Reification (Marxism)
Encyclopedia
Reification is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human (pathetic fallacy
) or living (reification fallacy
) existence and abilities, when in reality they do not. At the same time it implies the thingification of social relations to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism
and value-form
).
Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections yet seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion
of consciousness
, ranging from the rather innocent, to the grotesque
.
Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object or because it does not truly exist in separation.
Marx
argues that reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade, i.e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends, reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects.
This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.
The concept is related to, but is distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation
and commodity fetishism
. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.
in "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book History and Class Consciousness
. The concept of reification has also been present in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer
and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment
, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse
. Others who have written about this point include Gajo Petrović
, Raya Dunayevskaya
, Raymond Williams
, Timothy Bewes, Axel Honneth
, John Zerzan
, and Slavoj Žižek
.
Petrović, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, defines reification as:
Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".
Examples include the creation of false desires by the real labor of advertising. This is the construction of nouns naming parts of reality as intrinsically desirable "products", where the legal system of the capitalist country provides "fit for use" presumptions, and legislation allows the entrepreneur to create, for example, a reified and indeed fetishised noun, from “intellectual property
” to “Hula Hoop
” and “Windows Vista
”.
philosopher
Louis Althusser
criticized in his 1965 article Marxism and Humanism, what he called "An ideology
of reification that sees 'things' everywhere in human relations". Althusser's critique derives from his theory of the epistemological break, which finds that Marx underwent significant theoretical
and methodological
change between his early writings
and his mature ones.
The concept of reification is used in Das Kapital
, Marx's most mature work; however, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation
developed in The German Ideology
and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
.
Frankfurt School
philosopher
Axel Honneth
reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power in his recent work Reification (Oxford, 2008). 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.
Pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphic fallacy or sentimental fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations. The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification...
) or living (reification fallacy
Reification (fallacy)
Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea...
) existence and abilities, when in reality they do not. At the same time it implies the thingification of social relations to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism
In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
and value-form
Value-form
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues...
).
Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections yet seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion
Distortion
A distortion is the alteration of the original shape of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minimize it in practice...
of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, ranging from the rather innocent, to the grotesque
Grotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
.
Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object or because it does not truly exist in separation.
Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
argues that reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade, i.e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends, reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects.
This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.
The concept is related to, but is distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
and commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism
In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.
Quotations from Marx showing the use of the concept
Development and significance of the concept
After Marx, the concept was developed in extense by Georg LukácsGeorg Lukács
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...
in "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book History and Class Consciousness
History and Class Consciousness
History and Class Consciousness is a book by Georg Lukács, written in 1923. Class consciousness, as described by Lukács, is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology . According to Lukács, each social class has a determined...
. The concept of reification has also been present in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment...
and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Dialectic of Enlightenment , is one of the core texts of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment...
, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
. Others who have written about this point include Gajo Petrović
Gajo Petrovic
Gajo Petrović was one of the main theorists in the Marxist humanist Praxis School in the SFR Yugoslavia. He was the only one among the editors of the Praxis journal to stay in this position throughout the journal's publication...
, Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya
Raya Dunayevskaya was the founder of the philosophy of Marxist Humanism in the United States of America. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.-Biography:Of Jewish...
, Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, Timothy Bewes, Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, Germany and director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.-Biography:...
, John Zerzan
John Zerzan
John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like...
, and Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
.
Petrović, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 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 of modern capitalist society.
Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".
Examples include the creation of false desires by the real labor of advertising. This is the construction of nouns naming parts of reality as intrinsically desirable "products", where the legal system of the capitalist country provides "fit for use" presumptions, and legislation allows the entrepreneur to create, for example, a reified and indeed fetishised noun, from “intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
” to “Hula Hoop
Hula hoop
A hula hoop is a toy hoop that is twirled around the waist, limbs or neck.Although the exact origins of hula hoops are unknown, children and adults around the world have played with hoops, twirling, rolling and throwing them throughout history...
” and “Windows Vista
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
”.
Criticism
FrenchFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
criticized in his 1965 article Marxism and Humanism, what he called "An ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
of reification that sees 'things' everywhere in human relations". Althusser's critique derives from his theory of the epistemological break, which finds that Marx underwent significant theoretical
Theory
The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...
and methodological
Methodology
Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specificcomponents such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools . It can be defined also as follows:...
change between his early writings
Young Marx
Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...
and his mature ones.
The concept of reification is used in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, Marx's most mature work; however, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
developed in The German Ideology
The German Ideology
The German Ideology is a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow...
and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. Not published by Marx during his lifetime, they were first released in 1927 by researchers in the Soviet Union.The notebooks are an early expression of Marx's analysis of...
.
Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth
Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, Germany and director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.-Biography:...
reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power in his recent work Reification (Oxford, 2008). Instead of being an effect of the structural character of social systems such as capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, as Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and György Lukács argued, Honneth contends that all forms of reification are due to pathologies of intersubjectively based struggles for recognition.
Further reading
- Althusser, Louis: "Humanism and Marxism" in For Marx, The Penguin Press, 1969.
- Arato, Andrew: Lukács’s Theory of Reification, Telos, 1972.
- Bewes, Timothy 2002: Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, 2002, ISBN 1859846858.
- Burris, Val: "Reification: A marxist perspective", California Sociologist, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 22–43.
- Dahms, Harry: "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas." Current Perspectives in Social Theory 18 (1998): 3-62. (See Harry DahmsHarry DahmsHarry F. Dahms is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee since fall 2004, and Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Head in the Department of Sociology . His primary research and teaching areas are theory, economic sociology, globalization, social inequality, and...
) - Dunayevskaya, Raya: "Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities", in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 167–191.
- Floyd, Kevin: "Introduction: On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge," in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
- Gabel, Joseph : False consciousness : an essay on reification. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
- Goldmann, Lucien 1959: "Réification", in Recherches dialectiques, Gallimard, 1959, Paris.
- Honneth, Axel: "Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View", The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at University of California-Berkeley, March 14–16, 2005.
- Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look. Oxford University Press, 2008. Honneth on reification with responses by Judith ButlerJudith ButlerJudith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
, Raymond GeussRaymond GeussRaymond Geuss , a Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, is a political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy.-Life:...
, and Jonathan LearJonathan LearJonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.-Biography:...
. - Kangrga, Milan 1968: ‘Was ist Verdinglichung?’
- Larsen, Neil: "Lukács sans Proletariat, or Can History and Class Consciousness be Rehistoricized?". Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, Continuum, 2011: 81-100.
- Löwith, Karl 1932 (1982): Max Weber and Karl Marx.
- Lukács, Georg 1923: "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History & Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1967.
- Petrović, Gajo:"Reification" in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. KiernanVictor KiernanProfessor Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British Marxist historian and a former member of the Communist Party Historians Group with a particular focus on the history of imperialism ..Kiernan was born in Ashton upon Mersey, Sale to Congregationalist lower-middle class parents...
, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411–413. - Rubin, I. I. 1928 (1972): Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.
- Schaff, Adam 1980: Alienation as a Social Phenomenon.
- Tadić, Ljubomir 1969: ‘Bureaucracy—Reified Organization’. In M. Marković and G. Petrović eds. Praxis.
- Vandenberghe, Frederic: A Philosophical History of German Sociology. London: Routledge, 2009.