Sincerely, Rubber (Part 4)

This is Part 4 in a series titled "Sincerely, Rubber".

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply – electrical signals interpreted by your brain." – Morpheus, "The Matrix"

Sincerely, Rubber (Part 3) concluded with an allusion towards folks that are, I think, whether deliberately or subconsciously, resurrecting a personified Sincerity that had been incrementally starved over generations, then finally killed and shut into his coffin, by the Millennials. But before I talk about those folks, and in order to get the fullest picture of the extent of the effects, I'd like to expound on the wider phenomena that gives rise to the specific instantiation I've dubbed "Widgetfication".

My hope is that describing the more general phenomena, along with some practical examples, will help put a name to the intuitive, yet seldom articulated, force underlying Widgetfication. That force I'd like to describe is called "Reification".

Commodity Fetishism

In these ramblings, I'll be talking about ideas originating from the Frankfurt School, but you do not need to consider yourself a Marxist or Communist to recognize the utility of the Dialectical & Critical Methods for critiquing society.

Many of these ideas are fantastically articulated in a series from the "Lotus Eaters" Youtube Channel titled "Critical Based Theory". Although I do not align with the author's political conclusions, the series' description of Reification and its instantiations in society are spot on.

"Reification" was first articulated by the Hungarian Philosopher Georg Lukács, in his book "History and Class Consciousness". In it, Luckács describes the tendency of interpersonal relationships between people, in capitalist society, to become transformed and "reified" from a relationship between people into a relationship between commodities – between things, dare I say between widgets. This is a more general conceptualization that contains within it Marx and Engel's concept of "Commodity Fetishism". Before I go further, I'll first get some fundamental nomenclature out of the way – firstly: what is a commodity?

A commodity is simply anything that satisfies a human want. A shirt is a commodity, and so is a car or a watermelon or a taco. A house is a commodity, a piece of wood is a commodity, and a stock or an NFT are also commodities. Furthermore, Marx and Engel's dissect commodities into 3 distinct properties:

The first is labor value – how much labor was required to produce the commodity.

The second is use value – how aligned is the commodity with a human utility. For example, a pencil that does not write on paper is not really a pencil at all as it does not satisfy a pencil's utility – its telos.

The third is exchange value – what would be considered equivalent to exchange for the commodity. We've commonly used proxies for exchange value in the form of "money" or "currency".

"Commodity Fetishism" is the process by which, during the exchange process, labor value becomes divorced from the commodity, resulting in an illusion that the commodity arose not from labor, but from other commodities. In this way, the direct social relations between producer and consumer are first obfuscated, then eventually severed entirely; humans are alienated from the exchange process.

The amelioration of "Commodity Fetishism" has underpinnings in the increasing emphasis on "Shop Local"; at its core, the insistence on "Shopping Local" seems to be an effort to re-establish this relationship between producer and consumer

(but even this seemingly noble effort has become reified reducing "Shopping Local" to simply emphasizing, often times exploiting, the proximity of producer and consumer, rather than the social relationship between them)

Commodity Fetishism identifies a disfigurement of reality. Commodities begin to become totalities -- standalone objects in and of themselves, completely severed from their sources and their producers. With the social relation between producers and consumers severed, consumers begin to conceptualize commodities as "facts of the world" that simply "exist".

The concept of Commodity Fetishism simply identifies the phenomena of disfigurement, but it does not assert whether this disfigurement is desirable or undesirable. This is a separate issue.

So when the disfigurement of the social-relations is complete, either end of the relationship may change unbeknownst to the other, as long as the commodity's image is kept intact. This is what the broader process of reification truly transforms into something other than reality.

Reify Me, Captain.

Brands began as a way to encapsulate a commodity's labor value and use value into a captivating narrative to accompany its exchange value. As a 19th century US miner, for example, I might decide to purchase a pair of jeans produced by Levi Strauss & Co., because the brand represented a degree of labor and use value that meant high quality and utility.

The rivets at the corner of jean pockets and pants flys were an innovation from a Lativian-Jewish immigrant, Jacob Davis. When he could not finance the patent application for his riveting design (pun intended), Davis solicited his jeans wholesaler to finance the patent application. That wholesaler: Levi Strauss

The point of these ramblings is not to single out Levi's, it was simply used as a relatable brand.

The brand's "story" would conventionally consist of the founder's background, and how their insights resulted in a better product. This story would serve as a substitute in lieu of a direct social relationship between the producer and the consumer. In this way, the commodity's labor value and use value are thereby imputed into the brand and subsequently the branded commodity's exchange value – at least at first.

Not only does this first stage give rise to its fetishism, but also to the brand's eventual total reification. Since the brand encapsulates the underlying commodity's labor and use value away from the consumer, it may itself diverge from those underlying values, unbeknownst to the consumer (and perhaps even the commodity producer). In his book "Simulacra and Simulation", Jean Baudrillard systematizes this process into 4 stages.

The first stage is the one I've described above. The sign (read as 'brand') is a faithful encapsulation, such that consumer rightly believes, that the sign is a "reflection of a profound reality". This is what Baudrillard calls "the sacramental order".

The second stage is perversion of reality. The sign diverges from its hitherto imputed use and labor value – an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality. The sign does not faithfully encapsulate reality, and hints at the existence of an obscure reality.

The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality. The sign conveys itself as a faithful copy, but no longer has an original; it is a caricature completely decoupled from the original. It has no relationship to the original's labor value and use value, and no representation of any reality is present – the sign is arbitrary. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".

The fourth and final stage is pure simulacrum. The sign has no relationship to any reality, and has transcended to become its own reality – it has become a totalizing object in and of itself. It no longer needs to lay claim to any original because itself has become its own unique original. Subsequently, and most crucially, other signs may reference this simulacrum or reflect it as their own first stage. Baudrillard calls this the "hyperreal" – the "hyper reality". At this stage, total reification is complete.

The fourth and final stage of reification is recursive and compounding, signs referencing other signs – signs all the way down. At this stage, the original commodity's imputed values have been replaced in the hyperreal commodity by a new supreme value: sign value – the value of affiliation. Affiliation means affluence, and affluence means leverage. The original's use value becomes a secondary concern – in other words, human utility is reduced to a distraction. A clear case in point are fashion brands whose commodity's obscene exchange value have become completely unmoored as a reflection of the inside-out relationship between the original commodity and the reified brand's sign value.

Therefore, reification is fundamentally the process by which a commodity whose exchange value aligns with its labor and use values, transforms aka. "reifies", giving rise to an entirely new commodity, whose exchange value aligns solely with sign value, reducing labor value as instrumental, and use value – human utility, into an afterthought.

Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" phases of reification, although most intuitive when demonstrated using physical brands and commodities, is also here at their most benign. The truly pernicious reification is not of physical widgets, but of systems and regulating structures.

Luigi

"As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.

... The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity" - Karl Marx "Capital"

Insurance providers are particularly prone to reification. Often by design, insurance disconnects the relations between producer and consumer; its underlying commodity, the market between producer and consumer, is fetishized out of the box. Empirically-derived criteria are established as a way to mediate between producer and consumer.

But even when the criteria was determined faithfully, with the disfigurement in place and the incentive to maximize exchange value, the empirical structures reify, as the market mediated by the insurance provider becomes a totality, eventually turning against both producer and consumer. Classifications contrived by the insurance provider dictate what both the provider may provide, and what the consumer may consume. In the case of health insurance in the US, providers spend more resources ensuring their behavior and treatments are in compliance with health insurance providers coverage than they do meaningfully treating patients. On the other end, patients spend more resources navigating the maze of premiums, copays, deductibles, and covered procedures, than working with healthcare providers on treatment that is most aligned with their needs. The system that first aimed to maximize use value, now reified and having a life of its own, now works to simply sustain itself, at the detriment of use value and the instrumentation of labor value.

Another example is standardized tests in schools. These standards were first established as an empirical method for assessing the efficacy of an educational body. But with the disfigurement in place, and eventually funding predicated on the achievement of these standards, the standards reified, becoming totalities, divorced from education efficacy. Educators spend more resources checking off standards criteria than they do educating students. The need to posture the standard's sign supersedes the original use value. The effective education of students takes a back seat to the preservation of the standards.

In general, independent empirically-driven standards are prime for reification, as they are fetishized out of the box, and then market forces compel them to totalize. The malaise felt by humans working in these systems is almost universally experienced, but for those folks is also difficult to articulate. This is due to the standards themselves having become a totality – a phantasmic ghost with a life of its own, whose sole purpose is to sustain itself, disconnected from any use value, but with seemingly no human to answer for them, the standards simply "exist". Yet more empirical standards are established to assess the compliance with all the other standards, then governing bodies to enforce and detangle up the stack. This gives rise to the structure plaguing modern society: bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the reification of regulatory systems.

With sign value identified as the reified commodity value uber alles, we now arrive at its most pernicious simultaneous victims and villains. Reification consumes all, and the "Convergence of Opposites" subsumes even its most staunchly purported opponents.

This is the end of Part 4 in a series titled "Sincerely, Rubber".