Abstract
Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued, written by Richard Westerman, constitutes an important and promising theoretical contribution to the recent reassessment of Georg Lukács’s work and the revival of studies on this Marxist philosopher’s early thought. Westerman’s central and primary intention can be described as an effort to understand differently the meaning of the concept of reification (Verdinglichung). This concept is, for the young Lukács, the essential problem, phenomenon and relation of a capitalist society. Westerman’s work is also an effort to apprehend how Lukács introduces the possibility of the ‘rupture in this reality’, namely, the overcoming of the reified and contradictory social totality of capitalism, as it is presented in History and Class Consciousness. In other words, Westerman proposes a re-interpretation of the main essay of History and Class Consciousness, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’.
However, in order to accomplish this task, Westerman does not insist on foregrounding the indispensably central, but frequent and usual revision of the Marxian origin of reification of Lukács early critique of capitalism and on the importance of Hegel’s philosophy and dialectic in his interpretation of Marx’s theory.l On the contrary, he proposes three points which are rarely, if ever, examined in a systematic way, concerning some major theoretical influences exercised on Lukács: first of all, he takes a distance from a very current critique that perceives Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness as a product and typical expression of German Idealism, certainly in a more materialist version. Secondly, he recontextualizes Lukács within quite a different set of discourses, which are related by their attempt to explain meaning in terms of a formal structure independent of both subject and object’. Thirdly, Westerman in his effort to conceive reification through what he calls ‘the structure of meaning’, turns his gaze towards the less known yet strong influences of Neo-Kantianism (Emil Lask), of formalist history of art (Alois Riegl and Konrad Fiedler) and those of early phenomenology (Husserl). He proves that we can find these influences in Lukács’s drafts of a philosophy of art, the so-called ‘Heidelberg Aesthetics’, written during his Heidelberg period (from 1912 until 1918), only some years before the publication of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Furthermore, the author’s final objective consists in refuting the characterization of Lukács’s thought as a theory that gives ‘primacy of a monolithic collective subject – and particularly the laboring proletariat’, and intends ‘to render his thought more directly applicable to pluralist, postindustrial societies, and to bring it into dialogue with similarly asubjective perspectives in contemporary thought’. Therefore, this book understands Lukács’s Marxist critique of bourgeois society through the perspective of continuity with his philosophy of art, his first Aesthetic, rather than as a sudden rupture. In fact for Westerman, the ‘Reification’ essay, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, and ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ contain substantial influence from Lukács’s theoretical work of his Heidelberg years.
In this sense, Westerman’s approach takes an unambiguous distance from the very common supposition that Lukács puts the working class in the center of his analysis, simply as a subject that ‘stands outside society and history, capable in principle of free and spontaneous action that could reshape social relations at will’. Indeed very often, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ has been criticized as an idealist and messianic expression of the all-powerful working class (which is nothing more than the omnipotent Subject of history), who will finally reshape history. However, the proletariat according to Lukács is not a mythological subject, for objectivity and subject do not relate to each other as two external, alien, opposite things. Westerman’s elaborate answer to this cardinal objection concerning History and Class Consciousness also presents evidence for Lukács’s phenomenological perception of reification. As Westerman emphasizes:
Lukács himself described the theory of art he put together from these sources as a phenomenology of the aesthetic, and because of this, I shall follow him in referring to it as phenomenological both in discussing his Heidelberg drafts on art and in his later deployment of the same paradigm in History and Class Consciousness. However, his use of this term does not indicate that he was an orthodox Husserlian. His use of Husserl was by no means sufficiently systematic or granular to count as such. (p. 120)
More specifically, Westerman points out the significance of intentionality in Lukács’s social theory and his active interaction with the concept of social practices. Social practices form objects that are meaningful, through the fact that they constantly orient ‘subjects towards objects’. They have a meaning by the specifics of their relations between subjects and objects. Thus, it’s not a coincidence that Westerman will argue later that
Lukács offers a relational ontology – one that determines objects by the logic governing the intentional practices that shape them. To describe this as ontic indicates that this is the lived reality of those in capitalist society; it is what necessarily appears to them as real, or as the only way objects can exist socially. (p. 4)
These practices are what give a meaning to subjectivity and each individual subjectivity is meaningful, through the entirety of its practices and relations with other subjectivities and the objective world. In this sense, a subject acquires a social and historical meaning through the fact that its meaning relates to a specific object. Westerman makes it explicit that Lukács’s conception of the proletariat is far from being without problems; nevertheless, for him, Lukács fails in more interesting ways than is normally understood to be the case. Reading Lukács as a phenomenologist of reification in capitalist society, he can provide a rich theoretical model for understanding the determination of different kinds of objective reality by social forms and the possible subjective stances thereto. (p. 20)
Furthermore, Westerman in his effort to question a series of very regular and problematic lectures of Lukács’s early critique of reification and of his conception of the proletariat, criticizes the idea that History and Class Consciousness presupposes an exterior and prior to society subject, an unchanging ‘human essence beyond society’. More particularly, Georg Lukács is often criticized for considering ‘that some kind of organic social unity pre-exists that creates the structural-institutional forms of society’. Additionally, for this kind of critical approach (one of the most representative is the critique proposed by Postone), these structural/social forms are the result of the proletariat’s labor: the proletariat is the unique creator, the single historical subject who poses social relations, poses history, and who will finally liberate society from reification through revolution. In this sense Westerman notes: For many of Lukács’s critics, Lukács theory is Hegelian in that it supposedly relies on a grand historical demiurge, a macrosubject that (unconsciously or consciously) is capable of driving history. By demonstrating that the elements of Lukács’s theory that have hitherto been read as granting primacy to the subject are instead better understood phenomenologically describing the equal co-constitution of subject and object, I will rule out that argument. But this only clears the way to show where Hegel’s influence can be seen: it is visible primarily in Lukács’s use of the ontological categories of his Logic, and not the narrative of Geist unfolding itself in the world. (p. 11) On this reading, reification entails a mistaken belief about the nature of capitalist social relations: the impersonal, abstract form they assume leads us to take them as unalterable, automatic, mechanized laws to which we must submit passively. In fact (this interpretation continues), this is not much more than an error of knowledge that might be corrected. (p. 16)
Nevertheless, Westerman disagrees with this one-sided analysis of Lukács social theory, focused on the primacy of the subject. On the contrary, he insists that although the understanding of the proletariat as ‘the identical subject-object’ of history has without doubt a basis, it is not the only one possible. For Westerman, subject and more specifically consciousness as the Hungarian thinker conceives it, exceeds the notion of culture, including the practical social activity, ‘the notion of reality, the themes of experience and memory, and the problem of the first person perspective’. Here, Westerman follows until a certain point Andrew Feenberg’s analysis, but he suggests ‘that there is even more to his use of the term consciousness than this’. In this perspective, Lukács’s version of consciousness is defined by its relation to social institutions and practices, not only by its own contents or representations, and in this sense Westerman proposes that the ‘Reification’ essay is essentially a phenomenological account of social relations: reification explains the relations of subjects with subjects, the relations of subjects with objects and the relations of objects with other objects in capitalism. Similarly to consciousness, reification, the other main idea of Lukács’s book, is an ontological and not an epistemological category. Consequently, reification is better understood as a misguided totality ‘of collective practices based on rationalization’ and not simply as a misguided knowledge of capitalist society.
One of the most intriguing ideas that Westerman brings out, already from his book’s introduction, is that Lukács’s early theory of art continues to still be active in History and Class Consciousness. As Westerman points out concerning Riegl’s influence on Lukács: Riegl gave him a range of specific ways to describe particular systems of meaning in works of art. Within this framework, the problem of the relation of subject and object is reconfigured: rather than the relation of an a priori subject to an objective reality that exists outside or opposed to it, subject and object are treated as structurally defined parts of a meaningful totality of consciousness. (p. 37)
So, in capitalism subjects treat objects as commodities through a series of social practices, and objects take a meaning from a subject’s activity. Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism has the merit of highlighting on several occasions, that bourgeois totality for History and Class Consciousness is a ‘meaningful reality’ – and most extensively every social being is a meaningful reality – because it is the product of the active interrelations and interactions of the different elements which determine and constitute this totality, although individuals do not perceive this fundamental fact. It follows that for Lukács, and Westerman contributes to conceive this point, a subject’s activity is meaningful and defined only through its relations to totality.
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In the second chapter, Westerman explores in detail one of the main arguments of his book, the one on continuities and survivals of young Lukács’s philosophy of art in his early Marxist social theory. In order to realize this plan, Westerman focuses on two key concepts that Lukács develops in ‘Heidelberg Aesthetics’: the work of art as a self-enclosed totality, and the problem of the subject-object relation. His exploration of these ideas here is essential: these notions were determined, of course, to play a decisive role in his Marxist theory; it was here in his philosophy of art, I claim, that they first appeared in something like the form they would take in his account of society. (p. 88) the theory of social being in History and Class Consciousness draws on the categories and concepts as the phenomenological account of art with which he had aimed to habilitate. He began to analyse society using a paradigm analogous to that which he applied to art: it is a realm in which the meaning of objects is determined in relation to the totality of all other such objects, according to a governing principle that simultaneously presupposes a definite intentional attitude on the part of the subject. (pp. 143–144)
Keeping in mind this line of interpretation, what are the most important elements of reification in History and Class Consciousness as analyzed by Westerman? First, one of the main aspects of reification – as the key notion of Lukács’s phenomenological critique of capitalism – is that it is the concept which explains the net of interrelations between objects in modern bourgeois society and, at the same time, the very nature of the social practices of the individuals. In capitalism, this net is fundamentally defined for Lukács by the commodity-structure, which is not simply the sum, the totality of the essential characteristics of an exterior and alien to us thing – in that case of the commodity – but furthermore ‘a structure of consciousness’. Lukács perceives reification as something that on the one hand occurs in the realm of consciousness, but on the other hand it has its roots in the social being: in that sense, the reign of the commodity-structure shapes the architecture and structure of the subject as a reified consciousness. Reification is then also a state of the consciousness, the dominant way that social reality makes sense to subjects or the principal way of appearance of the social reality and of the historical process to them. The commodity form, this specific Gegenständlichkeitsform, is what gives birth to the reified way of appearance of social objects to consciousness. Thus, reification and commodity fetishism according to Westerman’s account of Lukács’s perspective are not a misguided understanding of social objectivity, but they are the only possibilities that capitalism offers and imposes to fragmented, abstract, rationalized subjects, in order for them to understand this totality and their place within it. Consequently, Westerman’s examination gives us distinctive but at the end convergent definitions of Lukács’s interpretation of reification, this constitutive phenomenon and reality of the bourgeois society.
Let us mention here some other basic dimensions of his approach. We have already noted that, for Westerman, Lukács perceives reification as ‘the only possible reality imaginable’ by the subjects, what appears to them ‘as the only possible coherent, integrated world’ or meaningful social and historical totality. All that is not subjugated to the abstract, rational, quantifying law of the commodity structure or predicted by it is inconceivable or needless. A subject’s social practices, as well as capitalist society as a whole, are meaningful because of their reified form and as reified form.
So Westerman grasps reification in History and Class Consciousness as the decisive and primordial relation between subject and object in capitalist society. However, he explains at the end of the chapter ‘The Forms of Social Reality’ that object and subject are not two separate entities: This interaction is not one between two distinct entities, but between two different poles of one phenomenological whole. What this means is that social reality cannot be understood merely objectively. By definition, it requires a particular standpoint or perspective on it – a manner of understanding or approaching it by which it makes sense. That standpoint is determined by the structural form of subject-object whole and not by the activity or knowledge of the subject. In the case of capitalism, this whole consists of (irrational, private) subjects standing outside a realm of objects relating to one another automatically and according to universal rules. […] This ontic social reality of reification is explained ontologically as the result of a particular objectively determined relation of subject and object. They are not separate a priori, but are instead divided and related by the commodity structure that governs their relationship and defines their totality. (p. 206)
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In our opinion, Westerman’s Reification Revalued is a book with an extremely elaborate and coherent conceptual argumentation, insisting not only on the consequences of the reification as Lukács describes it in Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, but in addition, on the elements that allow the rise of the reified social world and the formation of a ‘reified consciousness’. Westerman reminds us of the fact that, for Lukács, the architecture of the reified social exteriority corresponds essentially to the architecture of a reified consciousness and that what is primarily reified in bourgeois society is consciousness and not a specific object: Consequently, Lukács treats the concept of reification as directly applicable to consciousness as such. He repeatedly uses phrases such as the effects of reified consciousness or statements such as the reified structure sinks ever deeper, more fatefully, and constitutively into the consciousness of man. What is noticeable about these formulations is that it is not objects or social institutions that are reified, but consciousness itself as the realm of being that is so structured under the rule of the commodity form. […] that the internal structure of the individual’s experience as a whole mirrors the external fragmentation of the world of objects. (p. 289; italics in original) may be understood as particular domains, within which objects are constructed in distinct ways that govern the kinds of properties they have, and relative to which subjects may have different stances. The two-sided nature of Lukács’s explanation, incorporating both subject and object as two poles of a complete reality, has the potential to offer distinct insights into specific areas of social reality. (p. 17)