immanence

Some sixteen years ago, in the first of a series of pieces that tried to define what my work aimed toward (which at the time I called a “post-anthropocentric political ecology”; see here and here for a few others), I wrote that “what is essential is a collective struggle to wrest a realm of compassionate solidarity from a realm of suffering based in delusion.” Here’s a revisit of that idea. (Some of that series ultimately became Shadowing the Anthropocene, but here’s an example of a piece that did not.)

Among other analyses of the human condition, Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and a certain humanistic Marxism converge on the following understanding: that in an unstable and ultimately unreliable world, a world whose instability itself turns around an unstable and unreliable “us” at its center, we all do two things. We reify, and we fetishize.

That is, we “thingify,” treating unstable, dynamic, and elusive relations as well as conceptual abstractions as if they were stable, reliable, tangible objects. This gives us a sense of solidity by which we can comfortably move around amidst intangible processes. And, secondly, we invest some of those objects and abstractions with our desire — our productively libidinal, affective-emotional energy by which we connect ourselves to those things in a kind of emotional co-dependence.

Entire societies — cultures, religions, and so on — do this with specific objects, specific reifications, from which they select certain of them for deep libidinal investment. In early Christianity, “spirit” and “body” were reified, and the savior on the cross (and his saintly representatives) fetishized. Some early agricultural societies fetishized the maternal in the land, and later Christianity turned this into the Mother of God. In Nazism, the Nordic race and international Jewry were reified and fetishized, positively in the first case and negatively in the second, with Hitler becoming a stand-in for the former and the elimination of the latter being the first in a series of imagined purifications. With capitalism, the reification is on two levels — there is the fetishization of commodities, the objects of our desire, which becomes the engine for perpetual economic growth, and there is the fetishization of growth itself, the sine qua non of reality for the high priests who compel us to never abandon our faith. And so it goes down the line of every ideology ever to have seen the light of day.  

Some ideologies began as critiques of these very processes. Buddhism aimed its critical insight onto the process of reification, encapsulating it within its teaching of Pratitya-Samutpada, or codependent arising. It developed meditative practices by which individuals could de-reify all things, including even themselves. In the process, it delivered fetishes of buddhas and bodhisattvas of many colors, forms, and sizes. Marxism became a fetishization of the proletariat, its spokespeople (the Party), and the future it claimed to build; in battling its arch-enemy, capitalism, it failed miserably. Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, despite its best efforts, fetishizes lack, the Real, or desire itself.

We cannot function for long without reifying, and society can hardly be maintained without fetishizing. This knowledge can be helpful, especially if we learn to see it in the process of its happening — and to see process itself as what’s real, reifications and dereifications, fetishizations and defetishizations, all arising and passing amidst the ongoing effort to find ourselves, to connect, to relate, to feel, and especially to feel with others.

But even calling it “process itself,” as I just did, risks reifying unnecessarily. Sociality requires a certain measure of reification; love, even more so. The point is to do it well while remembering that we are not our reifications, our fetishes, our objects; and neither are they, us.

But what does “doing it well” mean? Well, that’s the starting point for real life. Could we learn to do it well with those closest to us? And then, could we learn what reifications (agreements, contracts, institutions) might help us do it well in a world of eight billion of us (and many more beyond that who are also worthy of our respect)?

If we could even collectively ask this question, without too much investment in the different answers we bring to it, we’d be getting somewhere.