Re: Reifying activities?

stephanie spina (sspina who-is-at email.gc.cuny.edu)
Sun, 22 Sep 1996 13:22:47 -0400 (EDT)

Jay -

Your posting about notions of activities and paradigms for things leads
me to think that there may be something useful for this discussion in
Baudrillard's _The System of Objects_. As I read it -- admittedly, not
with the attention or depth it deserves and my schedule precludes at
this time -- it offers a pretty good argument for activity-as-
consumption, which speaks to the issues you raise about reification.
Consumption, according to Baudrillard, is _the virtual totality of all
objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent
discourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity
consisting of the conscious manipulation of signs_. (p.200). Thus, a
system of objects/things cannot be divorced from that system's ideology.
Paradoxically, reification, which you describe accurately, I think, as

>most interestingly the kinds of errors we make, having talked of
>a process as a thing, when we analyze it in thing-terms rather
>than process-terms, whatever the local-historical-structural
>origins of our dispositions to do so

also applies to the errors we make when we analyze a thing as a thing in
thing-terms as if it existed independent of processes, including its
conception, functionality, production, etc. and its meaning system
including its psychology (for e.g. as projection or substitution).

stephanie

stephanie urso spina
sspina who-is-at broadway.gc.cuny.edu

Reference: Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, Verso, 1996.