. 2005 [1983]. "[https://www.marxists.org/archive/petrovic/1983/reification.htm Reification]." ''[[Marxists Internet Archive]]'', transcribed by R. Dumain from [[Thomas Bottomore. T. Bottomore]], L. Harris, [[Victor Kiernan. V. G. Kiernan]], and [[Ralph Miliband. R. Miliband]] (eds.). 1983. ''A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.'' Cambridge, MA: [[Harvard University Press]]. Pp. 411–413.
2. [[Andrew Feenberg. Feenberg, Andrew]]. 1986 [1981]. ''Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory.'' New York: [[Oxford University Press]].
3. [[Andrew Feenberg. Feenberg, Andrew]]. 2014. ''The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School''. London: [[Verso Books. Verso Press]].
4. [[Axel Honneth. Honneth, Axel]]. 2008. ''Reification: A New Look'', with responses by [[Judith Butler. Butler, Judith]], [[Raymond Geuss]], and [[Jonathan Lear]]. New York: [[Oxford University Press]].
5. (1966). "[[The Social Construction of Reality". Anchor [[Doubleday (publisher).
6. Silva, Sónia. (2013). "Reification and fetishism: Processes of transformation". [[Theory, Culture & Society]].
7. Westerman, R. 2010. "The Reification of Consciousness: Husserl’s Phenomenology in Lukács’s Subject-Object." ''[[New German Critique]]'' 111.
8. [[Lucien Goldmann. Goldman, Lucien]]. 2009. ''[[Lukacs and Heidegger. Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy]]'', translated by W. Q. Boelhower. London: [[Routledge]].
9. [[Louis Althusser. Althusser, Louis]]. 1969 [1965]. ''For Marx'', translated by B. Brewster. p. 230, "[http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65ii.html#s7 Marxism and Humanism]." Retrieved via ''[http://www.marx2mao.com/ From Marx to Mao] {{Webarchive. link. (16 May 2010 '', transcribed by D. J. Romagnolo (2002). Web.)