Uneven Reification

Justin Paulson Uneven Reification The "globalized" capitalist world of the twenty-first century is universally but unevenly pervaded by reification. Reification here, as throughout the Western Marxist tradition, refers to the processes by which sodai relationships and activities are objectified and, most importantly, instrumentalized and refashioned after the needs of capital. To understand what is meant by this concept, one needs to try to think outside of capital for a minute—not necessarily back in time, but of anything that is not organized principally around commodity production. Jameson usefully draws the distinction as between "traditional" activity, in which "the value of the activity is immanent to it, and qualitatively distinct from other ends or values articulated in other forms of human work or play," and activity in a sodety diaracterized by the "universal commodification of labor power," in which all forms of human labor can be . . . separated out from their unique qualitative differentiation as distinct types of activity. . . and all universally ranged under the common denominator of the quantitative, that is, under the universal exchange value of money. At this point, then, the quality of the various forms of human activity, their unique and distinct "ends" or values, has effectively been bracketted or suspended by the market system, leaving all these activities free to be ruthlessly reorganized in efficiency terms, as sheer means or instrumentality. (130-31) The alienation of activity from any immanent qualitative value is a universal characteristic of the capitalist mode of production; for this reason, Georg Lukács and most of those following him treated reification as an all-encompassing , objective condition of life under capitalism. Reification does not exist only where capitalist sodai relations don't exist—and in the current expansive phase of global capitalism, there really are no such locations any longer. Yet for this term to be at all meaningful today, in the wake of decades of both Western Marxist and poststructuralist critiques of classical Marxism, we must first emphasize reification's social character. The historical conflation of reification with "false consciousness" is something of a category error: individual consdousness might be ossified, "dumbed-down," or fragmented by reification, but reification itself cannot be understood as some sort of individual, subjective ailment. Rather, it must be understood in terms of the soczaZ processes set in motion by the dominance of commodity production. As with commodity fetishism more generally, at issue is not an individual's perception: if a table (to use Marx's famous example in Capital) appears to have been cut loose from the relationship that would tie its creator to its user, if its use-value seems to have been supplanted by its exchange-value, such that it "stands on its head" and takes on an existence 252 the minnesota review all its own, these appearances aren't illusory deceptions but are instead real results of the place of the table itself in the processes of production and the alienation of its creator(s) from those processes. Thus reification is not something that can be lifted from an individual, like a blindfold or an oversized hat. Although, per Lukács, a precondition for overcoming reification is that the alienations and contradictions arising in and from capitalismbe made consdous, the universality ofreification means that the transformation out of it must be a practical, sodai one. Lukács reminds us that a "purely cognitive stance," no matter how enlightened, can by no means overcome reification (205). Every individual in a dass or an entire sodety could be conscious of commodity fetishism or of the contradictions in capitalism but still do nothing about them (as Horkheimer and Adorno famously pointed out in Dialectic ofEnlightenment). Certainly, along with the objectification ofsodai relationships comes their mystification—the appearance of the hardened, reified forms as natural and inevitable. But we ought not to be shouting "false consdousness" at anyone who thinks that capitalism or neoliberalism, let alone one's own job, television consumption , or shopping trips, are natural—eadi an inevitable consequence of the way the world works. The biggest hurdle reification presents for us is that its products are not illusions perpetrated upon the individual that can just be cleared up, but are instead actual...