Reification

Reification is the process whereby one makes things appear as fixed or objective, as if they had a real nature and were governed by laws like physical objects. Commodification describes the effect of this in terms of how we value reified things. Reification focuses on the way human qualities become transformed into qualities of things, which then take on a life of their own and eclipse their origins in human processes. This is most obvious in the context of the products of human labor, which from the point of view of the marketplace have a more important reality than the person who made the effort to produce them.

More generally, reification describes the process whereby abstractions become thought of as things—for [Page 1283]example, labor, which can therefore be exchanged—as well as whereby things become thought of as natural or given—such as the social classes that perform labor. Because of the misplaced concreteness made of everything that is originally human, the contingency of the social world is hidden from us. Thus, we become passive because of constructions of our own making, which conceal their social and historical dimensions. This is the origin of our being alienated from each other, from the world, and from ourselves.

This insight led to the application of the notion of reification to the way broad social processes, including even what passes for rationality, are shaped through the interiorization of dominant views about what is real. Such freezing of our thinking distorts communication about, for example, what is public and what is private, or what is politics and what is law. Reification is a primary vehicle for the operation of ideology.

The modes whereby people and contingent circumstances become reified include grammatical devices such as the use of nominalization or the passive voice, as if events occurred without authors, as in “the banning of” or “was banned,” instead of “the government banned.” An example of the technique of naturalization would be in the way physiological differences between the sexes are described as natural and unchangeable, so that women's work is focused on children, and men's is not, with the result that the division of labor becomes fixed and beyond question.

The concept of reification does not seem to be used much today. It is not discredited, however, as much as absorbed into conventional thinking of the social constitution of reality. In this regard, it has played a vital role in our understanding of the mass organization of the modern world in the past century, from the industrialization of labor, through the deployment of the resources of the nation-state on behalf of its citizens, to the culture industry, and the control of information and entertainment on behalf of corporations.