Lukács and Reification

In History and Class Consciousness, Hungarian born philosopher Georg Lukács reinterprets Marx within a framework of Hegelian totality.  Lukács’ notion of totality calls for the unveiling of ideology as a projection of the bourgeois class.  Life is a social process created through the actions of human beings; totality refers to the whole process as a historical period.  Bourgeois society is fixated on specific “facts” of the process as if they stood fixated on one tree without the awareness of the forest surrounding them.  The totality of the social situation reveals the transitory nature of scientific laws.  This totality, however, is hidden from the consciousness by ideology.  For Lukács, ideology is less a false consciousness as it is a partial cognition.  Before examining this conceptualization in detail, it is important to understand Lukács theory of cognition; according to Leszek Kolakowski, knowledge for Lukács is not a “reflection’ of an external reality, there is no duality of thought and being.  Lukács believes in a dialectical relationship that relies on Marx’s theory of praxis where thinking about the world is dialectically connected to changing it. Understanding and changing the world are the actions of a liberated consciousness.  Cognition brings together the objective world and the subjective mind in an active process that should lead to the understanding of the totality of our social situation.

I use the word “should” because in practice the ideology of bourgeois society mystifies, to use Kolakowski’s term, consciousness.  The bourgeois cannot have anything but a false consciousness, to understand the totality of a historically based social situation would be contrary to their own economic self-interest.  Ideology, constructed from bourgeois false consciousness is projected on the proletariat through what Lukács terms reification.  Lukács reification is the conversion of the abstract and the subjective into the concrete and objective.  Lukács uses Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as the basis for reification.  Marx states in Capital that [reification] is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses…It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (quoted in Lukács 86).   Commodities and exchange value define human relationships; subjects are reified into objects of labour value.  Defining oneself becomes a calculation of the rationalized parts of our economic life: what we possess, in what manner do we convert our labour into things contribute to the sum of our being. 

One of the best (reified?) examples of the phenomenon of reification is found in Don Delillo’s White Noise. Delillo places the modern consumer in the role of Lukács’ proletariat In the novel, Jack and Babette Gladney return home from the supermarket and Jack observes:

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls – it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening (Delillo 20).

The things in the shopping bags define Jack and Babette, they reify relationships, security, and contentment.  The objects of consumption provide figures for calculations that externalize the consciousness.  They are the facts that Lukács and Marx see as obstructing cognition of the totality or the whole of social relations.  The bourgeois false consciousness forms obstructions in the form of reified abstract emotions and relations in the consciousness of the proletariat.  It is in this sense that I believe Lukács views ideology as partial cognition.

What is interesting is that the Bourgeois Jack is aware of the reifying effects of the consumer culture that surrounds him.  The result is what Lukács refers to as a reification of the phenomenon of reification until it becomes independent and permanent…a timeless model of human relations.  In other words, the reification of subjects into objects is natural and must embrace every manifestation of the life of society if the preconditions for the complete self-realization of capitalist production are to be fulfilled.  From a cognitive standpoint, Jack is able to recognize the fact of reification, and perhaps even the effects, but is unable to escape the naturalness of the experience (as manifested in the sense of well-being).  Reification begins as the objectification of the relation of commodity and consumer, but as Lukács states, it stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man: his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. 

Lukács goes on to describe how depth to which reification has formed the basis of man’s cognitive construction of his social world leads to the creation of laws.  Individual laws are formulated to deal with individual situations, but in aggregate they come to form a set  “general” (common sense) laws; laws become reified.  Laws are removed from the basis of their intent.  Laws become reifications of the particular relations of commodity and consumer in the capitalist system and are oblivious to the truth of the totality of society (in Lukács’ view the totality is the true state of proletariat oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisies obscured by the reified obstacles of false consciousness).   It is not until a crisis hits that the incoherence between general common sense laws and the totality becomes apparent. The financial crisis we face today is a perfect example of this incoherence.   Six months ago, the reifications of the financial markets were deemed a part of the general law, common sense dictated that unfettered markets drove growth and credit swaps that bet on mortgage defaults (a text book example of a reified process or practice) were deemed an acceptable financial practice.  Today these laws or practices have uncovered incoherence between the reified ideological practices of Wall Street and the totality of economic relations.  Today it is not a question of oppression as much as it is about greed, but Lukács’ concept of reification still applies.