Reification as an ontological concept

Lukács’s essay on reification opens with the statement that “the structure of commodity-relations [can] be made to yield a model of all the forms of objectivity of bourgeois society and all the corresponding forms of subjectivity.”³⁶ Lukács describes reification with a peculiarly ambiguous term: Gegenstandlichkeitsform, or “form of objectivity.” This term unfortunately disappears from the English translation and is everywhere rendered by circumlocutions that obscure its philosophical significance.³⁷

That significance can only be grasped against the background of the neo-Kantian debates in which Lukács himself was involved a few years before he became a Marxist. The trace of these debates is very much present in History and Class Consciousness. This is the link between Lukács’s sociological concept of reification and the philosophical problematic of rationality.

The neo-Kantian reference complicates the interpretation of the passage quoted at the beginning of this section. What does Lukács mean here by a “model?” Is he referring to an analogy or a cause? If commodity-relations are analogically homologous to forms of objectivity and subjectivity, then we must seek elsewhere for the cause of both. The theory of reification might then lead to an idealistic explanation of some sort, for example, a flaw in the spirit of modernity. But if commodity-relations cause objects and subjects to take a reified form, then Lukács would appear to have lapsed into crude economic determinism.

The interpretative problem stems from the unspecified concept of form of objectivity. This neo-Kantian term implies a transcendental account of meaning that Lukács never explicitly develops. Dilthey and his neo-Kantian contemporaries all emphasized the distinctiveness of cultural and historical phenomena. The irreducible individuality of events defies attempts to order them under laws such as those of the natural sciences. The concept of “Verstehen,” or interpretive understanding, familiar from Weberian sociology, is a social alternative to natural scientific explanation. The object of interpretation is meaning, or “validity” as the neo-Kantians called it. Meaning is not bare physical existence, but that aspect of things through which they are intelligible, make sense, are known, belong to a culture. In this account of the conditions of cultural intelligibility meaning is derived from the intentions of the subject. Husserl would soon radicalize this approach in a new form of transcendental idealism.

The neo-Kantian philosopher Emil Lask was also a significant influence on both Heidegger and Lukács because he began the move from a transcendental to an ontological theory of meaning.³⁸ Lask’s concept of meaning as form is developed in his transcendental theory of logic. A brief account of this theory is essential to understanding Lukács. Lask argues that meanings are ordered under categories in regional ontologies that define domains of objects. This is easily illustrated by academic fields although not confined to them. The “object” of physics is matter in motion. The meanings with which it is concerned are specified by these terms. By contrast, the “object” of English literature is a canon of poetry and prose “classics.” Certain works have “meaning” as objects of study in this context. These general categories are Gegenstandlichkeitsformen. Every sphere of existence has its own such category. We could, for example, extend the concept to the tools in a workshop as did Heidegger in a related analysis of meaning.

Lask’s notion of meaning is difficult to grasp because we normally confound meanings with the things that have meaning. There are a few experiences in which the distinction can be more easily apprehended. Consider for example the case of photographic representation. When we are asked what we see in a picture of a horse we are likely to reply, “A horse.” But of course we are looking at a piece of photographic paper, not a horse. The meaning of the picture is distinct from its existence. But this is an inadequate example since “photographic paper” is also a meaning. If we showed the picture to a cat, it would not see a “horse” or “photographic paper” but something to bat around or sit on. It is not clear that even this constitutes an unmediated relation to existence yet such a relation is an essential postulate of Lask’s theory.

Lask’s ontology has two divisions: existence and meaning. But nothing can be said about existence outside the context of one or another meaning that forms it and Lask does not explain the origin of the forms. They are neither material things nor metaphysical entities. They are pure transcendental conditions of realms of objects. But unlike Dilthey, Husserl, and earlier neo-Kantian philosophers, Lask does not attribute such conditions to the subject. Lask died in World War I at the age of thirty-nine, his work still incomplete. No doubt he would have addressed this lacuna had he lived. In any case, it inspired Heidegger and Lukács, who both accepted Lask’s breakthrough to a new kind of transcendental account of meaning that borders on ontology. Meaning is the “being” of the phenomena through which we gain access to them as what they “are.” Heidegger and Lukács went on to attempt to ground being in practice rather than subjectivity.

Lask’s terminology suggests this solution. He argues that the meanings or validities “hold” of particular entities through the form of those entities, and “form is nothing other than a particular objective Bewandtnis [involvement] pertaining to … the material.”³⁹ Involvements are articulated in judgments (“This is a hammer”), but Lask believes they are already present in the world before any judgments are made. Normally, we live with the meaningful entities we experience without thematizing meaning as such. (How often do we say “This is a hammer” when we see one, and yet we always know perfectly well what we are looking at?) The operative intelligibility of experience is the basis of the possibility of judgment and knowledge. Philosophical understanding of meaning requires a departure from the lived relation to it in the adoption of a transcendental perspective that focuses on the form in which things are given in experience.

In very different ways, Heidegger and Lukács showed how objects and subjects acquire meaning in a social world, conceived as a totality of involvements, through the practices of that world. They both seek an ontologically founding practical relation to meaning in a domain of real existents. Something (ontic) in the world must found the world as the totality of involvements (the ontological). The chief difference between them is that for Heidegger the all important something is the everyday practical activity of individual Dasein whereas for Lukács it is the collective practices associated with the economic system.⁴⁰

In Heidegger’s case this practical ground was explained in a “fundamental ontology” of phenomenological inspiration. In his workshop analysis, the notion of Bewandtnis is nicely developed in terms of “the arrangement, relevance, or involvement of the material itself,” i.e., the connections between the various tools and the work that grants them meaning qua tools.⁴¹ A hammer out of all connection with nails, boards, and the idea of carpentry could not properly be called a hammer. It would lack the contextual preconditions of its meaning. It would just be an oddly shaped, unintelligible thing.

Lukács responded to the lacuna with an account of the role of economic practices in establishing the conditions of meaning throughout bourgeois society. He offers a quasi-functional account, arguing that the meaning of each social entity is determined by “its relation to the whole.” And he adds that “the intelligibility of objects develops in proportion as we grasp their function in the totality to which they belong.”

Every substantial change that is of concern to knowledge manifests itself as a change in the form of objectivity of every object of cognition. Marx has formulated this idea in countless places. I shall cite only one of the best-known passages: “A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain circumstances. A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain circumstances does it become capital. Torn from these circumstances it is no more capital than gold is money or sugar the price of sugar.”⁴²

Lukács concludes that the totality is a higher reality than the isolated facts. In it the “processual essence” of society “achieves validity,” i.e., takes on its true meaning.⁴³

Lukács’s methodology is clearly delineated in these passages. Particular social objects are to be understood in terms of their economic involvements. They cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to the whole because that relation is constituting for their meaning. At the highest level of generality, the whole is characterized by the reification associated with the commodity form. A hierarchy of categories is implied in this approach, leading from particular to universal features of the totality.

As a form of objectivity, reification is in the first instance practical rather than theoretical. In constantly buying and selling commodities, including intellectual products, or working in mechanized industries, or engaging with bureaucratic administrations, the members of a capitalist society live the reified relationships that construct that society. The reified form of objectivity of the society gives coherence and meaning to social objects arising from and feeding back into the practical relationship to those objects, and it shapes the corresponding subjectivity of the atomized actors. This is what Lukács means when he says that commodity-relations are the “model” of the forms of objectivity and subjectivity in bourgeois society. The performativity of practice grants a single overriding form to the whole society, the form of thinghood.