Reification and the Consciousness of the Nation: Adorno vs. Lukács on Ideology and Social Totality

• In Event: Critical Theory, Race, and Literature

Abstract

Reification is a keyword in Theodor Adorno’s philosophy, bound up with his notion of identity thinking. Unlike identity thinking, reification is a term used by many others in philosophy and social science, but Adorno’s distinctive account has seldom been taken up. Instead, there persists a divide between those who employ reification primarily in a cognitive-epistemological sense – these tend to be analytic philosophers – and those who employ it in a sense which privileges social relations. Narrowness marks the former, while imprecision marks the latter. But the power of the latter conception lies in its connection to social and intellectual totality, famously explored by Georg Lukács. Adorno, however, advanced a sharp critique of totality in both senses, despite reification being central to his analysis of humanity and society. And his account of reification, I will argue, is ultimately more powerful than the regnant accounts today. Unlike most latter-day Marxist accounts of reification, which follow primarily on Lukács, it looks beyond the capitalist era of society, and towards transhistorical processes, but it remains materialist. At the same time, it digs much deeper into cognitive processes than is standard within Marxism. Adorno’s account of reification, I argue, has great potential in particular for aiding our understanding of the dominance of the nation-state over today’s world, and providing us with seeds for overcoming it.

Author

• Daniel Rogers, CUNY Graduate Center