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Abstract
This essay offers a defense of Lukács’s original formulation of the concept of reification (Verdinglichung), with a particular emphasis on defending the Marxist social-ontological commitments at work in that conception. An attempt will be made to demonstrate that these commitments cannot be summarily dismissed as they have been in Axel Honneth’s “rehabilitation” of the concept. Honneth’s project, it will be argued, consists in an attempt to dispense entirely with the Marxist character of the concept of reification, as well as an attempt to reconstruct the concept in purely normative terms as a “forgetting” of the intersubjective recognition which he takes to be both logically and chronologically prior to the cognition of which reification participates. In outlining this project, a defense of Lukács’s original conception of reification will be offered by means of a critique of Honneth’s criticisms of Lukács’s Marxist commitments.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Honneth, Reification 27. Hereafter cited as R.
2 The introductory essay by Martin Jay comes the closest to articulating the criticism offered in this essay. According to Jay, “[b]y refocusing the question of reification not on alienated labor or commodity fetishism or the inability to conceptualize the totality, Honneth inevitably invites questions about the burden he is placing on remembering the fundamental intersubjective recognition denied by reification” (R 10).
3 Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory 174; cf. his “Reification and its Critics” 174; The Philosophy of Praxis 128.
4 Hall 201.
5 Ibid. 208.
6 Kavoulakos 158.
7 Ibid. 162.
8 Ibid. 163.
9 Lukács, Defence 47.
10 Fracchia 71.
11 Ibid.
12 Lopez 276.
13 Chari 63–64.
14 Ibid. 64.
15 Ibid. 72.
16 Ibid. 65; cf. 67.
17 Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein 257; History and Class Consciousness 83. Hereafter cited as GK.
18 Marx, Das Kapital. Erster Band 793; Capital: Volume I 753. Hereafter cited as K1.
19 See Marx, Das Kapital. Dritter Band 822–23; Capital: Volume III 794. Hereafter cited as K3:
[C]apital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money. It is the means of production monopolized by a certain section of society, confronting living labor-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labor-power, which are personified through this antithesis in capital.
20 Marx, Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie 8–9; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 263.
21 Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent” 685; “The Author as Producer” 80.
22 See his notation that
[a]bove all, as far as labor-time is concerned, it becomes abundantly clear that quantification is a reified and reifying cloak spread over the true essence of the objects and can only be regarded as an objective form of reality inasmuch as the subject is uninterested in the essence of the object to which it stands in a contemplative or (seemingly) practical relationship. (GK 350–51/166–67)
for the worker labor-time is not merely the objective form of the commodity he has sold, i.e. his labor-power (for in that form the problem for him, too, is one of the exchange of equivalents, i.e. a quantitative matter). But in addition it is the determining form of his existence as subject, as human being. (GK 351/167)
23 Brown 39–40.
24 Ibid. 37.
25 Ibid. 42.