Reading Capitalist Realism

Capitalism and Reification: The Logic of the Instance

t i m o t h y b e w e s The Logic of the Instance Capitalism and Reification Disputes over the usefulness of the term “reification” have often been accompanied by insinuations about its fashionableness.1 “Fashionable ,” in this equation, describes the decline of a concept into the very process it describes: a “thing.” However, so imbricated are the two terms that it has long been difficult to say which is more fashionable : reification or its rejection on the grounds of its fashionableness. For a while it seemed as if any new reckoning with the concept of reification would have to come to terms with this relation of inseparability or reversibility between reification and the anxiety toward it.2 But recent interventions on the topic have made necessary a renewed attention to the difference between reification and its appropriation by the very forces it describes. Reification, in short, is back “in fashion ” with a vengeance. The publication in English of Axel Honneth’s 2005 Tanner Lectures together with responses by three eminent commentators (2008); the appearance of Kevin Floyd’s book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009); Fredric Jameson’s return to the subject in two recent books, Valences of the Dialectic (2011) and Representing Capital (2011); an essay on the topic by the literary critic Bill Brown (2006); as well as an emerging secondary literature on all these works, are collectively responsible for (or simply evidence of) a resurgence of interest in the concept of reification.3 The framing of these projects differs significantly; read together, they offer surprisingly varied understandings of the central term. Each makes reference to the work of Georg Lukács, the foremost thinker of the concept, but each puts forward a different model of how reification might be involved in a critique of capitalist relationality. For anyone who has engaged in 2 1 4 t i m o t h y b e w e s detail with this question, the variety of readings or appropriations of Lukács that seem possible is impressive. As a consequence of this heterogeneity, however, there has been little or no sustained dialogue between these authors. The aim of this essay is, in part, to establish the terms for such a dialogue, revisiting Lukács’s famous essay on reification in the context of these recent works and examining the relationship of the concept to two adjacent but largely untheorized concepts: representation and instantiation. I will focus on the work of Axel Honneth and Kevin Floyd, whose very different projects to rationalize and update the concept of reification nonetheless repeat the problem that has most often been responsible for obscuring the central importance of Lukács’s reification essay. Both thinkers, that is to say, take reification to be a representational rather than a logical category; in so doing, they threaten, even imperil, its effectiveness as a guide to the logic of capitalism. For reification, it will be stated here, has no necessary relation to representation. This claim flies in the face of most dominant accounts of reification, including Axel Honneth’s reframing of the term to mean the failure of ­ recognition—­ in other words, representational injustice toward the other. In Lukács’s work, as I will try to show, reification does not mean the representation (or misrepresentation, or misperception , or mistreatment) of human beings as “things.” Reification designates a logical event, not a representational one. Reification is not part of a critical approach premised upon the representation of the world; it is not a critical tool standing “ready-to-hand” but a problematic : a category of thought that is implicated in its own concept, that must include itself among its objects of critique. If reification remains the best theoretical explanation of the logic of capitalism, that logic is not well conceived as an event of representation (misrepresentation, the failure of recognition, etc.). Reification is not a limited or correctable event, but a logic that defines the ontological propensities of capitalism itself. Reification does not describe the perception of a particular entity in a form other than its real existence , but the very positing of that entity as existing. Representation is possible without reification. But for that possibility to be grasped c a p i t a l i s m a n d r e i f i c a t i o n 2 1 5 intellectually, the...