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  • A Queer View of Capitalism in Crisis
  • Miranda Joseph (bio)
The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism. Kevin Floyd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 270 pp.

Scholarship in queer studies has increasingly acknowledged global capitalism as a significant determination of heteronormativity, and several recent works have explicitly engaged the Marxist tradition. Kevin Floyd's The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism is a rich, rigorous, and useful book that builds on and substantially augments this work, explicating the interactions of sexuality and capitalism in the United States over the last century and developing the epistemological implications for queer theory and Marxism of bringing these knowledge projects together.

Floyd emphasizes that capitalism is not only a system of commodity production but a system of knowledge production. As Georg Lukács provides one of the most elaborate and devastating critiques of the epistemological implications of capitalism through the concepts of reification and totality, it is first and foremost these concepts that Floyd seeks to rework.1 He sheds the totalizing connotations of totality by focusing on Lukács's articulation of an "aspiration" to totality as a critical method. Floyd argues that this aspiration is shared by Marxism and queer theory (in its "universalizing" moments): "The effort to think totality is itself a critique of ontological and epistemological particularization . . . [of] capital's systemic, privatizing fragmentation of social production especially and of social life more generally" (6). With regard to reification, itself reified and applied so broadly as to be meaningless, Floyd's strategy is to locate instances of reification in the changing modes of accumulation and regulation through which, according to Regulation School scholars, crises of capitalism were kept at bay during the twentieth century in the United States.2

Floyd articulates Michel Foucault's narrative of the development and deployment of sexuality with this narrative of capitalism in crisis. He positions the abstraction of sexuality and desire in psychoanalysis as a historically specific instance of reification determined by the efforts of capital, in its intensive mode [End Page 476] of accumulation, to manage consumption. And, historicizing the "performativity" of gender that Judith Butler has theorized abstractly, Floyd argues that the emergence of performative gender (masculinity/femininity) is contingent on this reification and the related displacement of a nineteenth-century distinction between manhood and womanhood. The performance of masculinity that emerges (for the middle and upper classes) is, for Floyd, specifically linked to consumption—to learning new skills (corporeal knowledge) to be performed, such as DIY home maintenance or hunting and fishing as taught by Ernest Hemingway's columns in Esquire magazine. Floyd skillfully evokes the complex subjective aspect of this crisis moment as residual norms of manhood are unsettled by emerging norms of masculinity in this period through a reading of Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises.3

Bringing a Foucauldian perspective to bear on Lukács, Floyd argues that "subjectivity, while no less reified than Lukács would maintain, nevertheless becomes something other than purely passive, contemplative," as Lukács would have it. He suggests that Lukács "fails to recognize" that "epistemological 'partial functions' [e.g., psychoanalysis] open up new horizons of knowledge" (54). Floyd overstates his case in that Lukács does recognize that reification generates new sciences and new disciplines; he just doesn't see those projects as having the potential to be "critical," to situate themselves or their objects as products of the relations that constitute the totality. As I look around the contemporary university, I find that Lukács's critique remains frighteningly apt. So the point (and it is one Floyd makes, though maybe too indirectly) is that it is not enough to say that "reification makes possible a multiplicity of new forms of subjectivity and social practice" (75). The crucial question is the extent to which any such new form "aspires to totality"; that is, aspires "to understand the mediations that articulate different horizons of social reality" (6).

Floyd moves on to midcentury and shifts focus from reification to its potential negation through the aspiration to totality. He finds in Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization a useful positive appraisal of the potential of erotic reification to dialectically become...

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