Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From Honneth back to Heidegger and Marx

Abstract

After briefly criticizing Honneth's recent reconceptualization of reification as (1) psychological and (2) noneconomic, I outline the problem of reification from the perspective of Marx, which prepares the confrontation that I present between Heidegger and Marx, for the real issue is whether reification is the result of technology (which I will call “causality form”) or the result of the “commodity form.” I claim, against Heidegger, that Marx's concept of the commodity form is not based on subjectivity and, in addition, that Heideggerian ontology is unable to explain the connection between “enframing” and the capitalist structures that Heidegger implies in his descriptions of modern phenomena. Accordingly, this essay tries to open a new path towards what has recently been called “Heideggerian Marxism.”

Keywords:

• Marx
• Heidegger
• Reification
• Technology
• Commodity Form

Notes

¹It is interesting to note that Husserl was one of the first philosophers to use the word ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung). In his Logos article on philosophy as a rigorous science, he warns against naturalizing consciousness, which, according to him, leads to the reification of consciousness. This ontological confusion that Husserl is thinking of has not much to do with reification in Marx's sense, as the concept of reification in the tradition of Marx and critical theory is not used in the sense of “objectification.” I am therefore also skeptical about Honneth's claim that Heidegger's reflection on reification in Being and Time can be used in this context, as Heidegger here—whether he read Lukács or not—follows the Husserlian problem in Being and Time. Marx, though, is concerned with a different sense of reification: namely, the increasing independence of social relations and the appearance of those social relations as something that they are not.

²A similar point is made in Chari (2010), but the author does not develop an argument for how the economic perspective could be reintegrated into Honneth's approach. Jaeggi (1999, 2005), similar to Honneth, characterizes reification as a form of “misrecognition” (Verkennung): i.e., as a subjective concept.

³It is interesting to note that Honneth uses the word Menschenhandel (“human trade”; 1995, 98) for human trafficking, which already (as a word) points to an economic structure that Honneth denies since he claims that economic structures remain dependent upon recognitive (and therefore normative) relations.

⁴Though Žižek is one of the few authors to reflect on a materialist conception of ideology, he comes very close to Honneth when he claims that “reification has a liberating effect, as it also de-fetishizes ‘relations between persons,’ allowing them to acquire ‘formal’ freedom and autonomy” (Žižek 2009, 142). On the one hand, this view is similar to Honneth's, since Honneth assumes that the legal structure is not simply the extension of the commodity form but is itself based on normative grounds that are independent of it. On the other hand, Žižek remains within Marx's framework, as Marx claimed that modern capitalism is a progression towards formal freedom (if, for example, compared with the ancient slave system).

⁵A good example of the confusion is Zimmermann (1979, 105), as Zimmermann does not understand that, for Marx, reification is not caused by the division of labor. In contrast, Marx would claim that the division of labor is a necessary moment of the commodity form. For a better understanding of what Marx calls a “category,” see Reichelt (2002 and 2008, chap. 9).

⁶Though I am unable to develop this further in the present paper, Albert Borgmann (1984) makes the same mistake in his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life insofar as he identifies technology and commodity without really explaining how commodities are established and what they are.

⁷The best example for this can be found in Buris (1988).

⁸Heidegger's failure is most likely rooted in his (sometimes truly hilarious) global political schemes. His comments on Marxism in his notes on readings of Jünger's work exclusively cite sources that are not academic (for example, he reiterates Lenin's statement that communism is the combination of mobilization and electrification). It seems to me that Heidegger never conceived of Marxism as a viable philosophical source (though in his Letter on Humanism things seem to be different); rather, he takes it to be a worldview. Needless to say, in recent decades Marxist scholars have been concerned with separating themselves from a “worldview Marxism.” This structure is still visible in the recent attempts of a group of scholars called Neue Marx Lektüre (Backhaus, Reichelt, Heinrich, and Elbe) who attempt to establish Marx as an economic thinker who should not be understood through the official “Marxist-Leninist” ideology or through “worldview” Marxism. For this, see Michael Heinrich's (2004) response to a critique from Haug.

⁹English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

¹¹English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm. Backhaus (2004, 82) interprets this turn as a switching of subjective and objective: the subject receives an objective character and the commodity receives a subjective character (in the sense of Hegel); money and capital, in other words, are the “subject” of the development.

¹⁰For this, see Sohn-Rethel's (1971, 31) critique of Lukács’s conception of reification as false consciousness.

¹³English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm.

¹²For the purpose of this paper, I am unable to reconstruct the relationship of this term to Hegel's “verkehrte Welt” in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. For the general background of the world turned on its head through the separation of production and commodity, see Reichelt (2002, esp. 167).

¹⁴Marx writes: “The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination [Vorstellung], individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to factual constraints [sachliche Gewalt]” (Marx and Engels 1956–1990, 3:76; English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm; translation altered).

¹⁵English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm.

¹⁶In addition, the importance of the term “form” here should not be underestimated, as Marx is in this regard a Hegelian and anti-Kantian thinker. For Marx, the form of entities is not something that human reason brings to them; rather, it is inherent in reality. Accordingly, Marx treats “form” as something that belongs to the being of beings; for this, see Sohn-Rethel (1971, 30).

¹⁷It is interesting to note that Heidegger, without justifying it, switches from “Marx” (242) to “Marxist” (243) and “communism” (244) in his explanation, implying that Marx's doctrine can easily be translated into political doctrine (opposed to what he calls “Americanism”). Most likely this is the reason for Heidegger's neglect of the later writings on the essence of capitalism from a strictly economic standpoint.

¹⁸For this, see Backhaus (2004, 61). As Backhaus underlines, the concept of commodity according to Marx cannot be determined as a pre-monetary category. As a consequence, Marx's theory is the attempt to introduce an objective concept of value that cannot be reduced to a subjective category.

¹⁹Heidegger notes affirmatively that, according to Jünger, the soldier is the best expression of the modern form of the laborer, for during World War I the soldier turned out to be pure material to be used up (1976–2012, 90:219). The “homelessness” that Heidegger mentions in the “Letter on Humanism” is addressed in the notes on Jünger through the statement “that humanity does not have its Da” (90:226), the lack of which leads to the modern Raserei of technology.

²⁰All quotations in English from Heidegger 1976–2012 are the present author's own translations.

²¹The German word Rohstoff goes back to “prime matter.”

²²The emptiness in this quote refers to the forgetting of being. It should be noted that Heidegger (1976–2012, 79:56) claims that the transformation of the human into raw material is especially visible in the concentration camps, which, of course, would require a discussion of its own.

²³English translation taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.

²⁴This would, of course, require a thorough discussion of Andrew Feenberg's theory of technology. I am unable to address his theory in this essay, although one can observe the same trend in Feenberg's theory, as he moved away from any substantial economic-philosophical considerations, accusing Heidegger of being an essentialist and of reifying technology (for example, Feenberg 2010, 25)—the claim of which, given what I have outlined in this essay, should be rejected. There is, as far as I can see, and especially in Germany, a new generation of social theorists who are in the process of returning to more substantial theories of capitalism (especially see Rosa [2005] and Dörre, Lessenich, and Rosa [2009]). Backhaus and Reichelt have also expressed their uneasiness with Habermas's neglect of economic theory in his social theory; for this, see Reichelt (2008, chap. 15).

²⁵This move also helps us to see more clearly the dividing line between Adorno and Heidegger, as Adorno (1993, 57, 77)—in contrast to his successors—never gave up on the exchange principle as a principle that determines the whole of all social relations. For this, also see Backhaus (2004, 83).