Reification. posted by Richard Seymour

Let us take again the classic Marxian example of so-called commodity fetishism: money is in reality just an embodiment, a condensation, a materialisation of a network of social relations - the fact that it functions as a universal equivalent of all commodities is conditioned by its position in the texture of social relations. But to the individuals themselves, this function of money - to be the embodiment of wealth - appears as an immediate, natural property of a thing called 'money', as if money is already in itself, in its immediate material reality, the embodiment of wealth. Here, we have touched on the classic Marxist motive of 'reification': behind the things, the relations between things, we must detect the social relations, the relations between human subjects.

But such a reading of the Marxist formula leaves out an illusion, an error, a distortion which is already at work in social reality itself, at the level of what individuals are doing, and not only what they think or know they are doing. When individuals use money, they know very well there is nothing magical about it - that money, in its materiality, is simply an expression of social relations. The everyday spontaneous ideology reduces money to a simple sign giving the individual possessing it a right to a certain part of the social product. So, on an everyday level, the individuals know very well that there are relations between people behind the relations between things. The problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such. They are fetishists in practise, not in theory. What they 'do not know', what they misrecognise, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity - in the act of commodity exchange - they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.

In post-structuralist theory, terms like 'différance' and 'logo-centrism' appear as strategies of resistance to reification - both as a real process threatening the integrity of its own thought, and as a concept which itself falls into incoherence when pushed to its logical extreme. Gillian Rose's claim, in The Melancholy Science, that reification is not a 'concept' at all mirrors Jacques Derrida's insistence that his coinage différance is 'neither a word nor a concept'. This insistence on Derrida's part is necessary precisely in order to avoid the reification of his own term, although whether it is sufficient to do so is highly questionable. The meaning of différance, insofar as it can be articulated, is non-reifiability; différance, punning on Saussure's system of signifying difference and the French word différer, meaning both 'differ' and 'defer', implies that meaning is never fully present in the word. Meaning is structured by the difference between terms and between concepts within any signifying system, and it is characterised by deferral; meaning is a promise that is never honoured - or, more accurately, a promise which may always never have been honoured. Thus the term différance proposes a means of perpetually out-manoeuvring the processes of reification always threatening the versatility and plasticity of language.

Différance, however, also implies that the concept of reification is problematic per se. Reification posits a distinction between true and false consciousness, between meaning which is fully present in the concept and meaning which has in some sense departed from it, leaving the signifier as an 'empty husk'. Like Lukác's imagined reconciliation of subject and object - a reconciliation which, as Adorno points out, is both the origin and the goal of Lukác's philosophy of history - the idea that the proletariat might have or ever had an intimate relationship with truth is quite contrary to deconstruction's radical critique of ontological/teleological metaphysics.