Form and content

But the story of Lask’s influence on Lukács is not finished with these observations. Lask’s theory of meaning was intended to solve a fundamental problem in Kant’s philosophy, the problem of the thing-in-itself. Lask’s interpretation of the transcendental differed from Kant’s in that Lask did not propose a principle of mental synthesis by which forms would join with the content of sense experience. He dismissed the whole Kantian philosophical psychology and argued that the forms are independent of the mind. As subjects we are in immediate contact with a meaningful world. That world has its meaning in itself, not in our minds.

But meaning as we have seen is not identical with existence. The forms form a content that emerges with them from the original unity of the existing thing. This content is not a separate “thing,” for every thing is grasped through its meaning. Rather, the content is simply that which is so grasped. The easiest way to understand this is in terms of point of view. I apprehend a cup under the meaning “cup” but the content so apprehended could also inhabit other forms, for example, Wedgwood, or physical determinants such as weight and volume. What is more, the meaning “cup” could itself appear as a content for a higher level meaning such as “dinnerware,” or an entirely different meaning such as “three letter words.” In each case the content is formed by the meaning but not exhausted by it. Lask calls this contingent relation of form and content the “irrationality” of content. This is his reinterpretation of the Kantian thing-in-itself.⁴⁴

In Kant the thing-in-itself hovers inconclusively on the border between the ontic and the ontological. It is unclear if it really is a “thing” or a hypothetical precondition of sensation. The ambiguity reflects a gap between form and content Kant formulated as the limitation of finite human knowledge to objects of experience. Experience is rational, i.e., meaningful, insofar as it is imprinted by the forms of understanding, but its matter ultimately escapes the forms. In Lask this tension is reduced to a shadow of itself. The irrationality of content is simply the trace left by the contingency of the relation of meaning to existence, the fact that no particular entity is destined to any one specific meaning.

Lask argued that Hegel attempted to encompass the irrational existence of things in his system of categories. But this “emanationist” logic fails because existence cannot be deduced from concepts. The irrational is a necessary correlate of the rational. The principle of the irrationality of contents is also central to Lukács’s theory of reification. And he joins Lask in rejecting emanationism. But he does not accept Lask’s explanation of irrationality. Instead, he introduces an entirely new approach to the problem of the contents of the forms that shatters the structure of Lask’s theory.

Lukács historicizes the form/content dialectic and treats the structure of meaning at the highest level of generality as a cultural form, as the principle of intelligibility of an epoch. As we have seen, reification characterizes the capitalist epoch. But in redefining form as a cultural principle in this sense, Lukács undermines Lask’s characterization of content as a purely logical correlate. Content no longer stands in an ideal relation to its form but now acquires a real relationship to it. Objects enter culture through social processes that can be studied and understood. What is more, tensions between objects and their forms can be observed and analyzed. The concept of the irrational contents of the forms now takes on a factical power Lask would never have allowed.

These modifications of Lask’s schema have two consequences that Lukács develops in the second and third parts of the “Reification” essay. In the first place, Lukács recasts the history of modern philosophy in terms of the tensions between form and content. In the second place, he extends the argument to the living practical basis of the reified form of objectivity of capitalist society.

As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, Lukács applies his cultural approach to the analysis of the history of modern philosophy. He argues that modern philosophy identifies rationality with the reified form of objectivity of bourgeois society and then attempts to overcome the irrationality of the contents of the rational forms through deducing them from concepts. Why was bourgeois philosophy interested in overcoming the gap between form and content theoretically? According to Lukács, what is at stake is the vindication of the claim of rationality to embrace domains of being assigned to irrational forces such as royalty and religion in earlier societies. The ambition of the bourgeoisie to escape from the worldly power of the representatives of these forces requires it to extend its conception of rationality beyond all limits, at least in theory.

Lukács relates this ambition to Vico’s famous “verum-factum” principle according to which we can only fully understand what we have ourselves created. But this principle comes to grief because of the formal character of rationality. The history of classical German philosophy shows the failure of the project of modern philosophy; the content of its formal rationality escapes all attempts to encompass it fully within the forms. The contingency of the world remains and is conceptualized in the thing-in-itself.

Formal rational disciplines such as mathematics and natural science cannot grasp their contents, that is to say the purely contingent or “factical” objects to which they refer. The limitation is self-evident in the relation of formal laws to the particulars to which they apply. An abstract formula such as “distance = velocity × time” cannot account for the existence of its objects, only their relations once they have been conceptualized on the terms of the law. Similarly, a representation such as a map is useless until the person holding it has been oriented to the particular environment in which she is situated.

The gap between form and content is not merely a philosophical challenge. It also has a practical side. In practical life this gap cannot be closed by simply squeezing contents into the available forms. This limitation has never bothered physicists in the application of their formulae or geographers employing their maps. For them the relation of form and content is purely theoretical, but it ends up posing problems in daily life when forms actually form their content. Then it matters practically whether the forms are adequate to fully embrace their content. We are familiar with the unfortunate consequences of attempts to force the issue: bureaucracies that make no allowance for individual circumstances, laws the strict enforcement of which is unjust, work-to-rule strikes, teaching to tests, technical interfaces and manuals that require users to think like engineers, and so on.

In practice common sense treats forms as resources in the context of activities oriented toward a type of content rather than as absolutes.⁴⁵ We know very well that the map is not the territory but it is useful nevertheless once we find our bearings. But Lukács holds that modern capitalist society is a gigantic instance of economic and social forms imposed blindly on content.

The commodity form prevails regardless of whether it successfully mediates the distribution of use values or leaves masses in starvation. The formal economic laws fail to embrace the concrete content of economic life. Say’s law can serve as an illustration. It holds that the total supply of goods and services in a free market economy will equal the total demand at any given time. This law is contradicted by economic crises in which a glut of goods outpaces demand, bankrupting producers and impoverishing workers.

Administration and law ride roughshod over the human “cases” they treat under unbending rules. Technology imposes its rhythms regardless of the workers’ misery and the waste of their potential. The rationality of the system is fundamentally irrational from the standpoint of content. And that content is human! “The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim …”⁴⁶

The Lukácsian crisis theory is concerned with the generalization and breakdown of formal rationality as the governing principle of capitalist social life. The crisis appears “in the conflict between existence in its immediacy together with its expression in thought in the categories of reflection, and living social reality.”⁴⁷ Here we once again encounter the contradiction Marx identified between “true actuality” and “existing actuality.”

Lukács argues that bourgeois political economy is the immediate theoretical expression of the social structure (that is, of “existence in its immediacy”). Its formal-rational character contradicts “living social reality.” Lukács explains the emergence of political economy in terms of the relative success of the bourgeoisie in imposing its reified categories on actual social life. “Nor is it an accident that economics became an independent discipline under capitalism. Thanks to its commodity and trade arrangements capitalist society has given the whole of economic life an identity notable for its autonomy, its cohesion and its reliance on immanent laws. This was something quite unknown in earlier forms of society.”⁴⁸

But even this relative success of capitalist economic theory and practice meets its limit in inevitable resistance from below. Thus for Lukács formal rationality enters into crisis at two levels: epistemologically, in the ultimate failure of capitalist economic and social categories adequately to grasp the content of social life; and socio-politically, in the failure of the objects of these categories, the real institutions and relations they reflect, adequately to shape the lives of human beings in the society.

Nevertheless, Lukács insists that political economy is not simply wrong. It formulates more or less exact calculations and predictions in every sphere by abandoning qualitative explanations for quantitative ones. Partial abstract systems of laws can be constructed, each one embracing a specific segment of the economy in a form that allows it to be successfully manipulated for individual advantage. But the strength of this method is also its limit. Universal and atemporal laws such as those of political economy cannot grasp the practices that constitute social reality in its lawful regularity.

While partial social sub-systems such as enterprises and bureaucratic administrations are highly rationalized, the interactions between them are “irrational” in the sense that they are not organized and planned as they would be under socialism. The sum of the rationalized domains does not add up to the totality. Thus political economy cannot comprehend those shifts and transformations at the level of the totality in which the foundations of the social system are laid and changed. “The whole structure of capitalist production rests on the interaction between a necessity subject to strict laws in all isolated phenomena and the relative irrationality of the total process.”⁴⁹

This “irrationality of the total process” is reflected in the economic crises of capitalism, in which Lukács sees an unconscious rebellion of use value against the exchange value that is its phenomenal form. The reified form here fails to mediate successfully the production and distribution of the real contents—use values—needed to maintain the system and the individuals who live under it.

This same “irrationality” appears consciously in the class struggle. Reification constrains human life processes without always fulfilling human needs or performing the sense-making function that constitutes stable objects. Life overflows rationalization in every direction and comes back to haunt the rationalized domains in the course of class struggles. These struggles reveal the human basis of the society that has been shaped but also repressed by the reified forms. This provokes reflexive processes unknown in nature. Human lives considered as content of the reified forms have an independent power not just to violate expectations but also to understand themselves as doing so. This resistant self-understanding constitutes the core of what Lukács, following Marx, calls class consciousness. The process of abstraction in which wage labor consists

cuts [the worker] off from his labour-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialized process that has been rationalized and mechanized, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanized and rationalized tool … The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.⁵⁰

As can be seen from this passage, Lukács is more interested in the alienation of the working class than in its motivations. The brief reference here to the workers’ “physical, mental and moral existence,” so damaged by capitalism, refers us to the self-evident focus of generations of labor struggle and socialist political work. He takes for granted critical awareness of poverty, deskilled labor, and the indignities and injustices of life for the lower classes. These conditions appear as “content” of the reified forms not for any intrinsic reason but simply because in generating them, capitalism “forms” them inadequately, producing poverty in terms of wages, deskilling as technical progress, and indignities and injustices as well-deserved consequences of personal failings. Obviously, this aspect of Lukács’s argument appears inadequate today. We would like to know how what might be called the “facticity” of the working class enters consciousness, by what process it becomes the basis for resistance and revolt. Lukács’s rather limited account is explained in his theory of class consciousness, discussed in the Appendix of this book.

In any case, the situation of the proletariat gives rise to what Lukács calls the “self-consciousness of the commodity,” a bizarre hybrid of the human and the non-human. Philosophy and revolutionary theory are joined most intimately in this concept. But Lukács notes that the mere fact of self-consciousness is not revolutionary. A slave does not modify his status or society in recognizing the fact of his own slavery. What is different about the worker? The fact that the worker’s self-knowledge “brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge … Beneath the cloak of the thing lay a relation between men … beneath the quantifying crust there was a qualitative, living core. Now that this core is revealed it becomes possible to recognize the fetish character of every commodity.” ⁵¹

Capitalism is uniquely exposed to practical critique by its own members. No previous economic system was so vulnerable. This is because the existence of capitalism depends on the members of the society conceiving themselves as individual agents, interacting through objective systems such as markets. They must adopt a “contemplative” attitude and seek personal advantage in these systems. In sum, the reified structuration of the society depends on reified practice. Capitalism has a reified form of objectivity that is perceived and acted upon in a reified disposition, closing the circle of social construction. When it breaks down, the system is threatened.

The reified form of objectivity of the society is shattered from within. The workers, as private owners of a commodity called labor power, are transformed by self-consciousness into a potentially revolutionary force. The individualistic form of life imposed by capitalism, based on technical manipulation in conformity with the laws of the system, gives way to collective and conscious choice. “The act of consciousness overthrows the form of objectivity of its objects.”⁵² Lukács thus distinguishes what I call a “transforming practice” from a “contemplative” or reified practice.

In class struggle economic, political, and social acts react profoundly on each other, unlike the rigorous separation between them in bourgeois theory and practice; this constitutes an immediate refutation of the reified point of view. “Force … appears as the concrete embodiment of the irrationality limiting capitalist rationality, of the intermittence of its laws.”⁵³ To the bourgeoisie the result appears as imminent barbarism and social disintegration. Lukács argues, on the contrary, that it is the uncomprehended content of that abstract labor power the capitalist pays at the factory gate shattering its own reified form of objectivity and manifesting itself directly in historical action. Here the totality, as the actual moving force of history, the reality behind the reified appearances, emerges independently of the social laws and confronts them with forces they cannot control.