Don’t Gift Me That

Reification marches on. More on that word may be found on this blog (link), but in that note I failed to mention one meaning of the word. It also means to drain the life out of something, thus to make it seem like a corpse. Today the Wall Street Journal features an article on its Personal page titled “The Science Behind Gifting.” It uses two words that both do this—and then it concentrates on that mo-mo-modern linguistic delight, regifting. The science consists of asking people questions in surveys, which, like “gifting,” comes about as close to rendering Nothingness tangible, audible, and tactile as I am able to imagine. Below that article WSJ gifts me with news of mad-cow disease, to the right with news about heart attacks (actually how to avoid them by dieting). I’d rather catch the one or be felled by the other than learn to manage my gifting. Bah! Humbug!

Verdinglichung

English is a Germanic language but managed to get itself so mixed with Latin that the title of this post in English is Reification. Now that’s a word one has to learn. It does not communicate its own meaning. Well, Caesar did his damndest, but he didn’t succeed well enough to Latinize German. Therefore the same word, in German, communicates without your having to know, in advance of meeting reification, that its root is res, or thing. Translated literally, we’d have to say thing-making-into. That ending, making-into, we always render in Latin. It comes from facere. We have objectification, beautification, verification—and we verbify those words by using fy. So we could say thingify and get the gist just right—and right away improve the word by making thing visible. Now the irony of this little word is that it has Marxist origins. Marx accused Capitalism of thingifying people. He thought—at least for political purposes—that people were in some ways superior to things. He was being inconsistent, being an atheist. The notion that people are in some ways superior comes from the traditions of belief. (Yes, I’m aware. Reification is also used in the philosophical context as the concretization of something abstract, thus a fallacy—kindred of the pathetic fallacy that causes a lake to smile in the sunshine.) Reification came to my mind as I wrote the last post, because I find that action everywhere displayed as a cause or expression of mass culture—and I always think of it as Verdinglichung because it’s more, as it were, concrete.

Reification

When I first came across this curious word I understood it right away—and that because my little Latin sufficed to tell me that the re stood for the Latin res, thing. Therefore the word meant thingification—and signals the process whereby something that isn’t is turned into something that is—a thing. The word comes from German, Verdinglichung. It was coined by Marx, but for German readers it is as immediately understandable as thingification is in English, but with a lesser feel of awkwardness, the reason being that both parts of Verdinglichung come from West Germanic roots, but in thingification the thing is West Germanic but the -ification comes from Latin; the smell of a mongrel is in the air. Not surprisingly, therefore, translators rendered that German word in Latin. A variant is Versachlichung, rendered as objectification, and that English word is much less awkward because object comes from Latin too. Germans are less inclined to form neologisms from Latin—one reason why it is relatively easier to read philosophical works in that language. That Norman invasion has done strange things to English.

What Marx had in mind was turning living labor into gold, thus into a lifeless, tradable good. I came across the word in a more philosophical context and discovered, only this morning, that Marx and economics loomed behind it. In the philosophical context it stands for turning spiritual values into the material. Hence this word is a terrific single sound for characterizing cultural decline. It’s everywhere. Life is just a species of chemical reactions. Mind’s just the firing of neurons.