A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

THIS IS a book about how critical theory can address the forms of domination that have emerged in the context of neoliberal capitalism. It is a book that seeks to make critique more responsive to changes in the relationship between politics and economics in neoliberalism by joining two powerful methods of critique: theories of radical democracy on the one hand and critiques of political economy on the other. In this introduction I explain why this is such a crucial task for contemporary theory.

In the two decades following the collapse of actually existing socialism, victorious capitalism seemed to be the order of the day. As the world crossed the threshold of the so-called end of history, ideological resistance to capitalism—in the United States above all—receded into the background, even in the face of the blatant contradictions and injustices that postindustrial societies faced in the wake of the post-Fordist flexibilization of labor, economic recession, and the erosion of the welfare state. But the financial crisis of 2008 has brought the inequalities and injustices of capitalism as a mode of political and economic organization abruptly into public consciousness, both in the American context and globally.

In 2008 the nation witnessed a steady stream of bad economic news, including the fallout of the U.S. housing bubble, the subsequent failure of government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the hugely unpopular Troubled Assets Relief Program, which spent $700 billion to bail out major banks and financial institutions that were deemed “too big to fail.” The consequence was the conversion of a financial crisis into a budgetary crisis at the national level whose effects continue to be palpable in the daily lives of Americans who currently face high levels of debt and unemployment as the already thin protections of the state grow only thinner, both in the United States and worldwide.

This book examines the implications of the neoliberal transformation of the relationship between politics and economics for contemporary political theory. It argues that the polarization of two dominant approaches to contemporary political theory, namely neo-Marxism and radical democratic theory, has created an impasse that renders these theories insufficiently attuned to the ways in which the neoliberal negotiation of the boundary between economics and politics has transformed the content of the political. To the extent that progressive political theories fail to account for this transformation, which is both conceptual and practical, they risk producing theories that reinscribe rather than critique neoliberal forms of domination.

These two influential approaches in contemporary political theory on the left have tended to take divergent positions on how best to theorize a radical, transformative politics in the context of the neoliberal revolution. On the one hand, Marxist approaches, advanced by theorists such as Moishe Postone and David Harvey, have argued for an analysis of the macroeconomic dynamics of contemporary society as a way of understanding the political potential of contemporary radical social movements. On the other hand, theorists of radical democracy, such as Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and William Connolly, among others, have argued in favor of a theory of dissensual politics that defines itself through the recasting of the aesthetic, subjective, and perceptual matrix of social life in ways that interrupt and suspend neoliberal forms of domination on a register that is altogether parallel to economic forms of mediation. These two methods of critique, Marxist and radical democratic, have in recent decades posed themselves in opposition to one another.1

Yet, on the heels of the political ferment of 2011, social movements have emerged to challenge the feasibility of the theoretical split between notions of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. The Occupy movement, which became the first populist social movement in decades to pose a visible and broad-based radical challenge to the existing order in the United States, rejected the separation between economics and politics in American life as the cornerstone of neoliberal ideology and practice. Organizing and sleeping in “public-private” spaces, protesting home foreclosures, boycotting big banks, and buying back the debt of average American citizens, Occupy showed the necessity of tackling neoliberalism on its own terms, and those terms maintained that economics and politics were separate, even while granting personhood to corporations and forbidding individuals to assemble in so-called public spaces. Dismantling the neoliberal state’s ideology of separation between economics and politics required Occupy to furthermore work within the impasse between Marxist critiques of political economy and agonistic theories of radical democracy. The impasse created in theory, between a theoretical approach that prioritizes political economy versus a theory that highlights the autonomy of the political from the economic, was also revealed to be an impasse in practice that would have to be refashioned in new terms in order to develop a historically specific critique of neoliberalism relevant to the present.

I suggest that the critique of reification is a useful theoretical vehicle for motivating the materialization of critique, which is of crucial significance in neoliberalism. The concept of reification, after all, refers to the very process of becoming material and “thingly” in its etymology. According to Lukács, who developed the concept through a deep engagement with Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, reification is the central social pathology of capitalist society.2 Reification, he argued, is above all an unengaged, spectatorial stance that individuals take toward the social world and toward their own practices—it is the subjective stance individuals take 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. Reified subjectivity is a formalist and spectatorial form of subjectivity that is unable to see its own involvement in the broader processes of capital that comprise its domination. It is a form of subjectivity that is unable to grasp its own practice within the context of the social totality. At the heart of Lukács’s critique of reification is a critique not only of capitalist forms of labor but also of capitalist thought forms (also forms of labor),³ which reinforce capitalism as a fragmented and alienated form of life and play out the formalism and abstraction of capitalist labor at the level of thought.

Reification, so I will argue, is a useful concept for grasping neoliberal forms of domination, as well as for conceptualizing resistance to those forms in a way that resists the polarization between Marxist and radical democratic approaches that I highlighted earlier. This is, first, because reification provides an account of the relationship between forms of subjectivity and the structure of capitalism. The concept of reification helps to articulate the ways in which capitalist domination exceeds what is typically understood by the “economic” sphere in the narrow sense. In a time in which we are witnessing profound transformations in the relationship between the economy, culture, and politics, transformations that destabilize fixed distinctions between any of these categories, reification provides a language for talking about the new articulations of the political that have emerged as a consequence.

Some examples of the transformations in the nature of capitalist production to which I am referring include the informatization of the economy and the rise of what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have named “immaterial labor” within the field of production.4 Relatedly, the development of communication technologies, such as the Internet and social media technologies, have rendered the field of culture and communication a major arena for the expansion of commodification. And the ever increasing hypermobility of laboring bodies has changed perceptions of the boundaries between public and private, labor and leisure, and human being and worker. Such transformations in the nature of the capitalist mode of production over the last two decades provoke an important observation: the contemporary situation does not lend itself to being understood in terms of a clear distinction between the strictly economic dimensions of capitalism, commodity production, and the “superstructural” aspects of capitalism, the beliefs, desires, perceptions, and lifestyles accompanying commodity production. This is not only because the base/superstructure metaphor has perhaps always encouraged a reductionist understanding of the processes of capitalism, but even more importantly, because the real processes of capitalist production today increasingly rely upon beliefs, desires, perceptions, affects and attitudes, at the level of commodity production itself. These shifts have radically altered the position of subjectivity within the field of capitalist production, that is to say, how subjects are becoming involved in the processes of capitalist production. Such transformations indicate an urgent need to reflect upon the shifting boundaries of the political in this context in order to develop a critical vocabulary that illuminates emergent democratic possibilities.

Reification critique therefore provides a much needed vehicle for thinking about the micropolitical dimensions of capital—the quotidian practices that constitute, reproduce, and challenge the capitalist way of life—as well as for thinking about the kinds of practices that could foster postcapitalist forms of democracy. It is in this sense that reification critique can be of great use in arriving at a historically specific understanding of democratic practice for the contemporary moment.⁵ As radical democrats have emphasized, many of the most important social and political movements of our time are micropolitical in nature—they are centrally concerned with forms of subjectivation.⁶ But radical democratic theorists, challenging the reductionism of orthodox Marxism, have tended to deny the importance of understanding what Jason Read has called the “micro-politics of capital,” to the detriment of democratic theory.⁷ My reconstruction of the critique of reification connects the crucial micropolitical, experiential emphasis of radical democratic theory with an understanding of its relationship to the abstract dynamics of capital.⁸

Alongside the theory of subject production in capitalism that a critique of reification can help to articulate, reification critique is moreover essential for a political economy of the senses insofar as it provides a critique of a merely cognitivist form of theory. It gives an account of the theory-praxis relationship in neoliberalism and locates a key barrier to the effectivity of critique in its formalism and cognitivism. Lukács described these issues through his exploration of what he called the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.”⁹ In this book, I use the critique of reification to critique formalistic theory in the neoliberal context, arguing that formalism renders theory symptomatic rather than critical of neoliberalism. Moreover, I use the critique of reification against itself, to argue that dereification depends upon forms of theory that critique cognitivism by working at the affective, sensate, and experiential registers of critique.

Chapter 1 explores debates between neo-Marxists and post-Marxist radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. The impasse created between economics and politics in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal state and the economy.¹⁰ Yet, by separating the economic and the political, these influential theories neglect a crucial feature of neoliberal domination, what, following Michel Foucault, I call the “neoliberal inversion of liberalism.” Neoliberalism has inverted the liberal relationship between the state and the economy. The neoliberal state takes a strong role in the economy, yet manipulates the economy from a remove, through economic policies that obscure the unequal distributional consequences of its policies in the context of low growth. By contrast, liberal governmental rationality entails a laissez-faire relationship between the state and the economy. Yet, I argue that although neoliberalism entails an inversion in the relationship between the state and the economy, neoliberalism continues to legitimate itself using liberal frameworks. Thus the neoliberal state is able to take an ambivalent stance in relation to the economy, on the one hand emphasizing liberal principles when it chooses to roll back from social welfare functions, on the other hand taking a strong role in the economy when banks that are too big to fail must be bailed out.

This ambivalence is important for political theorists to understand, precisely because it resignifies approaches in contemporary political theory that have emphasized the autonomy of the political from the economy. Such approaches unintentionally legitimate neoliberal forms of domination in the context of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism. Likewise, neo-Marxist approaches that emphasize the heteronomy of the political, and its subordination to the economy, are similarly unable to account for the interrelationship between the economy and the political in the context of neoliberalism.

Chapter 1 deepens the account of neoliberal symptoms in contemporary theory by turning to critical theorist Axel Honneth’s recent works on capitalism, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea and Freedom’s Right. In particular, Reification on first glance appears to provide a promising avenue into a concept that could focus on the interrelationships between economics and politics by reconstructing the concept of reification. Yet Honneth’s approach, which theorizes reification as the “forgetting of recognition,” reinterprets the critique of reification as a normative critique that is separated from its political economic dimensions. Similarly, Freedom’s Right ultimately reduces the economic order of capitalism to its normative order. In both cases, Honneth’s approach fetishizes intersubjectivity by relying upon a notion of intersubjectivity that is constitutively insulated from neoliberalism for the validity of its critique. Honneth fails to appreciate the ways in which the neoliberal construction of homo oeconomicus entails a resignification of normativity in neoliberal society. The hyperresponsible, entrepreneurial neoliberal subject who must assume the burden of risk that the state no longer shoulders faces neoliberal domination in the form of an ethicized capitalism.¹¹ Honneth’s approach to neoliberalism, due to a purified and formalistic concept of intersubjectivity, does not go far enough in appreciating the ways in which neoliberalism resignifies forms of critique in the contemporary context.

Part 2 of the book is devoted to the conceptual foundations of the concept of reification in the works of Marx, Lukács, and Adorno. While it is widely acknowledged that the critique of reification has its basis in Marx’s work, the recognition of Marx as the grandfather of reification critique is largely due to Lukács’s influential work on reification in the 1920s. While Marx himself only seldom used the term Verdinglichung, the idea itself, which emerged from an articulation of the relationship between the dynamic of the capitalist economy and the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of capitalism, is arguably the raison d’être of Marx’s work as a whole. An extensive discussion of Marx is therefore crucial for understanding the critique of reification and is undertaken in chapter 3.

Marx pioneered a critique of capitalism that cut to the heart of its social, political and cultural forms of appearance. The discontinuities in Marx’s work—between his “political” and “economic” writings, between his humanism and his scientism, between the critique of capitalist subjectivity and the critique of its objective mechanisms—are well known and often recited. My discussion of Marx in chapter 3 reevaluates taken-for-granted distinctions in the Marxian corpus in order to put his writings to work in understanding the historical specificity of the capitalist articulations of economics and politics. In this chapter, the so-called epistemological break between the humanist Marx and the scientific Marx is bridged by grasping these phases of Marx’s work as two essential aspects of the critique of capitalist politics, which, moreover, are central to the critique of neoliberalism. The first aspect, based on Marx’s early theory of political alienation and his concept of radical democracy in early political writings such as “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “On the Jewish Question,” and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is a critique of what I call the “rigidification of political form” that takes place in capitalist society. The second aspect, based on Marx’s critiques of commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation in Capital, is a critique of the “bracketing of the political” from the economic that provides the condition of possibility for the capitalist mode of production. Both critiques of capitalist politics refer to forms of depoliticization that take place under capitalism. Together they provide the basis for understanding the concept of reification and its applicability to radical democratic politics. Marx demonstrates the importance of understanding not only the abstract domination inherent in the capitalist mode of production (the bracketing of the political from the economic) but also of imagining new political forms of democracy that look beyond the practical horizons of capitalism (the rigidification of the political). Marx thereby paves the way for an understanding of radical democracy that crosscuts the distinction between the political and the economic. His work, therefore, outlines one crucial aspect of struggles against neoliberal reification: they are struggles against both the rigidification of the political and the bracketing of the political from the economic.

Chapter 4 turns to an analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of reification critique, György Lukács. Lukács, writing in the 1920s, remarkably synthesized the concept of reification on the basis of Marx’s later works alone, since many of Marx’s early writings were not published until at least a decade later. Lukács’s influential text of this period, History and Class Consciousness, rendered explicit what remained largely implicit in Marx’s work: the crucial role that subjectivity played in the processes of the capitalist mode of production. According to Lukács, reification characterizes a disengaged subjective stance specific to capitalist society in which individuals come to regard certain aspects of their social world as ahistorical, immutable, and immune to the transformative power of human agency. Reification is a depoliticizing form of consciousness that misrecognizes the practical basis of the individual’s own activity and its role in constituting the social world. Far from merely describing the activity of industrial labor, Lukács shows that reified consciousness is a pervasive form of capitalist subjectivity and stands as one of the most fundamental hindrances to the realization of human autonomy in capitalist societies. Significantly, the positive contribution that emerges from Lukács’s critique is the idea of dereifying practice as an aspiration of democratic politics. I identify two criteria of dereified practice that emerge from Lukács’s discussion: dereified practice connects particular struggles with the social totality of neoliberalism, and it criticizes the formalism and perceptual dissociation that capitalism generates.

I suggest that Lukács’s critique of reification, while fundamental, does not fully deliver on the potential of a political economy of the senses, largely because his emphasis on self-reflexivity as the means for overcoming reification is articulated as a cognitive form of self-reflexivity. Yet, in the context of the plurality, fragmentation, and normative ambivalence of neoliberal subjectivity, Lukács’s emphasis on self-reflexivity retains too great a commitment to a unified class subject whose interests can follow largely from the structure of capital itself. It is precisely because the neoliberal subject cannot be viewed through the paradigm of a unified class subject (i.e., the proletariat) that the project of self-reflexivity becomes particularly problematic in neoliberalism. The structure of neoliberal capitalism creates disjunctions between class position and economic interest as well as between class and other markers of social difference such as race and gender.12 As such, neoliberalism generates forms of political ambivalence that render the paradigm of self-reflexivity inadequate to generating critical consciousness in the neoliberal context. In the context of neoliberalism, more complex strategies of critique will be necessary for dealing with the paradoxical and conflicting interests, desires, and perceptions of neoliberal political subjects living in postindustrial contexts. Strategies of critique that are adequate to the nature of neoliberal subjectivity require attunement to the ways in which embodiment, affect, sensation, and desire play into individual’s experiences of the forms of both hope and domination, security and precarity that individuals face in neoliberal society.

For this more embodied approach to critique, I turn in chapter 5 to Adorno’s theory of reification, particularly in the field of aesthetics. Chapter 5 explores Adorno’s critique of the Lukáscian emphasis on totality, reflexivity, and praxis in his critique of reification. Adorno shifts the proper sphere of reification critique toward the concept of experience. In his works Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, Adorno emphasizes philosophy and aesthetic experience as sites in which the reversal of reification into dereifed experience can take place. Social reification, however, which was the focus of Lukács’s theory, is treated pessimistically in his hands, particularly in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work Dialectic of Enlightenment, due to Adorno’s radical critique of the degeneration of praxis in modernity. While he moves past Lukács’s cognitivism, as well as his commitments to a unitary class subject, Adorno’s alternative concept of reification turns away from the task of political transformation, a theoretical decision that will have vast implications for how subsequent generations of the Frankfurt School understand the aims of critical theory and the use of reification as a concept. Yet, perhaps despite himself, his Aesthetic Theory provides one crucial strategy for dereified praxis, the notion of the “defetishizing fetish,” an artwork that acts as a kind of Trojan horse, a homeopathic assault upon forms of domination in neoliberal society.¹³ Through the concept of “like cures like,” the defetishizing fetish accesses, on a sensate, embodied level, the conflicting forms of attachment, commitment, and desire that characterize neoliberal subjectivity.

In chapter 6 I look at artworks that make use of the strategy of the defetishizing fetish in ways that move the critique of reification from theory to praxis. I discuss contemporary works by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg. These works engage the tensions and contradictions of structures of neoliberal capitalism at the subjective, perceptual level through strategies of distantiation and defamiliarization, structurally positioning the subject in uncomfortable or even impossible locations of desire, practical orientation, and observation. The result is an experiential critique of capital that goes beyond the merely cognitive critique of reification offered by the classic critics of capitalist reification discussed earlier.

Finally, chapter 7 explores recent forms of neoliberal protest that have emerged in response to the economic crisis in the United States and Europe. This chapter focuses on the Occupy Wall Street movements and highlights how their practices, including occupation of public/private spaces, protest of multinational banks and corporations, work on debt relief, and actions against home foreclosures, perform translations between the abstract logics of capital and political experience and thus render the economy a site of political struggle in a way that bridges the impasse between economics and politics in contemporary theory. This final chapter focuses on the ways in which political protest, like the aesthetic forms described in chapter 6, involves the subjective inhabitation of a space of ambivalence and incommensurability between conflicting normative commitments, practical commitments, and desires. The practices described in chapter 7 do not deny this ambivalence, which is inherent to neoliberal political subjectivity, but politicize and embrace it.