IN THE last chapter I argued that the structure of neoliberal capitalism has shifted the relationship between the political and economic spheres in contemporary society, thus resignifying modes of critique that either explicitly or implicitly bifurcate the economic and political spheres. Procedures of critique that do so reproduce a separation between economics and politics that mirrors neoliberal theoretical discourses rather than critiquing them.
Significant strands of contemporary political theory, however, may be insufficiently attuned to the neoliberal transformation of the content of economics and the impact it has on the critical potential of political theory. Historically, the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory has taken the relationship between subjectivity, political economy, and social life as central to its project. Prominent thinkers of the third generation, however, including Axel Honneth and Seyla Benhabib, have been more concerned with searching for a normative standpoint for critical theory in contemporary society as a response to a perceived deficit in the contemporary political lexicon. To a large degree they take over this task from Jürgen Habermas, who criticized first-generation critical theorists, including Adorno and Horkheimer, for their excessively sociological and denormativized approach. Habermas found fault with their undue emphasis on Marxian concepts of abstraction, commodification, and class struggle, which were less concerned with grounding a normative perspective from which to criticize society and more concerned with exposing the ambiguous and doubled-edged conditions of possibility of bourgeois normativity.
However, in the context of neoliberalism it may be that, far from a normative deficit, we instead confront a normative surplus as capitalist production in postindustrial economies increasingly relies on mobilizing the capacities of individuals in creating new arenas for capital accumulation. Debt becomes a generalized means by which neoliberal subjection operates by producing subjects who internalize the effects of financial crises as a matter of personal responsibility. As the state continues to withdraw responsibility for the provision of social welfare, by privatizing social services and retreating from the task of generating employment, individuals are increasingly seen as responsible for their own economic welfare, even as the economic crisis has created a structural situation in which basic employment has become a privilege.1 Thus many scholars of neoliberalism have related the retreat of the state from social welfare functions to the rise of an entrepreneurial form of subjectivity, homo oeconomicus.
Homo oeconomicus takes responsibility for the dimensions of social welfare that in an earlier era of welfare state capitalism were seen as obligations of the state. As Michel Foucault writes, “In practice, the stake in all neo-liberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange with homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”2 Homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur of the self.
The neoliberal production of homo oeconomicus in the context of a form of capitalism that is flexibilized and ethicized, however, indicates that the pressing task of critical theory is perhaps no longer to search painstakingly for a normative perspective from which to critique society but to interrogate the uses to which the surplus of normativity is put in contemporary neoliberalism. Critical theory’s project of critique may be better served by studying the ways in which the normative perspectives from which we purport to critique society, such as that of intersubjectivity and autonomy, have become fetishized. As such, I suggest that the critical standpoint of third-generation critical theory, which is based upon an intersubjective source of normativity that is conceived as constitutively shielded from the logics of capital, masks fundamental forms of neoliberal domination.
The increasing emphasis upon intersubjectivity at the expense of a critique of political economy in third generation critical theory is surprising, given the fact that Frankfurt School critical theory has from its inception been influenced deeply by the Marxian critique of capitalism and Marx’s analysis of the bifurcation between economics and social life as one of the central problems of capitalist modernity. Certainly members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, including Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, were grappling with the question of how to reinterpret critical theory in light of the new political possibilities and forms of subjectivation that had arisen with the shift from liberal capitalism to state capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet a number of influential contemporary critical theorists, like the radical democrats I discussed in chapter 1, are deeply ambivalent about the Marxian lineage of critical theory. Since Habermas’s communicative turn, many of the Frankfurt School theorists have tended to eschew materialist analyses as well as to turn away from an analysis of the ways in which economic forms constitute human experience.
Case in point is the influential Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth’s recent work on capitalism and critique, including his recent study of the Marxist concept of reification, which had been central to first-generation critical theorists, as well his recent work Freedom’s Right.3 Honneth’s work on reification as well as his work on the capitalist market is tantalizing, as this work suggests a return to the materialist themes of early critical theory that have been underemphasized by many critical theorists in the aftermath of the communicative turn.
Yet in this chapter I argue that Honneth’s engagements with the paradoxes of neoliberalism neglect the crucial connection between intersubjectivity and forms of capitalist production. With respect to his work on reification, a close read reveals that Honneth’s study of this classic Marxist theme is aimed more at a revision of the history of critical theory in purely normative terms than it is at a revitalization of a forgotten materialism. This is suggested by the way in which Honneth positions himself vis-à-vis the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who pioneered reification critique in his famous essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” which I will explore in chapter 4. In the classic Marxist account of the concept, reification describes a form of consciousness, an unengaged and passive stance, that individuals take toward economic structures in a society structured by the commodity form. Honneth, by contrast, argues that the most important aspects of reification can be understood in terms of a theory of recognition, as a wholly intersubjective phenomenon whereby human beings lose sight of their originary affective and engaged relation with others in their social world.
The emphasis on a purified understanding of normativity that is constitutively shielded from neoliberal logics is continued, and even deepened, in Freedom’s Right. Although in an earlier text, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Honneth acknowledges the deeply paradoxical nature of neoliberalization insofar as it brings about a “reversal” of the institutionalized normative achievements of the welfare state, his more recent work, including the text on reification, reveals the extent to which critical theory has systematically surrendered the conceptual tools to theorize the relationship between economics and politics.4 Honneth’s decisive separation of the critique of the normative paradoxes of neoliberalism from the critique of political economy, I argue, leaves him with too thin an understanding of the socioeconomic aspects of neoliberal domination.
Honneth’s approach to the critique of capitalism is significant because it reveals the ways in which critical theory reflects the same impasse between economics and politics that confronts both radical democracy and neo-Marxism, which I explored in chapter 1. In this chapter I interrogate why Honneth operates with such a limited understanding of the relationship between capitalism, intersubjectivity, and political economy. Honneth’s approach entails a reduction of capitalism to its normative order, and, moreover, depends upon forms of normativity that are constitutively shielded from capital as the basis of its normative traction. I am concerned with this issue insofar as I see Honneth’s approach as, again, symptomatic: Honneth’s reliance upon normativity insulated from capital exemplifies another facet of theoretical formalism that I criticized in chapter 1. It thus is insufficiently attentive to the resignification of forms of critique in the context of neoliberal society.
I first examine Honneth’s work on reification, focusing particularly on this work because it strikes me as exemplary of a broader problem in Honneth’s approach to social theory in the context of neoliberalism, but also because in subsequent chapters I will go on to reconstruct the concept of reification along alternative lines. I suggest that Honneth’s theory of recognition, which lays at the heart of his theoretical edifice and of his approach to reification, both responds to problems generated by the “communicative turn” of critical theory initiated by Jürgen Habermas and yet unintentionally reproduces them. Honneth’s concept of reification inherits a repressed version of the distinction between Habermas’s concepts of “system” and “lifeworld” that tends to effect a sharp dichotomy between intersubjectivity and communicative action on the one hand, and the structural critique of capitalism on the other. Honneth deprioritizes the socioeconomic aspects of reification on the basis of a purified concept of intersubjectivity. Purged of its material mediations, Honneth’s approach to intersubjectivity leads to a concept of reification that is inadequate to the task of criticizing capitalist forms of domination or to theorizing radical democratic political practice today. To the extent that critical theory remains bound to the dichotomizing framework of the communicative turn, I argue that it will be unable to formulate a politically relevant critique of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, as the borders between the economy, the political, and the social are being articulated in new ways that confound its assumptions. By appealing to an ahistorical form of sociality that is constitutively shielded from the influence of capital, Honneth fetishizes the social rather than taking up the important task of comprehending the ways in which social life is being transformed by new neoliberal forms of capitalist production, reproduction, and consumption.
I furthermore examine Honneth’s more explicit engagements with the problems of neoliberalism in The Right of Freedom and “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” In different ways Honneth’s emphasis on the normative order of capitalism, which is opposed to its structural logic, generates a theory that is polarized between the concepts of economics and politics and thus is insufficiently attuned to the neoliberal resignification and co-optation of the terms of normative critique. In the context of what Honneth himself has termed “ethicized capitalism,” viewing the normative order of neoliberalism abstracted from the structural logics that contextualize and politicize or depoliticize those norms results in a theory that may legitimate rather than critique the very forms of neoliberal domination that are under critical scrutiny.5
Finally, I engage with Nancy Fraser’s theory of the triple movement constitutive of neoliberal capitalism, which proposes a crucial and persuasive counterpoint to Honneth’s tendency to reduce capitalism to its normative order. Although Fraser’s emphasis on the norm of participatory parity in her theory may nevertheless retain vestiges of the third-generation paradigm that limit its traction in the neoliberal context, her more promising, innovative theory of the triple movement emphasizes the normative ambivalence that is structurally generated by neoliberalization.6
HONNETH: REIFICATION AS MISRECOGNITION
The clearest case for Honneth’s reduction of capitalism to its normative order could be made through a reading of his recent work on reification. In Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Honneth responds to what he calls the normative deficit stemming from the Marxist theory of reification and its consequent neglect of intersubjectivity. Honneth accordingly translates the concept of reification into the terms of a theory of recognition, emphasizing intersubjectivity, while essentially erasing commodity fetishism from his account of the concept. In Honneth’s framework, reification consists in the forgetting of an antecedent stance of recognition, which is presupposed by our knowledge of and engagement with other persons and objects in the social world. Yet Honneth’s focus on reification as the forgetting of recognition neglects aspects of the concept that could describe and critique fundamental forms of economic domination. This neglect is problematic, first, because it obscures the relationship between the economy and social life in contemporary neoliberalism and, second, because this obfuscation results in an ahistorical picture of society. By separating the normative aspects of reification from an analysis of their socioeconomic basis, Honneth evacuates much of the critical potential of the concept of reification for political theory. Honneth reduces reification to a phenomenon of intersubjectivity, yet he conceives reification too narrowly to ground a critique of social domination in contemporary capitalism.
Here I will briefly gloss the basic points of Honneth’s theory of recognition that are relevant to the relationship between capitalism and intersubjectivity, including Honneth’s restatement of his theory of recognition in the course of his debate with the critical theorist Nancy Fraser, which sought to clarify the extent to which a theory of recognition could take over the role filled by the critique of capitalism, in the terms used in that exchange, by claims for redistribution.7
Honneth’s theory of recognition seeks to reveal the moral constraints underlying social interaction and is based on the presupposition that inclusion of the members of society will always proceed through the mechanism of mutual recognition. According to Honneth, individuals are normatively incorporated into society by learning to view themselves as socially recognized in light of certain characteristics.8 Honneth argues that social theory requires concepts that can grasp social injustice in terms of subjects’ normative expectations of how society conditions their personal integrity. He writes, “the experience of a withdrawal of social recognition—of degradation and disrespect—must be at the center of a meaningful concept of socially caused suffering and injustice.”9 For Honneth, the importance of social misrecognition as a motivation for social struggle is an empirical claim, but it also indicates a normative principle of recognition that transcends these empirical instances. Recognition therefore indicates a much needed point of contact between social theory and the everyday expressions of injustice and disrespect, which he claims has long been a blind spot in critical theory. Honneth writes, “without a categorical opening to the normative standpoint from which subjects themselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completely cut off from a dimension of social discontent that it should always be able to call upon. … What is needed is a basic conceptual shift to the normative premises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect.”10 Honneth’s intersubjective reappropriation of reification therefore takes its lead from the phenomenology of misrecognition, which stands at the center of Honneth’s theory.
Honneth’s argument is directed against the economistic implications of the classic Marxist approach to reification, which he claims is insufficiently attentive to normativity. Honneth contends that the Marxist theory of reification is divorced from an account of the normative criteria by which the phenomena of reification could be criticized as well as an understanding of how reification could be experientially grasped. These criteria, on Honneth’s account, elude a theory that seeks to ground itself in an immanent critique of capitalism alone, since even the dynamics of the capitalist economy are to some degree dependent upon the normative expectations placed upon them by members of a society. In “The Point of Recognition,” Honneth writes, “even structural transformations in the economic sphere are not independent of the normative expectations of those affected, but depend at least on their tacit consent. Like the integration of all other spheres, the development of the capitalist market can only occur in the form of a process of symbolically mediated negotiation directed toward the interpretation of underlying normative principles.”11 Structural transformations of capitalism, according to Honneth, are fundamentally dependent upon normativity—even upon the implicit consent of individuals. Honneth’s conception of the relationship between social structures and normativity reflects the extent to which his theory decisively decouples the concept of reification from the critique of the social form of capitalism.12
THE FORGETFULNESS OF RECOGNITION
Honneth sees a more fruitful social theory of reification in the subjective dimensions of reification, that is, in the way subjects practically relate to the social world rather than in the analysis of commodity fetishism. The key point Honneth distills from Lukács’s theory in this regard is the notion of Teilnahmslosigkeit, or lack of participatory involvement. This term refers to a form of interaction whereby subjects lose sight of their fundamentally active and sympathetic engagement with the world, instead acting as detached observers who contemplate the world passively without existential or emotional involvement.13
Honneth argues that in the critique of Teilnahmslosigkeit lies an alternative, “unofficial” version of the critique of reification, which is based not on an idealist, demiurgic theory of human agency, but rather on a normative standard of intersubjective praxis that, far from fully eroded in the present by the generalization of commodity exchange, forms an ineradicable kernel of human being in the world.14 In these moments reification is understood not “as a collective subject’s production of an object” but rather as “another, intersubjective attitude on the part of the subject.”15 For Honneth, theorizing reification as an intersubjective phenomenon recuperates the critique of reification from totalization: reification does not eliminate engaged, nonreified praxis altogether, it has “merely concealed it from our awareness.”16
Armed with this insight, Honneth proposes to reinterpret reification in terms of recognition, arguing that such disinterested, contemplative forms of practice obscure but never fully eliminate the primary, interested, active stance of the human being toward the world. Honneth proposes to think this stance as a primary recognitional stance, which “enjoys a genetic and categorial priority over all other attitudes toward the self and the world.”17 Honneth’s understanding of reification is based on the priority of a recognitive, empathetic, interested relation of the human being to the world over a merely cognitive, passive attitude. Taking a suggestive line from Dialectic of Enlightenment as his inspiration, Honneth proposes to think reification anew as the “forgetfulness of recognition,” which indicates the process by which human beings lose consciousness of the antecedent stance of care and recognition that underlies knowledge of other persons and the world.18
The priority of recognition, according to Honneth, is both chronological and conceptual. Using the insights of developmental psychology and socialization research, Honneth locates the chronological priority of recognition over mere cognition in the experience of affective relationships with significant others in childhood to show how a critique of reification can be rooted in learning processes that reveal the emotional conditions of thought processes.19
While Honneth focuses on intersubjectivity as an attempt to synthesize his theory of recognition with the critique of reification, it is hardly possible to overlook one crucial absence in Honneth’s work on reification: it no longer views itself as a critique of sociopolitical relations in capitalism, which in Marxist formulations of reification establish the critique of social domination and the elusiveness of self-determination. Yet, in other recent works that I will discuss, Honneth claims to be interested in presenting alternative analyses of capitalism. Therefore it is surprising that in his analysis of reification, a concept historically oriented toward presenting a critique of capitalism, Honneth turns away from such questions.
In the subsequent sections I question why Honneth severs the link between the phenomena of reification and the structure of capitalist society. I contend that this question can be contextualized by viewing the critique of reification within the tradition of critical theory more broadly, paying particular attention to the way in which the concept of intersubjectivity has been theorized by Habermas and then Honneth as an attempt to reorient critical theory away from the normative model of the philosophy of the subject.20 Honneth’s reformulation of the critique of reification is an instance of a larger paradigm shift in critical theory toward communication and intersubjectivity and away from the structural critique of capitalism. Honneth’s dematerialized concept of intersubjectivity exhibits the ways in which contemporary critical theory remains conceptually trapped in the impasse between economics and politics generated by the structure of neoliberal society.
THE COMMUNICATIVE TURN OF CRITICAL THEORY: BEYOND THE PRODUCTION PARADIGM
For better or for worse, contemporary critical theorists’ approach to historical materialism is largely mediated through the work of the first-generation theorists of the Frankfurt School, who were greatly influenced by Lukács’s critique of reification. The collapse of the Frankfurt School into idle pessimism is widely believed to be a result of their adoption of the thesis of total reification, in which the standpoint of critical theory is consumed by a thoroughly administered society. Lukács, writing from the perspective of a revolutionary situation, addressed his analysis of reification to the practical questions that arose in the course of political struggle. His theory was oriented toward theorizing the possibility of proletarian agency.21 By contrast, the early Frankfurt School theorists, discarding Lukács’s positing of a revolutionary subject of history, saw in the concept of reification the key to why revolution had faltered. The critique of reification assumed a role in critical theory similar to that of psychoanalytic theory—it was a tool to explain why the working class failed to assume their revolutionary historical role. This was especially true of the works of Adorno and Horkheimer produced in the 1940s under the influence of Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, which diagnosed a new phase of capitalism where state intervention and the primacy of the political over the economic had effectively absorbed the immanent contradictions that were previously present in the liberal phase of capitalism.22
In the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno, in their classic work Dialectic of Enlightenment, the critique of reification is detached from its basis in the Marxian analysis of the historically specific commodity form and instead is deployed in the service of a critique of reason as such, which is now identified with instrumental rationality.23 Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to this familiar history, posits reification as a feature of all human societies, from the earliest shamanic rituals to the most recent manipulations of science, and thus capitulates to the myth of a social form without contradictions, where society supposedly no longer generates the standards for its own criticism. Materialist forms of critique have been tarred by their association with the pessimism of the Frankfurt School critique of reification. This tends to foreclose a real confrontation with the critique of capitalism at a conceptual level.
Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory away from the paradigm of instrumental reason attempts to redeem the project of immanent critique by recuperating the perspective of communicative reason. The communicative turn of critical theory counters the pessimism of early critical theory by revealing the concealed presuppositions of its critique of modernity, which, according to Habermas, relies on a normative standard of communicative reason that is immanent in everyday practice. Central to Habermas’s project is the rejection of the paradigm of “production,” the normative model of human agency underlying the left-Hegelian project of Marx and early critical theory. The production paradigm of agency, according to Habermas, is at the core of what has been referred to as the “philosophy of the subject,” a normative model in which history is understood as the activity of a collective subject that exteriorizes itself through its productive activity and then reappropriates that which it has exteriorized.24
The general thrust of dereifying critique in the Marxist tradition, which proceeds by revealing the historically constituted nature of existing social forms in order to comprehend the possibility of their transformation, is regarded as part of this problematic tradition of the philosophy of the subject. According to Habermas, this tradition restricts the concept of practice in a way that is unable to account for the immanence of reason to communicative relations themselves, which provides the practical standpoint of critique and discloses the proper sphere of social transformation. Habermas writes, “the emancipatory perspective proceeds precisely not from the production paradigm, but from the paradigm of action oriented toward mutual understanding. It is the form of interaction processes that must be altered if one wants to discover practically what the members of a society in any given situation might want and what they should do in their common interest.”25
In opposition to the production paradigm, Habermas foregrounds what he calls the “action” paradigm, which underscores processes of intersubjective interaction in its analysis of social transformation. Habermas thus reinterprets the critique of reification in the terms of communicative action, which he argues could succeed in grounding the normative standpoint of critique where the paradigm of production had failed. Yet I suggest that Habermas’s critical project relies on a sharp opposition between his intersubjective concept of “interaction” and the Marxian concept of “work” (Arbeit). As such, I contend that his concept of intersubjectivity becomes abstracted from its material conditions of possibility.26 This will have implications for the way in which Habermas, and later Honneth, theorize the critique of reification.
REIFICATION AS THE COLONIZATION OF THE LIFEWORLD
Habermas describes his Theory of Communicative Action as a “reformulation of the reification problematic in terms of systematically induced lifeworld pathologies.”27 By reinterpreting reification from the perspective of communicative action, or, in other words, as a phenomenon of a lifeworld that is invaded by autonomous, norm-free systemic institutions, Habermas places the dimension of intersubjectivity at the center of the theory of reification. In effect, he argues that reification is only comprehensible as what he calls “the colonization of the lifeworld” by systemic rationalization—the analysis of fetish forms is absent.28
However, Habermas’s reinterpretation of reification along these lines, I argue, has the problematic effect of sharply demarcating the intersubjective realm of the reified lifeworld from the denormativized sphere of systemic rationalization, without theorizing the ways in which the two are fundamentally intertwined—without recognizing, in effect, both that the system is far from denormativized and that the normativity of the lifeworld is materially constituted. Furthermore, Honneth’s attempt to address the shortcomings of Habermas’s theory, to set the theory “back on its feet,” as Honneth puts it, nevertheless inherits from Habermas a constrained concept of intersubjectivity, implicitly generated by some (repressed) version of the opposition between system and lifeworld, that is ultimately responsible for Honneth’s narrow understanding of reification.29
What Habermas finds insightful in Lukács is his analysis of reification as a systemic problem. As long as the production of goods is organized as the production of exchange values, which is accompanied by the commodification of labor power itself, “economically relevant action orientations are detached from lifeworld contexts and linked with the medium of exchange value (or money).”30 Interaction in such societies is coordinated through an external mechanism, rather than through the values and norms that properly characterize the sphere of interaction itself. On Habermas’s reading, Lukács’s insight is to illuminate the connection between the sphere of the capitalist economy, mediated through the principle of (exchange) value, and the deformation of what Habermas calls the lifeworld, that is, the horizon of communicative social action.31
Therefore, according to Habermas, this connection, which is the core of the phenomenon of reification, can be stated as follows: “The form of objectivity that predominates in capitalist society prejudices the world-relations, the way in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the objective, the social, and their own subjective worlds” (1:359). Habermas proposes to understand these quasi-objective mechanisms for coordinating action, such as the dimensions of the economy and the state, with the concept of “system.” Systemic integration is coordinated not through norms and values, but rather through the denormativized and autonomous “steering media” of money and power. In the system, “The mechanism for coordinating action is itself encountered as something external. Transactions that proceed through the medium of exchange value fall outside of the intersubjectivity of reaching understanding through language; they become something that takes place in the objective world—a pseudonature” (1:358). Apparently independent of human intersubjective constitution, the system takes on a self-grounding, thingly character.
While Habermas credits Lukács for challenging Max Weber’s pessimistic diagnosis of modernity, thereby implying an alternative theory of rationalization, which is not simply identified with reification, Habermas’s central critical point is that Lukács relies on too undifferentiated a notion of rationalization. In effect, Habermas claims, Lukács analyzes all processes of societal rationalization in light of the generalization of the commodity form and the abstraction of exchange. He writes, “As Lukács takes only one medium into consideration, viz. exchange value, and traces reification to the ‘abstraction of exchange’ alone, he interprets all manifestations of Occidental rationalism as symptoms of a process in which the whole of society is rationalized through and through” (1:360). To give an account of its own normative foundations, Habermas contends, the critique of reification must appeal to the notion of communicative action in order to comprehend the standard of communicative rationality as itself inherent to the social lifeworld, even under conditions of reification.
The main point of Habermas’s reformulation of Lukács’s theory of reification is to distinguish between systemic components that remain within boundaries and those systemic mechanisms that force their way into the domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization—the sphere of the lifeworld (1:374). This overstepping of boundaries constitutes a “colonization of the lifeworld,” which, according to Habermas, refers to a more specific and differentiated notion of reification than the one Lukács presents. Systemic integration, which Habermas posits as a functional requirement of complex societies, is not in itself problematic, nor does it constitute a form of reification. It is only when the steering media of the system overstep their boundaries and penetrate the communicative realm of the lifeworld that the problem of reification occurs. Habermas’s concept of society as system and lifeworld therefore aims to understand reification as the colonization of the lifeworld without resulting in a totalizing critique of rationalization as such. He can thereby claim that some form of systemic integration—that is, of “economy” and “state”—will be necessary to all complex societies as long as systemic structures do not penetrate the symbolically mediated lifeworld.
His criticisms notwithstanding, Habermas explicitly says that his attempt to reinterpret the problematic of reification is fundamentally influenced by the Marxian critique of capitalism. However, it should be clear that his approach diverges in significant ways from Lukács and Marx, particularly with regard to the way in which communicative action is conceived as immanent to the structures of linguistically mediated interaction: the critique of reification in capitalist society is rooted in the structures of communication itself, which contain an ineradicable potential for resistance to lifeworld-colonizing systemic structures.
Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory within the terms of a theory of communicative action forms the horizon of Honneth’s own reworking of critical theory along the lines of a theory of recognition. In The Critique of Power Honneth takes issue with Habermas’s conception of the system as a denormativized form of integration, arguing that this position obfuscates the ways in which normative structures of interaction are always embedded in social and political institutions. Honneth’s turn to recognition seeks to avoid the dualism inherent in Habermas’s theory, which concedes too much to systems-theoretic analysis. However, contrary to his own intention, Honneth’s theory, particularly in Reification, tends to address the problem by reducing the field of phenomena referred to by Habermas with the concept of “system” to the “lifeworld,” that is, the sphere of social integration, which rather than solving the conceptual problem merely displaces it to a higher level. This helps to illuminate the curious way in which Honneth theorizes reification with reference to lifeworld concepts alone, as the forgetfulness of recognition, without accounting for the commodity dynamic. Honneth’s reinterpretation of reification confines the critique of reification to the plane of a purified intersubjectivity. He therefore does not grasp the critical core of the concept, whose original intent was precisely to explain the peculiarity of capitalism as a system in which intersubjective relations appear as relations between nonhuman objects and thereby exert an abstract form of compulsion upon human action. By contrast, Honneth contends that economic processes are “not only normatively but also factually ‘embedded’ in the normatively structured social order.”32 With his theory of recognition, Honneth grasps crucial dimensions of the normative order of capitalist social relations, but he does so at the cost of neglecting the material constitution of those relations. This has implications for the relevance of his critique of reification to contemporary political theory.
Honneth’s theory of reification is therefore ambiguous in terms of its implications for a political theory of reification. On one hand, I contend that Honneth’s move away from the analysis of “systemic” rationalization that was central to Habermas’s analysis is a fruitful direction for the political critique of reification. Honneth rejects the functionalist notion of a denormativized systemic structure at the core of Habermas’s account, thereby providing a pluralized account of reification that is not simply confined to the boundary-defending reflexes of agents in the lifeworld. Instead, the specific causes and sites of various instances of the “forgetfulness of recognition” must be separately investigated so as to discover in each case how such forgetting is systematically enabled. Honneth writes, “If the core of every form of reification consists in forgetfulness of recognition, then its social causes must be sought in the practices or mechanisms that enable and sustain this kind of forgetting.”33 In that case, Honneth’s theory would not seem to rule out an analysis of the relation between the general structuring principles of society and the corresponding and mutually constitutive intersubjective phenomena of reification. Yet at many other points in the text the forgetfulness of recognition is viewed primarily as a cognitive process, and so what is needed is an account “of how the cognitive process can cause our antecedent recognition to be forgotten.”34 At such moments Honneth seems to reduce the phenomenon of reification to the realm of affective intersubjective relations alone, ruling out an account of the mediation of social relations with the structures that constitute them.
Yet even in terms of Honneth’s own theoretical trajectory, the focus on the affective identification of humans with significant others as the basis for a norm of dereified forms of social practice lacks the political connotations of the earlier struggle for recognition.35 In Honneth’s work on reification the lack of participatory engagement of Teilnahmslosigkeit stems from the fact that the primary, active, recognitive stance of the human being has merely been forgotten, but it is far from clear how this forgetting could be significant for social or political theory. When decoupled from the critique of fetishism, one must ask whether the concept of reification retains the necessary conceptual force for illuminating contemporary democratic politics.36
Honneth’s purified notion of intersubjectivity in Reification seems to continue the priority of normativity in Honneth’s earlier analysis of capitalism in his debate with Fraser. There he argued that even “seemingly ‘anonymous’ economic processes are determined by normative rules.”37 This approach left Honneth vulnerable to the charge, for example, by Nancy Fraser, that he reduces the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.38 Fraser’s critique raised the important question of whether Honneth grants any exteriority to the recognition order of capitalism or, rather, whether capitalism is ultimately no more than its recognition order.39 In that exchange, moreover, Honneth described his project as guided by a kind of “moral monism,” which argues that any normatively substantial social theory must discover “principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open up the prospect of desirable improvements.”40 In other words, as Honneth argues in The Struggle for Recognition, recognition is the “moral grammar” of social conflict. Therefore, even struggles that make claims for redistribution in the terms of class struggle, or in anticapitalist terms, presuppose a moral logic of recognition as the basis of claims to redistribution.
Marxist theory, according to Honneth, tends to sacrifice the logic of recognition to a metapolitical theory of the dynamics of capital to secure its scientific claims. This is self-contradictory, he claims, insofar as it must simultaneously “conceive of the very same processes as strongly dependent on value-mediated communication” in order to “accommodate immanent moral demands for redistribution within them.”41 Insofar as Honneth rejects the priority of a structural analysis of capital, one might argue that his approach refuses the distinction made by the young Marx between political and human emancipation. Honneth writes that his theory of the capitalist recognition order does not fully explain the dynamics of capital. He writes that a theory of recognition is “not sufficient to explain the dynamics of developmental processes in contemporary capitalism. But it is only meant to make clear the normative constraints embedded in such processes because subjects face them with certain expectation of recognition.”42
Honneth’s theory of recognition therefore appears to be another version of “the autonomy of politics,” posed in terms of a normative social theory.43 In this regard, Honneth’s theory of recognition looks surprisingly more like Jacques Rancière’s autonomous conception of politics (which I discussed in chapter 1) than is immediately apparent, although Rancière would reject the strong moral overtones of Honneth’s theory of social struggle as well as Honneth’s Hegelian conception of moral progress.44 What is somewhat similar in both theories is that the focus on the experiential dimension of the political as well as the delineation of the structure of emancipatory demands for equality, although expressed in economic or social terms, contain an immanent political/ethical logic that is not reducible to the economic or sociological dimensions of the struggles. In this respect, Honneth’s theory is symptomatic of the neoliberal impasse between economics and politics that I problematized in chapter 1.
Ultimately, I believe that by decoupling the critique of reification from the critique of fetishism, an approach that also characterizes Honneth’s trajectory in Redistribution or Recognition?, Honneth reinforces a problematic separation between the economy and the political, rendering the theory unable to grasp the breadth of emancipatory political struggles today, limiting politics to the logic of recognition without taking into account the dimensions of political movements that struggle for transformation of the existing structure of socioeconomic relations.
NEOLIBERAL PARADOXES
It is important to note that Honneth’s reinterpretation of reification as a purely intersubjective phenomenon in Reification as well as his approach in Redistribution or Recognition? stand in tension not only with the lineage of the first (and to a perhaps lesser degree with the second) generation of the Frankfurt School; it also contrasts peculiarly with his own statement of the paradoxical character of neoliberalism in his 2006 essay “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” In that text, Honneth and Martin Hartmann argue that the new economic forms characteristic of neoliberalism have eroded the normative achievements of the welfare state. “This ‘new,’ ‘disorganized,’ shareholder value-oriented capitalism affects in one way or another the normatively structured spheres of action distinguished above, bringing about developments that lead to the reversal of these institutionalized normative achievements.”45 The spread of shareholder-oriented norms of management decreases the power of workers, all the while mobilizing their creative and affective capacities towards the ends of accumulation (45). Most perniciously, the excessive responsibilization of workers (“entreployees”) in the context of an eroded welfare safety net creates an entrepreneurial form of subjectivity, which contributes to the problem of “social desolidarization” as well as to the paradoxical erosion of individual autonomy (49). Therefore, “What could previously be analyzed as an unambiguous rise in the sphere of individual autonomy assumes the shape of unreasonable demands, discipline or insecurity, which, taken together, have the effect of social desolidarization” (48–49). The result is a disruption of the notion of social responsibility and a turn toward the individual’s responsibility for her own social welfare even as the possibility of maintaining prosperity or even employment under current economic conditions is eroded (52).
In this text Honneth and Hartmann present a sophisticated understanding of the paradoxical nature of the normative order of neoliberalism, in which the very attempt to institutionalize and realize social norms of autonomy contributes to the undermining of those very norms. While Honneth’s emphasis is still on the normative order of capitalism, he demonstrates an appreciation for the mutual constitution of economic structures and normative logics, describing the relationship between economic structure and normativity as reciprocal and coconstitutive. He describes the relation between economic structure and normativity as, “on the one hand … an economic system that follows its own laws of motion and … is in its own way normatively integrated; but also, on the other hand, as a social system that continually forces social-political institutions to adapt to transformed economic structures” (45).
In “Paradoxes,” therefore, Honneth demonstrates a nuanced attention to the phenomenon of what I would describe as the fetishization of normativity in neoliberalism. The production of the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject as “entreployee” actually creates a surplus of normativity.46 Yet flexibilization and precarization create a form of autonomy that is ultimately paradoxical and productive of ambivalence rather than self-evidently liberatory. This essay thus stands in sharp relief from Honneth’s approach to the relationship between economics and intersubjectivity in Reification.
Yet in his most recent work, Freedom’s Right, Honneth steps up his emphasis on the normativity of economic forms in opposition to the structural critique of capitalism. The book is a massive historical reconstruction of the social, economic, and political institutions that have enshrined individual freedom as the central value of Western modernity. Honneth analyzes three social spheres of society as attempts to institute and realize the value of freedom: the personal sphere, the political sphere, and the realm of economics. As far as the economic sphere is concerned, which is the only part of the book I deal with here, Honneth essentially argues that markets must be embedded in social norms, yet the capitalist market historically has continually sought to disembed itself from such extraeconomic norms. The chapters on the economic sphere historically track the dynamics of the disembedding and reembedding of the market over the last two centuries and the ways in which social movements and trade unions have persistently sought to counterbalance the market’s disembedding and atomizing tendencies. Honneth argues, therefore, for an embedded market, which would contain norms about such things as price restrictions, commodities that should remain outside the market, limits on the consumption of luxury products, and the place of collectives (as opposed to individuals) on the market.47
Honneth’s study of the spheres of the labor market and of consumption is extremely rich, and I certainly cannot do justice to the breadth of his analysis here. I am interested predominantly in the larger theoretical point that Honneth’s study makes about how critical theory should approach the critique of capitalism. In Freedom’s Right Honneth moves away from the sophisticated analysis of the paradoxical character of normativity in neoliberalism exhibited in “Paradoxes.” His focus in the new work largely confirms the critical points I raised earlier about Honneth’s concept of reification, namely that Honneth reduces capitalism to its normative order and that, in the process, he makes use of purified concepts of intersubjectivity and freedom, shielded from capitalist logics, as the basis of his critique of contemporary forms of social domination.
In Freedom’s Right Honneth explicitly argues for a return to the theory of moral economy in Hegel and Durkheim as a way of responding to the forms of domination presented by neoliberalism and for a turn away from Marx’s structural critique of capitalism.48 The main systematic point that Honneth makes regarding the critique of capitalism is that contemporary forms of economic domination should be viewed not as structural problems inherent in capitalism but rather as “challenges” that are to be reformed from within the system of capitalism. “Neither the problem of exploitation nor that of enforced contracts should be grasped as structural deficits that can only be removed by abolishing the capitalist market economy, but as challenges posed by the market’s own normative promise, which can thus only be solved within the market system itself.”49 Unlike in “Paradoxes,” Honneth here seems to argue that the normative promises of the capitalist market economy are themselves unaffected by the neoliberal developments in capitalist relations. The norms themselves thus remain uncompromised. Yet in “Paradoxes” Honneth had diagnosed neoliberalism as paradoxical precisely because it creates a situation in which the very attempt to institute norms of freedom actually impedes the conditions of possibility for the realization of freedom. For Honneth, a paradox is, importantly, not counter to a contradiction but rather exemplifies a specific structure of contradiction. Thus “a contradiction is paradoxical when, precisely through the attempt to realize such an intention, the probability of realizing it is decreased. In especially striking cases, the attempt to realize an intention creates conditions that run counter to it.”50
Yet in Freedom’s Right the language of paradox seems to have fallen away. Instead capitalism presents us with “challenges,” challenges, however, that leave untouched the normative order that legitimates neoliberalism. In Freedom’s Right Honneth no longer accounts for what I earlier called the “neoliberal inversion of liberalism,” in which liberal norms are used to legitimate neoliberal economic practices, all the while eviscerating the content of the norms themselves. As Rocío Zambrana has perceptively argued, Honneth’s understanding of immanent critique “involves a notion of normativity whereby norms have critical potential if they remain insulated from capitalist resignification” and that, furthermore, for Honneth, “norms insulated from capitalist resignification are necessary for critique.”51 Yet, in the context of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism, and in the context of the paradoxes that ethicized capitalism presents to liberal normativity, Honneth’s search for norms shielded from neoliberal logics is untenable and even, I would argue, ideological. As a result of this critical procedure, Honneth’s work has become symptomatic of neoliberal paradoxes rather than critical of them.
Honneth’s approach in Freedom’s Right, which views problems within the capitalist economy as normative challenges that can be overcome by using capitalist forms, rather than structural problems that require transformation, makes clear that Honneth’s theory turns away from a critique of political economy that could dialectically mediate between structures of capital accumulation and the normative, intersubjective dimensions of capitalist society. Moreover, in his recent work Honneth in effect abandons critical theory’s historical task of the transfiguration of capitalism, ultimately arguing that neoliberal capitalism may pose challenges, but these challenges do not necessitate a fundamental transformation of capitalist society.52
NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF NEOLIBERALISM: A GLANCE AT FRASER’S THEORY OF THE TRIPLE MOVEMENT
Nancy Fraser’s work has long provided a counterpoint to third-generation critical theory’s waning attention to the critique of political economy. As Honneth was focusing his theoretical work on the theory of recognition in the 1990s, Fraser remained focused on the intersection between recognition and redistribution, emphasizing that the decoupling of recognition from redistribution constituted a central challenge for the left, which had become polarized through the false antithesis between culture and economics. In her 2003 exchange with Axel Honneth, Fraser argued that Honneth’s monistic theory of recognition reduced the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.53 Honneth, after all, had described his project as guided by a kind of “moral monism” in which a normatively substantial social theory must discover “principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open up the prospect of desirable improvements.”54 Fraser by contrast argued for a “two-front strategy” that addressed the mutual constitution of problems of recognition and redistribution.
The normative core of Fraser’s approach, as elaborated in that exchange, is the norm of participatory parity, which holds that the central norm of political and social struggles for justice is to enable “participating on par with one another in social life.”55 Participatory parity has at least two conditions, an objective condition, which precludes forms of inequality and economic dependence, and an intersubjective condition, which requires that institutions and cultural values express equal respect for all participants in social life.56 Within the terms of her dual emphasis on redistribution and recognition, participatory parity appears to be persuasive enough as a fundamental norm of critique. Yet the emphasis on participatory parity, while certainly politically more efficacious than Honneth’s privileging of recognition, may nevertheless present Fraser’s theory with a version of a problem similar to the one explored above regarding Honneth: that Fraser may, despite her own intention, articulate the norm of participatory parity as constitutively shielded from the neoliberal inversion and resignification of its normativity.
More promising than the commitment to participatory parity itself is Fraser’s recent articulation of what she calls the triple movement, which both expresses the deeply ambivalent nature of normativity in neoliberalism and foregrounds attention to the political articulation of norms in the neoliberal context as fundamental for understanding their status as either emancipatory or symptomatic of neoliberal forms of domination.57 The notion of the triple movement is inspired by Karl Polanyi’s theory of the double movement, a process by which markets have continually throughout history disembedded themselves from social fabrics, only to provoke a protectionist backlash from a civil society struggling to defend its forms of life.58 Yet, according to Fraser, Polanyi’s articulation of the double movement of marketization and social protection leaves out forms of social domination emanating from sites outside the economic realm. Therefore Fraser proposes the project of “emancipation” as a triangulation of Polanyi’s two-sided theory, which mediates conflicts between social protection and marketization. Whereas the notion of protection opposes the exposure of society to markets, the project of emancipation opposes domination. Emancipation subjects “both market exchange and non-market norms to critical scrutiny.”59 Emancipation therefore can expose the double-edged status of bids for social protection, which although opposing marketization may simultaneously entrench nonmarket forms of status domination.
The key insight of Fraser’s approach in her recent work on the triple movement is the triangular structure of emancipation–social protection–marketization and the normative ambivalence of each of the three terms.60 For example, marketization has potentially negative effects on society, but it may also have positive effects if it disintegrates forms of social protection that are themselves oppressive or based on status hierarchy. Even emancipation is ambivalent, because while it dismantles domination it may also erode the existing foundations of social solidarity and thus compromise the ethical basis for social protections. Therefore, Fraser argues, each of the terms must mediate the other two, for “it is only when all three are considered together that we begin to get an adequate view of the grammar of social struggle in capitalist crisis.”61 Fraser’s theory of the triple movement, I argue, is a crucial step in moving critical theory toward a focus on the normative ambivalence inherent in the structure of neoliberalism and the neoliberal inversion of liberal normativity, rather than relying on normative sources that must be constitutively shielded from neoliberal logics in order to retain critical traction.
Participatory parity, which pushes against the more radical realization of normative ambivalence in Fraser’s theory of the triple movement, represents a vestigial commitment to the third-generation critical theory project of what Zambrana has termed “metacritique.” According to Zambrana, “Metacritique assumes that norms insulated from capitalist resignification are necessary for critique.”62 Zambrana makes a powerful argument that the third-generation commitment to metacritique must give way to the work of what she calls “metatheoretical critique.” “Metatheoretical critique … thematizes the challenges of assessing and justifying core normative commitments in practice. It is a reflexive practice that seeks to contribute to critical and metacritical practices by making explicit the strictures imposed by the reciprocal determination of critique and capitalism. It thus makes explicit the logic of ambivalence generated and sustained by distinct Gestalten of capitalism.”63
I would argue along with Zambrana that the normative purity of participatory parity pushes against Fraser’s subtle and nuanced critiques of the political ambivalence of critical practices and political strategies that stand in opposition to neoliberalism. As in the case of Honneth, who puts forth a purified concept of intersubjectivity—and ultimately of the social—as a standpoint for the critique of capitalist domination, the metacritical focus of third-generation critical theory forecloses an analysis of the ways in which sociality itself is subject to logics of commodification and capital accumulation in neoliberal society. Indeed the requirement to retain a moral-political commitment to participatory parity pushes against the radical implications of Fraser’s triangular theory, which emphasizes normative and political ambivalence. This emphasis could move critical theory into a more concrete, politically attuned analysis of the structure of movements and political forms that could challenge neoliberal forms of domination while recognizing that such movements will remain irreducibly ambivalent in the context of the forces of marketization and social protection that inevitably constrain and constitute contemporary political action.
BACK TO REIFICATION
In subsequent chapters I explore the ways in which the concept of reification could be useful in articulating an approach to political struggle in the context of neoliberalism that recognizes the normative ambivalence that Fraser emphasizes in the context of Zambrana’s provocation toward a metatheoretical turn in critical theory. Because reification focuses on the relationship between subjectivity, capitalism, and the limits and possibilities of subjective experience in the context of capitalism, the concept can be useful for grasping the neoliberal mutation of politics in the twenty-first century.
In the following chapters I return to the origins of the concept of reification in the works of Lukács, Marx, and Adorno, thinkers for whom the concept was central. I reconstruct the concept with an eye to creating an experientially focused critique of political economy. By contrast to the late Frankfurt School account of reification, my alternative concept recognizes the centrality of both the intersubjective and material dimensions of reification for understanding democratic struggles in a contemporary context. Moreover, I address the question of how a critique of reification can respond to the problems posed by the rise of neoliberalism and its implications for how economic logics are articulated in contemporary society.