Following the model set down by the other volumes in the series of Berkeley Tanner Lectures published by Oxford University Press, Reification presents material deriving from Axel Honneth's visit to California in March 2005. Honneth's pair of lectures has been recast here as a short treatise on ‘Reification and Recognition’, and this text is followed by versions of the critical commentaries on the original lectures prepared by Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear. Together with Martin Jay's helpful introduction and Honneth's own brief rejoinder, the volume constitutes an attractive and eclectic package.
Although treatments of reification invariably look back to Marx's 1867 account of the ‘fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’ in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, it is Georg Lukács' theorisation of reification that has dominated more recent discussions. In the most significant essay in his 1923 collection History and Class Consciousness on ‘reification and the consciousness of the proletariat’, Lukács argued that while the labour of the proletariat had, in Jay's words, ‘made the social world’, its ‘constitutive role in that making had been obliterated’ (5), with the result that the working class struggled to rise above an ‘economistic’ or ‘trade union’ consciousness, one focused on winning incremental gains within the structures of the capitalist economic order, rather than on any kind of radical transformation of that order. Reification involved making a mistake, but one that was neither a moral error nor an epistemic category mistake. In Honneth's words, it could not be the former, ‘for it lacks the element of subjective intent necessary to bring moral terminology into play’, nor the latter, ‘because reification constitutes a multilayered and stable syndrome of distorted consciousness’, a ‘shift in attitude’ that ‘reaches far too deep into our habits and modes of behavior for it to be able to be simply reversed by making a corresponding cognitive correction’ [25–6]. Rather, reification was rooted in a kind of distorted praxis that deviated from a true or genuinely human praxis. In particular, Lukács maintained that the operation of the capitalist economy fostered a world in which subjects understood themselves as detached, calculating observers rather than as active participants in the construction of their social world, and that this acquired ‘second nature’ promoted a tendency to view both other people and oneself in increasingly ‘thing-like’ ways.
Honneth is sharply critical of Lukács' account. He rejects its idealism, deriving from Hegel and Fichte, which contends that ‘we can speak of undistorted human agency only in cases where an object can be thought of as the product of a subject, and where mind and world ultimately coincide with one another’ (27). And he resists the idea that participation in commercial life can be the major engine of reification, especially since ‘the persons with whom we interact in the process of economic exchange are normally present to us, at least legally, as recognized persons’ (75). But while Honneth rejects much of the substance of Lukács' argument, he holds on both to the thought that a retheorised notion of reification may be a powerful one for illuminating diverse features of the contemporary world and to the idea that it might still be best understood primarily as a ‘social-ontological’ phenomenon, rather than straightforwardly under the umbrella of normativity. Hence the subtitle of the book – ‘a new look at an old idea’ – and Honneth's attempt to reformulate an argument about reification in his preferred recognition-theoretical terms.
What does Honneth mean by reification? Examples adduced throughout his text include slavery, internet dating sites, various kinds of racism, job interviews ‘that have increasingly become to resemble sales talks’ (83), sex trafficking, industrial mass murder, and that of a tennis player ‘who, in her ambitious focus on winning, forgets that her opponent is in fact her best friend, for the sake of whom she took up the game in the first place’ (59). We might be sceptical that these disparate phenomena have very much in common with one another, but the thesis that Honneth seeks to develop is that these all involve what he calls a forgetting of antecedent recognition. Drawing on hints found in Lukács' own analysis and on arguments from a variety of sources – Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Cavell, and some of the literature on child development – Honneth argues for the priority of recognition over cognition; that is to say, that some kind of practical, empathetic or interested engagement with the standpoint of another is the prerequisite for developing any kind of ‘neutral grasping of reality’ (40). Just as in the Marxist theory, where reification involves losing sight of the commodity's origin in human activity, so too reification for Honneth consists of those moments where a concern to achieve an objectively-specified goal involves one's losing awareness of the more fundamental pre-cognitive recognitional stance.
In Honneth's short treatise, at least, reification is presented as having a wide range of applications. In addition to covering the kind of phenomena listed above, Honneth also argues there can be self-reification and the reification of nature. Both of these might seem odd ideas at first glance, especially the latter, but Honneth suggests that this might be best understood as an inattentiveness to the meanings that others have invested in the natural world. In a brief sociological discussion, Honneth further draws a distinction between two kinds of reification, the one deriving directly from ‘a particular praxis’, whereby ‘the mere observation of the other has become so much an end in itself that any consciousness of an antecedent social relationship disappears’, the other ‘a result of adopting a specific worldview or ideology’ that ‘leads them subsequently to deny this original act of recognition’ (79). His presentation ends by emphasising concerns about the relevance of reification to contemporary life. ‘The spectrum of current social developments that reflect such [reifying] tendencies’, Honneth writes, ‘run from the increasing hollowing-out of the legal substance of labor contracts all the way to the first indicators of a practice in which children's potential talents are regarded solely as an issue of genetic measurement and manipulation’, both cases offering examples of how ‘the institutionalized barriers that have prevented a denial of our recognitional primary experiences are threatening to collapse’ (80).
In the three short commentaries that follow, Honneth's critics are intrigued but unpersuaded. Butler worries that Honneth tries to build his case on a too-selective reading of the child psychology literature. Geuss is sympathetic to the project of ‘cultivating a nonmoralizing form of social criticism’ (128) but sceptical that this kind of recognition theory can serve as its adequate foundation. Lear, by contrast, is suspicious of the temptations of ontological critique, suggesting that the difficulties in several of the cases that Honneth describes owe to people being treated badly as persons, rather than to them not being treated as persons at all. All three commentators worry that Honneth's core anthropological argument is over-optimistic, that the initial moment of recognition is being treated as one of sympathetic affective engagement, when it might in fact be one of frustration, antagonism or hatred. In his own rejoinder, at the end of the volume, Honneth resists this last criticism, but he concedes ground elsewhere. The account he has presented, he insists, does not require the original act of recognition to be a positive or affirmative one, for even if we recognise the other as an enemy, we are recognising that other specifically as a human being, and it is that moment of recognition that reification manages to forget. But he concedes that if we take reification seriously in its literal sense, then we will in fact find very few genuine instances of the phenomenon. In most of the cases he considers, it is important that the people in his examples remain persons, however much they might be oppressed or objectified; and the example of the tennis player is basically withdrawn.
In these closing pages, then, Honneth reserves the idea of true reification for extreme cases of slavery, including sexual slavery, and for genocidal mass murder. But even some of these cases can seem problematic. Practices and ideologies of slavery might have tendencies towards reification, as with Aristotle's depiction of the slave as a useful tool for the master in the Politics, for example, but they need not; and one would like Honneth to say more clearly why he considers sex trafficking to belong under the banner of reification, rather than as being an extreme form of instrumentalisation, from which it was earlier distinguished. Even the case of racist genocide isn't as straightforward as Honneth's final remarks suggest. He writes of how it was his reflection on industrial mass murder that prompted his investigation into reification, noting that ‘even today it is difficult to comprehend reports describing how young men could nonchalantly shoot hundreds of Jewish children and women in the back of the head’ (158). But his final footnote here refers to Christopher Browning's Ganz normale Männer, or, in English, Ordinary Men, a book that isn't so much an account of the nonchalance of young men but of how the often reluctant and fearful middle-aged conscripts of Reserve Police Battalion 101 came to participate in mass shootings of Polish Jews through a terrible combination of peer pressure and alcohol.
If instances of genuine reification might be even more rare than Honneth himself indicates, the various phenomena that fall short of the extreme cases become examples of what he now calls ‘fictive’ reification (157). And for these cases, what we probably require is not so much more philosophical as more sociological analysis, both to flesh out just what the relationship might be between these two varieties of reification and to explain why this category of fictive reification might do a better job of illuminating racism, or internet dating sites, better than the competing alternatives. Honneth had earlier dismissed much of Lukács' classic argument about reification with reference to the thought that whatever else capitalism generates, it doesn't involve reification, insofar as the free legal personality of agents in capitalist society is crucial to its operation – a point on which Marx himself always insisted. But if the main focus of an examination of reification in contemporary life now centres around fictive reification, or those instances in which personhood isn't straightforwardly denied or forgotten at all, then space opens up for a considerable, even if not complete, reconciliation between Honneth's final position and that of Lukács in 1923, and it would be interesting to know how far down the road to reconciliation Honneth himself would be willing to travel. In sum, Reification is a provocative and a very interesting book. But, as with so much that has come out of the tradition of Frankfurt critical theory, the sociological side needs to be further developed before Honneth's new look at this old idea will really begin to bear fruit.
