Reification and immaterial production

Introduction

The concept of reification has a rather complex, but nevertheless interesting, intellectual history. From a politico-philosophical point of view, the starting point of this history can be traced back to Marx’s mature writings. From the composition of the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie in the winter of 1857–58 (e.g. see Marx 1993, 160) onward (e.g. see Marx 1990, 209, 1054–56; 1991, 969, 1020) Marx uses the terms ‘Verdinglichung’ and ‘Versachlichung’ in order to discuss the objectification of human activity and the fetishist transformation of social/human relations into relations between things – whether Marx uses the terms interchangeably and, if not, how each term relates to objectification and fetishism has been an object of considerable debate within Marxian and Marxist scholarship, the dominant view still being that the terms were used by Marx as semantically equivalent. But the locus classicus of Marx’s own discussion and analysis of reification, although neither ‘Verdinglichung’ nor ‘Versachlichung’ are used there, is traditionally considered to be the fourth section of the first chapter of the first volume of Das Kapital, that is, the section on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ (Marx 1990, 163–77). Despite the explicit and implicit references to and discussions of reification in the first and third volume of the Capital (the former having been published in 1867 and the latter in 1894) the themes of reification and commodity fetishism started getting prominence only after the publication of Lukacs’s seminal work History and Class Consciousness in 1923. A large and crucial part of that work (viz. the chapter on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (see Lukacs 1971, 83–222)) is occupied by Lukacs’s analysis of the phenomena of reification and commodity fetishism, with reification, as a historical specific result of ‘the structure of commodity-relations’ in capitalism, being proclaimed not (just) ‘the central problem in economics’, but ‘the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects’ (Lukacs 1971, 83). In the same year (1923), Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value is published in the Soviet Union, a work that highlights the key position of Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism in the development of his theory of value, which, nevertheless became widely accessible to the West only much later.

What actually offered a decisive boost in the discussions of reification was the publication of Marx’s earlier (to the Capital) manuscripts, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in 1932 and the Grundrisse in 1939, with alienation (as Entfremdung, Entäußerung or Veräußerung) becoming one of the central concepts of Marxist theory and the concept of reification being directly associated to it. ¹ Thus, the wider problematics related to issues of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism, as well as the concepts as such and the relations between them, become a major theme of discussion in post-war Western Marxism and critical and/or radical social/political thought in general – from the Frankfurt School (e.g. Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm) and the broader tradition of humanist Marxism (e.g. Lefebvre, Bloch) to the Situationists (e.g. Debord), the Socialisme ou Barbarie group (e.g. Castoriadis) and, in a critical way, early post-structuralism (e.g. Althusser) – and not only in philosophy and theory, but also in other branches of human intellectual activity such as sociology, psychology and literature. The 1960s can be considered to constitute the high point of those theoretical discussions, with the various and numerous social and political movements and revolts in the end of the decade signifying their practical counterpart. From the beginning of the 1970s onward – in the aftermath of those movements and revolts and under the expanding influence of post-structuralism and its criticisms of humanist Marxism – alienation, reification and commodity fetishism lose their central position in radical thought and critical theory. Studies on alienation such as Meszaros (1970), Schacht (1971) and Ollman (1976) and humanist Marxist philosophical movements, such as the Yugoslavian ‘Praxis School’, provide a kind of closure to a thematics which gets to be rather marginal in the new critical theoretical paradigm of ‘biopolitics’, under which concepts such as ‘value’, ‘exploitation’, ‘labour’ and ‘commodity’ become secondary, if not even irrelevant in certain cases, to the new forms of analysis based on concepts such as ‘desire’, ‘subjectification’, ‘discipline’ and ‘power’. There have been of course notable contributions to the broader thematics of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism from the end of the 1970s onward – see, for example, the works in the 1980s of members of the German Krisis group such as Kurz, Scholz, Trenkle and Jappe or a diversity of works ranging from Postone’s unorthodox Marxism (see Postone 1993) to Rosa’s work on acceleration as the driving force of modern capitalism (see e.g. Rosa 2010) and from Italian post-Autonomia (e.g. Berardi 2009; Virno 2015) to third-generation Frankfurt school theory (e.g. Honneth 2012) – but it seems that for the triptych of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism, to a large extent and in terms of popularity, the ‘good old’ days are gone.

In the same period (the 1970s) as the concepts of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism were falling out of political and philosophical fashion – considered, among others, as too ‘Hegelian’, an accusation that has been constantly accompanying the whole thematics from its very birth (i.e. the works of Lukacs and Rubin) as part of the criticisms developed by the tradition of orthodox, scientific, Soviet-influenced Marxism – and in response to the insurrectionary potentialities of the antagonistic (to capitalism) movements of the 1960s, a number of crucial developments in the organization of labour emerge, as has been emphatically stressed in the works of many Italian post-Autonomist thinkers (see e.g. Lazzarato 1996 and Hardt and Negri 1994, 2000, 2004, 2009, 2017). Starting with the end of the Bretton Woods System and the suspension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971–73 – a key turning point that signals the radical autonomization of financial capital – one may trace various crucial changes in the form of capitalism from the mid-/late 1970s onward. Changes such as the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist model of production and social regulation and from the hegemony of material (as industrial) to the hegemony of immaterial (as cognitive and/or affective) labour, the demise of the (Keynesian) planner-state and the rise of the crisis-state with the dominance of the neoliberal economic model, and the resulting alterations in the composition of capital and the working classes, with the biopolitical mode of production (i.e. the production of subjectivities, social relationships and forms of life) unfolding in the centre of the new hegemonic site of production of value, namely, the contemporary metropolis.

The primary goal of the present article is to discuss reification in light of the above changes addressing the question of whether and how reification (and the congruent concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism) may be (re)approached in the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical labour. More specifically, this article aims at investigating the question, first, of reification’s relevance to the new political, social, economic status quo and the new composition of labour and, second, of if and how reification changes itself, from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, in this new context. In order to address the above questions, and after this introduction, the article proceeds in the following manner. In the next section, I discuss the concept of reification (and its relation to alienation and commodity fetishism) with the intention of clarifying the ways in which it is understood and used in the presently developed approach – a similar, but briefer, elucidation takes place also with regard to the concepts of hegemony and immaterial production. In the third section of the article, I engage with the theme of the place and nature of reification in contemporary capitalism, starting from Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the latter and their emphasis on some of its distinctive characteristics such as the real subsumption of labour, society and life under capital and the demise of the (sharp) division between labour time and leisure/free time. Through this discussion I highlight how reification under the hegemony of immaterial labour becomes, on the one hand, even deeper and more widespread and, on the other hand and at the same time, (potentially) easier to diagnose, diminish or overcome, due to the increasing emergence of the common as a social relation antagonistic to the capitalist ones. In the fourth and concluding section of the article, I, first, stress the emergence of the production of subjectivity (and thus of its constitutive spheres of the symbolic and the affective) as the new hegemonic terrain of the intensified struggle between capital and labour. Then, I sketch some of the ways in which Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, interpreted in a rather unorthodox way as a simultaneous critique of the reification of the symbolic (language) and the ‘inner’ (affects) and a praise of the common, may contribute to the discussion of the place, role and nature of reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical production.

The concept of ‘reification’ (and a few remarks on ‘hegemony’ and ‘immaterial production’)

The attempts over the last almost 100 years to answer the question of what reification, alienation and commodity fetishism are, of the relation between them, and of the role they play in capitalism and human life have resulted in a vast scholarship and a wide range of approaches to the topic – some of the most significant ones have already been highlighted in the introduction above. Through these attempts, many more crucial questions (and respective answers) have risen regarding the broader thematics, such as the following: How are the concepts of reification, alienation and commodity fetishism to be positioned in relation to exploitation, technology, progress, reason, language, consciousness and human nature? Are the phenomena designated by these concepts socio-historical (i.e. specific to modernity and capitalism) or ontological (i.e. part of the human nature/condition)? Are these phenomena of an epistemological or a psychological nature, are they agential or structural, individual or collective? Can/should they be overcome and, if yes, how? The goal of this section is not to engage with the aforementioned questions, and the various actual and possible answers, in a direct and exhaustive way – that is a thematics so vast and complex that its proper discussion far exceeds the scope and limits of this article. Rather, what I aim to do in this section is just to briefly clarify the way these concepts, and especially reification, are understood and used for the specific purposes of our approach by highlighting some of their main relevant characteristics, without any pretension that this is the one and only, right, real or proper way to deal with them.

Such an approach as the one adopted here is not guided by an abstract methodological pluralism, but rather stems from the (Wittgensteinian) insight that the diversity, complexity, and, sometimes, generality, vagueness and confusion that the relevant bibliographical discussion exhibits is not the outcome of insufficient analysis, but in many cases actually reflects the character of the specific concepts, their uses and their in-between relations. To wit, alienation, reification and commodity fetishism are considered here as family resemblance concepts; this means to suggest that all the different individual instantiations of each term in the various different contexts, which are all grouped together under the same general concept, are not connected via the existence of a single characteristic (or a single set of characteristics) identical in, or shared by, all of them, that is, a common essential feature, but rather via a network of overlapping similarities among them. ² What makes the specific case under discussion more complex, is the fact that there is often a considerable overlap between the uses of the three distinct concepts (alienation, reification, commodity fetishism) too. Thus, even if one adopts one of the traditional conceptions of the relation between the three concepts, according to which reification is considered as a specific type/form of alienation and commodity fetishism as a specific type/form of reification (see Petrovic 1991, 465), the plurality and multifariousness of the uses of the concepts to be found in the relevant discussions suggest that there is no common essential feature to be found in all their different uses. Reification, alienation, commodity fetishism; all three concepts may be found to denote externalization, objectification, heteronomy, mystification, separation, loss or estrangement in all different kinds of contexts and combinations and from all different kinds of perspectives. ³ That is why it is of crucial importance to be clear about the specific ways in which the terms are used in the context of the present article and to highlight those of their aspects that are most relevant for our specific purposes.

The starting point for our specific approach to reification is provided by Petrovic’s, one of the prominent figures of the Yugoslavian ‘Praxis School’, definition of the concept, which reads as follows:

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. (Petrovic 1991, 463)

A further third specification regarding reification is that it is approached here as indeed the basis for the ‘complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx 1991, 969). As discussed by Marx in the first chapter of the first volume of the Capital (Marx 1990, 125–77) the products of human labour exhibit in capitalism a dual character; not only that of use-value – the value of the products of concrete labour as realized in their use/consumption for the satisfaction of material and immaterial needs – but also that of exchange-value – as congealed abstract labour (time), as the quantitative homogenization and commensuration of qualitatively heterogeneous and incommensurable labour (time) and use-values. Human products take the commodity form in the specific exchange-based system of capitalism through the transformation of use-value into a mere prerequisite and depository of exchange-value as long as commodities are primarily produced to be exchanged and not to satisfy human needs (i.e. social use-values are obfuscated, and displaced as a determinant of value, by exchange-values through the capitalist division of labour). The bond between producers, their labour, its products, and their use-values is mystified. The exhaustion of value by exchange-value (the commodity form), while an expression of the capitalist form of social production, namely, of socio-historically specific social relations of production based on certain specific characteristics such as the division of labour and the function of abstract labour time as the measure of (exchange-)value, appears as a ‘self-evident and nature-imposed necessity’ (Marx 1990, 175). Thus, the commodity form reflects ‘the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (Marx 1990, 164–65), with the (relations between the) labour products taking a life of their own, ruling, in the end, the producers instead of being ruled by them (see Marx 1990, 165–68), that is, reification, as described above. But what needs to be stressed most of all in regard to the further specification of reification as a form of mystification is that although the form of relation between things into which the relations between humans are transformed is a ‘fantastic’, ‘illusionary’ one (see Marx 1990, 165, 176), that does not make it less real. That is to say, as far as capitalism persists, or, to be more precise, as far as the law of value is operating under the command of capital – this point is discussed in some more detail in the next section – reification is a ‘real mystification’, ⁸ social relations really take the form, that is, not in an imaginary, but in an inverted manner, of ‘material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx 1990, 166). The fourth, and last, specificatory point is directly connected to this peculiar character of reification as a real mystification and has to do with the way that such an understanding of reification informs also its critique. Traditionally, the critique of reification (as well as of alienation and commodity fetishism) as a mystifying phenomenon has been based on the distinction between existence (or appearance) and essence and consequently on some kind of an account of human nature or essence. To wit, the critique of the various reified perspectives, social relations, practices and forms of life has been based on the premise that they constitute a perverted, deficient, false or unauthentic mode of social being, a deviation from their true, original, authentic, natural forms, from our essential self and from our (real, actual) human nature or essence – a critique of reification of such a kind is mainly characteristic of the broader tradition of humanist Marxism (see e.g. Marcuse 2002 and Fromm 2004), is mostly informed by Marx’s early views on alienation (and especially his notion of the species-being), and was in the centre of the debate between humanist Marxism and anti-humanist, post-structuralist Marxism (as expressed for example in Althusser 2005). What is important to note in any case is that this is not the only way in which a critique of reification may be articulated, especially taking into account its character as a real mystification. The criteria for such a critique may not be provided anymore by a hidden or lost, true, authentic, essential human nature that needs to be salvaged or saved (resulting in rather essentialist or identitarian stances), but from the (political) project of the invention, production and development of new potential anthropological types or forms of life, alternative and antagonistic to the capitalist/reified ones. ⁹ If ‘all reification is forgetting’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 191), then this forgetting: (i) may be understood not only as concerning who/what we actually are (or have been) as human beings, but also what we can, might or should come to be in the future, ¹⁰ and (ii) does not necessarily need to point towards a deeply hidden or rarefied truth, but can be rather understood as (also) a case of failing to notice something because it is always before our eyes (see Wittgenstein 2001, § 129).

Before moving to the next section, a few remarks on the way in which the notions of ‘hegemony’ and ‘immaterial production’ are employed in this article are also in order. Regarding ‘hegemony’, the term is used here, following Hardt and Negri, in a rather minimal manner in order to denote not quantitative predominance, but qualitative leadership, and, especially in connection to labour and production under contemporary capitalism, to highlight the shift of the economic centre of gravity and the way in which the qualitative dominant (immaterial) form(s) of production and labour gradually affect and transform the rest and society in general. ¹¹ Thus, hegemony is to be further qualified, not just as qualitative, but also as tendential, that is, as dealing with evolving networks of trends in production, labour and life (and not with any kind of (quasi-)scientific, quantifiable, deterministic ‘laws’). And it is actually the uneasiness and confusion over this qualitative and tendential character of hegemony, that is, over the idea that something can be hegemonic (as dominant) without exhibiting quantitative, and thus also quantifiable, predominance, that has served as a basis for many of the criticisms of Hardt and Negri’s works. ¹² As far as ‘immaterial production/labour’ is concerned, the concept’s employment in this article is largely informed by the way the concept emerged in (and became central for) the Italian (post-)Autonomia tradition, and especially the works of Hardt and Negri, and it is understood as designating the form(s) of labour that produce ‘information, knowledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects’ (Hardt and Negri 2004, 65). ¹³ Immaterial labour may be thus further specified as: (i) cognitive labour (primarily linguistic or intellectual labour that produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, cultural products, linguistic figures, images, etc.) and affective labour (labour that produces or deals with affects, such as feelings of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement and passion) (Hardt and Negri 2004, 108), (ii) biopolitical production, in the sense that it produces subjectivities, social relations and forms of life, being thus engaged with social life in its entirety (Hardt and Negri 2004, 94, 109–10), and anthropogenetic production, as the production of humans by (means of) humans (Hardt and Negri 2017, 122, 147), ¹⁴ and (iii) immaterial only with regard to its products and not to the nature of labour itself, which remains indeed material, involving, as all labour does, human bodies and brains (Hardt and Negri 2004, 109). Yet, there are still two points that, despite the brief but explicit references to them by Hardt and Negri, often go unnoticed, giving rise to certain confusions and misunderstandings regarding the character of immaterial production and stand thus in need of extra emphasis. The first has to do with the distinction between cognitive and affective labour as the two principal forms of immaterial production. It should be stressed that this distinction should not be conceived as a sharp and exhaustive one. Actually, in most forms of immaterial labour aspects of both cognitive and affective production coexist and are combined, creating a hybrid cognitive-affective form of labour (see Hardt and Negri 2004, 108–9). Hence, cognitive and affective labour should not be viewed as two separate (as mutually exclusive) forms that immaterial labour may take, but as comprising a continuum on the edges of which lie forms of labour in which one of the two aspects is predominant (e.g. sex work with regard to affective labour and higher education teaching/research with regard to cognitive labour). ¹⁵ The second point concerns the material aspects of immaterial production. Again, material and immaterial labour should not be conceived as two separate (as mutually exclusive) forms of labour, but as two aspects of labour that most often mix and combine, forming thus a continuum (see Hardt and Negri 2004, 108–9). But what is important to note is that this interpenetration of the material and the immaterial does not concern only the character of labour itself, as Hardt and Negri suggest, but also, and to a certain extent, the products of labour too. To wit, immaterial products also exhibit an irreducible material aspect – subjectivities, social relations and forms of life are always spatio-temporally situated and thus embodied or materialized in a sensuous or corporeal manner. ¹⁶ Furthermore, the model of the production of humans by humans may not be viewed as standing in opposition or contrast to the model of the production of commodities by means of commodities as Hardt and Negri hold (see Hardt and Negri 2017, 122), but rather, and especially under the current forms of the command of capital as discussed right away in the next section, as the latter model’s transformation, with humans and their relations being commodified. From such a perspective, it would be more accurate to refer to the material and immaterial aspects of commodities, rather than to material or immaterial commodities as such. ¹⁷

Reification and the real subsumption of life under capital

The hegemony of immaterial production, that is, the qualitative and tendential predominance of immaterial forms of labour, is one of the main distinctive characteristics of late capitalism, but not the only one – the demise of the welfare-state and the rise and dominance of the neoliberal political-economic model, with finance capitalism at the forefront, is certainly another important distinctive feature of post-industrial society. Be that as it may, what is most important to stress for our purposes is that the recomposition of capital and labour initiated in the early 1970s, signifying the real subsumption of not just labour, but of society and life itself within capital (see Hardt and Negri 2009, 137–42, 228–33; 2017, 39–42, 178–82), problematizes some of the most fundamental (sharp) distinctions in classical political economy, but also in Marx’s work too, such as the one between labour time and leisure time, between consumption and production, between productive, reproductive and unproductive labour, in the end resulting in the diffusion of labour into (the whole of) life (see e.g. Hardt and Negri 2004, 140–53; 2009, 131–37, 290–95, 312–21). Value produced in the context of the hegemony of immaterial labour is not just immeasurable, but actually beyond measure (Hardt and Negri 2009, 268–74; 2017, 128–31, 162–66, 222–25). Thus, Marx’s labour theory of value, as developed in the first chapters of Capital with the analysis of commodity fetishism being an integral part of it, appears to become less relevant, if not irrelevant, and the law of value is being put into crisis (see Negri 1988 for one of the first formulations of the idea of the crisis in the law of value in his writings and Hardt and Negri 2004, 140–53; 2009, 312–21; 2017, 39–42, 203–6 for its later versions). In the light of such an analysis of the development of capitalism, reification – as a concept developed and analysed in an era where material/industrial production was predominant and the paradigmatic form of a commodity was that of a material object/thing – seems also to have less relevance, if any, for an era such as ours paradigmatically characterized by immaterial (as also biopolitical) production. It comes as no surprise then that some (post-)Autonomia thinkers, such as Berardi, hold that in the post-industrial context, alienation no more takes the form of reification (as in the industrial context), but that of derealization (see Berardi 2009, 106–16).

Nonetheless, that is not the end of the story when it comes to the issue of reification’s relevance for immaterial production. The main reason for that is that while it may well be the case that the labour theory of value is nowadays an insufficient conceptual tool when it comes to the critical analysis of our actual contemporary practices and relations of production and that the law of value has indeed been thrown into crisis since the early 1970s, the law of value remains still operative. Negri in fact acknowledges that although the law of value has indeed been thrown into crisis – as the ‘moving contradiction’ between the continuously reducing socially necessary labour time and the imposition of labour time as the sole measure of value and wealth develops (see Marx 1993, 706) – it nevertheless still somehow remains in force, even if not exhaustively and in a rather arbitrary, ‘as-if’ manner, being actually socio-politically (re)enforced under capital’s command and control (see e.g. Negri 1988, 1991 for earlier formulations and Hardt and Negri 2009, 50–55, 137–49; 2017, 111–15, 155–225 for more recent ones). In the end, value produced as/in common in biopolitical labour is still expropriated by (finance) capital, albeit not exhaustively as we will discuss below, and takes the commodity form, whether material and/or immaterial. The increasingly dominant extractivist/rentier forms of late capitalism do not make generalized exchange irrelevant. Or, to put it a bit differently: the (labour) theory of value may be dead, but the law of value is still alive – although its health is rather debatable. ¹⁸ In any case, abstract labour (time) is still imposed by capital as the sole measure of value and as long as the law of value is enforced, the commodity form of the product of labour and the value form of the commodity are still imposed as social relations, forced labour (as capitalism’s blackmail for survival) remains the fundamental means of organizing society (see Cleaver 2000, 81–94), and, thus, the concept of reification, as analysed in the previous section, still remains, at least potentially, relevant for the analysis of late capitalism. ¹⁹ Therefore, we shall examine in some more detail how reification is affected, both from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, and may be (re)approached in the context of the changes in the form of capital(ism) and labour discussed so far.

On the one hand, reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial production seems to be intensified, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From a quantitative point of view, through the real subsumption of labour, society and life under capital reification appears to become more widespread, as continuously more and more social relations and practices, as well as individual and collective subject(ivitie)s, are reified and commodified. The hidden production of value – in the form of exploitative private data mining with regard to trends, preferences, views and so on – through our everyday use of services, networks, platforms and media, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube; the role of ‘immaterial objects’, such as clicks, views, follows, likes, statuses and emojis, and of ‘web influencers’ and celebrities in the production of value, together with capital’s war on web neutrality and privacy; hidden and/or targeted advertising, from personal online posts and forced product and service reviews to opinion articles and cultural artefacts (movies, TV series, video clips), especially with regard to the lifestyle niche (beauty, fashion, etc.); peer-to-peer economic exchanges in transportation (Uber), knowledge/intelligence (Amazon Mechanical Turk), food delivery (Foodora, Deliveroo), holiday/travelling (Airbnb) and so on or in the form of the various online crowdfunding platforms; the production of subject(tivitie)s as shaped by financialization (credit cards, loans, etc.); the commodification of public utilities, social security, healthcare, education and so on; the amateurization of the sex/porn industry; the valorization and reification of our social capacities for, for example, caring, helping, supporting, loving in affective labour and of our social intellectual production in the form of copyrights, logos, patents and so on in cognitive labour. All the above are just a few examples of new or expanded ways and fields in which reification emerges as ideas, affects, information, images, experiences, as well as social relations, subjectivities and forms of life are increasingly commodified. This quantitative intensification of reification is an inherent aspect of the real subsumption of social life under capital, demonstrating a tendential identification of life with labour (as the production of value). It is no more just the spatially and temporally limited labour site and time, but the whole of society and life that become the site of reification. This may initially seem as just a mere rediscovery of Lukacs’s original approach to reification as a central phenomenon not just in capitalist production, but in capitalist society in general (Lukacs 1971, 83), however it is actually quite a different, and a rather distinctive, aspect of reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial production. Reification is no more to be approached as being merely transferred, projected or expanded from social relations of production to social relations in general, but social life in general becomes directly productive of value. ²⁰ And this signifies, not just the quantitative, but also the qualitative intensification of reification in two important respects.

First, in biopolitical production, where (wo)man is the means of production of (wo)man, (wo)man becomes both fixed and circulating capital, both the subject and the object of production – human capital is unceasingly (self-)valorized. As Hardt and Negri observe, one distinctive feature of immaterial/biopolitical labour is that ‘the object of production is really a subject, defined, for example by a social relationship or a form of life’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 133). ²¹ The fact that these social relations or forms of life are immaterial – in the sense discussed in the previous section – does not mean that they cease to be of an objective nature; under the command of capital and the enforcement of the law of value, subject(ivitie)s, social relations and forms of life are still objectified as the objects of production, as the new immaterial commodity form, as immaterial objects/commodities. In the case of capitalist biopolitical production, subject(ivitie)s, social relations and forms of life are objectified and reified ‘as such’, that is, without the mediation of material objects as in the case of material/industrial production, while of course still remaining exchangeable with material objects, contributing thus to the further abstractization of labour. Under the hegemony of immaterial production, reification itself becomes immaterial, reaching, one could argue, its highest or deepest form. ²² Second, reification in late capitalism becomes deeper, since this kind of immaterial reification involves the cognitive and affective aspects of the human form(s) of life – aspects constitutive of human subjectivity par excellence. ²³ As Hardt and Negri observe: ‘when affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss’ (Hardt and Negri 2004, 111). But what needs to be stressed is that what is reified and commodified in immaterial labour (ideas, affects, etc.) is indeed something intimate, but not something private. Immaterial reification does not concern the objectification, alienation and fetishization of our supposed individual capacities (as privately owned) for social production and their products, but the objectification, alienation and fetishization of the very social relations and practices that constitute each subject as an individual subject. ²⁴

On the other hand, the potentialities for the diminishing or overcoming of reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial production seem to be also intensified. For that, the emergence of the common as a fundamental defining characteristic of immaterial/biopolitical production and a significant, if not the most significant, focal point of political struggle, as Hardt and Negri continuously emphasize, ²⁵ plays a crucial role. The notion of the common may be understood in Hardt and Negri’s works in two important ways. First, from a philosophical point of view, as a Spinozian–Wittgensteinian approach to a form of intersubjectivity that comes to replace traditional philosophical dichotomies such as universal/particular, public/private, subject/object and identity/difference (see e.g. Hardt and Negri 2009, 119–28). And second, from a political point of view, as a social relation antagonistic to the ones characteristic of capitalism, such as capital, value and property (see e.g. Hardt and Negri 2009, vii–xiv, 107–18, 119–28, 268–74). Hardt and Negri refer with the notion of the common not only to ‘the common wealth of the material world’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, viii), such as the air, the water and the fruits of the soil, but also to the (immaterial) products of labour and the means of future production. As they explain: ‘This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 139). And for them it is ‘The expropriation of this second form of the common – the artificial common or, really, the common that blurs the division between nature and culture’ that ‘is the key to understanding the new forms of exploitation of biopolitical labor’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 139). There are two further features of the common that need to be stressed. First, while economic valorization becomes (increasingly) internal to social life, capital remains (increasingly) external to the production of the common – that is why biopolitical exploitation takes the form of the expropriation of the common (see Hardt and Negri 2009, 137–49, 280–95). In late capitalism, the creation of the common, which constitutes the foundation of immaterial production as exhibited in its cooperative, collaborative and communicative aspects, becomes internal to labour and thus external to capital, resulting in labour’s tendentially increasing autonomization from capital (see Hardt and Negri 2004, 140–52; 2009, 169–78). Second, immaterial/biopolitical production, as production of (wo)man by means of (wo)man, is founded on the production in common, of the common. The common constitutes, paradoxically, both a foundation and a result of a process, a productive force and the form in which wealth is produced, it is both the object, which in biopolitical production is actually a subject, and the (collective) subject of production (see Hardt and Negri 2009, 119–37, 280–85). Furthermore, the social relation of the common may be viewed as both an already existing actuality – what Hardt and Negri called earlier the ‘existing prerequisites of communism’ and later the ‘specters of the common’ (which often appear in mystified forms) as based on the cooperative, collaborative and communicative character of production in late capitalism (see Hardt and Negri 1994, 275–83; 2009, 153–64) ²⁶ – and a potentiality, in the form of ‘making the common’, or rather ‘becoming-common’ (to follow Hardt and Negri’s employment of Deleuzian/Guattarian notions), that is, an ethico-socio-political project (see e.g. Hardt and Negri 2004, 103–15; 2009, 112–37). ²⁷ The common does not constitute (just) an epistemological/ontological given (a fixed or static social relation), but a form of social praxis and process (a dynamic self-transforming and self-producing social relation), a ‘commoning’ indeed, ²⁸ that in the end is produced by and produces subjectivities, social relations and forms of life. It thus emerges as both an existing and potential new form of social relation, a new way of relating to the products of our labour and the means of their production. Or, to put it otherwise, becoming-common is nothing else than the constant antagonistic/alternative production of subjectivities that are antagonistic/alternative to capital(ism). That is why the social relation of the common (as becoming-common) is not only relevant, but actually central for the discussion of the potentialities for the overcoming of reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical labour. ²⁹

From a quantitative point of view, the intensification of the socialization of labour that characterizes immaterial/biopolitical production, as more and more forms of production are based on cooperation, collaboration and communication, offers us a first way in which we can see the potentialities for the emergence of the common and, hence, for the overcoming of reification, as discussed above, getting multiplied. In the context of the hegemony of immaterial labour, it is not only the case that more and more social relations become commodified, but also that the production of value increasingly depends directly on social relations (and not material objects) – social relations that are increasingly, either actually or potentially, conditioned by that of the common (as a social relation/form of life antagonistic to that of reification). Furthermore, it should be noted that this intensification of the socialization of labour, due to the tendentially hegemonic character of immaterial/biopolitical labour, does not affect only the currently existing social relations, but results in the continuous production of new ones. The various Wiki-based, Tor-based and peer-to-peer projects (e.g. Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, torrents, TorBrowser, etc.); the Creative Commons licence; open access publishing; open-source software; grassroots health, care and social centres; they are all examples of forms of immaterial/biopolitical production that (can) constitute antagonistic alternatives to the social relations of property and capital and signify a new form of relation between producers, their products and their means of production. ³⁰ From a qualitative point of view, there are three points that need to be stressed in regard to the deepening of the potentialities for the overcoming of reification. First, in immaterial/biopolitical labour the irreducibly social character of production and the social form of its products, as based on the common, may become more easily discernible as such. From the moment that the products of immaterial/biopolitical labour are immaterial themselves (i.e. they do not take the form of material objects), it is potentially easier to discern that their conception, experience and role as autonomous exchangeable objects/entities/commodities separated from their producer is parasitic upon their conception, experience and role as the expression of social relations and the product of human creativity (as praxis). While in both material and immaterial production reification conceals and mystifies not only the exploitative social relations of production under capitalism, but also the emancipatory social relation of the common, in immaterial production the concealment and mystification of the common is potentially easier to be revealed – consider for example, on the one hand, the key role that language plays in immaterial/biopolitical production and, on the other hand, that language is not just the (immaterial) common par excellence, but also a common with which all of us are already familiar (as a common). Second, due to the anthropogenetic character of biopolitical labour – the (re)production of (wo)man by means of (wo)man – one could argue that under the hegemony of immaterial labour the means of production are (potentially) collectively owned, or, rather, collectively used in common for the production of the common. The social relation between (wo)men and the means of the production of wealth ((wo)men themselves) does not take anymore the form of property, but that of the common – once again, the Marxian notion of the General Intellect, and especially its analysis and development in post-Autonomia as not only concerning objectified scientific knowledge but also formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and language games (see Virno 2001, 148–49), is of high relevance. In immaterial/biopolitical production subjectivities, social relations and forms of life are both the products and the means of production and that means that both the products and the means of production are (potentially) collectively and individually appropriated, experienced and used by their producers. Third, and most importantly, despite the fact that social life has become directly productive of (economic) value under capitalist command and the enforcement of the law of value, capital still does not exhaust the whole of social life. Immaterial/biopolitical labour is immeasurable and excessive with regard to capital/value, our innovative, affective and creative capacities can never be fully quantified and valorized by/as capital and that is why capital can never capture the whole of life (see Hardt and Negri 2004, 103–15, 140–53; 2009, 150–53, 268–74). The real subsumption of life under capital characterizing late capitalism should not be understood as each and every single instance of human praxis falling under reification and commodification. There is always space left for ruptures, for the self-valorization of the multitude based on the common against reification, the command of capital and the law of value. Constituent power is never fully captured by constituted power, potenza is never exhausted by potere. ³¹

(Instead of a) conclusion: Wittgenstein, reification, and the common

What conclusions can be drawn from the above discussion? On the one hand, reification – as understood in this article, that is, as a point of conjunction, in a ‘complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ (Wittgenstein 2001, § 66), between objectification, alienation (as separation) and fetishism (as heteronomy) – seems to be intensified, both quantitatively and qualitatively, through the new forms it takes in the context of the hegemony of immaterial production. On the other hand, and at the same time, the emergence of the common as a social relation antagonistic to the capitalist ones and as both an ontological/epistemological prerequisite and social/political project seems to intensify the potentialities for the diminishing or overcoming of reification, again both quantitatively and qualitatively. Thus, one could argue that what is intensified in the end is the antagonistic relation between capital and labour, the ‘moving contradiction’ that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse between the reduction in socially necessary labour time and the enforcement of the law of value (see Marx 1993, 706). Furthermore, in the context of the hegemony of biopolitical production, language (or the symbolic in general) and affects emerge as the new hegemonic antagonistic terrain, the production of subjectivity (as cognition and affection) and forms of life emerges as the new hegemonic field of struggle (see also Hardt and Negri 2017, 222–25). Concrete manifestations of that can be found in the struggles over the immaterial common(s) – from Internet/information access, privacy and neutrality to intellectual property – and for the production of subjectivities and forms of life, as based on the social relation of the common and expressed in social movements, centres, spaces and so on antagonistic to the capitalist ones characterized by reification, property and (single) identity. It should be stressed that, from an antagonistic perspective and considering that what is directly at stake is ‘the production and reproduction of life itself’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24), it is imperative to elucidate the biopolitical character of the human condition in the age of late capitalism, that is, to be clear about the ontological, epistemological, anthropological, socio-historical aspects of the new extended terrain of struggle, which is human subjectivity (as materialized in our symbolic and affective practices) and, in the end, life as such. And among the numerous important contributions to the project of the elucidation of the human condition and life, the case of Wittgenstein stands out. That is the case not only because Wittgenstein is widely considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important one – especially with regard to language, the ‘inner’, and human subjectivity in general – but also because Wittgenstein’s later philosophy highlights how language and affects (as immaterial labour) produce reality, enabling us thus to enter into the postmodern (or the biopolitical) by introducing a corporeal point of view with regard to the nature of the symbolic (language) and a symbolic point of view with regard to the nature of the affective (body) as Negri insightfully suggests (see Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004, 175–83).

I have argued elsewhere in detail about the political import of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and, in specific, of the Philosophical Investigations as its paradigmatic manifestation (see Gakis 2018). For the purposes of this article, I will just enumerate the basic conclusions of that discussion. First, Wittgenstein’s critique of the Augustinian (and of his own earlier Tractarian) picture of language, together with the introduction of the key for his later philosophy conceptual trinity of language games, family resemblances and forms of life, as well as of the idea of ‘meaning as use’, may be viewed as a critique of the phenomenon of reification of language and meaning. Wittgenstein approaches meaning and language not as a thing, or as a relation between things (words, objects, logical forms, etc.), as autonomous entities that take a life of their own and govern human life, but as a social relation, or rather a network of social relations, between humans, as a manifestation of productive human praxis. Second, the metaphilosophical remarks of the Investigations – that is, paragraphs 89–133 of the work, which discuss the nature, role, methods and goals of philosophy – highlight an approach to (a new kind of) philosophy as a therapeutic enterprise aiming to treat certain philosophical, intellectual and, in the end, social mystifications of a linguistic character. Third, Wittgenstein’s discussions of rule-following as not being dependent on, determined by or corresponding to any kind of fact, object, entity or state apart from our social practices as embedded within our forms of life which we constitute and are constituted by, may be approached as underlining the role of the human communities as the source of normativity and accentuating the self-instituting, self-signifying and, in the end, autonomous (as self-governing, self-regulating) character of the human form(s) of life. Fourth, his arguments against the very idea of a private language may be read as an explication of the social relation of the common, with language emerging as the immaterial common par excellence. Fifth, and last, the remarks on pain in particular and on the philosophy of psychology in general in the Investigations constitute not only a critique of the reification of the ‘inner’ (i.e. of being in pain, being conscious, or thinking, imagining, expecting, hoping, believing, willing, meaning, intending, etc.), but also bring to fore the relation of interdependency, complementarity, interpenetrability and mutual constitution between the symbolic and the corporeal, the cultural and the natural, the social/political and the biological in the production of human subjectivity, individual and collective. While some of the main figures of contemporary Italian theory, ³² such as Negri, Agamben and Virno, have already explored some of the political ramifications of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in relation to late capitalism and immaterial/biopolitical production, ³³ the above sketch of the five main political aspects of the Investigations suggests that the potential of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy for contributing in an innovative and radical way in the analysis and critique of late capitalism, especially with regard to the theme of the place, nature and role of reification in the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical production, has not yet been fully explored.

As suggested above, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations may be approached as bearing both a ‘positive’ and a ‘negative’ political import. The positive political import consists in the highlighting of the self-instituting aspects of the human form(s) of life and the praise of the common, while the negative one in the critique of the reification of language/meaning and the ‘inner’. With regard to the latter, which could be described as a form of critique of immaterial reification, it should be noted that it does not only concern the often alienating and mystifying role that language plays in human life – what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (Wittgenstein 2001, § 109), resulting in the production of certain kinds of ideologies (in the form of pictures that hold us captive (see Wittgenstein 2001, § 115)), subjectivities and forms of life. It also concerns the forgetting of the very fact that not just the symbolic, but even the affective, are products of collective human praxis (as already mentioned, for Wittgenstein ‘an “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’ (Wittgenstein 2001, § 580)), a constitutive aspect of the production of collective and individual subjectivity. In the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical production, this ‘reification as forgetting’ (see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 191) is manifested in the direct production of value through the symbolic and the affective, taking the form of thinking, feeling and so on under the command of capital and in the production and exchange of the resulting commodities. One could even contend that in late capitalism forms of life as such emerge as the new hegemonic form of commodity and that demonstrates not merely the real subsumption of life under capital, but also the everyday barbarism of the imposition of the law of value and of capitalist command. While for Wittgenstein our everyday practices and forms of life are a given (see e.g. Wittgenstein 2001, §§ 81, 116, 134; Part II, 200, 226), it is an ontological/epistemological given, a ‘veritable ontological horizon’ (Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004, 177), not a political one (in the sense of an apology of the current status quo), since they are socio-historically open as the product of collective self-institution and self-signification – Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language as a historical city is quite illustrative (see Wittgenstein 2001, § 18).

Wittgenstein’s critique of immaterial reification is not only philosophical (ontological/epistemological), but has a significant social/historical/political aspect too, as it is directly connected to his critical stance against scientism – the cultural imperialism of science over all the various fields of human activity, the imposition of its features, such as rationalization, calculability, determinacy and abstraction as universal ideals, and the fixation with the idea of progress, characteristic of modernity and capitalism. ³⁴ And we should of course not fail to notice that scientism and its aforementioned features have traditionally been one of the main targets of critique with regard to the issue of reification as for example Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment testify. Wittgenstein’s later therapeutic philosophy (see Wittgenstein 2001, § 133) is not just addressed to philosophical diseases, but to social pathologies indeed, since for him philosophy is continuous with life – the case of his dispute with his student and friend Norman Malcolm over the use of the notion of ‘national character’ and its philosophically essentialist and politically nationalist connotations is quite telling of how certain pictures (as ideologies) may hold us captive, both philosophically and socio-politically. ³⁵ And that is the main reason why, for Wittgenstein, critical analysis and conceptual therapy is not enough. As he puts it: ‘The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual’ (Wittgenstein 1978, Part II, § 23). Marx suggests the same when he claims that: ‘[…] the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible only in a practical way, only through the practical energy of man, and how their resolution is for that reason by no means only a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, a problem which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it treated it as a purely theoretical problem’ (Marx 1992, 354). The resolution, in the context of the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical production, of the antagonism between the new, intensified forms of reification and the new, intensified potentialities for its overcoming – whether this overcoming can be total or just partial is a crucial question the proper discussion of which should be left for another occasion – cannot be provided by mere theoretical analysis alone, no matter how radical or critical. The antagonism can only be resolved through a radical change in our form(s) of life and this means, on the hegemonic terrain of the new intensified and extended struggle, the creation and development of a new anthropological type, a kind of a homo communalis, that will first antagonize and eventually replace the currently dominant one, that of the homo economicus, that is, the production of new forms of individual and collective subjectivity based on the social relation of the common. ³⁶