resile and reify and durkheim

As I was studying the dictionary, far ahead of where I am writing, I fell upon the "re's" and was so taken by the number and suggestiveness of many of them that I decided to jump ahead to introduce some to you. Only one of them, reify, is overused and unclear today; the other, resile, allures.

Resile

One of my favorite words in English is "resilient." The original meaning of resilient had reference to physical bodies which were able to resume their original shape after pressure was applied to them. Yet the figurative meaning, "tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change," is even more appealing. Resilience, or resiliency, is praised in an athlete, who rebounds from an injury, in a business leader who comes back from a defeat, in any of us who "come back from" a serious setback or threat to our equanimity. Perseverance may have been the buzz word of the 1980s and 1990s, but resilient is the word for today.

With the emphasis on being able to "bounce back" in our culture, it is surprising that the verb resile has not had a similar renascence. As a matter of fact, the usages of resile in the OED are pretty tied to physical bodies which recoil after being stretched or harmed. Of the five definitions for resile in the OED, the first three are said to be chiefly in Scottish use and are: (1) withdraw from an agreement; (2) draw back from a course of action; and (3) shrink from an undesirable experience. The only two definitions that seemingly are more widespread focus on the material object that has been put under pressure: (4) to recoil or rebound after contact or, with respect to elastic bodies, (5) to return to their original position after being stretched. Thus, even though "resilience" has developed a rich and attractive psychological meaning, focusing as it does on a person's grit, determination, patience, self-discipline, etc., resile is still hung up with elastic bodies and laws of physical motion. None of the quotations from the OED is more recent than 110 years ago.

My proposal is to breathe life into resile by having it become the verb equivalent of the psychological usage of resilient. Thus, we don't have to say that the athlete "shows resilience" or that he "bounced back" from an injury. We can say, "he resiled." Simple, clear, powerful and meaningful. "After the ACL injury, he resiled in less than a month." Join me in this?

Reify

Now that I have made the case for word development, let me make the case for dropping a word. I first heard the word "reify" in 1970 when I was a student at Brown University. It was on the lips of all the soft and hard-core Marxists at the time, and was meant to describe, as far as I could tell, the depersonalziation that capitalist society brought into the economic system, thus leading to dehumanizing of the workers to the benefit of the owners of the means of production. For example, the godfather of the 1960s Marxist generation, Herbert Marcuse, wrote: "Marx's early writings are the first explicit statment of the process of reification (Verdinglichung) through which capitalist society makes all personal relations between men take the form of objective relations between things." Ok, I think this is clear enough. The Marxist criticism of capitalism is that it "depersonalizes" relationships. It, to use Marx's word literally, "thingifies" relations.

But then let's go back to the original usage of reify, which literally means to "thingify" or, more properly, "to convert mentally into a thing; to materialize." The clearest extended definition I have seen comes from the 1880s and says, "When people make or find a new 'abstract noun,' they instantly try to put it on a shelf or into a box, as though it were a thing; thus they reify it." But here is where I have a problem. I can see how "to reify" means to take an abstract concept and make it into a "thing," but what really does that mean? Some scholars suggest it significes the process of converting inchoate inner feelings, collective fears, unspoken commitments of a people into a specific thing, such as a God. Thus, the fear that one feels at the dark, at the dangers posed by animals, might be "reified" into a God who gives light and protects the believer. Reification of feelings into a belief in God. But, I thought this was the word that Durkheim and others used for totemism--where the totemic object is feared/revered because it some how captures the essence of the community itself. [If any of this doesn't make sense, it is because it is derived from theorists who constructed vast systems regarding the origin of religions before anthropology had developed a field-work methodology that would be able to test their theories. Thus, I think that many 19th century religion scholars "made it up as they went along," so to speak.] So, where does that leave us with respect to the verb "to reify"?

Other scholars I have read seem to suggest that reify means the process by which the abstract (such as God) is made concrete in some way, maybe through a representation. But isn't this iconography? When you do a quick internet search for the various phrases in which "reify" appears, you discover that you can reify culture, reify feelings, reify God, reify attitudes and a number of other things. Some would even make things more abstruse by suggesting that the process of reification is the hypostatization of things--the creation of independent existences for feelings or abstract concepts. But by the time you get to this level of development, you have completely lost me. I do not know whether people are saying that historically a certain feeling led to a certain conception of God and whether that historical process is to be called reification, or whether reification is just such a jargon-laden word these days that it can mean anything to anyone, but is a clear sign to outsiders that they better keep their hands off the discipline!

That is, I see scholarly language as functioning occasionally to make things clearer in the field but mostly to tell outsiders that they have taken a wrong turn, they are trespassing and unless they withdraw quickly they will get their heads handed to them. But, in fact, the words like reify and reification serve very little continuing purpose in the field. They could easily be replaced with much more simple terminology. But, scholars don't do so because frequently they don't know what they are saying--and if anyone ever caught wind of that, they would be embarrased indeed. Better to keep an obscure language that keeps you employed and untouched by the outside world.

Conclusion

If there is any reason for keeping reification it is to use it in the Marxian sense of depersonalization. However, resile is a word that must be rediscovered and deepened. But maybe, in the end, this isn't so bad. We gain a word. We lose a word. It is a net enrichment.

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