Reification: History of the Concept

by F. Vandenberghe

Logos, a journal of modern society & culture
Fall 2013: Vol 12, No 3

Until fairly recently, reification was a central diagnostic concept of critical social theory and social philosophy. Due to its heavy metaphysical baggage and its grounding in an obsolescent philosophy of history, the theory of reification has, however, lost much of its credibility and prestige. To explain, describe and criticize various forms of dehumanization in modern capitalist societies, it is occasionally rediscovered, refurbished and actualized by authors within the Marxist tradition of Left Hegelianism. Through a grand narrative of reification, systemic processes of commodification, exploitation and domination that lead to a loss of community (anomie), meaning (disenchantment) and freedom (domination) are connected to a phenomenological description of the alienation of the modern self from itself, others and the world. As a critical category, reification squarely ascribes the blame of alienation to the system. The denunciation of reification is paradoxical, however: to the extent that it presupposes that the object is really a subject, it denies what it affirms (that the world is inhuman) and affirms what it denies (namely that there still is a subject that can act and change the world).

Literally, reification (Verdinglichung) refers to the transformation of human properties, relations, processes, actions, concepts, etc. into things. As a technical term, the term reification emerged in the English language in the 1860s out of the contraction of the verb facere (to make) and the substantive res (thing), which can refer both to concrete and empirically observable things (ens) and to abstract, indeterminate things (aliquid). As a synonym of ‘thingification,’ the inverse of personification, reification metaphorically refers to the transformation of human properties, relations, processes, actions, concepts, etc. into res, into things that act as pseudo-persons, endowed with a life of their own. Depending on the grammatical subject of reification – who reifies what: is it the analyst who reifies the concepts or is it society that alienates the subjects? – the transformation of human properties, social relations,  abstract concepts, etc. into things, types and numbers can operate both on an epistemological and on a social level. Both levels are united by an ontology of practices and a common insistence on the primacy of action over structure. In the philosophy of the social sciences, the concept is used to criticize structuralist, naturalist and positivist theories that hypostatize macro-social entities, dehumanize action and naturalize the system from a dialectical and praxeological position. In Marxist-Hegelian social philosophy, the concept is used by theorists related to the Frankfurt School to criticize capitalism´s systemically induced social pathologies of the life-world that distort the relation between actors and the world, the others and the self and bring the dialectics between agency and structure to a standstill. The concept is never a neutral one. Positive instances of reification (Gehlen, Latour, Virno) are rather rare, though. Usually, the concept is used polemically to denounce the ‘violence of abstractions,’ either of conceptual abstractions (Denkabstraktionen) that suppress the reflexive embeddedness of concepts into their social context, treat social facts as things, and transform metasubjects into megasubjects, or of real abstractions (Realabstraktionen) that strip individuals of their autonomy and reduce them to cogs of an abstract social machinery.

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