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This article critically examines the emergent phenomena of AI-generated and NFT art through the lens of Georg Lukács’ theory of reification and its existential implications. Lukács argued that under capitalism, social relations and human experiences are transformed into objective, quantifiable commodities, leading to a fragmented and alienated consciousness. Applying this framework to AI and NFT art, these technologies can be said to represent extreme examples of the reification of art and creativity in the digital age. AI art generators reduce artistic production to abstract, computable properties divorced from lived experience, while NFTs transform digital art into speculative commodities, imposing the logic of private property and exchange value onto the previously open domain of online culture. The existential dimension of this reification is explored, raising questions about the nature of creativity, originality, and the value of art in an increasingly financialized and automated world. The article suggests that a Lukácsian critique must not only diagnose the reified character of these cultural forms but also identify their potential for resistance and transformation, pointing toward a re-humanized and emancipatory vision of art in the digital age. Contemporary theorists such as Tiziana Terranova, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Benjamin Noys are invoked to further elucidate these issues.

This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

This essay argues that the supermarket partakes in the reification of the nuclear family form. The supermarket is a ubiquitous food space, shaping subjectivity through the ordinary aspects of everyday life. The ubiquity of this space obscures the historical nature of the nuclear family, presenting it instead as the natural and necessary structure of kin relations. I begin with a discussion of Georg Lukács’ account of reification, examining the ways reification thus theorized reveals the reifying force of the supermarket. I then make an intervention into Lukács’ notion of reification, attending to the ways domestic labor, procreation, the production of labor power, and the home as the center of consumption support the reification of the nuclear family both in and outside of the supermarket. In conclusion, this analysis points to the connections between the supermarket, the nuclear family form, and the production of climate chaos to argue that reconfigurations of family and food relations are necessary in the face of ongoing and proliferating climate-related crises.

The central axis of the article is the argument that History and Class Consciousness adopts from the Hegelian dialectics not only the category of totality but also the master–slave dialectic, although it never refers explicitly to the latter. Hence, in this article, we aim to detect the subtle influence that the Hegelian master–slave dialectic exerts on History and Class Consciousness and, more specifically, on the constitution of the Lukacsian concepts of reification, praxis, working class-bourgeoisie interaction, working-class self-consciousness, autonomous subject. Our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is mostly – but not only – based on its philosophical–anthropological interpretation by A. Kojeve. Kojeve’s interpretation, by attributing a crucial role to labour in the mastery–slavery dialectic, focuses on that aspect of the Hegelian dialectic which, in our estimation, was determining for HCC. In addition, our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is based on some occasional references Lukacs has to it in Young Hegel as well as on his interpretation latent in History and Class Consciousness.

In this article, I reflect on the future of macro-sociolinguistic research from a global-south perspective. I discuss the role that activism has played in scholarly work, and how such activism was hampered by persistent ideologies of 'thingification'; that is, ideologies that created languages and nations as 'objects' (to be managed and controlled by states and local/national/global elites). I ground the history of such discourses in colonialism-capitalism. I further explore the global and local regimes of language that were created through the dehumanizing violence of colonialism-capitalism, as well as the alternative futures that have been imagined by all those who resisted – and continue to resist – this violence. I conclude with some thoughts on temporalities, on the different relationships with, and to, time and the urgency of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick's films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick's works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film's immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze's semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick's constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick's films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I introduce the implantation argument, a new argument for the existence of God. Spatiotemporal extensions believed to exist outside of the mind, composing an external physical reality, cannot be composed of either atomlessness (infinite divisibility, atomless gunk), or of Democritean atoms (extended simples), and therefore the inner experience of an external reality containing spatiotemporal extensions believed to exist outside of the mind does not represent the external reality (inner mind does not represent external, mind-independent, reality), the mind is a mere cinematic-like mindscreen (a mindscreen simulation), implanted into the mind by a creator-God. It will be shown that only a creator-God can be the implanting creator of the mindscreen simulation (the creator of reality), and other simulation theories, such as Bostrom's famous account, that do not involve a creator-God as the mindscreen simulation creator, involve a reification fallacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staatsschulden werden in diesem Beitrag auf ihre doppelte Fetischisierung hin untersucht. Sie erscheinen, obschon Resultat komplexer gesellschaftlicher Prozesse, als Ding, das mit simplen moralischen Urteilen aufgeladen werden kann. Unter Rückgriff auf die Fetischtheorie von Karl Marx und die darauf aufbauende Verdinglichungstheorie von Georg Lukács wird argumentiert, dass diese Verdinglichungen in den grundlegenden Strukturen des Kapitalismus angelegt sind, den sozialen Formen; und dass sie durch theoretische Kritik und politische Praxis verflüssigt werden können. Dabei wird unter Bezugnahme auf weitere Positionen des Westlichen Marxismus mit Lukács über Lukács hinausgegangen, indem die spezifischen Fetischisierungen des Schuldenfetischs und des Territorialfetischs bestimmt werden und ihre Kombination zur Erklärung der extremen Verdinglichung der Staatsschulden herangezogen wird. Insgesamt plädiert der Beitrag für eine an die Dialektik von Verdinglichung und Verflüssigung orientierte Untersuchung und Kritik geographischer Gegenstände. This article scrutinizes the double fetishization of public debt. Even though they are the result of complex social processes, they appear as a thing that can easily be attributed moral meaning. Building on the theory of fetishization of Karl Marx and the theory of reification of George Lukács, the article argues that these reifications are inscribed into the fundamental structures of capitalism, i. e. into the social forms; and that these reifications can be liquefied through theoretical critique and political praxis. In order to do so, it is necessary to go beyond Lukács with Lukács by applying his theory to the specificities of the debt fetish and the territorial fetish, and by combining the two in order to explain the extreme reification of public debt. More generally, the article calls for a use of Lukàcs's dialectic of reification and liquefaction for geographical objects of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some key categories in the study of language and society – such as the notion of identity and the very notion of language itself – have come under critical scrutiny with the rise of concepts such as translanguaging. While acknowledging the epistemological and political necessity of this critique I caution against the conflation of concepts with social realities. At the same time, I argue for a critical practice that does not subsume the local in favor of global theoretical trends, which can result from conceptual reification occurring due to an insidious nexus between neo-liberal forces and global inequalities in knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Da das Umgreifende, das dialektisch auch das Ideelle umfasst, das Materielle ist, besteht das spezifische Weltverhältnis des Menschen in der Arbeit. Der Mensch ist nicht durch Prozesse der Verdinglichung, die zu seinem historischen Wesen gehören, entfremdet: Entfremdung wird vor allem durch die Unterwerfung des Individuums unter die Logik und die Wirklichkeit der Arbeitsteilung, d. h. durch die Vereinseitigung seiner Fähigkeiten bewirkt. Dargestellt wird dabei die jeweilige intensive Totalität der menschlichen Welt, um kathartisch, d. h. erschütternd auf den Menschen einzuwirken: in der konfrontativen und aneignenden Läuterung der Katharsis wird der ganze Mensch aus der Partikularität seines Seins befreit, wodurch er sich mit den großen weltgeschichtlichen Inhalten der Gattung identifiziert und ‚das Ganze des Menschen' erlangt. [Extracted from the article]

1 BGB auf die Bestellung eines Nießbrauchs an einem übertragbaren Recht anwendbaren Vorschriften gehören nur die Vorschriften, die allgemein für die Übertragung des mit dem Nießbrauch zu belastenden Rechts gelten. 1 BGB auf die Bestellung eines Nießbrauchs an einem übertragbaren Recht anwendbaren Vorschriften gehören aber entgegen der Annahme des Beschwerdegerichts nur die Vorschriften, die allgemein für die Übertragung des mit dem Nießbrauch zu belastenden Rechts gelten. 1 BGB als auch diese Motive des Gesetzgebers geben allerdings keinen Aufschluss darüber, ob für die Bestellung des Nießbrauchs nur die für die Übertragung des mit dem Nießbrauch zu belastenden Rechts normalerweise geltenden Vorschriften oder auch Vorschriften anwendbar sein sollen, die eine besondere Ausgestaltung der Rechtsübertragung zulassen. 22(a) Die Vereinbarung eines Zustimmungsvorbehalts nach § 12 WEG hat in der Mehrzahl der Anwendungsfälle den Zweck, den Wohnungseigentümern die Möglichkeit zu geben, sich gegen»das Eindringen unerwünschter Personen in die Gemeinschaft und gegen sonstige unerwünschte Veränderungen im Personenkreis der Teilhaber zu schützen«(BT-Drucks. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the transformation of the concept of History as it can be traced in the writings of Günther Anders. Anders is primarily known as a critique of modern technology specifically of the atomic bomb, which made him a mentor for the first anti-nuclear movement in West-Germany in the late 1950s. His historical thinking was therefore mainly perceived in its post-historic and apocalyptic dimensions. A closer look at his earlier writings reveals not only that his questioning of the modern concept of History began long before the "ontological cesura" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The article discusses two unpublished philosophical manuscripts as well as passages from his Californian diaries, both dating from 1940/41 and focussing the concept of progress. To follow his thoughts from two different angles – historical philosophical inquiry (however fragmented) and the literary form of his diary – gives us insight in his specific methodology of writing coined "Gelegenheitsphilosophie". This specific form between "journalism and metaphysics" enables Anders to review abstract philosophical concepts on the basis of everyday observation. In the crucial year 1941 Anders reviews progress-thought from the perspective of a Hollywood film studio, raising questions of tradition, authenticity and technological progress in cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an experimental design, this paper tackles the question of the framing impact of metaphors by focusing on the opportunity to implement a basic income (BI) system in a given polity. We take advantage of the preliminary stage of the BI debate in Belgium to study the influence of discursive strategies on the opinion formation process of individuals, since carefully choosing the arguments employed to address this question can help increase its psychological feasibility. Our experiment aims at determining to what extent the confrontation of individuals to metaphors illustrating the BI system impacts the way they apprehend its implementation. We show that very light variations in an informative text can induce major differences in the opinion formation process of the participants. BI proponents should thus pay attention to which metaphors are put forward in the public debate, as this could modify its outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explains the tenets of an updated version of semiosic translation. Many of the ideas in this paper have been brewing for some time. For example, the integration of the Peircean notions of sign and abduction and the Wittgensteinian concepts of rule-following, complex-fact, and hypothesis. It turns out that this synthesis leads to some new proposals about translation semiotics that seek to move the field from the reification of objects, concepts and practices toward a broader conception of translation and translating centered on the translator's agency. What this means is, among other things, that semiosic translation avoids a delimitation of signification (things and actions conveying meaning) by rejecting any conceptual appeals tinged with foundationalism. Rather, my argument will concentrate on elucidating the unpredictability of semiosis as a determinant of all forms of translation across sign systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Essentialist conceptions about language, and the relationship between language and other things, are still fairly common in society, and to some extent in linguistics. It is of particular relevance when working with specific (named or unnamed) languages in multilingual environments, or with one specific (named or unnamed) variety of a language among many. This article investigates how essentialism manifests in a collection of macro-sociolinguistic research articles on Afrikaans in contemporary, multilingual South Africa through critical discourse analysis. The findings indicate that subtle and covert indications of an extent of essentialism are quite common in the data, and even explicitly essentialist statements and claims are not completely absent. Some counter-examples of and challenges to essentialism in the data are also explored, although they are found to be less common than covert instances of essentialism. Suggestions regarding a few essentialism-related problems that arise from the data are discussed briefly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is in vain that one looks for realistic descriptions of landscapes in skaldic poetry. There is no interest in the landscapes where the actions which are the only concerns of this genre take place. However, landscape features such as mountains, the sea, trees, caves or the sky are perceptible in the system of the kennings, yet only as more or less abstract ideas. They mostly lack congruence within their semantic and situational contexts as is shown by the examples of kennings for 'earth' and 'sea'. However, a more inclusive research shows that there are images of landscapes that may be called metaphorical or mythical. These may be conceptualized as different types: (1) The emotional state of individual characters can be projected on to landscapes (e.g. Hallfreðr, Óláfs Erfidrápa 19). (2) The inner space of a human being can be depicted as a landscape. This is the case in countless kennings for ‚breast‘ used as metaphors for the insides of a human being, found most frequently in various kennings for 'poetry'. (3) Descriptions of sea-voyages on the turbulent sea are situated at the border of real and mythical landscapes in as much as the sea may be depicted as a threatening monster ready to devour the ship (e.g. Refr Gestsson, Ferðavísur). Alternatively, the storm that generates the churning sea may be personified as a giant (Egill Skallagrímsson, Lausavísa 23). (4) Þórsdrápa presents a special case in its depiction of Þórr’s journey to Geirrøðr and the land of giants. In this instance there appears to be some kind of interchangeable relation between the landscape - especially rivers - and demonic or mythical beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "space of literature" is a metaphor for literature introduced by the French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot to express the specificity of literary discourse, which says what otherwise cannot be said. In this it produces a community around the unsayable. This ability to say something previously unsaid makes literature to some extent akin to scientific inquiry. In the last decades, research in Old Norse-Icelandic studies has not focussed on this aspect of the saga literature. The study of the sociological conditions for literary production in medieval Iceland can explain why the self-conscious pursuit of literary expression resulted in the emergence of a unique literary genre, the Saga about early Icelanders (Íslendingasögur). This group of sagas projects on a particular temporal and spatial construct, that of Iceland during the Settlement and Conversion periods, the unspoken concerns of their time of writing, the Sturlung age and its aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on rabbinic notions of animation, materiality, agency, and representation, as well as on the boundaries between the thing, the human, and the divine. Additionally, the paper argues that while rabbis attempted to neutralize the claims of such image-things, in part by exposing their materiality, their excess nonetheless escaped such rabbinic efforts. Finally, the paper argues that in the fourth century, along with the 'material turn' in the Roman world inspired by Christian engagement, we find not only a greater sense of the excess in the things of avodah zarah, but also a concomitant thingification of the rabbinic sage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between modern environmentalist thought and the sciences has been fraught with contradictions and reversals. Environmentalism relies on science as the basis of its arguments about the state of nature, but has also held scientific reifications of nature partially responsible for current environmental crises. Ecology has sometimes been perceived as an alternative to normal science, but climate change denial, particularly in the US, has led to a return to science as a firm foundation for environmental claims. In the nonfictional and fictional literature on environmental crises, nonetheless, science plays a varying role. Whereas texts and films concerned with climate change tend to endorse science, works that address pollution and toxicity often criticize the inability or the reluctance of scientists to forecast or diagnose the effects of toxins on human bodies. Formally, tropes and themes from speculative fiction have increasingly migrated to environmental nonfiction as a way of conveying environmental science to a broad public. The outcome of such rhetoric remains to be seen, as nonfiction writers typically underestimate the reinterpretation of scientific facts and figures as merely symbolic in the context of fictional narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on new media has always highlighted the assumption that in authoritarian contexts, communication technologies provide political activists with ampler space than available in the heavily policed physical world. However, social and political changes taking place throughout Egypt and the Arab region reflect a shift. In a country like Egypt, where only around 30% of the population have internet access, the vibrant digital media scene is relocating itself once more in public spaces. Digital initiatives, such as Askar Kadhibun (Lying generals) and Musirrin (Steadfast), are transforming online media material into older (pre-modern) modes of traditional media, such as graffiti and traveling street performances. This constitutes a shift towards the ascendancy of popular cultural production, and a challenge to the reification and sacrilization of digital media in a context where poverty and illiteracy play a major role in both the dissemination of information and in political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Within The Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant deals with the social institution of household, the Domestic Society, next to Property Right and Contract Right as part of the Private Right. The juridical problem to solve is the question to what extent human beings can be entitled to dispose persons as a 'belonging' at all. This problem of Reification insistently arises with regard to the relation of partners in a marriage: According to Kant, Sexuality as a consumption by which human beings make use of themselves as of things is reconcilable with the dignity of humanity only under the condition of marriage. By marrying, persons acquire one another reciprocally, so that they aren't in an external relation to one another any more. However, in contrast to this strict juridical reciprocity of the sexes in a marriage there is no corresponding equality concerning the regime of the household. Hence, with his anthropology of the sexes Kant unintentionally implements teleological patterns of argumentation into the Right of pure practical reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the study of professional discourse by focusing on the role of written texts in complex communication processes. It also aims to contribute to the field of social semiotics by problematizing the concept of grammatical metaphor, framing it multimodally and interactionally. The case in focus is a risk analysis meeting which is characterized by explicit definitions of goals and methods: the objective of risk analysis is to identify and evaluate potential risks that might threaten a project. However, the activity also has other goals, such as finding common ground and developing a joint perspective in the project group. Managing these divergent agendas is possible given the technique developed and the tools used: small pieces of paper, pens, a whiteboard, whiteboard markers, and oral conversation. In the choice of resources for different purposes, materiality is crucial. Because of the affordances of the small notes and the thick ink marker, the individual risks are thingified at an early stage, while oral conversation is used for problematization and negotiation. In the minutes, the construal of risks as things is preserved and contributes to the reification and thus technification of similar meanings in the social practice of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformative powers of global capitalism presently dispossess and unsettle millions of people as well as comprehensively reshape the built environment on previously unseen scales of creative destruction. When the world is constantly dis(re)membered in ever new ways remembrance as a both individual and trans-generational complex of experience, memory, and knowledge loses significance in everyday life. Confronting rapidly transforming neo-liberal landscapes across the globe, critical scholars no less than dispossessed migrants find themselves in a memory crisis akin to the one observed as part of the context of the French Revolution and the profound transformations of European modernization. In the article, this collective crisis of memory-knowledge-politics is addressed through an engagement with the four concepts “reification,” “amnesia,” “aphasia,” and “apraxia,” the former elaborated through the latter three. Time-space disjunction and dislocation, irrelevance of memory, incapacity to combine, and inability to practice, equates passivity and obedience in relation to the havoc wrought upon masses of people and places. A core concern of the article is to articulate the four concepts in relation to built space and its role not simply as reflection of but rather as effecting and exacerbating the memory-knowledge-politics crisis. The article suggests that the memory crisis has political urgency in the particular sense that a radical politics against reification needs to be articulated in relation to an understanding of built spaces as collective mnemonic assemblages of memory-knowledge-politics, while also suggesting that spaces might be mobilized to topologically articulate past and present intersectional relations of forgetfulness-ignorance-power, and thus possibly be made to contribute to rather than deflect political consciousness and continued struggles for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a reading of the effect of exchange on subjectivity. Two modes of exchange are discussed: commodity-exchange and gift-exchange. Following Marx, Simmel, Lukács, and Bewes, commodity exchange is argued to be detrimental to subjectivity insofar as it leads to abstract, mediated social relationships, and reifies the subject. Debates around the notion and application of reification are investigated. The anthropological insight of Mauss on gift-exchange is introduced and used to challenge elements of the thesis of reification and process of on-going commodification. Gift-exchange is argued to perpetuate concrete, immediate social relations. Critical attention is drawn to the gift as critique of the commodity. My interrogation suggests that there is a problem because the gift is often over-idealized in much gift discourse and figures as a binary opposite to the commodity. This is especially the case with one of the leading contemporary theorists on the gift, Jacques Godbout. Themes that support the notion of the gift, such as family and community bonds, reciprocity, and ‘face to face’ relations, are often taken for granted as being fully enabling. On the other hand commodity exchange is perceived as being exclusively disabling. The article begins to challenge this thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]