'All Reification Is a Forgetting': Benjamin, Adorno, and the Dialectic of Reification

In his contribution to the book The Idea of Communism, Slavoj Žižek argues that ‘we can no longer talk about “reification”in the classic Lukácsian sense. Far from being invisible, social relationality in its very fluidity is directly the object of marketing and exchange’ (Žižek, 2010, p. 221). 1 While reification in the traditional sense referred to the apprehension of social relations as things—for instance, to consider the price of an object as a mysterious and autonomous force, instead of something that has its origin in human labour mediated by relations of commodity exchange—today these social relations themselves have become the model of the commodity form, as industrial capitalism has turned into ‘cultural’ capitalism, intellectual and immaterial labour are becoming increasingly predominant, and information and experience the primary consumer goods. Indeed, in a world in which, more than ever, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Marx, 1978, p. 517), the critique of reification might run the risk of identifying with the aggressor. Hence, it is worthwhile to take a look at earlier critiques of Lukács’s critique of reification, of which those of Adorno and Benjamin are the most original.