Search Results

This chapter turns to an analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of reification critique, Georg Lukács who explored the crucial role that subjectivity played in the processes of the capitalist mode of production. This chapter argues that Lukács’s analysis of the subject’s reified stance in capitalism is crucial for reconnecting a critique of political economy with lived experiences and subjective perceptions of capitalist society.

This chapter turns to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory of reification for a more embodied approach to critique. The chapter argues that Adorno's aesthetic theory, perhaps despite himself, provides one crucial strategy for dereified praxis, the notion of the “defetishizing fetish,” an artwork that acts a kind of Trojan Horse, a homeopathic assault upon forms of domination in neoliberal society.

The chapter elaborates how the Object Oriented Ontology’s universe of things works too closely with financial capitalism, as both generate a posthuman reality. The OOO seems too preoccupied with the industrial capital of modernity and its production of stuff (objects and services) to mark its postanthropocentric ontology to consider how financial capitalism, now accounting for over 33% of the profits in the economy despite 7% of the real economy and 4% of the jobs, operates ontologically not through physical objects but through leveraging debt and hoarding value. Indeed, the immaterial objects that the OOO celebrate may include derivatives and hedge funds (themselves often pools of immaterial value). The shift from industrial capitalism’s organization around the production of objects and capture of labor to financial capital’s debt and leveraging marks what I call a movement from the logic of the object and capture of labor to the logic of the derivative and hedging of debt/value. I discuss how the reification of life works in both these contexts, and show how reification is a necessary term for thinking humans rendered into a field of assets and shares of value.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go follows a group of genetic clones who are created as wards of the British health service because they serve a utilitarian function: They are manufactured for the purpose of having their vital organs harvested until their death. The world he envisions of a grouping of humans reproduced to be a living warehouse of organs while certainly dreadful is nowhere near as horrific as when organ transplantation and global uneven development intersect in our neoliberal present. Ishiguro shows how humans who view their humanity instrumentally expedite a world that is ready to slice them into shares, monetizing all the parts along the way. Through Ishiguro’s text, I diagnose the reification of the body as an aggregation of fungible body parts. Human reification challenges bioethicists and cultural critics alike to reflect on how human dignity and bodily integrity no longer serve as barriers for marking the species-limit due to new advances in biotechnology.

In spite of the tremendous growth in trajectory research over the past 25 years, the trajectory methodology is not without controversy. Debates and controversies remain a central feature of the literature. This chapter presents an overview of the major controversial issues and provides guidelines and suggestions for moving the research forward with greater clarity and reduced confusion. This chapter also picks up on the discussion of model-building considerations introduced in Chapter 2. Specifically, issues pertaining to (a) statistical criteria for class enumeration; (b) distributional issues, model misspecification, and overextraction of trajectory classes; (c) dependency on antecedents and covariates; and (d) robustness or sensitivity of trajectory solutions in relation to various methodological factors are detailed.

Modernity has always carried the seeds of the counter-revolution. The counter-revolution was not intended to be a conservative restoration of the old regime. It was an apocalyptic scenario that promised redemption through violence and destruction. Revolutionary nihilism is a distinctively modern phenomenon and has advocates on both the Right and the Left, but in all cases was animated by its opposition to bourgeois culture and the Enlightenment. From Joseph de Maistre’s attack on the legacy of the French Revolution to Georges Sorel’s celebration of violence and the myth of the general strike, these revolutionaries helped to create antinomian movements that would find expression in both fascism and communism. This chapter examines the influence of these apocalyptic doctrines on twentieth-century thinkers like Lukàcs, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.

Literalism is the heir of the search for an ancient Adamic language of “true names” in which names and things were thought to be in unity. The conceptual contrast that is of concern in this chapter is that between true versus literally true. After briefly listing some examples where this distinction can be made but is not always made, extended space is given to critically analyzing the claim that genes are literally recipes written in DNA in order to illustrate how endemic and un-noticed literalism can be in scientific discourse. Diagnostic literalism in psychiatry is sometimes termed reification. Three different “misplaced literalisms” that occur in psychiatric diagnosis and classification are literalism about taxa, literalism about diagnostic criteria, and literalism about explanatory constructs. All three of these literalisms are made more likely by our need to rely on authorities when deciding which truth claims to accept.

Nature, invention, human vileness, and Creative Evolution all conjoin in Hector’s speech in Act III: “Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely] I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.” It is uttered in the garden, toward which the whole play has been moving, with the backdrop of nature (“heavens”), the theme of invention (“some new creation”), the revelation of the vileness of human invention when cut off from nature (“us useless futile creatures”), and the suggestion of Creative Evolution (“will supplant us as we have supplanted the animals”). In brief, the passage summarizes one of the play’s themes: the baseness of human invention when alienated from, and contrasted with, nature’s creativeness, as symbolized by the garden and nature.

Chaplin's Essanay and Mutuals films arrived in France in 1916, during the war, eliciting strong reactions from artists, writers and poets, and directly hastening the first experimental cinepoems in 1917-18. This chapter explores how the fundamentally paradoxical embodiment that Chaplin figured in his movies--vulnerable yet invulnerable, Romantic yet unsentimental, noble yet a bum, small yet powerful, spastic yet unshakeable, animated yet reified, etc.—reached into French poetry. Aragon noted this ontological plasticity of Chaplin, and Goll developed the demiurgic, rebellious, but also abject, even insect-like nature of the Tramp's persona. Indeed Michaux, Ponge, Soupault and Debord all compare Chaplin to a lowly insect, a social parasite. The housefly in particular, because of its faceted eye, angular flight, and ubiquitous gaze, became an animalized metaphor for the camera and the film apparatus. Chaplin's body and films are thus the site where crucial esthetic and epistemological mutations were discovered that came to shape cinepoetry through what I call Chaplin's ‘automatic riding.’