Reification, commodification and possession

Sustaining the Quest for Sustainable Answers on COVID-19 (Part #3)

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Possibly to be understood as wave-like in its manifestation, there is a widespread process of conceptual reification closely associated transformation of whatever can be reified into commodities -- lending themselves to, or necesssitating, legal definition as such for administrative purposes. The process is entangled with the psychosocial quest to possess exclusively whatever is commodified and to regulate associated issues of ownership -- with the relation between possession of property and defining the properties of objects offering a degree of irony.

The various manifestations include:

• transformation of creativity into products, most obviously those susceptibe to manufacture and sale; less obviously this is evident in the production of academic papers (in a publish or perish mode).
• redefinition of products as intellectual property through registration by copyright, trademark or some form of contractual licensing
• knowledge; less obvious these processes are evident in the case of elements of culture with which collective identity may be associated -- possibly long after this recognition was first valued
• the explosion of enthusiasm for the capture of personal data for the purpose of profiling. This ranges from recording purchases, tracking web searches and geographic localisation, to records of health and financial data, and to DNA
• the vast effort to catalogue and classify natural features, whether species or topography, potentially with a view to their commodification, as with plant species and mineral resources. The pattern extends to the extraterrestrial environment (given the ressources they may represent), and to astronomical phenomena
• a degree of confusion between any catalogue of objects and their relation in ecosystemic terms -- exemplified by the contrast between a restaurant menu and the ambiance of the dining experience there, or between a museum collection of species or cultural artefacts and the dynamics of the system with which engendered them
• the commodification of process as in the definition of due process, fidelity, education and career pathways, and employment. This extends to the sense in which products and people are understood as processed through various sytems (assembly lines, queues, helth facilities, job centres, etc)

As a consequence of the above, knowledge can be variously recognized as "incarcerated", "entrapped" or even "entombed" in "parts". This is most evident in the case of intellectual property. Any process of explanation can be understood in this light -- "wrapping up" and packaging experience in containers designed for that purpose.

The naming process may have psychocultural significance as a means of frame creation or territorial appropriation (also known by the Icelandic term land nám, coined by Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Rg Veda as Land-Nama Book, 1935) and discussed elsewhere. This territorial appropriation process, notably practiced by the Navaho and the Vedic Aryans was further described by Joseph Campbell (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: metaphor as myth and religion, 1986):

Land nám ("land claiming or taking") was [the Norse] technical term for this way of sanctifying a region, converting it thereby into an at once psychologically and metaphysical Holy Land.... Land nám, mythologization, has been the universally practiced method to bring this intelligible kingdom to view in the mind's eye. The Promised Land, therefore, is any landscape recognized as mythologically transparent, and the method of acquisition of such territory is not by prosaic physical action, but poetically, by intelligence and the method of art; so that the human being should be dwelling in the two worlds simultaneously of the illuminated moon and the illuminating sun. (p. 34)

As Campbell notes, this is a variant of the archetype of a "promised land", namely "a spiritual region, or condition of mind, wherein phenomenal forms are recognized as revelatory of transcendence". **** naming stars, theories, etc

The commitment to this complex of reification/commodification can be seen as a variant -- a century later -- of the illusory enthusiasm for a mechanistic model of the universe. Then, as now, the underlying belief is that if the position and direction of every feature of that universe could be known, then the development of that universe could be predicted, if not controlled. Obvious evidence of this belief is to be found in the philosophy associated with the manipulation of democratic systems, as highlighted by the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Strangely missing from the commitment to this belief are the dynamics associated the achievement of what it appears to promise. One archetype is offered by the Imperial Library on Trantor of Isaac Asimov's Robot, Galactic Empire and Foundation Series, and the dilemma of how to engage with its contents. The dilemma is higlighted by the shards consituting the only evidence of civilizations long past, desperately collected by archaeologists -- a process potentially to be repeated by those of the future with respect to the electronic traces of the current civilization.

In the light of the fundamental challenge to the mechanistic model of the universe, namely Einstein's theory of relativity, is any understanding of what universal comprehension would imply -- if only in the instance of global governance. Curiously disguised by that theory is the treatment of intellectual property as potentially influenced by the context in which the theory was formullated (Einstein's Implicit Theory of Relativity - of Cognitive Property? Unexamined influence of patenting procedures, 2007)

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