IN CHAPTER 3 we explored how Marx’s theory of democracy highlights two forms of depoliticization at play in capitalist societies: the rigidification of the political and the bracketing of the political. While the first refers to a critique of capitalist politics articulated from the perspective of the political sphere itself, the second refers to the way in which depoliticization occurs with the bracketing of politics from the extrapolitical spheres of social life, including the economy. Marx explores these two aspects of capitalist politics as distinct but interrelated—both dimensions are crucial for understanding postcapitalist democratic possibilities. Marx’s conception of democracy, then, entails forms of politicization along these two axes: the politicization of forms of rule (against the rigidification of the political) as well as critical reflection upon the boundary between the political sphere and the spheres of society that are seen as beyond politics (against the bracketing of the political from the economic).
What remains underdeveloped in Marx’s account, however, is an explicit theory of the production of subjectivity in capitalism and the specific relationship between subjective experience, practice, and the sociopolitical form of capitalist society. The critique of capitalist politics in Marx is not yet a full-fledged philosophy of praxis.1 Not until György Lukács’s subsequent development of the concept of reification would the specific issue of the production of subjectivity and its role in constituting capitalism as a political, economic, and social form be more deeply explored. Lukács’s work on reification turns Marx’s critique of political economy toward what I am calling a political economy of the senses: a critique of political economy accounting for the role subjective experience plays in both constituting capitalist domination as well as criticizing that domination. Lukács’s theory of reification focuses on the subject’s stance in relation to the social world as one of the most significant facets of the reproduction of the capitalist social form. And he does this by examining how capitalism structures not only “the economy,” taken as a bounded sphere of society that exists “outside” the subject, but also how capitalist forms permeate the subject’s perception of the world at the most intimate level.
Lukács brings a perspective to the critique of capital that I would suggest is overlooked in current discussions. While there is much work being done on issues of class struggle, redistributive politics, and the problem of inequality, there is less focus upon the relationship between neoliberal socioeconomic forms, forms of political subjectivity, and the structure of capitalist experience.2 Yet economics is not just a matter of how wealth in our society is distributed or of how production operates, though it is certainly about these things. Equally important is the way in which economic forms are constituted by the very forms of perception that predominate within a society.
Lukács emphasizes the idea that capitalism consists of a particular form of production, reproduction, and distribution as well as of perception. Indeed, the way in which subjects in capitalist society perceive the social world is itself an increasingly crucial aspect of capitalist production and reproduction. The turn to Lukács’s theory of reification addresses the underemphasis of questions of perception, experience, and sensation in discussions about capitalism. His critique stresses the ways in which capitalism perpetuates a form of subjectivity that creates dissociation from the effects of one’s actions as well as the sensorium of society at large.
In this chapter I will show that Lukács’s analysis of the subject’s reified stance in capitalism is crucial for reconnecting a critique of political economy with lived experiences and subjective perceptions of capitalist society. I derive three dimensions of reified subjectivity from Lukács’s analysis of bourgeois philosophy and the capitalist labor process: dissociation, formalism, and fragmentation from the social totality.
These three dimensions of reified subjectivity are the experiential counterpart to Marx’s analysis of political economy. A subject that is dissociated is not fully feeling or experiencing the sensations or effects of her actions. This dissociation occurs both individually and socially—that is to say, capitalism produces dissociation in the mechanization of the body, which Lukács describes in his exploration of the industrial labor process, as well as in the fact that capitalist subjects are removed from the social effects of their economic actions.
Formalism refers to the schematic character of experience in capitalist society. As in Lukács’s exploration of the Kantian thing-in-itself, which reveals the merely formal character of rational knowledge, which does not penetrate the content of the material world, reified subjectivity is only able to grasp the forms of concepts without grasping their content. According to Lukács, the schematic character of perception in capitalist society means that experience is in some sense always predigested. Moreover, the form of experience is homologous with the commodity form insofar as subjects increasingly perceive in terms of quantity rather than quality. The shift from analog to digital musical forms is a good example of a similar shift in perception: we increasingly perceive the sonic world in terms of segmented 1s and 0s rather than as a continuum of qualitative sounds and vibrations. Finally, Lukács identifies the fragmentation of subjective experience and the inability to perceive the social totality as a crucial feature of reified practice.
I update Lukács’s theory of reification in the context of neoliberal conditions to show that while in neoliberal capitalism subjects may appear to be active, involved, and innovative, rather than passive and disengaged, neoliberalism has actually rendered the so-called active stance of the individual functional to capital accumulation. Neoliberal economic subjectivity in the context of postindustrial societies may no doubt be active and entrepreneurial. Nevertheless, neoliberal subjectivity exhibits a way of inhabiting the world that is formalistic and dissociated and thus creates a closed system that forecloses the possibility for subjects to become cocreators in the social and economic worlds they inhabit. Far from becoming obsolete, therefore, the paradigm of reification critique has only become increasingly relevant in the context of neoliberalism.
REIFICATION: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO LABOR
In “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukács argues that reification is the central social pathology of capitalist society.3 Reification, according to Lukács, is primarily a passive form of consciousness characterized by a lack of participatory involvement (Teilnahmslosigkeit) with its object, which apprehends “things” in the world as inert objects to which human consciousness merely conforms. Reification consists of a double movement of abstraction and naturalization whereby formalist thought tends to abstract from the material world and consequently to naturalize objects, taking them as given rather than as constituted by the activity of consciousness.4
Lukács explicitly relates the critique of reification to the critique of “commodity fetishism” conceived by Marx as a form of relation between humans that is disguised as a relation between things.5 Commodity fetishism refers to the way in which social relations disguise themselves as something objective rather than socially mediated and thus come to be regarded as beyond the domain of human agency. The spectatorial attitude of reification that characterizes human consciousness in capitalism is therefore a crucial part of the peculiar economic structure of the capitalist form itself.
To explore the perceptual and subjective dimensions of capitalist reification, Lukács takes us through a labyrinthine analysis of bourgeois philosophy, from Kant through Hegel. His ultimate purpose is to show the deep homology between forms of consciousness and forms of social structure. In particular, Lukács’s essay on reification demonstrates that one of the fundamental challenges capitalism poses for the project of human emancipation is the unique way in which it frames human experience. Capitalism, defined primarily by the predominance of the commodity form in a society, produces subjects that relate to the social world as spectators rather than cocreators of that world. Yet, before we can understand the political effects of this spectatorial form of consciousness, Lukács directs us to the deeper subjective structures that anchor reified consciousness. If we look at the structure of the subject-object relationship in capitalism, Lukács shows, we will see that reified consciousness consists in a kind of dissociation of the subject from the material aspects of the social world that would allow for its transformation. Dereification, then, consists in reconnecting the subject’s experiences of capital with its relationship to political economic structures.
REIFICATION AND THE ANTINOMIES OF BOURGEOIS THOUGHT
It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the German idealists—namely Kant, Hegel, and Fichte—on Lukács’s work. German idealism revealed to Lukács the ways in which bourgeois philosophy participates in the naturalization of a reified social world.6 Kant exemplifies for Lukács the limits of bourgeois philosophy for a critical theory of society, but Kant is also important insofar as his work provides a sharply accurate portrayal of reified subjectivity. Lukács compares the formalism of the economic laws that condition our experience of objects in capitalist society to Kant’s deduction of the unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the transcendental deduction, Kant’s well-known refutation of empiricism, Kant argued that the unity of apperception is the condition of possibility of objective empirical knowledge.7 Lukács demonstrates that the conditions of possibility of experience, which Kant argued are transcendental, are actually a historically specific feature of human experience in capitalist society. Moreover, Lukács suggests through this comparison that the German idealists had not ultimately theorized the conditions of possibility of experience as such. Rather, they had theorized the experiential possibilities of a pathological form of society. In the following sections I discuss three attributes of reified subjectivity from Lukács’s discussion of bourgeois philosophy in his “Reification” essay: dissociation, formalism, and the inability to perceive the social totality. As I will explain, Lukács’s critique of the experiential pathologies of capitalist society paves the way for what I am calling a political economy of the senses, a critique of capitalism that engages both the levels of political economy and political experience.
FORMALISM
Lukács finds in Kant’s work a theory that reveals the immense power of the subject to constitute its own experience, rather than to passively imbibe the empirical world as if it were given independently of the subject’s creative synthesizing activity. At the same time, Kant reveals the limits of a philosophical approach that fails to recognize and pursue its own practical implications: it contemplates and legitimates extant social forms rather than submitting them to the test of reason. Lukács’s task in the section of the “Reification” essay entitled “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” is to reveal philosophy’s misrecognition of its own practice as the misrecognition characteristic of practice in general in capitalist society. In philosophy as in social reality, the subject takes itself to be the spectator rather than the producer of its world.
In the first Critique, Kant inquires into the transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience of objects and attempts to show that the supreme condition of experience is “apperception,” the “I think” that accompanies all representations of the manifold of sensory intuition into intelligible form by the categories of the understanding. The thesis of transcendental apperception amounts to the conditionality of experience on self-consciousness, in other words on consciousness of the very rules the subject applies to intuition in order to unify the manifold of sensory experience into a representation of the object. The logical dependence of experience on apperception means that experience is, in its very nature, represented in lawlike form, that is, according to the application of a rule.
Lukács applies Kant’s doctrine of apperception to the reified second nature presented to experience in capitalist society. Following Kant, Lukács suggests that although the social world apprehended by the senses appears to follow its own laws, in reality it operates by laws that are somehow posited by human beings. Kant deduced that the manifold of nature is apprehended by a subject who imposes the laws of its own faculty of reason onto nature as the very condition of experience. Lukács writes, “modern philosophy sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or e.g. has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.”8 Through its own spontaneous activity of synthesis, the subject produces the object.
However, there are limits to the extent to which the subject can be said to produce the object in Kant’s framework. These difficulties are encapsulated in the Kantian antinomy of the thing-in-itself, the irrational remainder that lies beyond the border of knowledge yet seems to contain within it the very content of the real itself. In pursuing the rationalist goal of systematizing knowledge into rational concepts, Lukács argues, Kant confronts the problem of the irrationality of pure intuition, the sensuous content that cannot be deduced from a rational form. Ultimately Lukács argues that in Kant’s framework sensuousness, or, crudely rendered, “the empirical facts,” can only be said to be the product of human reason insofar as they are infinitely deferred and dissolved into further concepts. This solution to the problem of the irrational thing-in-itself, however, results in what Lukács critiques under the name of formalism. Formalism refers to the character of subjective experience in capitalism whereby subjects relate to their experience schematically. Subjective experience is framed within terms that separate the subject from the content of experience. The content of experience is predigested and thus experienced within existing categories and frameworks that foreclose novel and differentiated experiences of the social world.
According to Lukács, capitalist experience is structured by the commodity form that bifurcates human experience into the division between use value, which is qualitative, and exchange value, which is quantitative. Kantian rationalism similarly reflects this bifurcation—it coordinates the form of concepts without ever accessing their content. Therefore, Kantian rationalism, according to Lukács, is a “co-ordination, or rather a supra- and subordination of the various partial systems of forms (and within these, of the individual forms). The connections between them must always be thought of as ‘necessary,’ i.e. as visible in or ‘created’ by the forms themselves, or at least by the principle according to which the forms are constructed.”9
The content of objective experience, however, cannot be deduced from its conceptual form. Insofar as rationalism fails to demonstrate that the object can be deduced from the concept, it erroneously claims to bestow rationality upon content or “matter.” But in actuality the rationalist position simply accepts the mere givenness of the content, which remains irrational. As Lukács writes, “It is evident that the principle of systematization is not reconcilable with the recognition of any ‘facticity,’ of a ‘content’ which in principle cannot be deduced from the principle of form and which, therefore, has simply to be accepted as actuality.”10
Lukács’s insight, which leads his essay from the critique of theoretical philosophy to social theory, is that the irrational content of experience has a social existence. The “given,” the irrational facticity against which Kantian formalism has no argument, can be understood as the dogmatism of a way of life, to put the problem in Hegelian terms.11 Formalism is therefore not only a philosophical problem, it is the subjective and experiential means by which capitalist society reproduces itself economically.
TEILNAHMSLOSIGKEIT: CAPITALIST DISSOCIATION
One can see now that although Lukács spends considerable energy critiquing bourgeois philosophy, in reality his target is in fact the form of subjectivity that predominates in capitalist society, which bourgeois philosophy had theorized and universalized. Related to the problem of formalism, Lukács further critiques a spectatorial and unengaged form of consciousness that predominates in capitalist society, reflected not only in philosophy but also in the process of industrial labor. This spectatorial form of consciousness could be described as a form of dissociation. Reified subjects in capitalist society dissociate in the sense that they take themselves to be the mere observers rather than the cocreators of the society in which they live. Bourgeois philosophy reflects the spectatorial consciousness that predominates in capitalist society at large: it reflects a detached, unengaged point of view from which to judge internal events rather than events in the world. Lukács refers to this detached stance with the word Teilnahmslosigkeit, or lack of participatory involvement, as we explored in chapter 2 with respect to Honneth’s reinterpretation of the theory of reification. However, in contrast to Honneth’s discussion, Lukács sees Teilnahmslosigkeit not merely as an intersubjective phenomenon, but as one that is deeply tied with the political economy of capitalist society.
This dissociative, spectatorial form of consciousness is exhibited not only in bourgeois philosophy but also in the subjective dimension of the capitalist labor process. Subjects dissociate from the body, as exhibited in the repetitive movements of industrial labor, but also from the affective and practical social consequences of their laboring activity. Moreover, Lukács shows that a contemplative, unengaged stance toward the objects of activity takes precedence in the capitalist labor process, an attitude that takes the rules to which laboring activity conforms to be largely unalterable and pregiven. He writes,
Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. As labour is progressively rationalized and mechanized his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.12
This contemplative stance is due, on the one hand, to the fact that the dynamic of commodities on the market tend to “confront him [the individual] as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity” (87). Therefore, this spectatorial stance has to do with the individual’s experience of the commodification and alienation of the products of his own labor, which, “subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article” (87). The commodification of labor results in the bifurcation of the individual worker into exchange value, which includes the complex of faculties that he sells for a wage, and use value, which, by contrast, contains his whole personality. This is the case not only in factory labor but in service or bureaucratic labor as well, insofar as they too foster a relationship of disengagement between the agent and the goals of work. Referring to bureaucratic labor, Lukács writes, “The split between the worker’s labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, an object that he sells on the market is repeated here too. But with the difference that not every mental faculty is suppressed by mechanization; only one faculty (or complex of faculties) is detached from the whole personality and placed in opposition to it, becoming a thing, a commodity” (99). The reified consciousness of the worker, therefore, is hardly confined to the proletarian. The same contemplative, objectifying form of consciousness is to be found in the figures of the journalist and the bureaucrat, who, just as much as the factory worker, although from different perspectives, tend to divorce themselves from the concrete object of their work.
What all these activities share in common is that they promote a form of consciousness in which the worker abstracts from the “material” of the object of activity in the labor process. In the example of factory labor this problem is clear enough: under mechanized conditions of production the worker’s activity no longer relates to the object of production as a coherent, useful object that satisfies needs. Instead only a small fragment of the final product is under the control of the individual worker. Moreover, the commodified product is alienated from its producer even before it is fully manufactured. In bureaucracy the individual bureaucrat’s work accesses only a fragment of the segmented system, and his consciousness takes the limits of the bureaucratic system to be the limits of his own activity. Thus, Lukács argues, “The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness” (98). The common problem shared by these forms of activity, including philosophy, is that they become specialized, fragmented, and abstracted from the ontological problems of their own sphere. As such, reified activity misrecognizes its status as constitutive of the world within which it operates, taking itself to be merely passively operating within the confines of a pregiven, naturalized situation.
Strongly influenced on this point by Max Weber, Lukács emphasizes the principle of rationalization to explain the formalistic quality of such activity. “We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle of rationalization based on what is and can be calculated. … Rationalization in the sense of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production” (89).
That labor becomes increasingly subject to calculation and prediction is only a sign of the extent to which subjects themselves have no intrinsic relation to it. They relate to their own activity as if it were an alien thing, controlled by an unknowable power, whose movements are subject to prediction and calculation, but not to understanding or to meaningfulness in terms of the subject’s own experience. It is rather like relating to one’s own arm as if it were a prosthetic limb, controlled through remote control by an unknown being. Illustrating this point, Lukács arrives once again at the jarring metaphor of spectatorship, of a subject that can only “look on” passively at its own mechanistic activity: “the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (90). Ultimately, Lukács contends that the dissociated spectatorial subjectivity of capitalist society merely legitimates the irrationality of capitalist society’s laws rather than subjecting them to critical reflection or practical transformation. “True praxis,” as opposed to reified, dissociated forms of praxis, will not limit itself to the reified structure of society as given. By reflecting upon the perceptual and experiential aspects of the capitalist economy, political praxis can open up the space of practical possibility beyond capitalist social and economic forms.
TOTALITY AND THE STANDPOINT OF CRITIQUE
Lukács argues that another problematic feature of reified subjectivity consists in the way that subjects lose sight of the social totality. Their labor and perception becomes so specialized, schematic, and historically unmediated that subjects grow increasingly unable to see how their activity is related to the social form of capitalism as a whole. Lukács standpoint of “totality” is perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of his text, for the standpoint of totality, it is often claimed, contains within it all the problems associated with what has come to be branded an antipolitical “essentialism.”
This essentialism lies in the claim that a single social group, in this case the proletariat, might stand as a universal class whose political mission and perspective upon the whole, could be objectively written into its social position. To the extent that any social group could claim to occupy this position, their claims to do so would necessarily be ideological.13 A vision of politics enunciated from the perspective of social totality, it has been argued, is therefore both sociologically and normatively problematic. It can neither explain the nature of social conflict in contemporary capitalism, which more often than not is enunciated in terms of gender, ethnicity, or race rather than class, nor grasp the basis of pluralized social struggles, which are better articulated in terms of the normative logic of plurality and communicative action rather than in the authoritarian terms of a “politics of collective singularity,” to use Seyla Benhabib’s term.14
Third-generation critical theorists like Benhabib as well as radical democrats like Laclau rightly reject a vulgar Marxist conception of totality, which grounds emancipatory political agency in the objective situation of a collective subject. However, critics of the vulgar Marxist position have perhaps gone too far in rejecting the notion of social totality, along with the problematic essentialism of vulgar Marxism, to the detriment of democratic theory.
I argue that the abandonment of the perspective of totality is mistaken. The critique of totality is based on a reading that takes Lukács’s concept of totality as the perspective of a substantial social actor (the “working class”) rather than as an abstract structure within which social groups struggle.15 To be clear, Lukács himself invites this problem in his text—his formulation of the problem of totality is ambiguous. I suggest, nevertheless, that the perspective of totality can be reconciled with a democratic, nonessentialist political perspective, provided it is theorized as a principle of political action itself rather than as an extrapolitical social positioning, and that the basis for such an analysis can be found in Lukács’s text.
As I have already discussed, the focus of Lukács’s essay on reification is the commodity form as the structuring principle of capitalist society, which is found in the diverse, separated spheres of society that comprise the culture of capitalism. In this sense, Lukács’s analysis of reification attempts to comprehend capitalism in terms of its basic categorical forms. His critique of capitalism, therefore, should be differentiated from the critique of capitalism as an “economic” system, traditionally conceived. That is to say, Lukács’s critique should be differentiated from traditional critiques of exploitation, class domination, market and private property. His critique of reification is a critique of abstract domination, focused upon the way in which subjects in capitalist society naturalize their social world, relating to it as spectators, rather than engaged participants who practically produce and reproduce its structures.
In the third part of the “Reification” essay Lukács argues that the proletariat, occupying the standpoint of totality within the capitalist system as its self-identical subject-object, is the privileged agent of dereifying practice. Through its daily labor as a cog in the capitalist production process, the proletariat gains insight into the true nature of its own activity and its role in the reproduction of capital. Lukács appears to present a theory of political action that is essentialist in the most problematic sense, substantializing the proletariat into an agent, which, by virtue of its objective social position, could transform the distorting forms of capitalist society. Beyond the reductive conception of political agency this thesis implies, it is unclear how the proletariat serves as the solution to the problem of reification Lukács so insightfully and thoroughly delineates. As Postone writes, “it is difficult to see how the notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary Subject points to the possibility of the historical transformation of the quantitative, rationalized and rationalizing character of modern institutions that Lukács analyzes critically as being capitalist.”16 It seems as if the conjunction between the two parts of the essay’s title, “Reification” and “the consciousness of the proletariat,” have at best a tendentious, external relation.
What is clear is that Lukács claims that dereified practice is oriented toward capitalism as a totality. The political agent of dereified practice is able to practically oppose reification by situating its own practice within the whole system of domination rather than taking the reified, naturalized phenomena on their own fetishized terms. The improper short circuit would be the move from an orientation toward totality as the criterion of dereified practice to the specification that a single substantial, collective, social agent could occupy the standpoint of totality, whereby both the standpoint of totality and the collective agent could be materialized outside of a process of political articulation itself. Here the radical democratic critique of Marxist essentialism from theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe and Rancière coincides with the later Frankfurt School critique of the normative presuppositions of the philosophy of the subject from theorists such as Habermas and Benhabib. Neither the subject position nor the social object—“society”—can be specified outside of the communicative processes of political action itself without extinguishing politics with a spurious metapolitical “science.”
I suggest, in contrast to the essentialist reading of Lukács, that the proletariat can function not as an essentializing social agent but rather as an agent that arises in the process of political construction. The practice of totalization, that is, making connections between individual experiences of domination and a social system of domination, constitutes an act that is specifically political in that it is not determined by something like the forces of production or class position. Furthermore, the structure of capitalist domination is not something that is assumed in advance; rather, it is articulated through a process that begins from individual experiences of reification and proceeds to construct expanding webs of connections to broader economic structures. By this process individuals chisel through the fetishized, self-obscuring forms of capitalist domination without knowing in advance what is constituted as an alternative. Dereified practice is the practice of a determinate negation.
The standpoint of totality can thereby be seen as a process of construction, a process of political articulation rather than the occupation of a position of totality that is independent of politics. Lukács’s argument for the standpoint of totality as the standpoint of dereified practice is, from a methodological standpoint, intended to challenge the ahistorical, reifying outlook of bourgeois society and of positivist science, which, by decontextualizing processes from their historical becoming, posits them as immutable, necessary, and fixed. According to Lukács, bourgeois philosophy and bourgeois science misrecognize the precise sense in which human beings can be said to “produce” the world. In Kant and Fichte this production or positing of the world could be understood as a production only in the most formal epistemological sense: the human mind produces the object insofar as it organizes the manifold of sensory intuitions into representations of objects in accordance with the formal categories of reason.
Lukács understands the “production” of the world by the subject otherwise, and he uses the principle of art to think about production as a field of activity where the human can be seen to create reality as a concrete totality. He writes, “This principle is the creation of a concrete totality that springs from a conception of form oriented towards the concrete content of its material substratum.”17 In this sense the standpoint of totality is not the perspective of absolute knowledge. Rather, as the metaphor of artistic production suggests, the construction of totality is itself a creative act that is grounded in the concreteness of a situation; it is the act of one who is rooted in a world, thrown into a field of action instead of observing from the detached, contemplative perspective of the scientist—it is an engaged standpoint: the standpoint of the proletariat is the standpoint of a subject-object.
Lukács likens the creation of totality in the work of art to Schiller’s aesthetic principle of the play impulse (Spieltrieb), in which the human, reified and fragmented in social life, becomes fully human through the aesthetic act of play, satisfying appetites for both form and matter through the playful creation of new forms.18 Art is simultaneously a preparation in consciousness for the transformation of the world itself and a catalyst for that transformation, where consciousness makes demands on the world for change.19 Fredric Jameson interprets Lukács’s notion of the construction of totality as narrative along these lines in Marxism and Form. He writes,
What Lukács describes as proletarian truth is, on the contrary, a sense of forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface of the present into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into the consequences of acts. Indeed, we are tempted to claim that for the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness the ultimate resolution of the Kantian dilemma is to be found not in the nineteenth-century philosophical systems themselves, not even in that of Hegel, but rather in the nineteenth-century novel: for the process he describes bears less resemblance to the ideals of scientific knowledge than it does to the elaboration of plot.20
The aspiration to totality is the aspiration toward mediation, which provides a perspective by which the reified present can be viewed as only one possible experience of the world among others. Lukács writes, “the very thing that should be understood and deduced with the aid of mediation becomes the accepted principle by which to explain all phenomena and is even elevated to the status of a value: namely the unexplained and inexplicable facticity of bourgeois existence as it is here and now acquires the patina of an eternal law of nature or a cultural value enduring for all time.”21
Totality introduces dynamism and context into a world that obscures its own historicity. In this sense, as Jameson provocatively suggests, the reference to totality can be seen as a kind of political plot construction whereby a new relationship to action is established, which invests the world with connections that break out of the immediacy of the disengaged, contemplative mode of cognition characteristic of capitalist culture. This process of construction begins by taking the present as a question, by taking the situation into which one is thrown as the occasion for making connections to the whole. Lukács writes,
The historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of the present, with the self-knowledge of its own social situation and with the elucidation of its necessity (i.e. its genesis). That genesis and history should coincide or, more exactly, that they should be different aspects of the same process, can only happen if two conditions are fulfilled. On the one hand, all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence). On the other hand, their succession, their coherence and their connections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural components of the present.22
The construction of totality begins immanently, that is, from self-knowledge, and proceeds to inquire into the historical necessity, or appearance of necessity, of the present. This indicates a dialectic between the subjective and objective dimensions of social arrangement in the present.
The process of making connections to totality shows the way toward a form of mediation between individual experience and the totalizing form of the capitalist system, which exhibits itself in different ways in the lives of individuals. The key point is that the aspiration to totality highlighted in Lukács’s political theory need not be understood as the claim to absolute knowledge by a transsubject, instead we can think of this as a practice in which individuals examine their own position within the structure of a social system that is unjust and oppressive and ask where they stand as individuals within the whole, where they reproduce domination, where they resist. As Lukács writes, “the relation to totality does not need to become explicit, the plenitude of the totality does not need to be consciously integrated into the motives and objects of action. What is crucial is that there should be an aspiration towards totality, that action should serve the purpose, described above, in the totality of the process.”23 The aspiration to totality, which means to understand one’s own action within the context of the whole system of social relations, is a fundamental criterion of dereified practice. A political orientation toward totality is contrasted to the fragmentation and atomization of capitalist society, in which the phenomena of reification appear necessary and unchangeable.
Lukács contends that reified activity is contradictory, insofar as it is activity that does not recognize itself as such, activity that perpetuates, reproduces, and creates a particular form of dominating social relations, yet misrecognizes its own active constituting activity in that process. But the ultimate political point is that the contradictory nature of contemplative, reified activity is something that comes into the view of individual experience through a labor of totalization. The horizon of totality delineates the field of capitalism as a structuring form, but from the perspective of individuals who are atomized and separated into their own isolated spheres of practice. The construction of totality opens the individual to perceive possibilities that are obscured within reified, capitalist culture by forging connections between various forms of domination across spatial boundaries. Totality should be thought of in a temporal sense as well—the immediacy of reification can be pierced by bringing a historical perspective into the present.
Therefore, the aspiration toward totality is conceived as the outcome of a political process rather than in a way that is reductive and static. Such an approach is more consistent as well with Lukács’s critique of reification in capitalism than the essentialist reading. Maurice Merleau-Ponty perhaps puts this point best:
Certainly nothing can change the fact that our knowledge is partial in both senses of the word. It will never be confused with the historical in-itself (if this word has a meaning). We are never able to refer to completed totality, to universal history, as if we were not within it, as if it were spread out in front of us. The totality of which Lukács speaks is, in his own terms, “the totality of observed facts,” not of all possible and actual beings but of our coherent arrangement of all the known facts. When the subject recognizes himself in history and history in himself, he does not dominate the whole, as the Hegelian philosopher does, but at least he is engaged in a work of totalization.24
RECONSTRUCTING REIFICATION IN CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE
As we have seen in chapter 1, neoliberalism has reconfigured the relationship between the economic and political spheres in contemporary society. The neoliberal state takes an ambivalent role in relation to the economy, which shifts the boundary between economics and politics in neoliberal society in complicated and unstable ways and results in a depoliticization of economics. Here I discuss the subjective dimensions of such transformations. I argue that neoliberalism has entailed a transformation in how subjects participate in the capitalist economy. In the context of the technological transformations of the Internet age, subjects as consumers and producers have become much more directly “active” in shaping the commodities they purchase and produce. Moreover, by contrast to earlier phases of capitalism, laboring subjects in service economies are increasingly called upon to become active, enthusiastic, and entrepreneurial, whereas in industrial capitalism, for example, workers tended to be interpellated as passive, obedient, and machinelike.25 Studies of the transformations in management discourse reflect this shift in the ideal worker, from the Taylorist conception of the worker as an obedient automaton in the period of high industrial capitalism to the contemporary image of the Google employee, who is encouraged to play foosball onsite in order to get the creative juices flowing.26
Given the transformation in the structure of work in contemporary postindustrial societies, one might be skeptical of the usefulness of the paradigm of reification for describing contemporary economic and political subjectivity. After all, the Google worker is far from passive—indeed, she is valued for her individuality, creativity, and enthusiastic engagement.27 Could one still refer to this form of subjectivity as reified?
Yet I suggest that while the increasing engagement of contemporary capitalist subjects in work may superficially appear to indicate greater “participation” of subjects in their socioeconomic worlds, such forms of participation point to a novel dimension of depoliticization in contemporary capitalism. For, as neoliberal subjects become more “active” in the production of commodities in the informationalized economy, they may nevertheless become disengaged and spectatorial in the political sphere. Moreover, the increased activity and engagement of workers in a capitalist economy that has become increasingly “cognitive” in its orientation can nevertheless be compatible with a form of subjectivity that is formalistic, dissociated, and severed from the totality of capitalist social relations. These aspects of reification, I suggest, are ultimately much more important for grasping neoliberal subjectivity than the distinction between “activity” and “passivity.” Reification critique is a useful and underutilized conceptual resource for grasping the ambiguities of participation and political agency in contemporary neoliberal democracy, provided we understand reification to be not a form of “passivity” but, as I have emphasized, a form of activity that involves a dissociated, formalist, and fragmented form of consciousness. Lukács used the concept of reification to refer to the unengaged, nonparticipatory, spectatorial stance individuals take toward the social world and their own practices in capitalist society.28
Reification is the subjective stance assumed by individuals toward a society in which the economy exists as a separate, self-grounding, and autonomous realm of social life, operating in a way that is seemingly independent of human will. At first glance Lukács’s emphasis on reification as a spectatorial stance corresponding to an inexorable and seemingly unchangeable economic system may seem historically outmoded, given the increasing activity and engagement of neoliberal subjects in their roles as producers and consumers. But far from invalidating Lukács’s central point about reification, neoliberal forms of economic subjectivity merely point to shifts in the structure of reification. The increasingly “active” stance of subjects in their status as producers and consumers points to a displacement of the phenomena of reification: as neoliberal subjects become more “active” economic subjects, they may nevertheless become dissociated from the political effects of their laboring activity. Lukács’s theory is useful for grasping an important ambivalence in neoliberal political subjectivity: he highlights the ways in which “participation” can become fetishized and thus mask the way in which human activity itself becomes commodified.
The production of a particular kind of subjectivity is itself an increasingly crucial aspect of the mode of production of commodities. With the concept of reification Lukács draws attention to the way in which capitalism cannot be conceived as a purely “economic” system but rather must be recognized as a social form that produces particular kinds of subjects. Given the vast transformation in the structure of capitalist accumulation and subject formation that has taken place in recent decades, I suggest Lukács’s account of reification can be useful today if it is reconstructed to account for the new ways in which subjects are involved in the processes of capital accumulation, production, and consumption. Lukács’s critique of reification was developed in a period in which industrial production was the dominant form of production. He therefore seeks to grasp the implications of the increasing imbrication of scientific knowledge and commodity production, which converge in Taylorism, for the subjectivity of capitalism. In Lukács’s concept of reification, reified subjectivity, while central to the processes of production, is understood as a supplement, albeit a necessary one, to commodity production. He writes, “The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.”29
While the mechanical processes of capitalist production as well as Taylorist forms of work discipline produce a subject who relates to the world as something impervious to intervention and homogenized in time and space, the production of reified subjectivity in that context is supplementary to the real processes of commodity production. This is not to say that the subjective aspects of reification identified by Lukács are not central to his account, but the point is that the production processes he seeks to theorize are those of mass industrialized production. These processes are no doubt imbricated with forms of subjection. But the reified subjectivity of Taylorist production is a supplement to the production of commodities because, unlike contemporary forms of commodity production, subjectivity is not itself commodified. “With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanization extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialized rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.”30
The psychological aspect of reification is an “extension” of the rationalization of the industrialized commodity production process. The supplementary status of reified subjectivity appears, moreover, in the ambiguity between Lukács’s description of reification as “contemplation” on the one hand and as the practical misrecognition of social activity on the other. When Lukács speaks of reification as a contemplative stance that workers take toward the social world, he depicts the reified subject as passive. “Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. … As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”31
Yet, in his analysis of the antinomies of bourgeois thought in part 2 of the essay, Lukács describes reification as a subjective stance that misrecognizes its own practical basis as socially productive activity and instead takes the social world to be objective and beyond the field of human intervention and transformation. On the one hand there is a passive, spectatorial subject who participates in the labor process as if no more than a part of a machine. On the other hand there is a subject who misrecognizes the thoroughly constructive, practical basis of his activity: a subject who produces the social world through his own activity, yet is dominated by an object which he misrecognizes as alien.
The point I want to make is that this ambiguity in Lukács’s account points to the space in Lukács’s theory that demands reconstruction in light of contemporary transformations. For what we are witnessing today is a shift in the position of subjectivity within the processes of capitalist production. Whereas, in earlier phases of industrial capitalist production, the production of commodities arguably took primacy over the production of a reified subject whose alienated labor drove the production process, in the current conjuncture the production of reified subjectivity no longer has the status of a supplement in the accumulation process—the production of subjectivity has become an immediate site of capital accumulation. Subjectivity itself, in various ways, is being commodified. This is indicated by transformations in the nature of the labor process in recent decades, in particular by what theorists such as Negri and Hardt and Maurizio Lazzarato have referred to as the hegemony of “immaterial production” in contemporary capitalism as well as to the increasing engagement of subjects in commodity consumption through the Internet.32 These transformations in the position of subjectivity within the processes of consumption and production raise the important question of whether the framework of reification can account for the engaged activity of the subject in the labor process and the way in which subjectivity has become directly productive of capital and active in shaping the commodities that individuals consume. The active and engaged nature of neoliberal economic subjectivity contrasts sharply with Lukács’s idea that reification is a kind of passivity or disengagement that accompanies a mechanistic and rationalized production process.
NEOLIBERALISM AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY
In chapter 1 I detailed several broad political economic shifts of recent decades in the context of neoliberalization. Here I add to that discussion an emphasis on transformations in the relationship between subjectivity and capitalist production, which theorists have referred to as a shift toward “immaterial labor.” The passage toward an informational economy has entailed a change in the very status of labor at play within production and the relationship between communication, consumption, and production. On the side of production, the transition from Fordist production to post-Fordist “Toyotism” fundamentally transformed the position of communication and information in the production process. With advances in the capabilities for communication between the production line and markets, production could be made more responsive to consumption, to the point of rendering production actually subordinate to the consumer demand for the product.33 And what is now known as the “Walmartization” of the economy has involved even further flexibility in production, a logistic transformation of the relationship between production systems, retailers, and transportation providers.34
In contemporary capitalism the service sector is based primarily on the exchange of information, communication, cultural production, and knowledge rather than the production of material goods. It is for this reason that the type of labor proper to the service sector has been named “immaterial labor” by theorists such as Lazzarato and Negri and Hardt.35 That is not to say factory production and other forms besides the immaterial do not persist in contemporary capitalism—this is clearly not the case. But immaterial labor has become the dominant form of production in postindustrial societies. Even industrial production has incorporated the techniques of immaterial production: the production of commodities unavoidably passes through networks of immaterial labor, be it through informational networks on the production line or through the image factory on the way to the market. Additionally, affective labor appears as the shadow side of the simplistic picture we receive in the media of the highly trained and highly paid computer programmer as the face of immaterial labor: a largely feminized and growing care work sector indicates that immaterial labor operates through a specific modality of proletarianization.36
The dominance of immaterial labor in contemporary capitalism points to a change in the position of subjectivity within the capitalist mode of production. As immaterial labor has become dominant within production, the production of subjectivity has taken on a direct role in the processes of capitalist accumulation. More and more features of social life become productive for capital: styles, forms of communication (Twitter, Facebook, smartphones), communities, affects, and desires.37 As Lazzarato writes, in immaterial labor “the process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it ‘produces’ production.”38 In the context of immaterial production the stance of workers in an informationalized economy appears far from “passive,” both at the practical and discursive levels.39 Indeed, as Boltanski and Chiapello show in their study of transformations in management discourse, The New Spirit of Capitalism, post-Fordist management discourses have been aimed precisely at moving away from Taylorist conceptions of the human being as machine toward an emphasis on mobilizing the worker’s “authentic self” actively in the workplace.40
Some of the primary effects of the immaterialization of labor upon political subjectivity have occurred through the creation of what Jodi Dean has named “communicative capitalism.” Citizen subjects of communicative capitalism are mobilized as “active” toward the ends of capital creation and consumerism, yet become increasingly disengaged in the robustly political sense, according to Dean. Amid the intensified communication of the Internet age, isolated and repetitive forms of speech via e-mail, Twitter, blogging, “Yelping” become a stand-in for collective action. However, as Dean notes, “Expanded and intensified communicativity neither enhances opportunities for linking together political struggles nor enlivens radical democratic practices. … Instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles coincides with extreme corporatization, financialization, and privatization across the globe.”41 Dean illustrates how, in communicative capitalism, citizens treat “commercial choices as the paradigmatic form of choosing,” displacing attention from the fact that the market is not a public sphere where claims to universality are debated but rather a mechanism of capital accumulation.42
As a result of the increasing immaterialization of labor in the context of communicative capitalism, the main point that I want to underscore here is the way in which contemporary economic subjectivity is self-motivated and entrepreneurial in the workplace and in consumption. Yet the political subjectivity of neoliberalism, by contrast, is increasingly unengaged and complacent. As Wendy Brown notes in her discussion of the political rationality of neoliberalism,
a “mismanaged life” becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. The model neo-liberal citizen is one who strategizes for her/himself among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neo-liberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded, indeed it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers … which is, of course, exactly the way voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.43
To the degree that subjectivity in neoliberalism is made directly productive in the immaterial labor process, rendered ever more active in shaping objects of consumption, one could argue that subjects are demobilized in the political sphere. This is not, however, because subjects are merely distracted by consumption or even because politics itself has become modeled upon the activity of consumption, as Dean and Brown seem to indicate. It is because the conditions of contemporary labor and consumption (which are increasingly less distinct from one another) capture and co-opt the creative, productive energies of subjects. Contemporary transformations in the relationship between subjectivity and capitalist production facilitate the loss of the social totality on the part of subjects through dissociative and formalistic modes of activity.
FROM THE COGNITIVE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES
The central problem with the dissociative, formalist, and fragmented kind of experience that predominates in capitalist society is that subjects are unable to deeply experience novelty, materiality, and totality, which could provide the basis for critical consciousness. The contraction of social experience removes a crucial site of engagement that could open up emancipatory and transformative possibilities within capitalist society. Moreover, the spectatorial stance of reified subjects creates a form of dissociation that is therefore itself functional to capitalist commodity fetishism and alienated labor. The reification of capitalist subjectivity creates what I will call, using a term drawn from the field of somatic studies, a closed system. A closed system is a system that becomes rigid and loses the capacity for new information to enter its purview.
The closed system can be extremely efficient because it takes a certain level of decision out of the calculus of activity and allows for the flow of information along ready-made pathways of communication. It is well suited to a society in which ends-means rationality and mechanistic activity predominate. However, what a closed system gains in efficiency it loses in flexibility and creativity. According to the somatic theorist Emilie Conrad, a closed system cannot hold as much information as a more fluid, open system that is constantly adapting itself to its environment. An open system is patterned but also flexible. It is engaged in a perpetual dialectic between its structure and that which is outside itself. As Conrad emphasizes, however, an open system is fluid but still highly coherent. She writes, “‘Flux,’ which is highly coherent, is not to be confused with amorphous,’ which is incoherent.”44 Conrad points to the possibility of a form (at both the organismic and social level) that is both fluid and structured and allows for responsiveness between inside and outside, between the part and the whole.
Lukács’s critique of capitalist reification bears an interesting resemblance to Conrad’s concept of the closed system. Reified subjects becomes more and more specialized and efficient in achieving their limited ends, but they simultaneously becomes less and less engaged with the actual materiality of the world, both internally (as sense and sensation) and externally (as engagement with institutions and the ethical and practical consequences of their economic actions). The closed system of capitalism and the subjects who inhabit it lose the capacity to adapt and experience phenomena that are not framed in the perceptual terms of the system. At the mutually reinforcing level of political economy and subjective perception, the subject experiences society repetitively and formalistically.
Yet Lukács reveals the problem of capitalist reification as a dissociated form of subjectivity that is dialectically intertwined with a manner of social organization without illuminating a way through. While the consciousness of the proletariat becomes the central means by which reification could be overcome, the model of subjectivity inherent in Lukács’s model of political agency is merely a coming to consciousness of one’s role in the closed system—it is a model of struggle based upon the self-reflexivity of the subject. Applying Conrad’s metaphor of the closed system to capitalist reification, one can see that the central problem is a lack of responsiveness of subjects to the very information and experiences that would provide a means for transforming the society in which we live. The issue is a lack of responsiveness to, as William Connolly describes it, “the numerous intersections between economic life and other force fields with differential powers of metamorphosis.”45 But that lack of responsiveness, I would suggest, is not merely a lack of cognitive responsiveness. Overcoming reified consciousness is not just a matter of correcting our thought patterns or of recognizing previously unrecognized information about how capitalism works. It is, as Lukács well understands, a practical transformation in the structure of consciousness that is required. Yet the fundamental problem with Lukács’s approach to overcoming reification is that, despite his attempt to delineate the conditions for the practical overcoming of reification, Lukács’s theory remains a cognitive critique of reification. It purports to resolve a problem of practice using techniques that are appropriate only for resolving a problem of knowledge.46
Lukács’s emphasis on self-reflexivity as the antidote to reification illustrates this problem. Reflexivity refers to a kind of practice that, rather than accepting fetish forms at the level of their appearance as reified, naturalized, and immutable, tries to view fetishized social forms and social institutions as somehow constituted within the field of human agency in order to think about how they could be transformed. For Lukács, reflexivity in practice is closely bound to the possibility of reflexivity in theory. The idea that human beings have the capacity for self-reflexive knowledge of the world is the central contribution of German idealism from Kant to Hegel. Interrogation of the practical and normative meaning of self-reflexivity in knowledge has been a central preoccupation of the Western Marxist tradition, from Marx himself through the Frankfurt school. Kant argued that self-reflexivity is the transcendental condition of the possibility of knowledge of the empirical world—we know objects only insofar as the mind imposes conceptual form onto a sensory manifold and, in so doing, thinks itself in its every thought. While Kant thus demonstrated the fundamental activity of the subject in constituting the objects of knowledge, Hegel’s critique of Kant was that Kant did not conceive of the positing activity of the subject in relation to the object radically enough. Self-reflection is not merely a return of the subject from an empirical world that is given, but involves a repositing of the given: hence the subject and object stand in dialectical, mutually constitutive relation to one another. Marx’s turning of the Hegelian dialectic “inside-out” was intended to show that only the revolutionary transformation of existing society through political practice would constitute an actual “repositing” of the given by the subject rather than a quietistic reconciliation with it.
In a further turn of the screw, Lukács asks why the dialectic between the subject (reified consciousness) and object (fetishized capitalist society) comes to a standstill—or, rather, why does it continue in its infinite repetitions without the intervention of something new? This has something to do with the nature of both reified consciousness, which takes its own world-constituting activity for mere contemplation, and the nature of capitalist society, which takes the form of a fetish that obscures its own status as a historically specific social form. Lukács, in contrast to Marx, emphasizes the subjective dimensions of the process of capitalist production and reproduction, but he does so in a peculiar way. Lukács’s twist, which many dismiss as a problematic return to Hegelian idealism, asserts the very materiality of reified consciousness itself. Insofar as individuals misrecognize the material, practical, world-constituting implications of their own practice, they contribute unconsciously to the reproduction of domination. It is in this respect that Lukács is often held to be the super Hegelian, dissolving the objectivity of capitalism that was reestablished by Marx yet again into the product of a self-creating subject. However, we can see that Lukács’s claim is significantly different from the statement that consciousness produces objectivity, and therefore, it must simply reappropriate its alienated objectivity by recognizing itself in its externalized other.47
The crucial aspect of this reflexivity for Lukács is a becoming conscious of unconscious structures of social reproduction and therefore of one’s position within those structures. By making conscious the mutual constitution of subject and object, he suggests, the necessity and naturalization of social institutions can be placed radically into question, and thus transformed. In reified society, Lukács writes, the dialectic between subject and object is unconscious—the mutual constitution of subject and object is not immediately visible; rather, the object appears to have a rigidity and power that is impenetrable. “Thus we find the subject and object of the social process co-existing in a state of dialectical interaction. But as they always appear to exist in a rigidly twofold form, each external to the other, the dialectics remain unconscious and the objects retain their twofold and hence rigid character.”48
As long as this dialectic remains rigid and unconscious, that is, as long as social reality is apprehended in the form of a perceiving subject confronting an inert object, the possibilities for its transformation will remain circumscribed by this opposition and thus fragmentary and limited. This is the fundamental limitation of bourgeois thought that Lukács criticizes. He points toward the possibility of an alternative standpoint of the proletariat, which could somehow become self-reflexive precisely through the coming to consciousness of its own status as an “object” within the capitalist form of life. One recognizes here Lukács’s reliance upon Hegel’s exposition of the master-slave dialectic, which staged the ironic reversal of slavery (objecthood) into self-consciousness, revealing the slave’s privileged standpoint in the pursuit of freedom due to his practical knowledge of objectivity obtained through the activity of work. Like the slave, the proletariat
appears in the first instance as the pure object of societal events. In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence. This forces upon him the knowledge that the most elementary gratification of his needs, “his own individual consumption, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of reproduction or not, form therefore an aspect of the production and the reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing idle.”49
To say that the worker is the object in this process is not to say that she is literally deprived of her humanity, but to show her fundamental lack of autonomy in relation to the structures of the labor process, which renders even the most personal private activities somehow functional to a process that operates apparently independent of her activity. Lukács writes,
The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim, and which cuts him off from his labor-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialized process that has been rationalized and mechanized, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanized and rationalized tool.50
The worker’s experience of herself as simultaneously active in the process of producing capital, and yet victimized and disempowered by that same process, allows the worker to reflect upon the way in which her activity is thus contradictory.
The self-reflexivity of the worker in relation to her own activity leads to a practical insight into the structure of capitalist domination itself, whose operation is perpetuated as much by a reified consciousness that remains unconscious of the way in which human activity becomes functional to a system of domination as by the dynamic of capitalism itself. Indeed, Lukács’s point is to break down this distinction, to show that a bringing to consciousness of the subject’s activity and involvement in the processes of capitalism will bring about a change in the structure of domination. Lukács writes, “when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge.”51
The self-knowledge of the worker and the status of his activity within the processes of capital, according to Lukács, leads to a practical transformation in the very structure of capital itself. Following Hegel, Lukács argues that appearances themselves are essential in nature, they have a social effectiveness that is real. Reification is thus not simply a form of consciousness that veils a deeper layer of economic reality: reification is a practice that organizes social being itself. In a radical reversal of the infamous base-superstructure metaphor, whereby an economic “base” purportedly determines the “superstructural” response, Lukács seems to argue rather that the very forms of appearance of capitalist society, the way they appear to individuals, affect their “objective status.” The demand for reflexivity, then, is not meant to simply reduce objectivity to subjectivity to demonstrate the socially constructed nature of reality; conversely, it reveals the objective, practical character of the reified appearances, reified forms of consciousness, themselves.52
Although Lukács’s theory of capitalist reification takes a crucial step toward constructing a critique of political economy that takes into account the experiential dimensions of capitalist forms of domination, his emphasis on self-reflexivity and on treating reification as ultimately a problem of knowledge results in a merely cognitive critique of reification that is ultimately inadequate for theorizing forms of derefied praxis, despite his claims to the contrary. The closed system of capitalism that Lukács depicts cannot be rendered more responsive by merely cognitive means. To effect the shift from theory to praxis Lukács aims for but never reaches, we will have to search for strategies that go beyond the cognitive approach of his critique. For this, we will turn in the following chapter to Adorno’s analysis of art and the critique of capital.