{"id":14136,"date":"2025-07-08T16:54:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T21:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2025-07-08T16:54:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T21:54:11","slug":"whats-the-question-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/07\/08\/whats-the-question-again\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the question, again?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> and here<\/a> for a few others), I wrote that<\/a> “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.<\/em> (Some of that series ultimately became <\/em>Shadowing the Anthropocene<\/a>, but here’s an example<\/a> of a piece that did not.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, and we fetishize<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is, we \u201cthingify,\u201d 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 \u2014 our productively libidinal, affective-emotional energy by which we connect ourselves to those things in a kind of emotional co-dependence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entire societies \u2014 cultures, religions, and so on \u2014 do this with specific objects, specific reifications, from which they select certain of them for deep libidinal investment. In early Christianity, \u201cspirit\u201d and \u201cbody\u201d 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 \u2014 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<\/em> 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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s real, reifications and dereifications, fetishizations and defetishizations, all arising and passing amidst the ongoing effort to find ourselves, to connect, to relate, to feel<\/em>, and especially to feel with others<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even calling it \u201cprocess itself,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does \u201cdoing it well\u201d mean? Well, that\u2019s 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)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,691847],"tags":[4417,348,711246,711247,4425,16911,711248,389,711245],"class_list":["post-14136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-religion-spirituality","tag-buddhism","tag-capitalism","tag-fetishization","tag-lacanianism","tag-marxism","tag-process-philosophy","tag-process-relational-philosophy","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-reification"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-3G0","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1040,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/03\/13\/the-other-biocultural-studies\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":0},"title":"the other biocultural studies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Following from the last entry: I should have mentioned the other kind of biocultural studies that's been getting more & more attention recently: see here, here, and here. The \"Biocultures Manifesto,\" which appeared in New Literary History back in 2007, seemed to suggest that it was time for all the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7775,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/09\/01\/dupre-on-process-biology\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":1},"title":"Dupr\u00e9 on process biology","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Writing in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science blog Auxiliary Hypotheses, widely published University of Exeter philosopher John\u00a0Dupr\u00e9\u00a0recently announced a project entitled A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology (PROBIO). According to Dupr\u00e9, who is\u00a0director of Egenis, the Center for the Study of the Life Sciences (formerly the ESRC\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/28\/process-objects-at-the-nonhuman-turn\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":2},"title":"Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies. The list of speakers reads like a \"who's who\" of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2668,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/02\/27\/sspeculative-rrealism-philosophy-as-life\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":3},"title":"s(S)peculative r(R)ealism & philosophy-as-life","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"It's nice to see Speculative Realism capturing the attention of SF writer and all-round idea impresario Bruce Sterling - see his Speculative Realism as \"philosophy fiction.\" As a long-time SF lover, the idea of \"philosophy fiction\" has always appealed to me. Some of the best writing in the genre has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10145,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/06\/02\/updated-process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":4},"title":"Updated process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 2, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I originally presented a \"primer\" to process-relational philosophy on this blog back in 2010. A substantially updated version of it is part of my book, Shadowing the Anthropocene. Here it is as a stand-alone, 10-page PDF file.","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7677,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/06\/21\/beatnik-brothers-in-parrhesia\/","url_meta":{"origin":14136,"position":5},"title":"“Beatnik Brothers” in Parrhesia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy\u00a0includes work by Quentin Meillassoux, Tristan Garcia, a review panel discussing\u00a0Katrin Pahl's Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion, and a piece by me on the objects-processes debate in speculative realist philosophy. The latter, entitled \"Beatnik Brothers? Between Graham Harman and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14136"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14146,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions\/14146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}