By Aaron Henry
!!
Reconsidering
Gramsci: “Power is Recognition”
“But as stated earlier these relationships are not simple. Moreover, some are involuntary and some voluntary.Furthermore, the very fact of being more or less profoundly (knowing more or less the way relationships can bemodified) conscious already modifies them. Once recognized as necessary, these same necessary relationshipschange in aspect and importance. In this sense, recognition is power”
1
!
This quote from Gramsci’s essay “What is Man
”
is an easy passage to overlook in
The Modern Prince and other writings,
more importantly its meaning and complementary relationshipto Gramsci’s method of praxis (the fusion of theory and action
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), is an even easier connection, inits opacity, to surrender up to the vast depths of Gramsci’s works. In my last essay I took theposition that Gramsci’s idea of Good Sense and the construction of a progressive cultural unity(a historic bloc) was grounded in a genealogical method of recognizing and uncovering the ideasand social relations that structured the moral and ethical frameworks of bourgeois commonsense. However, what was actually meant by ‘genealogy’ and ‘power is recognition’ generatedmore confusion than clarity. Consequently, this paper takes a different approach in the hopethat it will achieve the clarity and insight that eluded my last attempt on this subject. Inparticular, I will argue that the achievement of ‘good sense’ may actually be, for Gramsci, aprocess of recognizing the reified structures that underpin the arrangement of social forces,ideas and institutions that configure the hegemonic bloc. In this respect, power, in a limitedsense, is recognizing the relationships that comprise this bloc and the processes that activelyreproduce these relations within culture, ideology and the relations of production. In order todevelop what I mean by reified structures this paper will proceed by outlining Georg Lukacs’concept of reification through a few examples. Following this I will show, using the openingquote as a reference point, how this concept can be applied, albeit with some modifications, toGramsci’s own conceptions on the interrelationship between consciousness, good sense, andpraxis. It is my hope that through this synthesis I will be able to demonstrate that reification andhegemony go hand in hand.
!
At first glance Lukacs may appear as an unlikely theorist to probe for insight intoGramsci’s works. However, Lukacs, like Gramsci, is also concerned with consciousness and‘ideology’ and its role in perpetuating and reproducing capitalist society. In this sense, althoughthe two differ in how these ideas are realized, maintained and disseminated throughout society,Lukacs’ concept of reification and its relation to capitalist ‘ideology’ warrant some reflection. Inhis chapter “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” Lukacs explores how theprocesses of commodity fetishism in capitalist society (‘seeing’ relations between people asrelations between things) are reified throughout society as these relations become imprinted“more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of [the individual]”
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. Indeed, whileLukacs locates the genesis of these relations in the commodity structure of capitalist society hetraces how these relations come to be normalized and disguised as ‘things’ throughout
1
1
Antonio Gramsci, 2007, “What is Man” in
The Modern Prince and other writings
pg. 78
2
While I do not have the space to give a full treatment of whether or not Gramsci used the word praxis as a codefor marxism or to denote a new type of analysis beyond marxism, I want give it some attention. In particular,considering that Gramsci’s concern is in maintaining the unity between theory and practice in Marxism it isarguable that by using the phrase ‘philosophy of praxis’ he is advocating neither a turn to new ‘marxism’ or using acode; rather, he may be arguing for an ‘old’ marxism or more precisely a return to the primary tenets of historicalmaterialism. In this sense, the use of ‘philosophy of praxis’ may have been used to denote a return to an analysisthat considered the relations between living human beings and in this sense, a firm connection between theory andaction. After-all, this connection was elusive in some versions of marxism espoused in western and eastern europesome of which had advocated for a scientific approach that abandoned historical materialism’s focal point of livinghuman relations in favor of what Gramsci referred to as transcendental or futurist variations of historicalmaterialism. (see Gramsci’s “Critical Notes on an Attempt at a Popular Presentation of Marxism by Bukharin” and“Marxism and Modern Culture” in
The Modern Prince and other writings
)
3
Georg Lukacs, 1971, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,”
History and Class Consciousness,
trans.Rodney Livingstone, pg. 93
bourgeois society through the reification of consciousness. In particular, as a capital exchangecircuit begins to dominate the social relations and processes of exchange in society (M-C-M),the expression of value becomes increasingly quantitative as a calculus of efficiency,measurement, and productivity thereby allows workers to be measured in comparative value(quantitatively in product, efficiency etc.) based on a standardized calculation of one hourswork
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. This necessitates the development of natural laws, multiple calculuses from which to planand measure economic activity, standardize labour and mechanize production. In the immediatesense, this reifies the existing social relations within the production process as it allows thesehuman relations to be measured, understood and approached as mere units of labour (things);however, simultaneously the development of these natural laws, and ideological implements tounderstand the ‘market’ serve to entrench these reified structures into the broaderphilosophical consciousness of bourgeois society (i.e. within the disciplines
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of Economics,Science). In particular, bourgeois science approaches the world as the only possible world; andthus it is rendered into a discrete empirical reality formalized with universal laws andimperatives that are supported by, but also used to deduce a priori, a set of isolated objects thatmake up the whole continuum of bourgeois knowledge:‘facts’
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.
!
However, as Lukacs notes, the more sophisticated and specialized bourgeois societybecomes in its categorization, measurement and comprehension of its area of expertise themore it must “turn its back on the ontological problems” that belie its own epistemology
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. Inthis sense, the critical impulses of bourgeois society are neutralized and bourgeois scienceremains incapable of moving beyond the original natural laws it first postulated and used toestablish its intellectual and moral predominance over the feudal order. In other words, throughthe fusion of its natural laws to the structure of commodity exchange, the iconoclastic power of bourgeois philosophy is inverted, reified and ultimately reconstituted into a force of pureconservatism: “we live in the best of all possible worlds
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”.
!
Consequently, through the development of these reified relationships throughoutbourgeois society (e.g. within art, science, production, exchange, reproduction) a series of tendencies are put in motion that not only naturalize capitalist society but simultaneously createan ideological carapace to further shield and strengthen these reified relations/structures. Forinstance, in terms of the former, the bourgeois reduction of the world to an object completewith discoverable natural laws transforms the practical activity of the individual into a ‘thing’ thatis subject to the overarching objective metabolic forces of the ‘economy’ (i.e. supply anddemand, equilibrium, the invisible hand etc). Consequently, what are in reality a series of relations between living human beings are recast as mere vectors in a closed system that exists
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“
Therefore we should not say that one man during an hour is worth another man’s hour but rather that one manduring an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour” Karl Marx,
Capital Volume 1
pg. 374-6.
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Ironically, this word itself is a form of reification. “ What does the word discipline suggest other than a set of boundaries beyond which specialized knowledge dare not go? Any Epistemology that defines its inquiry in relationto its boundaries cannot produce anything but partial truths; and, therefore, is destined for intractable impassesbetween its own ‘laws’ and the social totality it remains fettered, by its own reasoning, from fully acknowledging.
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In this sense, bourgeois science reduces the processes of social life, of its own social existence, to a series of atomized facts strung together in the patina of an eternal natural law. As a result relations and processes onceunder the microscope of bourgeois science are fragmented and reduced to singular categorizable ‘things’ that canbe separated from the context of politics, culture or history. Arguable, in a world where human relationshipsbetween individuals are buried within objects a social and psychological need to situate oneself within factsbecomes paramount for the stability of the individuals psyche; thus the need for these facts to be reproduced andconsumed regularly becomes paramount, ushering in new scales of educative institutions whose primary mandate,in varying degrees, is to teach the individual ‘how’ to digest facts.. “Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys andgirls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” Thomas GradGrind, Chapter 1 “ The One Thing Needful” in
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens, pg. 47.
7
Georg Lukacs, 1971, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in
History of Class Consciousness
pg.104.
8
The catchphrase of Professor Pangloss from Voltaire's novel
Candide
typifies the key principle of Bourgeoisscience.
apart from human relations, and is propelled forward by seemingly immaterial forces, whichappear to exist beyond the control points of human activity or mediation.
!
For example, in a recent statement Steven Harper announced that Canada was in a‘technical recession’ defined as: a decline of real national output over two successive quarters.This statement generated hostility from opposition parties on the grounds that a series of layoffs and the reduction of working hours were not technical but real elements of a recession;however, both Harper’s initial statement and the opposition’s rebuttals, arguably, operate withina common reified consciousness of the economy as a system that can be measured, quantified ingrowth, and is subject to objective forces (i.e. layoffs, and reduction in work hours as issuescaused by a ‘supra phenomenal’ objective force: the ‘recession’). In this sense, the relations of living human beings whose practical activity and labour produce and reproduce the materialconditions of reality are sublimated into ‘things’ that make up the structural forces produced bythe ‘natural laws’ (or in the case of financial crisis the alleged disruption of these natural laws) of the market. Subsequently, both the initial statement and the subsequent rebuttals serve only tofurther reify capitalist relations
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and further entrench reification into the collective socialconsciousness. It is through these processes that a similar ‘consciousness’ comes to existsbetween speakers who would consider themselves ideologically opposed (I shall return to thesignificance of this point later).
!
However, beyond this topical example we can also identify how the reification of consciousness is articulated in spheres of interaction that are not ostensibly directly related tothe ‘economy.’ In particular, the relationships and practices that uphold capitalist society arereified within the legal system. In particular, the rule of law in capitalist society must be capableof expressing the economic conditions of society without being reduced to a set of antinomiesby the class interests that often act as a centrifugal force creating profound and visibledisjunctures between the legal structure and the ‘neutral’ application of law to classes incapitalist society
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. In this sense, law is, on the one hand, a site in bourgeois society and at theinternational level where the immanent contradictions in the capitalist order are rendered mostvisible; insofar that the facticity of natural and positive laws as isolated rules that exist beyondhistorically determined material conditions, (as universal rules derived from abstract reality) arequickly realized to be expressions of concrete relations within society or the internationalorder
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; and in this sense, once these legal articles are understood to be concrete relationswithin society rather than ‘mere objective things’ some elements of consciousness are de-
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The great irony of course is that the ‘crisis’ is the moment where the patina of natural laws governing over theeconomy are cast aside and for a brief moment before the energies of the intellectual order (a)mend the dislocatedlaws of supply and demand or the mechanisms of the invisible hand, the frailty of these laws is laid bare as thestructural contradictions immanent within these relations float to the surface of society. That such, contradictionshave not been uncovered with greater clarity within this crisis is perhaps a testament to how thoroughly reifiedsocial life is in the west.
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A legal system that upholds the right to free association yet rules that freedom of association does not includethe right for unions to strike is an example of such a disjuncture. See, the Dolphin Delivery Case, 1986, where itwas decreed by the supreme court of canada that the freedom of association in the Charter of Rights andfreedoms did not include the right to strike.
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(An example of this at the international level would be the invasion of Iraq as international law lacked thecapacity to sanctify an overt imperialist war; in this sense, as international lawyers mined the archives of international law for a legal justification of ‘preemptive strike’ international law was rediscovered as not merely acompendium of dusty legal articles (things) but as a expression of concrete relations connected to specific needs(oil and a ‘clean’ territory that could be configured legally, socially and politically to the demands of flexible capitalaccumulation) of a social class. Another example can be found in the dredges of history. The Dutchman Grotius, thefirst international lawyer, initially argued that all states, people and prince were bound together by natural lawwithin a Great (international ) society; however, as the East India Trading Company expanded and came into conflictwith Portugal over maritime trade this society was made amenable to private wars, which were just and part of natural law if they were waged to advance an individuals and a nation’s right to trade. (See Bull, Hedley, 1990, “TheImportance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations” in
Hugo Grotius and International Relations,
OxfordUniversity Press.)
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