NOTES on:
Berger, P. and Pullberg, S. (1966)
Reification and the Sociological Critique of
Consciousness. In New Left Review
I/35 56 -71
Dave Harris
We can divide sociological theories into those
that sees society as 'a network of human beings',
or as 'a thing—like facticity' (56). Social
structures are either the result of human
interaction, or some external reality. These
two types can be represented by Weber and
Durkheim. What is really needed is a new
perspective showing their interrelatedness.
Durkheim is useful for showing how social
relations look real and are taken as such, but we
also need to examine how they become given or
real. We do not need some abstract model
that contains both, but rather to retain aspects
and both theories—how do subjective meanings
become objective and factual? How do human
activities produce social things? Neither
Weber nor Durkheim can do this on their own, and
we need to understand the full comprehensive
process, 'involving both subjective productivity
and objective product' (57): this means we must
'understand society as a dialectical
process'. Certain marxian categories are
useful here, although there is no political
commitment, and we want to develop a sociology of
knowledge.
Reification, for example, might be
useful. In Hegel, we need a dialectical
perspective to show how the experience and
consciousness are related. Experience
involves not only knowledge, but also praxis, as
an all encompassing 'philosophical totalization'
(58): 'Spirit objectivates itself, alienates
itself and recovers itself without respite', and
this constitutes experience. The dialectical
link overcomes rigid oppositions between being and
thinking. Although Hegel never used the
term, we can see reification in each stage,
whenever objects are experienced in themselves,
something against a subject. Such
reification produces limited experience, and thus
an impulse towards new and higher levels of
thought, until we get to the absolute when we
realise 'the complete dialecticality of thinking
and being'. This process is revealed in
history, but at the absolute stage, alienation
will be 'surmounted' in a moment of fully
transparent understanding.
Marx objects to this in two ways, involving an
attempt to separate alienation from the general
process of objectivation. In EPM,
Marx accuses Hegel of reducing real activities and
contradictions to dialectical moments of [pure]
movement. There is a real process and
existence which is not the same as philosophical
thought. From the point of view of Hegel,
all human beings and their works must be
reifications, but this confuses reification with
alienation and with objectivity in the name of
'transcendental idealism' (59). For Hegel,
only thought can realize the dialectic.
Hegel absorbs human beings into thought forms, but
he also develops 'an objective scientism'involving
a particular conception of human nature: but
humans are involved in constructing their own
nature and even science. We see this in
commodity production, which produces a reified set
of social relations as described in economics, and
only the commodity seems to relate human beings to
each other, as external things, separating and
uniting them, but only as 'functions of the
autonomous economic system'. Labour becomes
reduced to work and so on. This is not
economic determinism for B and P—they use that
term to describe an uncritical deployment of this
fetishized view of social life.
So there are two aspects of reification for
Marx—'the autonomization of objectivity',
stripping out human activity, and the specific
'autonomization of the economic' which turns human
relations of production into something thing
like. Having pinned down the process in the
economic, we can then extend it to all social
relations, as do Lukacs and Goldmann. As a
result we get reified theory in social and
political sciences. These offer an
understanding of ourselves 'precisely as reified',
and this helps 'perpetuate and legitimate'
alienation and reification (60).
We need to take away polemic and utopian thinking
from this discussion, and clarify the terms.
Objectivation can be described as a general
process where by 'humans subjectivity embodies
itself in products'. This is
'anthropologically necessary', since human beings
are always intentional, and direct their
subjectivity towards the world. Objectification
is something different: it is a stage in the
process of objectivation that permits us to grasp
what is going on in consciousness, using language,
giving objects a name, communicating that name to
others. Alienation refers to a
broken stage in this general process of producing
objects: products appear 'as an alien facticity
and power standing in itself and over against [us]
, no longer recognizable as a product' (61).
This permits human beings to forget that they have
produce the world in which they live.
Alienation is not the same as psychological
estrangement, as in anomie—alienated products
include religious interpretations and myth.
Alienation need not be experienced in terms of
psychological stress, since it might be normal and
healthy to see social life is produced by some
divine force: 'Psychological "health" is a
function of the social situation'. Reification
refers to the last stage in the process of
alienation, when things 'become the standard of
objective reality', and only things are accepted
as real. It requires 'objectification in an
alienated mode'. It is perfectly possible
for any historical phenomenon to be alienated and
reified, but it need not be so, unlike
objectivation and objectification, which are
anthropologically necessary and a priori.
Human beings produce a world because they are
directed towards objects when they act.
Action means changing what is given, developing a
meaningful totality with meaningful actions in
it. This is never completed but is always
being constructed in a process of
'totalization'(62). But this is always a
social process, since 'sociality is a necessary
element of human being'. The reality of
social worlds have to be constructed and
reconstructed, 'continuously realized', meaning
both actualized and recognized. The reality
of the world has to be constantly reaffirmed,
again as a social process, involving the consent
of others. It is possible to see the
constructed world as clearly expressing the
intentionality of people who produced it, and it
is this that makes it understandable.
Social structure is an objectivated part of a
constructed world: 'social structuration is part
of the human enterprise of totalization'.
Social structures have no other reality, apart
from human activity that produces them, and they
have to be constantly realized. However,
they are essential to existence, since they
constantly provide sense to the individual and
'new modes of meaningful action' (63).
Social structures are both produced, and are an
medium for further production. We only
become social through social structure.
These arguments so far operate with pure
possibilities. In concrete circumstances,
social structures often narrow horizons for the
people who inhabit them, appearing as 'an external
facticity', something alien and opaque, something
coercive—hence the notion of the social fact as
something that resists the individual.
Individuals are vulnerable. Structures also
socialize individuals and this 'pervasive
regulated functionality of social structure takes
on an almost automatic character'. Social
structures must do this to maintain some kind of
social order, since there are no biological
constraints with human beings. We can see
this external character by invoking any of the
institutions, such as families or workplaces, but
it is also found in language 'the most fundamental
social objectivation of all'. Language is
clearly a human product yet it is also an external
facticity, and it regulates us in an automatic
fashion, requiring a minimum of reflection.
All this is commonplace, but it implies that the
institutionalization of human actions, and social
structures, require alienation, in order to
produce the taken for granted world.
Strangely, then, human beings are producing a
world from which they are alienated—but there is
at least the theoretical possibility of reversing
the process. One effect of alienation is not
only to produce an external world, but to produce
a closed self, an objective humanity, or reified
consciousness. [Note in the footnotes there
are some references to Sartre].
There are in fact three levels of consciousness:
(a) 'direct and pre-reflective presence to the
world' (65); (b) the reflective awareness of the
world; (c) specifically theoretical
formulations. Reification can occur on the
last two levels, which implies that ' the
foundations of theoretical reification lie in the
pre-theoretical reification of the world and of
oneself'. Social situations can produce
alienation and reification, as when expressive
intentions of human beings, gestures, for example,
are seen as things in themselves. We now see
how reification entails dehumanization.
However, human beings continue to reflect and even
to theorize. If this is done with already
alienated objects, we get an alienated
totalization, or alienated consciousness.
This can be 'designated as false consciousness',
mistaking the results of the process and
forgetting the process. If this 'achieves a
theoretical formulation', it can serve to mystify
[as in ideology, although the authors do not want
to use the term]. For example, an
objectivated gesture gets further objectified on
reflection, and then worked into a whole system or
'reifying apparatus by which any gesture is no
longer a specific expression', but produces a
stereotyped world view. At a further level,
a reified psychology might develop based on these
world views.
It is clear that theoretical levels do not simply
reflect underlying social processes. They
can themselves affect pre-reflective forms of
consciousness. They can offer extra levels
of reification, becoming dogmas and closing off
any further possibilities. The example, page
66, turns on role theory—the notion of role
objectifies action, further reflection about roles
might want to apply this to all action, and a
sociology might develop 'that regards roles rather
than people as the prime reality', as a further
mystification, as in it is roles that interact:
people are only playing roles. This model of
the world can be internalized, and indeed, is
quite likely to affect 'certain middle-class
college-educated strata in America' (67) [a
footnote specifically exempts Mead who retains a
dialectical link between I and me. It does
echo the mockery of Goffman as a theorist of
American bourgeois].
This is a typical process of reification,
involving roles and institutions as reality.
Roles are reified versions of action, as we saw,
and can be seen as constraining individuals, who
can only embody roles. The analysis can be
applied to all levels of social development.
They can produce a particular kind of false
consciousness as when businessmen argue that they
are acting on behalf of the economic system.
There can be religious undertones in this view in
that human beings merely represent 'various
superhuman abstractions they are supposed to
embody', and religious or scientific theories can
develop on this basis. Institutions are
reified by seeing them not as objectivations, but
as something supra-human, factual as in something
natural. Families can be reified like this,
producing deviants who seem to rebel against the
very nature of things. A current example is
'the horror with which "sexual perversion" is
still regarded today'[things have moved on a bit
since then, but pedophilia, I suppose, would
remain as an example]. Even the deployment
of medicalized categories instead of moral ones
'hardly mitigates the harshness of theoretical
annihilation' (68). These reifications might
tap into something fundamental, 'the terror of
chaos'.
After these reifications, the dialectical process
is lost, and replaced by some notion like
mechanical causality. Human relations are
understood as relations of things. The
dialectic stops, and only society produces
men—this is 'sociologism [which] represents
reification on the level of theoretical
formulation'. The reification 'converts the
concrete into the abstract, then in turn
concretizes the abstract'. It reduces
quality to quantity, and this helps an
institutional system function, seen best in
bureaucracies. The process is 'cross
cultural and historically recurrent', found in
people and the 20th century, the 12th century and
'the primitive in just about any century'.
Reifications help systems of any kind run more
smoothly, minimizing reflection and choice, making
conduct automatic, and the world is something
taken for granted. 'Reification in this way
comes close to being a functional
imperative'. It helps reduce actions to
graspable processes, actions without the
actor. Social processes are therefore
'intrinsically alienating and
dehumanizing'[always? They have always been
so far?]. However, there is not a strong
anthropological necessity, even though reification
is the reality for 'most'societies (69). We
cannot see this as some fall from original
paradise, and, nor is it confined only to
capitalism [Levi Strauss and Savage Mind
is cited]. Psychology suggests even that
'reification is at least a stage in the biography
of the individual as it is in the history of the
species'(69) [a footnote cites Piaget!].
Dereification remains as a theoretical
possibility, but there have also been three actual
'socio-historical constellations' which are
'conducive'. In the first place, social
structures can disintegrate in a crisis producing
'catastrophic disenchantment', and this has
happened in ancient societies as well as modern
ones. Secondly, cultural contacts can
dereify even if they do not produce cultural
collapse. Contacts lead to a crisis in
knowledge, 'a clash of worlds', and several
consequences might arise ranging from 'promiscuous
syncretism to violent xenophobic retreat'
(70). Thirdly, some groups and individuals
may serve to marginalize mainstream views, as with
European jews, or Indian ascetics, both of whom
contributed debunking and sardonic comment.
Some individuals may deliberately seek marginality
in order to become more aware, or they might have
been placed in a marginal position 'as a result of
one or another biographical accident' [and the
footnote cites Simmel on the stranger, and Vebelen
on the Jews].
The sociology of knowledge is itself marginal:
philosophy claims to be best able to analyze
consciousness, while sociology tends to focus on
social locations. However, inputs are
required from both. Philosophy tends to
isolate itself from the world in order to
contemplate it, and as a result it can itself
become 'alienated activity, estranged both from
man and his world'(71) [the self chosen fate of
Deleuze]. Philosophy can become unpopular
and unintelligible, but philosophy is still a
human product, and philosophers are socially
located: it can be seen as a superstructure based
on 'actual concrete living human
intersubjectivity'(71). It should turn
instead to a critique of everyday life [and Schutz
and Lefebvre are good examples]. Sociology
can turn into narrow empiricism or abstract
theorising, and again both depart from everyday
life and turn into superstructure. It can
also produce unintelligible pomposity. It
must also return to clarify every day life which
'entails a critique of consciousness, which is the
very stuff of everyday life'. The sociology
of knowledge offers an essential meeting place
between the two disciplines, and will stop
alienation both in philosophy and sociology.
The analysis of reification is one example of
possible progress.
more social theory
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