Reification as an Ontological Concept (original) (raw)

Towards a Critique of Reification as a Critique of Forms of Life

Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2021

The claim that there is "no alternative", to contemporary neoliberal capitalism is widespread today. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of reification to scrutinize the alleged necessity of the capitalist social order. Developed by Georg Lukács, the problem of reification refers to the experience of social arrangements as thinglike entities rather than as products of social construction. By addressing the problem of reification within a social ontology of forms of life, the occurrence of reification is understood as resulting from the normatively neutral self-presentation of the capitalist form of life. To deneutralize social norms that shape the capitalist form of life, this paper argues that social critique should turn to shared standpoints from which reification is experienced as a problem. Such standpoints can be found in social practices that are already involved in shared, normatively imbued forms of life beyond the reified logic of the capitalist form of life. Hence, it is argued that alternative forms of life are positioned to de-reify the norms that guide the capitalist form of life at large.

Why Still Reification? Toward a Critical Social Ontology

Michael Thompson (ed.) Georg Lukács and the Possibilities of Critical Social Ontology, Leiden: Brill, 2019

After a cartography of the main interpretation threads of Georg Lukács' theory of reification (Postwar French Philosophy, Standpoint Theory Feminism and the Frankfurt School) I go on to discuss reification as a subjectivation process. In order to underpin the latter, I turn to Lukács' Ontology of the Social Being and especially to his understanding of labour as a social-ontological category as promoted by Lucien Goldmann and Nicolas Tertulian. The argument is that through labour processes the subject is being subjectivated not only through the production process and the subsequent alienation of the producer from the product, but also through the consumption of commodities since desires are herein being generated that subjectivate the subject towards their satisfaction. From this though, intersubjective bonds unravel between producers and consumers that designate dereification process as immanently collective process. In the last part, I discuss such collective dereification practices from the background of authors moving within the framework of New Materialisms. The argument is that the ongoing actuality of Lukács' notion of reification lays in founding agency as a necessarily collective form of practice.

Reification: Contemporary Perspectives

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 9/2, 2021

Saulius Jurga, Konstantinos Kavoulakos (eds) A key philosophical theme across traditions including German Idealism, Marxism, critical theory, phenomenology, and existentialism, “reification” (from the Latin res, meaning “thing”) refers to a process whereby phenomena that do not possess thing-like characteristics, such as psyche, consciousness, personhood, personal abilities and capacities, and social relations, are regarded as things. The definition of such thinghood varies among thinkers as diverse as Marx, Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, Lukács, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Paci, Gabel, Goldmann, Habermas, Feenberg, and Honneth, depending on their overall theoretical preferences. For some, the res of reification may refer, for example, to natural things, which belong to the realm of objects and are to be explained on the grounds of natural-scientific procedures; for others, thinghood is a result of complex cultural processes, such as historical sedimentations of social relations and practices that eventually acquire a quasi-natural status via conventions, identities, laws, and institutions. More recently, reification has sometimes been conceived in terms of communicative failure, social pathology, misrecognition, disengagement, and cognitive and affective upset, but such approaches to the concept have also attracted criticism for obscuring the social and economic levels of reifying structures. Finally, the phenomenon of reification has been also linked both to the prevalence of formalistic reason in philosophical discourse and the technological domination of nature and society. In this sense, the concept of reification has acquired new relevance in contemporary theoretical debates, resulting in a proliferation of publications unmatched in decades. In this issue of Metodo, authors are invited to interrogate the origin, meaning, and legacy of the concept of reification, as well as to explore the various forms reification assumes in theory and practice.

Return to Reification – An Attempt at Systematization

Axel Honneth’s book Reification is an important attempt at rehabilitating a central concept in the left-Hegelian tradition, an attempt that nevertheless remains curiously left aside in Honneth’s subsequent work. Perhaps discouraged by a somewhat negative reception of the book, perhaps by internal problems in his elaborations in it, or perhaps both, Honneth has not continued developing the ideas he presents in it, and at least in one publicized occasion he seems to have more or less abandoned the project. In my view there is much to recommend in the book in particular, and in the attempt at rehabilitating reification as a critical concept in social philosophy in general. What I wish to do in this article is to elaborate further on themes in Honneth’s Reification, as well as in Judith Butler’s critical discussion of it. I will start by making a few conceptual clarifications on the different applications of the concept or concepts of reification, and I will then concentrate on one of these applications—reification of other persons. I will have quite a few things to say about a centrally important topic in Honneth’s treatise of reification, one which Butler rightly puts her finger on in her discussion of Honneth: what exactly it means to take up the perspective of the other person. Like Honneth, I will connect this theme to the concept of recognition, yet I will do this in a way that differs from Honneth’s. Also, though I will draw on several ideas in Honneth’s account of recognition, both in Reification and in his path-breaking The Struggle for Recognition, his conceptualization of the theme is burdened with certain ambiguities and unresolved tensions which I will try to clarify, working thereby towards a more conceptually controlled and thus practically useful conception of reification as a tool for immanent social critique. To connect with the general theme of this volume, a particular kind of ambivalence will become apparent in the course of my discussion, one having to do with the uncertainty of what exactly we have in mind when we talk of ‘recognition’: though on a first, rough approximation, recognition of other persons can be thought of as the opposite of their reification, there are in fact important phenomena that are cases of ‘recognition’ in a widely accepted sense, yet at the same time they involve something intuitively paradigmatically ‘reifying’. These are not merely questions of consistent nomenclature, but more importantly of conceptual precision and thus empirical lucidity required for utilizing the concepts of reification and recognition in critical social philosophy.

What is Reification? A Critique of Axel Honneth

Inquiry, 2010

In this paper I criticise Axel Honneth's reactualization of reification as a concept in critical theory in his 2005 Tanner Lectures and argue that he ultimately fails on his own terms. His account is based on two premises: (1) reification is to be taken literally rather than metaphorically, and (2) it is not conceived of as a moral injury but as a social pathology. Honneth concludes that reification is “forgetfulness of recognition”, more specifically, of antecedent recognition, an emphatic and engaged relationship with oneself, others and the world, which precedes any more concrete relationship both genetically and categorially. I argue against this conception of reification on two grounds. (1) The two premises of Honneth's account cannot be squared with one another. It is not possible to literally take a person as a thing without this being a recognisable moral injury, and, therefore, I suggest that there are no cases of literal reification. (2) Honneth's account is essentially ahistorical, because it is based on an anthropological model of recognition that tacitly equates reification with autism. In conclusion, I suggest that any successful account of reification must (i) take reification metaphorically and (ii) offer a social-historical account of the origin(s) of reification.

Enacting Reification: ‘False Consciousness’ as Situated Embodied (Mis)cognition

In this paper I sketch out a way of rethinking reification on the basis of phenomenological considerations concerning the pre-reflective horizonal-intentional Gestalt structure of experience, combined with resources drawn from contemporary work on situated and embodied cognition, in particular the dialectical framework of enactivism. The idea is to salvage the critical-theoretic import of the concept of reification by coming to more robust material terms with it as a form of embodied cognition – or, if you like, miscognition – understood neither as the representation of an ontologically reified world, nor as the ideological misrepresentation of an unreified world, but rather as the mutually generative enactment of a world-horizon and a mode of experience based upon the dynamic interaction between sensorimotor capacities and sociohistorical context. Approaching reification in this way can shed strategic light on the possibilities and prospects of overcoming it (i.e., dereification).