Rethinking reif ieat ion

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HANNA FENICHEL P I T K I N Department o f Political Science, University o f California, Berkeley

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing

smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big

that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and

[ was glad when at last I saw walls far away to

the right and left, but these long walls have

narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber

already, and there in the corner stands the trap

that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said

the cat, and ate it up.

Franz Kafka, "A Little Fable ''~

Kafka 's n ightmarish fable dwells in the same terrain of experience as the

concept o f reification. Both engage the mystery of how we, with our eno rmous scientific sophist icat ion and technical capabi l i ty have come to be so helplessly t rapped by our own activity. Or should one say, have come to feel so helplessly t rapped? Or to be t rapped because we feel t rapped?

"Reif ica t ion" is not a household word. Its investigation is complex and somewhat tedious, o f interest only to specialists. I f it nevertheless mat- ters, that is because of these larger and urgent issues. Ult imately the

quest ion is, are we going to blow up the world? Must we? Like other specialists, I used to suppose that I knew what reification is. Thus, in a recent publ icat ion I wrote, wi thout having given the mat te r much

thought , " . . . reification: a coming to take for granted as 'given' and in- evitable what in fact is the product o f h u m a n action. ' '2 Since then I

have begun to give it some thought , with the result that I am no longer sure what reification is, or what I mean by "re i f ica t ion ."

Theory and Society 16:263-293 (1987)

@ Martinus Ni jhof f Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

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Etymologica l ly the te rm is not difficult. It derives f rom the Latin res, a noun o f broad signification, variously translatable into English as " th ing , " "ob jec t , " "matter , . . . . concern ," "affair, . . . . business ," "proper - ty, . . . . case (in law)." To reify is to turn something into a r e s . But there the difficulties begin. Wha t sort o f something? And how?

In puzzling out answers to these questions, I hope to do more than mere- ly share my confus ion with others. In the process o f discovering the in- ternal incoherencies o f this obscure concept, one can learn a good deal abou t the social and political reality in which we live, about our ways o f

unders tanding that reality and ourselves, our powers and our helpless- ness. One learns what o f impor tance the concept o f reification is mean t to address, and how it fails. Ult imately I shall argue that this concept ,

intended to diagnose our self-entrapment and thereby to empower us, fails because it suppresses instead o f clarifying the real political prob- lems involved in effective public action. The discussion begins with Lukgtcs and Marx, moves on to sociology and, briefly, to the dictionary,

and ends up with politics, theory, and ourselves.

Reification in Lukdcs

Reification has received the greatest a t tent ion in Marxist thought , so that is the place to begin. But, with the exception of one casual passage, Marx

himself never used the word; nor did Hegel. 3 It was introduced into Marx i sm by Georg Lukfics's seminal essay, "Reif icat ion and the Con-

sciousness of the Pro le ta r i a t . ' 4 Actually, Lukfics used the G e r m a n word "Verdingl ichung," which might more literally be translated into English as " th ingif ica t ion" ( f rom Ding, thing). But the latinate word was availa- ble in English, and one should not cavil at the t ranslator 's decision to

use it. Res is close enough in meaning to bo th Ding and thing.

Though Marx scarcely used the term, Luk~ics claims that the idea o f reification is central to his thought . And Marx certainly did use a num- ber of terms in the same general conceptual region, such as "object if ica- t ion , " "es t rangement , " "a l ienat ion," "ideology, . . . . myst i f ica t ion ," and " fe t i sh ism." There is also what Engels - but not Marx - called "false consciousness. ''5 Lukfics concentrates on fetishism, claiming that the section near the beginning of Capital on the fetishism o f commodi t ies is the key to the book and to all o f Marx 's work, because " the riddle of commodity-structure... [is] the central, structural p rob lem o f capitalist society in all its aspects ," and thus, " the necessary and immedia te reality

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of every person living under capitalism. ''6 kuk~ics equates commodity fetishism in this broad sense with reification, as indicated for instance by the title of the section in which he discusses it. 7 Its essence, he says,

is tha t a relat ionship a m o n g people is given the character o f a thing and thus

acquires a " p h a n t o m objectivity," whose strict, apparent ly al together closed

and rat ional a u t o n o m y conceals every trace o f its fundamen ta l nature: the rela-

t ionship a m o n g people. 8

A relationship among people is regarded as a res. 9 This implies, second, that something essential is concealed, is misapprehended as phantom. And this, in turn, implies further that human capacities remain un- realized; something actually within human power appears to be auto- nomous and to exercise power over people. What is primarily reified in commodity fetishism, according to Luk~ics, is human productive labor or work ( A r b e i t ) . t~ People's productive activity is real, "concrete," "definite," and it requires real working relationships. In commodity fetishism, those who do this work understand it and themselves only in distorted or "fantastic" form. H They understand their own ac-

tivity and power only as concealed in its material products, and under- stand those products only as commodities, subject to the impersonal forces of the market - inflation, depression, the law of supply and de- mand, and so on. Consequently the producers experience themselves as subject to such impersonal forces, powerless. But in advanced capital- ism, Lukfics argues, such fetishism extends beyond factory workers and bourgeois political economists into all aspects of everyone's life: people lose awareness of their capacity for agency. What is most important here, Luk~ics says, is that in reification, "people's own activity, their own labor confronts them as something objective, independent of them, dominat- ing them through an autonomy alien to human beings. ''12

Reification, then, is a misapprehension of the world, an "ideological phenomenon," in which reality is "falsified" or hidden under a decep- tive "covering" (or "husk") that must be uncovered.13 Luk~cs says that "the basic methodological thought" underlying C a p i t a l is the undoing of this reification, "the reconversion of economic objects from things back into concrete human relationships" that are capable of being trans- formed by human choice and action. 14

Yet this is not the whole of Lukfics's concept. Reification cannot be simply a misapprehension of reality, for commodities and the market and its laws are "by no means merely forms of thought." Rather, "they are the forms in which contemporary bourgeois society is objectified," and their constraint is real. 15 As capitalism develops,

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objectively . . . a world o f f inished objects and o f relat ionships a m o n g things

comes into being (the world o f commodi t i es and their movemen t on the mar-

ket), whose laws are gradual ly discovered by h u m a n beings but nevertheless

conf ront them as inexorable, independent ly func t ioning powers. 16

This world and its power are no phan toms , which is why the abol i t ion

of capi tal ism "cannot be a mere movement o f thought , but must at tain a practical abol i t ion [Aufhebung] of its forms as life forms of socie- ty. ' '17

Evidently, then, the misapprehens ion of h u m a n relationship as res is only one side o f Luk~tcs's reification, the other being the development o f

the real, funct ioning world o f market capitalism. In a way, this is not sur- prising, because in Marx i sm social reality and its ideological representa- t ion do, indeed, correspond, though in a distorted or inverted manner. Lukfics says explicitly that " the reification process o f work itself and also that o f the worker 's consciousness progress" together. 18 But what does

"reif icat ion" mean at this point , and how are its two sides - if that ' s the right word - related? I f it means misapprehending something as res, how can the actual development of marke t capi tal ism be reification? And if commodi t ies and the marke t are not phan toms but have real pow-

er, then how is perceiving them as real and powerful a misapprehension?

Seeking answers to these puzzles, one is drawn to certain passages where

Lukfics explicitly says that reification has two sides, one o f them "objec- tive" and the other "subject ive." But these passages are cryptic indeed, and turn out to be no help.

The "fet ish character" o f commodi t ies , one of these passages says, is both an "object iv i ty-form [form o f objectivity? fo rm in objectivity?

Gegensti~ndlichkeitsform]" and a " m a n n e r of conduct [attitude?] o f a subject [that is, o f a person: Subjektsverhalten]." The latter "cor- responds to" the former.19 A second passage adds that when, in reifica-

tion, people 's own activity confronts them as an independent power, "this happens in bo th an objective and a subjective respect [regard]. ' '2~

The objective respect is the passage already cited, about the coming into being of a real world of commodi t ies and market . The subjective respect seems to be that subjects - that is, persons - and their characteristic person-like activity become commodi f i ed too, are in fact bought and sold on the market . These passages, then, distinguish the objective side of reification not f rom reification as misapprehens ion o f reality, but f rom people 's real manner o f conduct or their real commodi f ica t ion . So they do not help answer our questions, zl

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As if all this were not confusing enough, Lukfics also somet imes men-

tions a "reified m i n d , " "reified consciousness ," or "reified structure o f consciousness" as characteristic o f m o d e r n capital ism. 22 In context, the

passages clearly mean the sort o f mind that tends to reify, to misappre- hend relat ionship as res. But Lukfics does not call it a reifying conscious- ness. 23 His choice o f verb fo rm reveals his assumpt ion - perfect ly nor-

mal in Marx i sm - that each socio-economic fo rmat ion determines characteristic forms of consciousness. But reification characterizes capital ism, so Lukfics must be implying that this process is distinctive in

capital ism, deserving a distinctive name. Clearly the word here cannot mean taking a relat ionship for a r e s , or any of the other senses of the word discussed so far.

There are thus at least five aspects o f Lukfics's concept o f reification: 1) the misapprehens ion o f relationship as res; 2) the coming into being o f

the capitalist world o f commodi t ies and a marke t whose laws have inex- orable power; 3) the manner o f conduct o f persons that "cor respond to" 2); 4) the commodi f i ca t ion of persons and o f their characteristically hu-

man activity; and 5) the forming of the kind of mind that tends to 1). Reification seems to mean something different in each o f these aspects. Some of the meanings are relatively close to others and compat ib le with

them, but some seem downright inconsistent, and with some it remains unclear why they should be called "reif icat ion" at all.

Lukdcs and Marx: Reification and objectification

Was Lukfics merely confused? He himself later so maintained. In 1933, under pressure f rom the C o m m u n i s t Party, Lukfics recanted some of the

views expressed in the essay. Then, toward the end of his life and under a less restrictive regime, he reviewed the whole mat ter again, in what be- came the preface to a collection including the original essay. 24 At issue

generally in the recantat ion was whether Luk~tcs had reintroduced Hegel ian idealism into Marx ian thought . Specifically with respect to reification, Luk~.cs judged in retrospect that he had confused it with

both what Marx called object i f icat ion and what Marx and Hegel called es t rangement (Ent fremdung, sometimes, but not always, t ranslated as al- ienation), z5 The latter confus ion Lukfics treats as a minor sin, because the terms are closely related, though "nei ther socially nor conceptual ly identical. ''26 But confusing reification with Marx 's object i f icat ion he thinks more serious. For it suggests that after the communi s t revolution, work and the need to produce our livelihood will vanish along with class

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exploitation, as all oppos i t ion between mind and mat te r proves illuso- ry. 27 Tha t is indeed a Hegel ian rather than a Marxis t idea, and surely

not what Luk~ics intended.

Even in retrospect, however, Luk~ics never abandoned the idea o f reifica- tion. Perhaps, then, his real meaning would emerge if one could undo

his youthful confus ion and substract away Marx ian objectif icat ion.

W h a t would this entail?

H u m a n beings are distinguished f rom other animals, Marx says, by the fact that we work on the physical world to produce what we need to live; and we do so not in invariant, instinctually prescribed ways, as bees build hives and birds build nests, but creatively, inventively. "Free, conscious activity is the species character o f h u m a n beings. '28 Because work is our

natural f o r m of self-expression, we work even beyond the press o f neces-

sity, so that some of what we produce is not immedia te ly consumed. A m o n g the lasting objects that humans produce, the most impor tan t are

tools and other means o f product ion, for they become par t o f the work envi ronment for later h u m a n beings, and so condi t ion the species. This

is what Marx calls objectif ication.

Etymological ly speaking, one might be tempted to call it a kind of reifi- cation, in the relatively literal sense that h u m a n beings are the artificers,

the res-making species. H a n n a h Arendt - though surely no Marxist - uses the word in precisely this way. Reification, she says, means "fabr ica- tion, the work o f homo faber. ''29 A carpenter, for example, makes a ta-

ble. O f course, he does not create that res out of nothing; he uses objects and materials tha t already existed. Wha t the carpenter reifies, according to Arendt , is not his materials, which were already res, but his idea of a table, his intention, his "men ta l image. ''3~ Animals and even plants

t rans form physical objects. Wha t makes the t r ans fo rmat ion of wood into a table an instance of reification rather than some natural process of growth or decay is the involvement o f intentional h u m a n activity. Reification is the realization in the physical world of a h u m a n inten- tion. 3t

Manifested in the physical world, such reification is by no means the highest faculty for Arendt . While superior to labor - the producing and consuming o f what is necessary to sustain life - it is inferior to action, which alters not physical objects but h u m a n relationships. Marx, howev- er, saw the latter as an inseparable correlate of mater ia l product ion, so that in working on the world we produce far more than objects. People

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produce their means of product ion, but they also produce new forms of

social organization to suit those means of production, new forms of character and symbolic expression to suit the new social forms and tools. H u m a n beings are shaped by the conditions in which they must produce in order to live, but they themselves produce some of those conditions. In short, the human species produces technology, science, art, morality, civilization, itself. 3z

For Marx, this process is (dialectically) cumulative. In developed capital- ism, the environment in which people must produce their livelihood is highly artificial, with an enormously complex technology and division of labor. We are almost entirely independent of raw nature, particularly compared to primitive hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies. And yet, in a way, we are more dependent than any previous society, though less aware of our dependencies. The residents of, say, Manhat tan would

be more helpless if their water-supply failed, if food deliveries into the city stopped, if money ceased to function as legal tender, than a primitive tribe facing any but the most cataclysmic natural disaster. We are more dependent - but not on nature. We are dependent on our humanly made and sustained environment, on each other. More and more, our problems are o f our own making.

Now, if such self-fashioning of the human species is what Marx meant by objectification, how might the young Luk/tcs have confused it with

what he otherwise meant by reification? Arendt shows how something like Marxian objectif icat ion might be called reification, in the literal sense of res-making. Did some such idea confuse Lukfics, mixing the real product ion of objects and relationships into his concept o f reification as misapprehension? The former would then become the objective side of his concept. It is tempting to think so, for then undoing Lukfics's confu- sion would require only subtracting away objective reification, thereby removing the vexing puzzle of how one can misapprehend as objective what is in fact objective.

Unfortunately, this won't do. For one thing, Lukfics's objective reifica- t ion is supposed to end with capitalism, while Marxian objectif ication of course continues t r iumphant . The real world of capitalism is at best one product of, not the equivalent of, Marxian objectification. 33 But

perhaps that discrepancy was part of Luk~ics's confusion. More trouble- some is the fact that even if he no longer called the market and com- modities objective reification, Lukfics would still want to insist that they and their power are objectively real. So the puzzle would remain.

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No, despite Luk~tcs own retrospective judgment , the difficulties encoun- tered in his concept of reification do not result f rom his having been somehow untrue to Marx. They originate, or at least have close parallels, in Marx's own thought. 34 For though Marx uses terms like "mystifica- t ion" and "fetishism" that imply a misapprehension of reality, to be criticized as Feuerbach criticized religious belief, he also stresses how his work differs f rom Feuerbach's, and how the critique o f political econo- my differs f rom that of religion, in just this way: gods are unreal but the market is not. So Marx seems as deeply commit ted as Luk~ics simultane- ously to both the real power and the delusional nature of commodi ty structure. 35 But in Marx the apparent paradox is easier to investigate.

I f commodit ies and the market exist objectively and have actual power to constrain our lives, what does Marx think is fetishized or mystified by bourgeois political economists? Marx says the mystification lies in their taking their concepts and categories as timeless and universal, rath- er than characteristic specifically o f capitalism. The misapprehension is not that commodit ies and the market exist objectively or that they have power, but that they will and must always exist, that they cannot be changed, that we cannot change them. To the bourgeois political economist , Marx says, his concepts and formulae appear "as much a self-evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labor itself. ''36 Taking commodi ty exchange to be eternal is a misapprehension. Taking it to be unchangeable by human action becomes a misapprehension at some specific time in history, when the capitalist economy is sufficiently developed to make a successful communis t revolution possible. Before that time, ending capitalism is not yet within human power, so seeing it as humanly unchangeable is simple realism. 37

Perhaps, then, the misapprehension involved in Luk~ics's pr imary sense o f reification is like that in Marx's fetishism: not the reality of commodi- ty structure nor its power, but its eternal inevitability. That does not fully explain Luk~ics's reification, however, bo th because mistaking something changeable as eternal is not mistaking anything for res, and because his other senses o f reification still remain obscure.

On this reading, Luk~ics's reification as misapprehension would be a short-lived phenomenon. Seeing commodi ty structure as humanly un- changeable only becomes a misapprehension fairly late in the develop- ment of capitalism. Also, Luk~ics's reification only makes sense where Marx's objectif ication is far advanced. It means the mystification of hu- man powers. Earlier societies may have mystified various aspects of their

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activity, but they could not mystify human powers very extensively be-

cause human powers were not yet very extensive. Only where human powers and options are fully developed is there anything much to reify. Reification resides in the discrepancy between our real powers and our concept ion of them. That is why Lukfics insists that it is a condit ion "specific" to advanced capitalism, arising only when commodi ty ex- change has become the "constitutive form" or "universal structuring principle" of society, the "universal category of social being as a whole. ''38 Some exchange o f commodit ies and quite a lot of human ex- ploi tat ion already existed in primitive societies, Lukitcs says, but they re- mained occasional, peripheral, or isolated phenomena. Only when they become central and pervasive in advanced capitalism do they turn into a kind of "second nature" to which we are in "servitude. ''39

Whether because it presupposes pervasive commodi ty structure, then, or because it presupposes objectif icat ion that is far advanced, reification is a phenomenon only of advanced capitalism for Luk~ics. Almost the op- posite view is held, however, by the sociological theorists o f reification, to whom this essay must therefore turn next.

Berger and Luckmann: Reification in sociology

For the sociological version of reification, the classical source is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction o f Reality. Their defini t ion o f the term is much like Lukfics's initial formulation: a misapprehension of human activity as res. Reification, they say, means " the apprehension o f human phenomena as if they were things," or - putt ing it into the jargon - "as a non-human facticity. ''4~ But Berger and Luckmann's concept remains essentially unitary, and has no coun- terpart to Luk~tcs's "objective" reification, let alone Arendtian reifica- tion. Reification is always and only "a modal i ty o f consciousness. ''41 The sociologists do discuss something they call "object ivat ion" that seems close to at least some features of Marxian objectification, but they stress that it must not be confused with reification. The latter is a misap- prehension of reality; objectivation is a sociological fact about our spe- cies, "by which the externalized products of human activity attain the character o f objectivity. '42 Some of our activity results in products that remain perceptible to ourselves and others "as elements o f a c o m m o n world. '43 This includes not only physical objects, but also language and social institutions. Indeed, the entire "social order is a human product, or more precisely, an ongoing human product ion. '44

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Reification is the failure to recognize these products as human ly engen- dered.

The decisive question [that identifies reification] is whether [one] still retains

awareness that, however objectivated, the social world was made by men -

and, therefore, can be remade by them. 45

The example Berger and Luckmann adduce is the insti tution o f mar- riage, which they say can be reified variously,

as an imitation of divine acts of creativity, as a universal mandate of natural

law, as the necessary consequence of biological or psychological forces, or, for

that matter, as a functional imperative of the social system. 46

What identifies all o f these as reifications is the denial o f h u m a n choice and agency in fashioning the institution. 4v

The sociologists not only exclude Luk~ics's "objective" reification, but also omit f rom their concept anything like the fifth aspect o f his concept , the producing of a "reified consciousness ." They do, however, discuss something akin to Luk~ics's "subjective" reification, mos t ly in his third aspect (the at t i tude or manne r of conduct o f a "subject") but possibly

also in the four th aspect (the commodi f i ca t ion of "subjects") . They call it the "reif icat ion of ident i ty" or "o f the total self." This they define as the total or excessive identif icat ion o f a person with one par t icular role

or stereotypical category. I t includes bo th the stereotyping of others, as in anti-semitism, and what existentialists call " inauthent ic i ty ," in which

one denies one's own opt ions and responsibilities by reference to a role:

"I have no choice in the matter, I have to act this way because of my posit ion"

- as husband, father, general, archbishop, chairman of the board, gangster, or hangman, as the case may be. 4s

Despite their basically similar definitions, Berger and Luckmann differ p ro found ly f rom Luk~ics on bo th the causes of reification and the prospects for its cure. Lukgtcs describes a number of features of capitalist society that p romote reification. Most fundamenta l is the mechaniza t ion of work. 49 Required to work with machines and on assembly lines, workers must subordinate their impulses and natural rhythms and be- come themselves machine-like. They develop what Luk~ics calls (in an un- for tunate choice of word) a "contemplat ive a t t i tude," meaning that they lose all independence, creativity, sense o f agency - the very capacities that distinguish them as h u m a n beings. 5~ But as more and more institu-

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tions are bureaucrat ized, formalized, " ra t ional ized" in Max Weber 's

sense of the word, to fit in with factory product ion, reif ication spreads

to all classes, so that a "worker faced with a par t icular machine" has

much the same experience as,

the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the tech- nologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology. 51

As the capitalist e conomy becomes a single, unified structure, it also produces a single, " fo rmal ly unified structure of consciousness"; yet, at the very same time, the division o f labor is becoming more elaborate, un- til everyone is a "special is t ," aware only of his part icular task. 52 No one

takes responsibil i ty for the whole; no one can survey the whole; no one is in charge. Even those individuals still aware of personal choices con- strue them only in terms of their par t icular s i tuat ion and interests. 53

The large-scale, collective consequences of individual decisions and mass apa thy thus confront everyone as an external force, and those conse-

quences are very great. Almos t everything that matters is by this t ime hu- man ly produced or shaped.

For Berger and Luckmann, the causes of reification are much simpler,

and of little interest. Object ivat ion arises because it is psychological ly and socially functional. People develop routines, bo th individually and

interpersonally, because this makes life more predictable, decreases ten- sion, secures order and saves t ime and effort, leaving people free to deal with what is new. 54 But object ivat ion is not reification. About whether

reification is funct ional and what causes it, Berger and Luckmann have little to say. They suggest that it is biologically natural to the small child being initiated into a culture created by others. Adults may recall creat- ing or modi fy ing some institutions by their own agency, but the child has

no such experience. For it, the culture is "given," not human ly made, and it learns otherwise only as its thinking is "dereif ied" through in- creasing sophist ication. 5s

Accordingly, for Berger and Luckmann, reification is not part icularly a

m o d e r n phenomenon , nor tied to any par t icular mode o f product ion. It is a universal h u m a n tendency, a feature of social psychology in general: "as soon as an objective social world is established, the possibility of reification is never far away. ''56 They do recognize that reification will be more intense in some social circumstances than others, and that it can somet imes extend to an entire " inst i tut ional order as a whole ." But their example of this is drawn f rom primitive society: a society that sees

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its entire culture as a microcosm "reflecting the macrocosm of the total universe as made by the gods." They do not have a historical theory like Luk~cs's, in which reification is the culmination of a (dialectical) histori- cal process. On the contrary, Berger and Luckmann stress that, if any- thing, reification is at its height in the beginning, in isolated primitive societies.

It would be a mistake to look at reification as a perversion of an originally non-

reified apprehension of the social world, a sort of cognitive fall from grace. 57

Reification is a function of naivete, they argue, both in the species and in the individual. Primitive tribes and small children assume that their way is the only possible way. Having encountered no alternative, they be- stow on their own institutions "an ontological status independent of hu- man activity and signification." Only with increasing sophistication is this assumption undone through "dereification of consciousness, which is a comparatively late development in history and in any individual bi- ography. ''Ss Accordingly, Berger and Luckmann urge sociologists to study the

social circumstances that favor dereification - such as the overall collapse of

institutional orders, the contact between previously segregated societies, and

the important phenomenon of social marginali ty: 9

They make no comparable suggestion about the social circumstances that produce reification.

Luk~ics, by contrast, is far more detailed and explicit about the origins of reification than about its cure, though he is of course convinced that it will end in the communist revolution. Although all classes in advanced capitalism partake of it, they experience reification in different ways. The proletariat gradually becomes class-conscious as a result of factory or- ganization, economic crises, and political struggles over wages and working conditions, but the substantive content of its class- consciousness is radically different from that of the bourgeoisie. Because the proletarian is objectively both a commodity on the market and a hu- man being capabIe of agency, proletarian class-consciousness is "the self-consciousness of the commodity" and thus necessarily dialectical,. closing the unbridgeable gap postulated by bourgeois thought between mind and matter, the realm of freedom and the realm of causation. 6~ Speaking less abstractly, bourgeois class-consciousness means awareness of a shared interest in maintaining capitalism, and thus in maintaining a competitive, fragmented, non-class orientation. Proletarian class-

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consciousness means awareness o f a shared interest in cooperat ion, col- lectivity, and solidarity. Thus workers begin to " in tend" the whole; being dialectical, their class-consciousness is able to "lead to a knowledge of totality. '61 So they overcome the "contemplat ive" att i tude and come to realize their collective power of agency as a class.

For Berger and Luckmann, then, part icular instances o f reification are relatively easy to cure, but reification as such will never end. It arises anew with each infant. For Lukfics, by contrast, reification ends with the coming o f communism, and it ends totally. Lukfics believes in (dialecti- cal) progress; Berger and Luckmann do not. Yet things are not so simple, the contrast between the two perspectives not as stark as it first seems.

For one thing, Lukfics and Marx cannot have failed to know the sort of facts Berger and Luckmann stress about primitive peoples. Though an- thropology was in its infancy, they had studied the history o f Greek phi- losophy, bo th directly and in its Hegelian version. They surely knew about the development f rom Homer ic naive simplicity (in which d i k e -

the root o f the later word for justice or righteousness - simply meant " the way": the way things are, the way things are done) through the presocratics and Socrates and the Sophists to later Cynics and Stoics and Skeptics. 62 When Lukfics says that reification is at its height in late capitalism, he certainly does not mean that the Homer ic sort of naive e thnocentr ism is at its height. On the contrary, he doubtless shares Marx's view that capitalism tears people out o f their tradit ional roots in craft and communi ty and forcibly sophisticates them in the melting pot of urban life and factory work.

Furthermore, a l though Berger and Luckmann warn against regarding reification as "a sort o f cognitive fall f rom grace," they themselves pro- ceed to do just that. "Man is capable o f f o r g e t t i n g his authorship o f the human wor ld ," they write. In reification, "the world loses its compre- hensibility as a human enterprise." And "the decisive quest ion is wheth- er [one] s t i l l re ta ins awareness" of human agency. 63 Evident ly in pas- sages like these, the sociologists are thinking not o f primitive naivet6 but of phenomena like habi tuat ion and forgetfulness, the routinization o f charisma, the t ransformat ion of sect into church and of mass movement into bureacracy. They note that abstract, theoretical thinking - surely a feature o f modern sophistication - tends to reification. 64 And they warn "against the distortive reifications o f both sociologism and psy- chologism," as well as of the "structural analysis of social phenomena , " all o f which tend to make sociologists mistake the very nature of their

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proper subject matter : "society as par t o f a h u m a n world, made by men. '65

Evident ly two rather different kinds of p h e n o m e n a fit within the defini- t ion o f reification that Luk~ics and Berger and Luckmann share. James W. Woodard ' s Intellectual Realism and Cultural Change: A Preliminary Study of Reification is useful here, for Woodard makes the distinction explicit, though only with reference to individual psychology. 66 Like

Berger and Luckmann , he notes the reification involved in the naivet6 and "egocent r i sm" o f small children, but points out that in another sense, children reify less than adults. For,

the child has not yet been conditioned to the full battery of conventionalized hypocrisies, institutionalized absurdities, and sanctified fallacies which have be- come so integral a part of the mental world of the adult. 67

I t is the child who is able to see and say that the emperor wears no

clothes. Thus one must distinguish the "reif icat ion o f inhabi tua t ion" f rom the "reif icat ion o f naivet6. ''68

For Berger and Luckmann, all aspects o f culture are equally relevant to

reification. They do not give preference to mater ial over non-mater ia l culture, nor to the means and m o d e o f p roduc t ion over religion, philoso- phy, or art. Consequently, for them it is not obvious tha t there is more

object ivat ion in m o d e r n than in primit ive society. Wha t might it mean,

after all, to say that one society has more culture than another? So the sociologists have no reason to assume that the potent ial for reification is greater in m o d e r n capi tal ism than in a primitive tribe. Though they are in fact interested in bo th kinds o f reification, failing to notice the distinc- t ion Woodard draws, they discuss the cause and cure only of naive reifi-

cation, and have no alternative to offer to Luk~cs's account o f modern , sophist icated reification. They are simply confused. Lukfics avoids this confusion, but only by ignoring naive reification altogether; he is interest-

ed only in the si tuat ion where h u m a n powers are extensive, and where nothing but reif ication blocks their realization.

To some extent, Luk~ics and Berger and Luckmann talk past each other, but not entirely, and their basic definit ions are close. Might social science be able to determine empirical ly which o f them is right? But how would such a s tudy proceed? H o w measure reification? Would the results o f such a s tudy not depend on the sense of reification with which it began? The conceptual problems cannot be escaped so easily. Perhaps, then, the d ic t ionary can offer an authori tat ive resolution.

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Consulting the dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary says that reification means "the mental conversion o f a person or an abstract concept into a thing," and, cor- respondingly, to reify is " to convert mental ly into a thing; to material- ize." The earliest examples date from the mid-nineteenth century.

The first thing to notice about the definit ion is the term "mental( ly) ." Evidently the physical conversion o f anything into a r e s is not acceptable as reification, though there seems no etymological reason for this limita- tion. But what does "mental ly converting into a thing" mean? Does it, for instance, mean mentally producing some actual change in the world, or merely changing the apprehension of a world that itself remains un- changed? Physical conversion into a thing would presumably have to in- volve changing the world, but mental conversion is ambiguous. Psy- chokinesis aside, whether and how we can mentally change the physical world is a vexed quest ion o f philosophy. Some philosophers argue that the world is consti tuted as much by our concepts as by the merely physi- cal. Take Ha nnah Arendt 's concept ion of reification already discussed: the realizing of a "mental image" in some physical object through fabri- cation. This would seem to qualify as converting some non-res into res,

but was it done mentally or physically? Doesn' t the answer have to be "bo th"?

Most likely, however, what the dict ionary means by "mental ly converting into a thing" is changes in apprehension o f the world, whether misappre- hensions that create illusions, or correct perceptions that remove them. The dict ionary gives examples of both kinds.

Next, notice that the dict ionary allows only two kinds o f entities to be reifiable: persons and abstract concepts. Reification turns out to mean something different in each case. First, what can it mean to convert a person into a r e s mentally? The dict ionary example to illustrate this us- age is about how what people once regarded as Helios, the sun god, came to be recognized as an inanimate object, the sun. This is clearly a change in apprehension (even if a philosopher might want to call it also a change in the world), and in the direction of shedding rather than creating illusions.

What would consti tute the mental converting of a person into a res in the opposite direction, creating a misapprehension? Presumably it would mean something like depersonalizat ion or dehumanizat ion: regarding or

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menta l ly treating persons as if they were objects. This could mean deny-

ing their moral status as humans , their membersh ip in what Kant called the " k i n g d o m of ends," o f beings we may not use as mere means to our own ends, in the way tha t objects are used. Here reification would mean

a failure to apply moral considerat ions in the (mental) t rea tment o f peo- ple. Alternatively, dehumaniz ing a person could mean denying that per- son's capaci ty for agency - that is, for initiative, responsibility, creativi-

ty, a u t o n o m o u s judgment . While the denial o f mora l status is done to others, the denial o f agency can also, important ly, be done to the self, as in Berger and Luckmann ' s "reif icat ion o f ident i ty" ("I have to act this

way because of my p o s i t i o n . . . " ) or Luk~cs's third aspect o f reification (the manner o f conduct o f a "contemplat ive" subject). In literary criti- cism, reification is somet imes contrasted to an imism or personif icat ion

in just this sense: reification means that a person is presented as an inani- mate object, while an imism or personif icat ion mean that an object is presented as alive, a person. 69

The reification of "abstract concepts" is an al together different kettle o f fish. It has nothing to do with their dehumaniza t ion , or mora l status, or agency. Instead it means something like hypostat izat ion: menta l ly converting an abstract concept into something concrete, tangible, or -

as the dic t ionary says - "mater ia l iz ing" it. It is not clear why the dic-

t ionary says "abst ract concepts ," given that all concepts are abstract , and other abstract ions besides concepts can presumably be reified. Prob-

ably the dic t ionary should s imply have said "abs t rac t ions ."

All of the dic t ionary examples illustrating the reif ication of abstractions, by contrast with those for persons, imply a misapprehension, the errone- ous ascribing of materiality. Woodard glosses the meaning of this sense of reif ication as:

conferring an overgreat concreteness or tangibility on what is only conceptual, relational, or functional.., taking as factual, concrete, or perceptual that which is only conceptual;.., taking as absolute that which is only relative, etc. 7~

Ultimately, he says, it means "any unwarranted extension of reality in the thing perceived or conceived," including project ion, hallucination, delu- sion, wishful thinking, naivet6, provincialism, a n t h r o p o m o r p h i s m . 71 He even introduces the category "negative reif ication" for cases where reali- ty is improper ly constr icted instead of extended. 72 Woodard points out that the e tymological root o f "real" is also res; reification, he suggests, is realification. 73 Woodard is a nominalis t , and thinks the reification o f abst ract ions is always a misapprehension. But one need not share his phi losophical stance.

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Indeed, even though Woodard defines the word as any unwarranted ex-

tension or contract ion o f reality, and even though the dic t ionary exam-

ples are all o f misapprehension, one might also include in the reification of abstract ions the correct recognit ion as material o f what had previous-

ly been taken for merely abstract, the correct recognit ion o f the real as

real, whether concrete or abstract. The con tempora ry phi losopher Wil- lard Van O r m a n Quine, for instance, uses the word "reif icat ion" in a

manner entirely neutral between misapprehens ion and correct apprehen- sion. Recognizing all our categories and concepts as conventional , Quine uses "reif icat ion" to mean the selecting of what sorts of entities we will consider real and "admi t to our ontology. ''74 Reification in this sense

can be good or bad; it's a mat ter o f getting reality right.

Take commodit ies . Are they res? Are they real? Concrete or abstract? Here is an iron frying pan I bought this morn ing at the hardware store for $12.95. It is (or was this morning) a commodi ty . It is a real physical object, subject to natural laws like the law of gravity. It has practical use

value; I bought it to cook with. It has a physical history, having been manufac tu red in some part icular t ime and place by the actual productive activity of some part icular person(s). But are these things true o f it as

a c o m m o d i t y ? " C o m m o d i t y " means an i tem of marke t exchange, to be

bought and sold. Qua commodi ty , this pan has neither weight nor size, neither practical utility nor a physical history. It has only a price, and it is subject not to natural laws but to the laws of the market , such as

supply and demand. O f course there would be no c o m m o d i t y exchange if there were not physical objects and living people to produce and use

them. But commodi t ies are also real in their own right, as commodit ies ;

for example, marke t f luctuations in their prices have direct, practical consequences in people 's lives. So what do we mistake in reifying com- modit ies?

H o w do Lukfics's and Berger and Luckmann ' s concept ions of reification

fit into the dict ionary definition? Are they reification of persons or o f abstract ions? Certainly parts o f what the dic t ionary calls reification of persons are central to their concerns, but the sorts o f entities that these theorists say are reified are not persons, but relationships, activities, processes, " h u m a n p h e n o m e n a , " " the social wor ld ," "externalized products of h u m a n activity," and so on. These certainly have to do with h u m a n beings, but they are not themselves h u m a n beings. Berger and Luckmann say that " the reified world is, by definition, a deht /manized wor ld ," but what is being reified in that sentence is not a person, but the world. 75

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Perhaps, then, these theorists are mainly concerned with the reification

of abstract ions? But neither Lukfics nor Berger and L u c k m a n n consider the entities that get reified to be abstractions. On the contrary, what typi- cally happens in their reification as misapprehens ion is a lmost the oppo-

site. Some concrete, actual, (as Marx would say) sensual h u m a n activity, relationship, or p roduc t is mystified into an abst ract ion like the marke t

or the gods. This seems more like improper abstractness than improper concreteness; why call it reification? The market , or the gods, are indeed

taken to be real and even personif ied as exercising power over people. But Lukfics also insists that the marke t and its power are real. A n d surely if something is being improper ly personif ied or demonized, that would be more like animism, the opposi te of reification. Accordingly, in the one

passage where Marx uses the word Verdinglichung, he contrasts the reifi- cat ion of productive relationships to the personif icat ion of things, though he says bo th occur together in political economy, as a ghostly "Mons ieur le Capital and M a d a m e la Terre do their haunt ing simultane-

ously as social characters and as mere objects. ''76

Our argument , then, seems driven to the remarkable conclusion that neither Luk~cs's nor Berger and Luckmann ' s concept o f reification fits the

dic t ionary defini t ion at all. Tha t need not be a fault. Dictionaries are

somet imes wrong, and even when right they reflect usage, which - un- der condit ions of reification - is more likely to disguise than to reveal

reality. Poets, scientists, and theorists somet imes discover i l luminating

new ways with words. But it does signify that the dic t ionary cannot clari-

fy what these theorists mean by reification.

Can we?

The complexities and confusions mount . It is t ime to get back to basics: what is really at stake in the idea o f reification for these theorists?

Review for a moment : Luk~cs first defined reification as mis taking a hu- man relat ionship for res, but soon complicated things by introducing ob- jective reification and other senses o f the word. Berger and Luckmann avoided these complicat ions by confining the te rm to a failure to see the h u m a n origin of what is human ly made, so that " the world o f institu- tions appears to merge with that world of nature. ''77 Marx, too, men- t ioned confusing the formulas o f bourgeois economics with "necessi ty imposed by nature"; Lukacs spoke of assigning to h u m a n things a " p h a n t o m objectivity"; and the Dictionary o f Marxist Thought defines reified things as " m a n - p r o d u c e d things which have become independent

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(and which are imagined as originally independent) of man. ''78 So the

issue becomes mistaking humanly made r e s for natural r e s . And why does that matter? Berger and Luckmann say it most explicitly:

The decisive question is whether [onel still retains the awareness that, however

objectivated, the social world was made by men - and, therefore, can b e re- m a d e b y t h e m . 79

These theorists want to free and empower people. The real point of reifi- cation for them is that it bIocks or cripples action because people fail to see their real options and capacities. The point is problems that might be solved, suffering that might be alleviated, disasters that might be averted if only people saw them as actionable, saw how they themselves were inadvertently causing the trouble by their own activity.

So it is not so much that n o n - r e s is taken for r e s or even that humanly made r e s is taken for natural, as that t roublesome conditions we could change are taken for unchangeable. But if that is the real point, then, first, "reif icat ion" does not seem a very good word for it. And, second, Lukfics's and Berger and Luckmann's t reatment o f reification rests on a crucial, hi therto only implicit assumption: that humanly made equals humanly changeable, while natural r e s equals humanly unchangeable.

As soon as that assumption is explicit, its problematic character becomes evident. Whatever made anyone suppose such an equat ion to hold?

Surely our most ordinary experience suggests otherwise. We shape and alter natural objects all the time; we are the artificers. And what can be more difficult than organizing people for significant social change - unless it be accomplishing a significant change in oneself? Hegel said it and Lukfics quotes him: "It is much harder to bring movement into fixed ideas than into sensuous existence. ''80 Indeed, Luk~ics argues explicitly that the concept ion of nature as fixed and unchangeable is itself a bour- geois reification, and both he and Berger and Luckmann stress our ca- pacity to t ransform the natural. They do not in fact believe the assump- t ion hidden in their concept.

But perhaps the problematic assumption has not yet been given its most plausible formulat ion. Two modif icat ions suggest themselves. Perhaps what is to be taken as humanly unchangeable is not natural objects, but the natural laws that govern such objects; and perhaps what is to be tak- en as humanly changeable is not whatever originated in human action, but whatever is - even now - sustained only by human activity. Both modif icat ions are worth considering.

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H u m a n beings change many natural objects, but always only in accord with the laws o f physics, chemistry, and biology, which themselves are not human ly changeable. So mistaking h u m a n relationships or activities for res might mean taking t hem for the sort of entity that can be changed only in accord with unchangeable, eternal laws. This would fit with

Marx ' s charge against the bourgeois political economists , that they took their fo rmulae to be "as much a self-evident necessity imposed by nature

as productive labor itself. ''8~ But Marx certainly thought tha t even hu-

m a n act ion was limited by inescapable necessities, including some - like the need to produce - that were natural and eternal. Berger and Luck- m a n n would surely agree, and it is hard to believe that Lukfics would not. Unless one d e f i n e s the social world as what is human ly changeable, and

the natural as what is not, b o t h h u m a n and natural res are human ly changeable only within limits, some of which are condi t ional and tem- porary, others necessary and eternal. So the prob lem here is not taking h u m a n for natural res hut mis taking condit ional or t empora ry regulari-

ties for necessary and eternal ones, an error that can occur in natural science as well as political economy, and which there is no reason to call

reification.

There is, however, ano ther sense of "natura l law" to be considered. Throughou t most o f European history, most people regarded nature, or

the deity that created nature, as imposing not only necessary regularities on objects but also s tandards of right conduct on people - "na tura l laws" in the sense, say, in which they are invoked by the United States Declarat ion of Independence. People have a choice abou t obeying such

laws, but not about their validity or content. Mistaking some local and t empora ry h u m a n convention for such a law can, indeed, prevent people f rom acting to change it, and bo th Lukfics and Berger and L u c k m a n n appea r to include this sort o f mistake in their concepts o f reification. 82

But this kind of natural law has nothing to do with res; it applies only to h u m a n beings, so again the term "reif icat ion" seems inappropriate .

The other possible modif ica t ion in the problemat ic assumpt ion that hu- man ly made equals humanly changeable is that it refers not to origins but to maintenance. Surely much that is begun by h u m a n act ion is be- yond our power to undo, somet imes even to control or modify. Consider murder. Consider a forest fire. Consider a chain reaction. But maybe when Berger and Luckmann refer to what is " m a d e by men - and, therefore, can be remade by t h e m , " they really mean what is, even now, sustained only by h u m a n activity. For they also say that "social order is a h u m a n product , or more precisely, an ongoing h u m a n p r o d u c t i o n . . .

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[that] exists only and insofar as h u m a n activity continues to produce it. ''s3 Lukfics, too, speaks of " the unbroken product ion and reproduc-

t ion of those relations a m o n g humans ."s4 Capital ism, racism, marriage, baseball , the criminal law, the university - such insti tutions consist in organized pat terns of h u m a n activity and relat ionship (even if some o f them also involve the use o f certain physical objects).

Insofar as an insti tution consists only in h u m a n activity, the proposi t ion

that it is changeable by h u m a n activity seems tautologically true: changed activity is a changed institution.

T h a t apparen t tautological guarantee of success, left implicit and there- fore unchal lenged, is one reason for the appeal o f the idea of reification. Yet the phi losophical security of the tautology only masks the real prac-

tical and polit ical problems. The issue is not, after all, whether our ac- tivities are likely to change in some way, but whether we can change them

deliberately, in accord with our intentions, to achieve certain goals. And the answer to that quest ion is thoroughly problematic, varying f rom case to case. We watch with horror the approach o f nuclear war, o f ecological disaster, o f world famine. Yet these disasters are not approach ing us; it is we who are approach ing them by our cont inuing activities. To avert them we have only to stop doing what we do.

Only! I t sounds like the advice given to Kafka 's mouse by the cat. The quest ion is - can we?

" C a n " is a notor iously t roublesome concept, vital to our daily function- ing but a phi losophical nightmare. 8s Its use always seems to presuppose

an unlimited number o f implicit "ir is ," many o f them involving fur ther "can ' s" or "could ' s" tha t are themselves equally problematic. Given enough "ir is ," including some that are wildly counterfactual , absolutely anything becomes feasible. Yet, in the event, only one o f the possibilities actual ly happens. " C a n " ranges about in the intervening terrain, shadowed by its even more elusive companion , "could ." Their meaning

always needs to be completed, and the "iris" they presuppose limited, by the part icular context o f their use. s6

The difficulties are great enough with respect to our individual lives. Suppose that I have a bad habit , or a character flaw, or an addiction. Can I stop? "You can if you want to enough , " admonishes the reformer. "She can if she has sufficient ego s t rength ," comment s the psychologist . "She can if placed in a favorable social env i ronment , " adds the sociolo-

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gist. " G o d will ing," m u r m u r s the preacher. And we know that, in practi-

cal terms, it all depends.

I f these matters are hard to think about with respect to an individual,

they are even harder with respect to the large-scale social and political issues where the idea o f reification is mean t to apply. For there one must deal not merely with problemat ic "can ' s , " "could ' s , " and " i f ' s , " but also

with the problemat ic "we." Wha t "we" can do depends on who we are - how many, how determined, how powerful or skillful. And the m e m -

bership of that "we" will vary with the way we define our task and our means, for some will join and others withdraw with each change in direc- tion. All this fur ther depends profoundly on how people unders tand themselves and their world. Change people 's ideas, and their conduct

will change; yet not just any new idea will be accepted. A new way o f looking at things will be widely accepted only if it makes sense of peo- ple's actual experience, speaks to their needs and desires. And in politics,

th inking is always divided, controversial. There will not be agreement even on goals or the identif icat ion of problems, let alone on the causes

o f problems or the means to their solution. So the cheerful claim that

what we have made we can remake differently, masks the question of whether those two "we's" are the same. In the words o f the f amous 1960s joke, " W h a d d a ya mean, 'we, ' White Man? ''s7

In addit ion, the feasibility o f changing social institutions involves the p rob lem o f organizat ion. Changing the habitual , inst i tut ionalized pat- terns o f interact ion of large numbers o f people requires organizing or coordinat ing them in some new way. And every way o f doing that has fur ther consequences o f its own. A bureaucracy produces different results than a commune ; a keninist revolution develops differently f rom

an anarchist one. It may even be that some goals cannot be reached by

means o f deliberately organized act ion at all.

Finally, some social insti tutions are part icularly difficult to change be- cause their funct ioning is basic to our physical survival. They cannot be interrupted for long, or people will die. So if they are to be altered, pres- ent a r rangements must p rompt ly be replaced by some feasible al terna- tive. Even if many people can see the bad consequences of present insti- tut ions o f product ion, each o f them still needs to make a living and all still need food, water, and shelter. In the absence of a feasible alternative, they cannot s imply stop what they now do. 88

Central to Lukfics's and Berger and Luckmann ' s intentions in discussing

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reification is the idea that people fail to solve problems or avert disasters because they lack awareness that they themselves are causing those prob- lems or disasters and couM stop doing so. But what people can do, what options are really open at a part icular time in a part icular society, is al- ways politically problematic. The point is not action for its own sake, for we are already active; the point is action that will succeed in promot ing justice or f reedom or simply well-being. Sacrificing people and wasting resources in the pursuit of hopeless causes are not helpful.

Does it all come down, then, to nothing more definite than good politi- cal judgment , and leave us with nothing more useful than some secular version o f Reinhold Niebuhr 's prayer: "God grant me the strength to en- dure with serenity what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to tell the difference?"

Conclusion

By now this essay has accumulated over twenty alleged meanings, senses, or aspects o f reification; there seems not much point in listing them. 89 Some of them are mutual ly consistent, almost overlapping; others are in- compatible. Some are in accord with the dict ionary definition, others not. With some, the sense in which some entity is being converted into a res is evident; with others, t ry as I might, I cannot find such a sense. The dict ionary entry itself is rather slipshod, and interpreters have ex- panded the term's meaning almost indefinitely beyond it. The main ways in which Lukfics and Berger and Luckmann use the word do not fit into the dict ionary defini t ion at all. They make the meaning o f reification de- pendent on concepts like "can" and "could" that are themselves heavily dependent on the part icular context o f their use. Lukfics's and Berger and Luckmann's discussions are confusing and very probably confused. The whole thing is a swamp.

Can this concept be saved? And should it?

Within the limits of the dict ionary definition, the concept does its work well enough. When Stephen Gould, say, criticizes psychologists for reify- ing intelligence by assuming that the I.Q. test must be testing something,

he and the concept per form a clear and useful function. 9~ But if the main concerns are those of Lukfics and Berger and Luckmann, in my opinion the term mystifies more than it reveals. Their concerns could be accommoda ted within the dict ionary definit ion as reification o f persons,

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in the sense of denying people 's capaci ty for agency. But a l though Luk/tcs and Berger and Luckm ann do occasionally use the word this way, for the mos t par t they do not. So art iculat ing their concerns within this sense of the word would require extensive rewriting of their arguments .

Would political theorists who share those concerns not do better to a b a n d o n the concept?

I would unhesitat ingly advise it, except for one, crucial considerat ion. There really is something going on a m o n g us that we urgently need to think and talk about , and that Luk~ics's and Berger and Luckmann ' s concept ions o f reification were meant to address. People do feel t rapped, in a way that makes Kafka 's little fable so perfect ly emblemat ic for our experience. Despite the prevalence in m o d e r n society o f all o f Berger and

Luckmann ' s "social circumstances that favor derei f icat ion," very many people do feel helpless to influence the condit ions that constrain their

lives. Millions o f Amer icans turn their backs on politics, judging that en- gagement in it would make no significant difference. Millions o f mem- bers of the underclass feel worthless - though also filled with diffuse rage - because society seems to have no use for them. Almos t all o f us

funct ion in large organizat ional systems, whether as parts o f the machin- ery or materials being processed, and have learned to take that condi t ion for granted. We funct ion within an economy that depends on a system

of internat ional banking and finance that everyone knows to be in con- stant danger o f collapse. Almos t all o f us submit wi thout quest ion to the

" technological imperat ive" that daily exhausts our resources, destroys our health, and poisons the earth. And we march like sleepwalkers down the road marked "deterrence" and "nonpro l i fe ra t ion , " toward nuclear doom. 91 Experts and critics offer various diagnoses of our condit ion,

but whatever measures are actually taken to treat it seem only to make it worse.

This familiar litany o f troubles suggests a malaise far too extensive and

too grave for the powers of political prudence. When a society, or an en- tire civilization, .or even the whole h u m a n species seems bent on self- destruct ion, one suspects systematic, pervasive, fundamenta l derange- ment in people 's pat terns of bo th thought and conduct . Calling on polit-

ical prudence here is a lmost bound to mean calling for "more of the same." Here what is needed is a more basic real ignment o f assumpt ions , o f the sort that has tradit ionally been associated with great political the- ory.

Wading through the dismal swamp o f reification theory, as this essay

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does, can leave one feeling that such concepts, and political theory itself,

are hopelessly abstracted f rom reality and o f no practical use in relation

to our urgent political problems, so that political prudence is the only hope. But polit ical reality itself, and the prudence by which gifted actors

know how to move within it, always presuppose and depend on theoreti- cal f rameworks - if not self-conscious, deliberate theorizing, then unex-

amined, inherited theory or, more likely, f ragments o f theories that may well be outda ted or mutua l ly inconsistent. So if we seem today bereft o f political prudence and judgment , cIose to our wits' end, that may be be- cause our wits are operat ing out o f such incoherent f ragments of inherit-

ed assumptions .

The message to be derived f rom the familiar litany of our troubles and our sleepwalking, then, is not the familiar exhorta t ion to, "For God ' s sake, do something before it is too late!" For while we may feel inert, we

are already doing something - a lot o f things - and they are the source

o f our troubles. Like Kafka 's mouse, we run and run. Berger and Luck- mann ' s and Lukfics's concept o f reification was meant to address precise-

ly those troubles that are the large-scale ou tcome of our myriad activi-

ties, sustained and enlarged by nothing more than what we do. The p rob lem is how to stop, how to do something else, what else to do.

Tha t is a problem as much for thought as for action, a problem for ac- t ion in formed and empowered by new thought. Par t o f the value of Berg- er and Luckmann ' s - and even more of Lukfics's - discussion of reifi-

ca t ion is that they tried to provide a general theory of the nature and roots o f our condit ion, orienting us to likely avenues for action, feasible ways and means, probable allies and opponents . Their efforts, this es-

say has argued, were confused and deeply flawed. The concept o f reifica- t ion is p robably not a good tool for the job, and bad tools mean s loppy work. But better s loppy work with a bad tool than no work at all. Those of us who persist in reaching for the word "reif icat ion" as a tool should

p robab ly employ greater care. We should require ourselves to specify in each case precisely what we mean, and at tend to whether and how our

various meanings in various contexts are interrelated. But whether we re- vise the concept o f reification, or abandon it, or just let it cont inue to

slop a long in its present state o f dishevelment doesn ' t much matter. Wha t matters is that we continue to think - hard and critically, theoreti- cally and politically - abou t the condit ions that Lukfics and Berger and

L u c k m a n n were t rying to address.

Our thinking here must be s imul taneously theoretical and political: theo-

288

retical in the sense o f radical, cutt ing through conventions and cliches

to the real roots o f our troubles, seeing social a r rangements large-scale and long-range, as if f rom the outside, which may be what Luk~ics meant

by "intending totality. ''92 Yet the thinking must also be political, in the

sense of or iented to action, practical, speaking in a meaningful way to those capable of making the necessary changes, those Luk~ics called " the 'we' o f genesis. ''93 For Lukfics, o f course, that mean t the proletariat .

But one need not be a Marxist to see the need for locating such a "we," and the point o f seeking it a m o n g those with an objective interest in the right sort o f change and the potent ial power to bring it about . The a im is not some new doctr ine to save us f rom ourselves, but a t r ans fo rmed way of seeing what we already tacitly know and do, which restores us to our real world - the "concrete here and now," as Luk~ics puts it - and

our real, living selves, including our capacities for action. Tha t would

mean not some access to mysterious, infinite powers, but the appropr ia - t ion of our actual powers, recognizing the present m o m e n t as " the mo-

ment of decision, the m o m e n t o f the bir th of the new," as Lukfics says, out o f which we joint ly "make the future. ''94 T h a t is no return to

Hegel ian idealism, but a recovery of the practical, political Marx.

Thinking bo th theoretically and politically in this way is no easy task;

indeed, it is a lmost a contradic t ion in terms. Yet it may well be our best hope, and the world is in a hurry. Despite all o f the political and phi losophical difficulties, unless we under take this task we may well

guarantee our own en t rapment , assuring tha t we will end up like Kafka 's mouse, rather than h u m a n and free.

Notes

1. Franz Kafka, "A Little Fable," in Franz Kafka, the Complete Stories, edited by Na- hum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), 445. I am deeply grateful to Carolyn Port- er, Michael P. Rogirt, John H. Schaar, George Shulman, Sara M. Shumer, and Paul Thomas for reading and criticizing drafts of this essay.

2. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought o f Niccol6 Machiavelli (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984), 277.

3. Tom Bottomore, editor, A Dictionary o f Marxist Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 411. The exceptional passage is in Capital, vol. Ill, ch. 48, where Marx calls the "reification [ Verdinglichung] of social relationships" a "mystifi- cation" whereby the elements in the economist's "trinity formula" - capital, land, and labor - are "autonomized and ossified" in an "enchanted and inverted world." Unfortunately for Lukfics's thesis, Marx says that this particular mystification (and thus Marx's only use of the word Verdinglichung) is "dissolved" rather than imposed or exemplified by "classical economics."

289

4. Georg Lukfics, "Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats," in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968), 170-355; "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History

and Class Consciousness, tr. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 83 -222. Lukfics's essay was written in 1922. The translation of passages cited is mostly my own, but references are given to both the German text and the Livingstone transla- tion for the convenience of readers.

5. Friedrich Engels, letter to Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893, in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, second edn. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 766.

6. Luk~_cs, "Verdinglichung," 171, 338; "Reification," 83, 197. See also "Verdin- glichung," 297-298; "Reification," 170.

7. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 171 and, e.g., 174; "Reification," 83 and, e.g., 86. 8. Luk~,cs, "Verdinglichung," 170-171; "Reification," 83. 9. Occasionally Lukfics maintains, instead, that what is reified is a process, or he equates

relationship and process, or he claims that only process is real, that all supposed ob- jects and facts are really only processes or "aspects of processes"; at other times he treats the idea of process itself as a reification of human activity. "Verdinglichung," 3l l-313, 317, 319, 347-348, 179; "Reification," 179-181, 183-184, 203-204, 89.

10. Hannah Arendt has argued that Arbeit is rightly translated by "labor" rather than "work," and concluded accordingly that Marx saw human beings fundamentally as the animal laborans. This seems to me doubtful both with respect to the modern trans- lation of Arbeit (though it may be valid etymologically) and with respect to Marx's thought. The German terms in this conceptual region simply do not correspond neatly to their English counterparts. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 79-93.

11. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 195, quoted by Lukfics from Marx.

12. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 175; 13. Luk~ics 14. Luk~ics 15. Luk~ics 16. Luk~ics 17. Luk~ics 18. Luk~ics 19. Luk~ics 20. Luk~ics

175; "Reification," 101, 86. The latter two terms are

"Reification," 87. "Verdinglichung," 186, 174, 296; "Reification," 94, 86, 169. "Verdinglichung," 317; "Reification," 183. "Verdinglichung," 308; "Reification," 177. "Verdinglichung," 175; "Reification," 87. "Verdinglichung," 308; "Reification," 177. "Verdinglichung," 181; "Reification," 91. "Verdinglicbung," 171; "Reification," 84. "Verdinglichung," 175; "Reification," 87.

2I. Luk~ics "Verdinglichung," 175, 176, 178; "Reification," 87, 88, 89. The deciphering of Luk~ics's meaning here is made more difficult by his citing passages from Marx to the effect that labor power becomes a commodity to the worker himself, suggesting "subjective" in the sense of idiosyncratic, inaccurate because of personal bias. But this is not what Luk~ics means by "subjective" here. "Verdinglichung," 174-175; "Reifica- tion," 86-87; citing Karl Marx, Capital, I (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing

House, 1961-62), 72, 170. 22. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 185, 193, 331; "Reification," 93, 99, 192. 23. Compare Lukrics, "Verdinglichung," 293; "Reification," 166. where quantification is

a "reified and reifying covering" or "husk" hiding reality. 24. On Luk~cs's biography consult G. H. R. Parkinson, Georg Lukdcs (London, Henley,

and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); T. Hanak, Lukdcs war traders (Meisen- heim: Anton Hain, 1973); Evil Fekete and Ev~i Karadi, Gydrgy Lukdes: His Life in Pic-

tures and Documents (Budapest: Corvina Kiddo, 1981).

2 9 0

25. Georg Luk~cs, "Vorwort (1967)" in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, 25, 27; "Pref-

ace to the New Edit ion (1967)" in History and Class Consciousness, x x i v - xxv. Actual-

ly Luk~cs is relating his own though t to that o f bo th Marx and Hegel, and to no t just

two but three o f their concepts: Entiiusserung, Entfremdung, and Vergegenst?ind- lichung. While the third of these is unproblemat ica l ly t ranslated by "object i f ica t ion,"

the first two present t rans la t ion problems. Some translators use "al ienat ion" for the

one G e r m a n term, some for the other, and there is good reason for either decision.

Ent?iusserung is related to aussen, which means outside; so it m e a n s "outer ing ," exter-

nalizat ion, projection. Entfremdung is related to fremd, mean ing foreign or strange;

so it means " fore igniza t ion ," es t rangement . But the former term is used in G e r m a n

for a l ienat ion of property, the latter for the al ienat ion o f affections. Both Hegel and

Marx use all three words, and bo th sharply dis t inguish Entfremdung, a painful condi-

tion, f rom the other two, which refer to h u m a n creative power. Hegel tends to juxta-

pose Entfremdung most ly to Entgiusserung; M arx jux taposes it most ly to Vergegen- stiindlichung. For a t hough t fu l t rea tment o f these t ransla t ion problems, see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, t ranslated by Mar t in Milli-

gan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publ i sh ing House, no date given), 10-13 .

26. Luk~ics, "Vorwort ," 27; "Preface ," x x i v - x x v .

27. Luk~ics, "Vorwort ," 25; "Preface ," xxiv.

28. Karl Marx, "Economic and Phi losophic Manusc r ip t s o f 1844," in Tucker, editor,

Marx-Engels Reader, 76.

29. Arendt , Human Condition, 139. See also 95, 187, and H a n n a h Arendt , Between Past and Future (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1968), 153.

30. Arendt , Human Condition, 140-141.

31. Accordingl2,; only what can be "represented in the outs ide world" is "capable o f [un-

dergoing] reif icat ion," so that menta l images can be reified but sensat ions cannot .

Ibid., 141.

32. " M a n [der Mensch, tha t is, the h u m a n being] produces m a n - h imsel f and the other

m a n , " so that " the entire so-called his tory o f the world is no th ing but the begett ing

o f m a n th rough h u m a n labor [Arbeit]." Marx, "Economic and Phi losophic

Manusc r ip t s , " in Tucker, editor, Marx-Engels Reader, 85, 92; see also The German ldeology in ibid., 157.

33. Luk~ics's objective reification is confused also because it includes bo th material ob-

jects, which surely would cont inue into a commun i s t society unless destroyed in the

revolution, and entities such as commodi t ies and the market tha t d isappear with

capital ism.

34. Accordingly, Luk~ics is able to adduce passages f rom Capital tha t closely parallel a

n u m b e r o f his a rguments ; e.g. "Verdingl ichung," 174-175; "Rei f ica t ion ," 86.

35. Nor does the dist inct ion between Schein, illusion, and Erscheinung, appearance, to

which Andrew Ara to calls a t tent ion (Andrew Arato, "Luk~ics's Theory o f Reifica- t ion ," Telos, No. 11 (Spring 1972) 2 5 - 6 0 , at 32 n) help here, for then the ques t ion be- comes what Erscheinung, appearance, means: is the market objectively there or not? Do market regularities constra in people or not? A n d if so, jus t how is tha t appearance

different f rom "essence," part icularly for a Marxist?

36. Marx, Capital, I, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 327. 37. Marx says: "The life-process o f society, which is based on the process o f material

product ion, does not strip o f f its mystical veil until it is treated as product ion by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material g round-work or set o f con- di t ions o f existence which in their turn are the spon taneous product of a long and pa infu l process o f deve lopment . " [bid.

291

38. kuk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 171, 173-174; "Reif icat ion," 84, 85 -86 . 39. For the most part, "'exchange va lue . . , is still directly bound up with use value," and

people can still perceive directly the actual, sensuous activity by which goods are

produced. Similarly, even where there is great exploitation and even mechanical, stan- dardized labor, as in the building of the Egyptian pyramids, this was not the main basis o f production; the slaves were regarded as exceptions, not even human. This seems to conflict with kuk~ics's claim that in primitive society exploitation is not yet mystified: is the exclusion o f slaves from the category of human beings not a mystification, then? Marx himself says about the construct ion of temples in ancient Egypt by slaves both that it was based "upon direct relations o f subjection" visible to all, not mystified, and that it "appear[ed] to be in the service of the gods ," thus mystified after all. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," I72; "Reif icat ion," 84; quoting Marx, A Contribution to a Cri- tique o f Political Economy, tr. by N. I. Stone (New York and London, 1904), 53. Lukr~cs, "Verdinglichung," 173 - 174, 180-181; "Reificat ion," 85 - 86, 90. Marx, Capi- tal, I, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 327; "Economic and Philosophic Manuscr ipts ," in ibid., 78.

40. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction o f Reality: a Trea- tise in the Sociology o f Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, I967), 89, 88.

41. Ibid., 89. 42. Ibid., 60. In an earlier article by Berger and Stanley Pullberg, objectivation is distin-

guished from objectification in this way: "By objectivation we mean that process whereby human subjectivity embodies itself in products that are available to oneself and one's fellow men as elements of a common world . . . . By objectification we mean the moment in the process o f objectivation in which man establishes distance from his producing and its product, such that be can take cognizance o f it and make of it an object o f his consciousness." Peter k. Berger and Stanley Pullberg, "Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness ," History and Theory, IV (1965) 196-211, 199-200. The latter concept, rather strange in its implication that while working we do not take cognizance of what we work on, does not appear in The Social Construc- tion o f Reality.

43. Bcrger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 34. 44. Ibid., 52; see also 4 9 - 5 9 . 45. Ibid., 89. 46. Ibid., 90. 47. Berger and Pullberg say that reification "defines action without the actor, and praxis

without the author ." They add that it "converts action into process"; but Berger and kuckmann are as ambiguous as I-ukfics (see note 9 above) about whether process is a reification, or the unreified reality o f human life. Berger and Pullberg, "Reif icat ion," 208; Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, e.g. 189.

48. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 91. 49. Luk~ics, "u 177-178; "Reif icat ion," 88 -89 . 50. Luk~cs, "Verdinglichung," 179, 191, 348; "Reif icat ion," 89, 97, 204. Later in the essay

Luk~ics uses the much more felicitous term Zusehauer ("Verdinglichung," 292) trans- lated as "observer" in Lukrics "Reif icat ion," 166, but adopted even more felicitously as "spectator" by Guy Debord in Society o f the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977), first published as La societd du spectacle by Editions Buchet-Chastel (Paris) in 1967.

51. Luk~tcs, "Verdinglichung," 191; "Reif icat ion," 98; see also "Verdinglichung," 192-193, 268, 289; "Reif icat ion," 99, 149, 164.

292

52. Lukfics, "Verdinglichung," 193, 198, 177, 180; "Reification," 100, 103, 88, 90. 53. Lukgtcs, "Verdinglichung," 299, 304; "Reification," 171, 174. See also Georg Lukgtcs,

"Klassenbewusstsein," in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, 144-145; "Class Con- sciousness," in History and Class Consciousness, 63.

54. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 53, 57. 55. Ibid., 58 -59 , 90. 56. Ibid., 89. 57. Ibid., 90. 58. Ibid., see also 59. 59. Ibid., 91-92. 60. kuk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 295 - 297; "Reification," 168-169. 61. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 340, 297, see also 299, 304; "Reification," 198, 169, see

also 171, 174.

62. Luk~ics remarks that reification played a role in ancient Greece (which seems inconsis- tent with his claim that it is a condition specific to advanced capitalism), but he locates it in that society's "maturi ty" - that is, in its period of greatest sophistication rather than primitive naivet6. "Verdinglichung," 209; "Reification," 111.

63. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 89. 64. Ibid., 91. 65. Ibid., 187, 186, 189.

66. James W. Woodard, Intellectual Realism and Cultural Change: a Preliminary Study of Reification (Hanover, N.H., Minneapolis, Liverpool: Sociological Press, 1935).

67. Ibid., 89. 68. Ibid., 17. 69. For instance, Harland William Fawkner, Animation and Reification in Diekens's Vi-

sion of the Life-Denying Society (Uppsala: University of Stockholm, 1977). More properly, one should further distinguish between animism and personification.

70. Woodard, Intellectual Realism, 7-8. 71. Ibid., 8-11. 72. Ibid., 12. 73. Ibid., 8. 74. Willard Van Orman Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1981), 9-15, 183. 75. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 89. 76. Marx, Capital, vol. III, ch. 48. Marx actually contrasts Versachlichung to personifica-

tion, but Verdingliehung appeared in the previous sentence, and Versachliehung has no distinct English translation ("matter-ification"?).

77. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 90. 78. Marx, Capital, I, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 327. Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung,"

171; "Reification," 83. Bottomore, Dictionary, 411. 79. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 89; my italics. 80. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, II, 27, cited in Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 301;

"'Reification," 172. 81. Marx, Capital, I, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 327. 82. For instance, Luk~ics, "Verdinglichung," 329; "Reification," 191; Berger and Luck-

mann, Social Construction, 90. 83. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 52. 84. Luk~cs, "Verdinglichung," 313; "Reification," 180. 85. For starters, try J. L. Austin, "Ifs and Cans," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1961).

293

86. Compare Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), esp. 270.

87. For those who were too young to have heard it: the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indi- an side-kick, Tonto, are hopelessly trapped by hostile Indians. As the enemy warriors close in for the kill, the Lone Ranger says, "Tonto, what are we going to do?" To which Tonto responds, "Whadda ya mean, 'we,' White Man?"

88. This is one way of conceptualizing what is basic about Marx's "base." 89. Well, maybe, in a footnote: 1) Misapprehending a human relationship as a thing

(Luk~ics); 2) Recognizing what had been taken for a human relationship as a thing (im- plicit in O.E.D.); 3) The coming into being of a world of commodities and their move- ments on the market (Luk~_cs); 4) Realizing a "mental image" in an artifact (Arendt); 5) Forming a mind in such a way that it tends to take human relationships for things (Luk~cs); 6) Misapprehending a person as a thing, in the sense of denying capacity for agency (O.E.D., Lukfi.cs, Berger and Luckmann); 7) Misapprehending a person as a thing, in the sense of denying moral status (O.E.D., Luk~cs, Berger and Luckmann); 8) Recognizing as a thing what had been mistaken for a person (O.E.D.); 9) and 10) (Mis)apprehending an abstraction as a person (Luk~ics, possibly Berger and Luck- mann); 11) Misapprehending an abstraction (abstract concept?) as a thing (O.E.D., Woodard, Quine); 12) Recognizing as a thing what had been mistaken for an abstrac- tion (abstract concept?) (implicit in O.E.D., Quine); 13) Misapprehending an abstrac- tion as real (Woodard); i4) Deciding what is real (Quine); 15) and 16) (Mis)apprehend- ing something humanly made as natural (Berger and Luckmann, probably Luk~ics); 17) and 18) (Mis)apprehending temporary or contingent regularities as eternal, universal laws (Marx on fetishism, possibly Luk~ics, possibly Berger and Luckmann); 19) and 20) (Mis)apprehending human conventions as sacred (Luk~ics, Berger and Luckmann); 21) and 22) (Mis)apprehending what is humanly changeable as humanly unchangeable (Luk~ics, Berger and Luckmann). If one further divides each of these categories be- tween the reification of inhabituation and that of naivet6, their number will double. But perhaps that distinction will not actually fit all of them; I have not pursued the matter.

90. Stephen Gould, The Mismeasurement of ,~Ian (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 91. A few of these "dangers" might actually be blessings for those now exploited and op-

pressed, but most would be clear and unmitigated disasters. Even Marxists must now take seriously the possibility that the owners of the earth might destroy it rather than give it up.

92. Luk~cs, "Verdinglichung," 303, 297; "Reification," 174, 169. 93. Lukfics, "Verdinglichung," 267; "Reification," 149. 94. Luk~tcs, "Verdinglichung," 348; "Reification," 203-204.