Space
Social spatialization is, following the same Tardean logic, a specific form of repetition, namely that of ‘imitation’. It is through imitation that spatiality becomes possible as existent. Imitation is easily observed in terms of materiality, which, for example through acts of building, planning and even architectural conceptualization, become necessary preconditions for a space to exist in the first place.
In the social sciences, the word reification has a bad resonance and is usually invoked to denounce some sort of conceptualization of process as ‘wrong’. However, it is at the core of what culture is: repetitions of practices which constitute a ‘becoming-real’, one might even say ‘realization’, of meaning. Realization, being at once ‘becoming real’ and ‘becoming aware’, is such a wonderful term exactly because it shows us the ‘in between’ (becoming) as a relational event. When reification is simply taken as another word for realization, then perhaps we can begin to let go of the negative connotations that this term has been burdened with.
http://www.wix.com/hci_msrp/empty_space
…. Joost
2 Comments
Outside of its Marxist and Lukacsian definition and their derivation, reification [Verdinglichung] is often understood as the process of becoming sacred or holy, and therefore set apart from common society. Would, then, embracing reification not mean accepting a state of affairs where ‘becoming’ creates increasingly strict and reinforced boundaries between holy and profane, public and private, social and individual?
What this post most likely refers to under reification is the virtual as the space between the abstract and the concrete. The illustration brings out a sense of this in-between space that unless thematized falls back into either of the more stable conditions of either abstract possibility or concrete reality.
In this respect, die Verdinglichung as a process of becoming reified, could be reinterpreted as a process that carries traces of the virtual in what becomes available thereafter. Basically, “becoming-real” and “becoming-aware” point into two opposite directions of concreteness and abstractness respectively that the virtual connects.