Reification of Objects

The Frankfurt school emphasized the ways in which the superstructure imposes upon the public consciousness, forms of cultural, psychological, and social conditions by which the bureaucratic system is , thus, maintained and the individual’s subjectivity is weakened and confined to a certain set of debased world-values, produced and distributed by what Adorno terms, the Culture Industry. Adorno’s conceptual reification acknowledges the gap between the object and the concept in a similar way as Ferdinand de Saussure’s differential structure of language which states that the semantic value of the signified is mediated by difference rather than the meaning being inherently inscribed in the signified itself. 

This comes to occur when the object is estranged from its particularities and viewed strictly from a framework of universals. The concept is more reminiscent of its Platonic ideal by which the object asymptomatically strives toward but inescapably falls short of. According to Karl Marx, the process of reification takes place when objects begin to transcend their purposive or intentional origins and assume a life of its own in which it renders qualities that seem to manifest themselves as invariant and unchanging. Similarly, in a market economy, an object’s worth is defined by its exchange-value rather than its use-value; therefore, the object is not inherently imbued with properties by which it receives its value, but is socialized to appear as such. The instrumental reason , utilized and fostered by the Enlightenment, assumed the object to be contingent upon that of the concept or that the object contained a set of necessary properties by which it was defined. Adorno’s qualms lies not in the concept or the object tout court, but rather the methods by which the relationship between the two is perceived. 

For example, the entertainment that is produced by the Culture Industry is instilled with a general quality of “sameness”; this sameness must be uniquely packaged relative to each type of consumer such as by class, age, and the like, but altogether, the organized patterns by which the larger bureaucratic interests are fulfilled and not deviated from, is that which makes these commodities indistinguishable from that of another. There is no escape from the filter by which objects are subsequently advertised and framed; the identity of the object is fixed upon it being an extension of work. While entertainment temporarily seeks to liberate the subject from the mundane, the nature of how these leisure activities are unified come to mirror those of the routine-laden work hours.