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But when they arrived, the workers ran off, hoping to start their own farms, and “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” With no compulsion for the workers to sell themselves as wage laborers, the colony foundered and then almost failed. “Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!”

How could Mr Peel have made such a fundamental mistake? Mr Peel’s belated discovery, says Marx, was something that had not been immediately evident in England because it was so deeply written into the everyday practices of capitalism, “that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, which is mediated through things.”¹⁷⁵ Mr Peel brought all the instruments of productive life, but failed to see the social conditions of compulsion required for workers to use them. The subsequent process of distortion of meanings, focusing on things to the neglect of their social meanings, we call “reification.”

By reification, we do not mean “thinginess” in the narrow sense of making three-dimensional objects, one of our forms of meaning in this grammar. We mean reification as a kind of fixing, of objectifying and hypostasizing states of human affairs in multimodal configurations of text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech.

Reification is a process of making things to seem inevitably so, ineluctably so, always-obviously so. Then, paradoxically, for their overwhelming self-evidence their underlying meanings become hard to see or disappear from view. As a consequence, such states of affairs seem impervious to redesign, less obviously designs in the sense of having been made to serve one interest or another and so, not obviously contingent and changeable. Mostly, this works in favor of the status quo, and so the differential interests of the powers-that-be.

If rhetoric makes interests explicit, reification is implicit meaning. And if rhetoric is obvious in ways that are at times heavy handed, reification can be pervasive and subtle. Then there is always a possibility for functional transposition, where reification can be rearticulated as rhetoric, or rhetoric rendered redundant or buried by reification. When the rhetoric rings hollow, the fatalism of reification may do the same job. Such is the shiftiness of transpositions in the meanings of interest.

Ostensibly objective realities, however, have ever been designed. And their having-been-designed can be recovered in a transpositional grammar. Then, their historicity springs back into view. History is never inevitable. Things could have been different, which means they could still be, again. Objectivity is unmasked as circumstantial, social, and interest-laden.

It is through these processes of reification that the “freedom” of the market comes to seem inevitable, inarguable, natural. What you seem to see in front of your eyes is a “free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity of capital on one side, the owner of the commodity of labour on the other.” Left at this, we have a useful fiction, encapsulated in Marx’s irony in the person of the “wage-labourer, … compelled to sell himself of his own free will.” So, in the case of Mr Peel, “In the colonies where no such seemingly natural compulsion exists, the beautiful illusion of freedom is torn aside.”¹⁷⁶

We need a transpositional grammar to disentangle the systematic distortions of meaning that may occur in the objectification of meanings. We need such a grammar to disentangle the social designs of reality, and so also to raise the possibility of their redesign.

Here now is a rough map of some rhetorical compared to reifying means for the expression of interest:

Fig. 2.3: Rhetoric and reification

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¹⁷⁵ Karl Marx, 1867 [1976], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, pp. 932–33.

¹⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 935.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 240–242. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Reification §AS2.3