Key Arguments

• The actual work of fabrication is performed under the guidance of a model—an inner image or a blueprint—that exists outside the fabricator and prior to the work process.
• There is a veritable gulf between bodily sensations (pleasure, pain, desires) which are private, incommunicable, and incapable of reification, and mental images which lend themselves easily to reification.
• Modern psychology’s claim that images are merely ‘in our heads’ reflects the modern condition where most ‘work’ is performed in the mode of labor; workers often cannot ‘labor for his work rather than for himself’ and lack any notion of the object’s ultimate shape.

Source Quotes

Solidity is not the result of pleasure or exhaustion in earning one’s bread “in the sweat of his brow,” but of this strength, and it is not simply borrowed or plucked as a free gift from nature’s own eternal presence, although it would be impossible without the material torn out of nature; it is already a product of man’s hands. The actual work of fabrication is performed under the guidance of a model in accordance with which the object is constructed. This model can be an image beheld by the eye of the mind or a blueprint in which the image has already found a tentative materialization through work.

This model can be an image beheld by the eye of the mind or a blueprint in which the image has already found a tentative materialization through work. In either case, what guides the work of fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the actual work process in much the same way as the urgencies of the life process within the laborer precede the actual labor process. (This description is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychology, which tell us almost unanimously that the images of the mind are as safely located in our heads as the pangs of hunger are located in our stomachs.

In either case, what guides the work of fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the actual work process in much the same way as the urgencies of the life process within the laborer precede the actual labor process. (This description is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychology, which tell us almost unanimously that the images of the mind are as safely located in our heads as the pangs of hunger are located in our stomachs. This subjectivization of modern science, which is only a reflection of an even more radical subjectivization of the modern world, has its justification in this case in the fact that, indeed, most work in the modern world is performed in the mode of labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to, could not “labor for his work rather than for himself,” and frequently is instrumental in the production of objects of whose ultimate shape he has not the slightest notion.

(This description is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychology, which tell us almost unanimously that the images of the mind are as safely located in our heads as the pangs of hunger are located in our stomachs. This subjectivization of modern science, which is only a reflection of an even more radical subjectivization of the modern world, has its justification in this case in the fact that, indeed, most work in the modern world is performed in the mode of labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to, could not “labor for his work rather than for himself,” and frequently is instrumental in the production of objects of whose ultimate shape he has not the slightest notion. These circumstances, though of great historical importance, are irrelevant in a description of the fundamental articulations of the ) What claims our attention is the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or pain, desires and satisfactions—which are so “private” that they cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being reified—from mental images which lend themselves so easily and naturally to reification that we neither conceive of making a bed without first having some image, some “idea” of a bed before our inner eye, nor can imagine a bed without having recourse to some visual experience of a real thing.

This subjectivization of modern science, which is only a reflection of an even more radical subjectivization of the modern world, has its justification in this case in the fact that, indeed, most work in the modern world is performed in the mode of labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to, could not “labor for his work rather than for himself,” and frequently is instrumental in the production of objects of whose ultimate shape he has not the slightest notion. These circumstances, though of great historical importance, are irrelevant in a description of the fundamental articulations of the ) What claims our attention is the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or pain, desires and satisfactions—which are so “private” that they cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being reified—from mental images which lend themselves so easily and naturally to reification that we neither conceive of making a bed without first having some image, some “idea” of a bed before our inner eye, nor can imagine a bed without having recourse to some visual experience of a real thing. It is of great importance to the role fabrication came to play within the hierarchy of the that the image or model whose shape guides the fabrication process not only precedes it, but does not disappear with the finished product, which it survives intact, present, as it were, to lend itself to an infinite continuation of fabrication.

Key Concepts

• The actual work of fabrication is performed under the guidance of a model
• what guides the work of fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the actual work process
• (This description is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychology
• the worker, even if he wanted to, could not “labor for his work rather than for himself,”
• the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or pain, desires and satisfactions—which are so “private” that they cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being reified—from mental images which lend themselves so easily and naturally to reification

Context

19 REIFICATION: Epistemic structure of making—external guiding image; critique of modern subjectivization; ontological difference between sensations and images regarding reification.