Reification Safari

September 27, 2007 12:12 PM

Can you give me some examples of reification? A friend mentioned this concept offhand a few years ago. My understanding is that reification involves treating an abstract concept as if it were material. The example my friend gave at the time was inflation. But when I read the wikipedia article about reification, it seemed to indicate that it involves not just treating an abstact concept as if it were real, but also treating it as if it were human. Certainly all the examples give that impression. I'm looking for examples of reification that don't involve anthopomorphism so that I can hopefully identify some patterns. Would concepts like race, or the seasons qualify? Why is reification being so difficult?
posted by Jeff Howard to Writing & Language (20 answers total)

The Wikipedia article does not match my view of what reification means, but I will note that they have a few specific descriptions of the term from different displines and I sort of know the word from litcrit or postmodernism originally. I think of it as referring to the nouns you can't hold, words like democracy, justice or infinity. You might find this conclusion to an article called Rethinking Reification interesting since it claims that the definition and some usage of the word are at odds. Here's an excerpt

Within the limits of the dictionary definition, the concept does its work well enough. When Stephen Gould, say, criticizes psychologists for reifying intelligence by assuming that the I.Q. test must be testing something, he and the concept perform a clear and useful function. But if the main concerns are those of Lukács and Berger and Luckmann, in my opinion the term mystifies more than it reveals. Their concerns could be accommodated within the dictionary definition as reification of persons, in the sense of denying people's capacity for agency. But although Lukács and Berger and Luckmann do occasionally use the word this way, for the most part they do not. So articulating their concerns within this sense of the word would require extensive rewriting of their arguments. Would political theorists who share those concerns not do better to abandon the concept?

I also think this is useful because one of the ways which you can reify without anthropomorphizing is via measuring. So saying someone has more intelligence, like above, is like saying it can have countable qualities, when really intelligence is more of a concept only measurable in a sort of "best guess" fashion.
posted by jessamyn at 12:27 PM on September 27, 2007

You mean something like "Jackie Treehorn treets objects like women."?
posted by sour cream at 12:30 PM on September 27, 2007

When I was in school, this term was often used, in a Marxist context, to refer to things that had been cut off from the material conditions necessary for their production. For instance, when you go to the supermarket and buy an apple, you think of it as an object--a thing--not the result of a huge economic process that involves labor and technology.

This would be more or less the way Georg Lukacs uses it in this essay.
posted by wheat at 1:05 PM on September 27, 2007

Treating an object like a human is anthropomorphization, reification (as far as I know) is treating an abstract as if it were real. Race and gender are the usual examples.
posted by arcticwoman at 1:09 PM on September 27, 2007

INABA (which stands for either "I'm not a brilliant academic" or "I'm not a bullshitting academic") but I think of it generally in terms of power and hegemony. So, people say that in America we live in "a system" that can only be changed by money which leads to inaction and despair. But we're taking a complicated economic, political, and cultural phenomenon, capitalist society today, and treating it as a monolithic entity. Hence, reification.
I can't think of times when reification happened in a positive sense. Rather, it is largely a tool for understanding how the paper tiger scares us.
posted by history is a weapon at 1:12 PM on September 27, 2007

Reification has a meaning in computer science but I can't do any better than the Wikipedia definition can.
posted by GuyZero at 1:16 PM on September 27, 2007

Arcticwoman is exactly correct. "Race" is an not only abstract but mythic, but people talk about it and orient to it as if it were concrete. It is not. It is reified.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 1:18 PM on September 27, 2007

I thought that the MW dictionary example was interesting and instructive: "these instincts are, in humans, reified as verbal constructs."

But I always understood it as a theoretical term for metaphor, when abstracts are treated as concrete things and by which an analogy is drawn.
posted by klangklangston at 1:35 PM on September 27, 2007

I always heard/saw it used in reference to social constructs that were treated as though they were either natural laws, or biological imperatives. Particularly when the construct in question is taken as an unquestion(ed/able) premise for other claims.

Personally I think that some academics are guilty of tossing it around as a weapon against any concept they don't like, or don't believe in. I found this irritatingly true of social anthropologists, who like to see everything as a social construct. There's a point where accusations of reification don't add anything to the discussion and just reduce everything to absurdism. It's a very difficult accusation to argue against, if it's been cast at you, and I had professors who loved to pull it out as their "Jedi mind trick" trump card, regardless of context.

However, if you accept the socially-constructed view of 'race' (which I do and I think is uncontroversial at least among academics), there are some good examples of reification there.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:46 PM on September 27, 2007

The process of reification is that process by which the subjective—complex, contingent—becomes (or becomes understood as) objective—fixed, inherent, physical. Records/Albums can be thought of as reified music.

For Marx/Lukacs, this ties into commodity fetishism. I think Zizek explains it best:

[W]hat is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements.

posted by wemayfreeze at 1:51 PM on September 27, 2007

Is it fair to say that any example of naming that identifies a discrete section of an otherwise continuous spectrum could lead to reification? Does Crayola reify colors by only including eight different crayons in the box? Are spring, summer, fall and winter reifications along that line? It seems like all taxonomies could be examples of reification...
posted by Jeff Howard at 1:52 PM on September 27, 2007

When I was taught about reification in philosophy classes it was mostly in the context of race and gender--

eg, gender is reified because it's an abstract idea that's lived as real through continuous bodily repitition of various abstract ideas of how a person identified as a certain gender ought to act. Through repetition, gender becomes embodied and real. That's what Judith Butler says, anyways, though in way more and bigger words.
posted by ITheCosmos at 2:31 PM on September 27, 2007

I've always thought of reification as the inappropriate classification of ontological status. Specifcally, mistaking something which is really a property for a substance.

An example, taking yellow to be a thing in its own right and not a property of things. (Ignoring various complications in color theory.)

Another example, taking velocity to be a thing (i.e. a substance or subject in a metaphysical sense) instead of merely being a property that things have, which is what it really is.

Essentially if you take the substances to be the independent stuff of the world to which we attribute dependent properties, reification is mistaking a dependent property for an independent thing.
posted by oddman at 2:38 PM on September 27, 2007

One more thing, one result of reification is that it allows for the conclusion that the color yellow, or velocity, could exist in a universe without anything else. This mistake is, of course, the result of thinking of them as substances and not properties.
posted by oddman at 2:47 PM on September 27, 2007

Reifying is "thing-ifying"; "res"=Latin for "thing". Treating [something] as if it were a discrete entity, a thing, a real quantity, rather than merely an idea.
Examples:
"That Obama, he has charisma by the bucketload."
"The indie comics scene today is hot."
(These examples are not so perfect. The example of Gould saying that IQ tests reify intelligence is a great one.)


Anthropomorphizing is "person-ifying". Treating [something] that isn't a person as if it were a person with human-like traits.
Examples:
"Katrina was the worst party guest New Orleans had ever seen, flooding the city in her rip-roaring bender."
"Microsoft slyly chuckled as it prepared to reveal what was up its sleeve."
"The anteater king tells his subjects wonderful stories about the ant-nests of old."
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:04 PM on September 27, 2007

Also what oddman says captures one common use. (I think not the only use -- though having a hard time articulating why -- but a common one and probably a core case.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:06 PM on September 27, 2007

An example from education: a professor gives a lecture to a group of students. This is an event, an interaction between people that happens at a particular time and a particular place. However (as suggested by the word "gives") some people might reify "the lecture" to be a thing, delivered (think about that word too!) imperfectly by the professor. The action in the world, the lecture, is seen as a thing: "the lecture". This is illustrated by the language that is sometimes used: a student will say to the professor "have you got the lecture", meaning the slides from the lecture. In the absence of being able to get the reified thing, they look to get a related physical object as a substitute.
posted by Jabberwocky at 4:09 PM on September 27, 2007

The problem with "reification" is that it is a technical term in philosophy and sociology for which no really well agreed-on meaning exists.

Lukács who invented the term originally used it only for the process in which social relations (especially exchange value) become regarded as natural properties of things. But from then on, different thinkers have used it for different purposes (the most important use today is probably in gender studies). So you can really only give a definition in relation to a specific tradition.

If you want to be exact, either define it yourself as you want, or use "objectification" (treating persons/processes/... as objects) and, as others have already suggested, "anthropomorphizing" (treating non-human entities as humans).
posted by criticalbeaver at 5:40 PM on September 27, 2007

Falstaff: Can honour set to a leg? No: or an arm? No: or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

Shakespeare, 1 King Henry IV, Act V.
posted by kimota at 6:07 AM on September 28, 2007

Thanks for the insight everyone. Now I've got a chance of figuring this out.
posted by Jeff Howard at 3:56 PM on October 1, 2007