Reification
Interest (What is this for?)
Reification
0.0 MARY: If rhetoric is transposition of representation with communication with interpretation, reification is the way the world is, in an ontological sense.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 240-42.
0.22 MARY: Here is an image taken in a shopping mall. The large advertisement hanging across the atrium is rhetorical. It is trying to speak to shoppers with an explicit message. But the mall itself reifies. Reify comes from the Latin word “res” which means “thing.” Reification is the thinginess of the mall. It happens this particular mall is of world-historical importance - it is the first mall in the world, the Southdale Center in Minneapolis, opened in 1956
Now let’s parse several aspects of reification here in this mall. Downstairs you can see brightly lit shops, commodities that you may need to purchase, that you may or may not be able to afford. But these commodities and your purchasing power are related in a whole complex social and material formation of manufacture, corporations, work – and perhaps also exploitation, poverty, and existential angst. But in the resistant thinginess of this reality makes it seem to be a state of affairs that is inevitable and forever – when of course it is historical. 1956 was in historical terms the day before yesterday. And if it is historical, it is arguable.
Upstairs, another reification - you can see shuttered stores. With the rise of online shopping, malls and in-person stores are in decline, and where the decline is most serious, they become ruins. This is another version of reification, the sense of decline when you find you are living in ruins.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 247-52.
2.05 MARY: Now we are going to enter the shops. This is the world’s very first supermarket, Piggy-Wiggly, opened in Memphis in 1916.
2.14 MARY: Its inventor was Clarence Saunders, and here is his patent application. The patent application said:
“The object of my said invention is to provide a store equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve himself and, in so doing, will be required to review the entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently and attractively displayed … [T]he goods may be selected and taken by the customers themselves while making a circuitous path through the store.”
Supermarkets have since become ubiquitous parts of our lives… as if they have always been with us and always will, though in historical terms they only entered human life very recently.
3.02 MARY: Here, a supermarket consultant, Siemon Scamell-Katz, parses their meaning.
(1) is the grab zone or impulse area at the checkout. (5) is the traffic builder, essential items that are put in like milk that are positioned in the most inconvenient place possible, in order to force you past (4), where less essential items placed at so-called “buy level,” which is an average adult’s waist or chest level (items children might want are placed lower). Or, to get to the milk you might have go down (6), called the “power aisle,” for heavily promoted items.
Some parts of this experience are rhetorical, signs or advertisements, but this consultant advises the store owners for whom he works to keep these to a minimum – let the objects and the configuration of the space speak for themselves.
Reification is the inexorable, existential reality of having to live this experience in order to consume milk. The price of reification is the invisibility for the moment of the social relationships of corporations to workers and consumers, and the environmental consequences of this mode of living, so radically removed from environment. The meaning, and the selective blindness, is in the insistent thinginess of this arrangement, its apparent ontological inevitability.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 258-62.
4.40 MARY: Here we contrast across the various forms of meaning the processes of expression of interest via reification (the first row) with the rhetorical expression of interests (in the second row).
Roughly speaking, rhetoric is the explicit expression of interest. Reification is implicit, where interest is realized in ways that are not directly expressed. Indeed, reification is often a kind of cover-up, one that benefits some interests at the expense of others. The cover-up then becomes an essential part of the meaning. Parsing interest may uncover human inequalities and travesties of nature that throw into question established patterns of interest.
And of course, as our theory of transposition – there is no hard-and-fast distinction between rhetoric and reification. The one is always ready to become the other. If the cover-up in reification is exposed, the participants under question may resort to rhetoric. Or rhetoric may beckon participants into meanings where reification can kick in, the advertisement that brings somebody into a supermarket, for instance.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 242..
5.58 MARY: Which leads me now to mention two modes of reification, activation in which I am wanting milk to satisfy my human need, and alienation, when getting the milk may involve needless exploitation of people and nature, and senses of disquiet given the underlying cynicism and spiritual emptiness of a commodity-entranced world.
6.24 MARY: The great social and cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, parsed the commodity as a process of reification. The Paris arcades of the nineteenth century, which in some respects prefigured the twentieth century shopping mall, were, quoting Benjamin now, “street galleries… of lascivious commerce… wholly adapted to arousing desires … [T]he commodity proliferates along the margins and enters into fantastic combinations.”
This portrait of Benjamin was taken by a photographer who he greatly admired, Germaine Krull, a pioneer of photo-realism. He wrote about her and included her shop imagery in his “Little History of Photography.”
7.08 MARY: This is one of Germain Krull’s photographs, and these are Benjamin’s words: the “commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop window containing beautiful and expensive things.”
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 255-58.
7.22 MARY: Or, to quote artist Barbara Kruger in her modern update of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”—“I shop therefore I am.”
Reification is a state of being, a way of life, an ontology of ordinariness. To escape the thrall of reification, we need to parse its underlying patterns of interest.
- Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 267-68.