[FRA:] Advice needed for a critique of Honneth's theory of reification

[RE]

Greetings. I would like to ask list participants for advice regarding a critique of Honneth's formulation of the concept of reification, set out in his Tanner lecture published in 2006. Here's a link to the book:


http://www.amazon.com/Reification-Look-Berkeley-Tanner-Lectures/dp/0195320468/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231338170&sr=1-2 


In brief, my understanding of reification has always foregrounded the "second nature" angle, whereby social institutions take on a naturalized/sacrosanct quality that obscures their human authorship and denies the possibility of significant social change. I've believed that there is abundant evidence that this is an important aspect of hegemony, and also that across widely differing theoretical standpoints there are resonant analyses - for example, references to "social mythologies," "background understandings," and other terms used by critics ranging from Roland Barthes to Susan Faludi - that lend a kind of construct validity to the second nature concept, albeit without buying into Lukács' emphasis on commodity fetishism. I'm therefore bewildered by the way Honneth depreciates this phenomenon, and instead truncates reification into a "forgetting" of a primary relationship of care between human beings. 


In his introduction to the book, Martin Jay offers an account of Honneth's reasoning. To boil it down, Jay refers to the well-known criticism that Lukács' Hegelian framing of reification depended on a simplistic model of reappropriation of an alienated creation (capitalist institutions) by their creator (the working class). Honneth - who in making this argument seems more-or-less to follow Habermas' review of reification at the end of the first volume of TCA - effectively says that once we acknowledge the problems with an Hegelian framing, the "second nature" phenomenon dissolves and we're left with limited version of reification that is, to put it coarsely, preoccupied with how people come to treat each other instrumentally, "forgetting" a way of regarding others empathically that, again coarsely, is innate. 


This concession seems mistaken to me, but I worry that my objection may be philosophically naïve. I'm inclined to argue that we can simply recast the supposed Hegelian core of Lukács' concept of reification in the less abstract terminology of a theory of social conflict and revolution. Recalling Marcuse in "Reason and Revolution," Hegelian dialectics anticipate social theory, and helps to orient us to certain kinds of problems and potentials (for example, reification, the open-ended nature of concepts and their referents >> history as an open-ended, contradictory process). If the purported change agent, the working class, doesn't turn out to be interested in or capable of gaining control of anarchic capitalist processes, then we need to move from the broad overview offered by Hegelian Marxism to consider what might stand in the way. We take up terms (class consciousness, mobilization potential, relative deprivation, etc.) that entail orientation to mundane, commonsensical ways of thinking about social problems, including the understandings held by the participants themselves. As we consider their understandings, we will see that a naturalized view of the social order is widely held, and that this view is *part* of what limits their ability to imagine social alternatives (I hope I'm not sounding too cognitivist here). This approach thus regards Hegelian terminology as something like a placeholder, or a set of regulating concepts, emphasizing a real capacity for coordinated action to reformulate social relations, along with the state of consciousness that would accompany precede and accompany such action. 


If this holds water, then it appears that Honneth is replicating what he claims is Lukács' error. That is, his broad indictment of Lukács for using the Hegelian placeholder/conceptual regulator obscures a complex set of real world social dynamics and meaning structures that may offer challenges to a social order that has escaped human control. Indeed, in one sense Honneth's error is more severe. While it could be said that Lukács was overconfidently assuming an outcome to these dynamics - i.e., the Subject "inevitably" reappropriates the created social Object, so the working class will inevitably establish socialism - Honneth theoretically suppresses consideration of them, and thus mistakenly obliges the fall back to a relatively narrow demonstration that "care" is an ineluctable bonding element in human relations. Even if he pulls this off, it remains unclear what implications this demonstration holds for system-level criticism, whether "care" can be counted on to reinvigorate a critical theory of society. (I'd add that, in looking over recent forum postings, these considerations are very pertinent to Ralph Dumain's post of 9/23/08, wherein he discusses the positivist animosity towards fantasy. In the sense I'm using it, the concept of reification is fantasy's critical icebreaker.) 


My concerns:

1. Am I underplaying the interconceptual linkages entailed by an Hegelian frame? I.e. if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound and so it isn't legitimate to set up a limited translation because it underestimates the connection of the translated terms to the rest of the Hegelian system. However, as I suggest above in the reference to Marcuse, this seems to have been standard practice in Western Marxism's appropriation of Hegel (for that matter, I'd imagine that Lenin had something like this in mind when he was reading Hegel during World War I.) 


2. I also wonder if my assertion that there is a "real capacity for coordinated action to reformulate social relations" doesn't run into the reservations that Habermas, again in TCA, apparently has regarding anything that smacks of Marx's species-being concept. That is, I prefer to think of it as a durable species capacity, while Habermas may regard it as thoroughly contingent on sociocultural factors that may no longer exist. (Is this part of the reason for his shift away from the triad of human cognitive interests in KHI?)


Thank you for taking the time to read this. I welcome any comments and suggestions.


William Earnest