Everyday Hegemony: Reification, the Supermarket, and the Nuclear Family

1 Reification and the Supermarket

Despite their often-limited accessibility which hinges upon race and socio-economic status, supermarkets are pervasive food spaces in the United States and much of the Global North. These food spaces make possible the common distribution and exchange of vital goods, serving as primary sites supporting the reproduction of human life. As Shane Hamilton argues, “supermarket-style mass food distribution” is premised on industrialized and globalized agriculture.^[1] Supermarkets therefore tether eaters to globalized, financialized, chemicalized, mechanized, and fossil-fueled processes of food cultivation, production, distribution, consumption, and waste, while simultaneously obfuscating such tethering.

The ubiquity and ordinariness of supermarkets obscures globalized food processes. These food spaces, insofar as they present food as severed from the natural world and therefore always readily available in abundance, partake in processes of reification. While my primary interest in this essay is the reification of the nuclear family form in and through this food space, it is worth mentioning how reification shapes relationships to food broadly before considering the ways reified food supports the reification of the family form.

Lukács does not explicitly deal with food. However, his examination of the formation of social reality under capital can be extended to critically analyze the capitalist management of food and food systems. Thinking with Lukács, I attend to the ways capitalist food systems facilitate the propagation of rationalizing and abstracting logics into the biological through food. Moreover, an examination of contemporary food spaces like supermarkets demonstrates the ways ordinary life is saturated with reified forms and reifying forces, revealing the contemporary relevancy of Lukács’ critique.

Lukács asserts that the commodity form is the distinctive constitutive force in modern capitalist society. Lukács’ formulation extends from Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, that “mysterious” feature of the commodity unique to capitalist relations of production.^[2] A commodity, for Marx, originally appears as something “extremely obvious” and “trivial.”^[3] But the seeming obviousness of the commodity conceals the social relations bringing that object into being. The mystery of the commodity lies in its fetishization, as the products of labor reflect the social characteristics of labor as objective qualities in commodities themselves. Social relations between people, then, assume “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”^[4] As commodities appear to have certain objective qualities, fetishism backgrounds capitalist relations of production as people engage with commodities and each other in their ordinary lives. Capitalist relations of production, therefore, seem severed from the world they bring into being.

Though Lukács begins from Marx’s key insights about the commodity form, his analysis examines problems extending from commodity fetishism rather than fetishism itself. Lukács stresses that the commodity form extends beyond commodities, permeating objective and subjective relations constituting social reality. This extension of the commodity form, Lukács clarifies, becomes the “dominant form of metabolic change” in modern capitalist societies, ultimately transforming “the total outer and inner life of society.”^[5] As the prevailing metabolic force in capitalist society, commodity exchange becomes the universal category of organization.^[6]

Objectively, the supremacy of the commodity form provokes the abstraction and rationalization of objects and the relations between those objects. Through rationalization, qualitative differences between objects become irrelevant in capital’s prioritization of profits. Quantitative differences are of primary importance and the “irrational and qualitatively determined unity” of an object is no longer significant.^[7] Such unity, Lukács reiterates, is shattered by the calculating rationality of capital.

Governed by the instrumentalizing reason of capital, supermarkets shape the ways food is produced and presented. Supermarkets obscure the complexity of relations constituting food, presenting it instead as a mere commodity. Rather than presenting food as part of vast networks of relations beginning with the soil, sun, and pollinators, continuing through workers in fields, slaughterhouses, and factories, on trucks, trains, ships, through warehouses and the hands of supermarket employees, and ending, oftentimes in landfills, the construction of the supermarket fragments the “qualitatively determined unity” of each food object.^[8] Rather than attending to food in its ontological complexity, the primary quality of importance is the price at which the commodity can be bought and sold. Don Mitchell illustrates the complexity of relations informing the qualitative aspects of a given commodity when he writes:

[t]he appearance of even the seemingly most trivial thing – a strawberry on your kitchen counter, perhaps – is a complicated affair involving dozens or hundreds or thousands of people, complex policies concerning tariffs and taxation (and maybe even the enforcement of these policies), contradictory border policies and innumerable decisions by banks, fertilizer companies, labor contractors, and much, much more. These days it presupposes the existence of roads and powerlines, commodity relations and family relations, State Department directives and public health studies, advanced biogenetics and a keen understanding of hydrology, systems of labor exploitation and the invention of (we hope) less environmentally damaging refrigeration technology.^[9]

In the midst of the supermarket, qualitative differences in the processes bringing foods into being are seemingly severed from food commodities through capital’s rationalizing and abstracting logic, presenting them as mere objects up for purchase.

The universalization of the commodity form also finds expression in and through the consciousnesses of those existing under capitalist modes of production. Reification, as the process whereby social relationships assume the character of relationships between mere things, extends from this dominant form of metabolic change. The commodity form, therefore, becomes a totalizing phenomenon, and crucially for Lukács, comes to constitute the “second nature” of human beings living under capitalism.^[10]

In asserting that the logic of commodity exchange comes to constitute the second nature of those in modern capitalist societies, Lukács stresses how capital’s tendency for abstraction and rationalization transforms the entirety of society. In conjunction with the rationalization and fragmentation of objects, Lukács details the “necessary fragmentation of the subject.”^[11] As labor under capital is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, instrumentalizing logics permeate consciousness as subjects are coerced to conform to its abstracting laws and calculations. This process bears upon the whole of social relations, engendering a particular kind of subject whose consciousness becomes fragmented and detached.^[12] Such detachment flows from processes of abstraction and rationalization ultimately fracturing the prior “unity” of the human subject. Reification, therefore, entails the fragmentation of human consciousness, cultivating habits of detached contemplation.^[13] Lukács describes detached contemplation as a passive orientation toward the world and others. Such habits are rationalized through the logic of capital, obscuring the historical nature of social relations, while also cultivating indifferent and emotionless stances to the world and others.

Reification entails not only the loss of a unified subject, but also a process in which one’s perception becomes reifying. As Axel Honneth points out, Lukács conceptualizes reification as both a result and a process actively reformulating consciousness and transforming the actions, behaviors, and relations of the subject.^[14] As reification proliferates, instrumental logic transforms knowledge production, causing “human beings to experience historical processes as natural laws that govern human life and elude human control.”^[15] In this way, reification entails the normalization of abstract, detached, and instrumentalizing subjectivity through relations between knowledge production, consciousness, and perception, obscuring how hegemonic forms of social life are historical in nature.

The instrumentality of capitalism’s logic serves as a reifying force in the supermarket. While foods are presented as objects removed from their material–historical relations, the function of food becomes increasingly instrumental as well. Food choices are made for specific reasons – to cultivate health, strength, or weight loss, to work long hours, to be satisfying, to be easy, and so on. Importantly, the commodification and reification of food objects support the instrumentalization of the body and its practices. This instrumentalization of the body and its practices through food reveals novel ways that the commodity form structures the lives of subjects living under capitalism. In what follows, I explore how this instrumentalization of the body and its practices is perpetuated in the domestic sphere through the nuclear family and its food practices, bringing Lukács’ notion of reification to bear on contemporary processes and problems.

2 The Nuclear Family and Domestic Unwaged Labor

Lukács’ conceptualization of subjective forms of reification hinges upon male-dominated models of factory labor. While Lukács’ account is persuasive, I suggest shifting toward an examination of feminized forms of domestic unwaged labor to consider how reification emerges and shapes social reality differently in this often-overlooked sphere of everyday life. I conceive of domestic unwaged labor as central to the reproduction of the nuclear family form.^[16] Moreover, the nuclear family form is central to the functioning of contemporary neoliberal capitalism.^[17] Following Kathi Weeks, I define the nuclear family form through three primary dimensions: privatized systems “of social reproduction, the couple form and bio-genetic-centered kinship.”^[18] This hegemonic form of kinship relations is reified in and through ordinary spaces like the supermarket.

Before progressing with this analysis, however, it is crucial to recognize the relations of the nuclear family to other forms of oppression and domination. While in some cases, families may serve as shelters from racist, colonial, classist, ableist, cis-heteropatriarchal institutions and infrastructures, the model of the nuclear family does not ultimately thwart structural oppressions.^[19] As Weeks notes,

the model of the nuclear family that has served subordinated groups as a fence against the state, society and capital is the very same white, settler, bourgeois, heterosexual and patriarchal institution that was imposed by the state, society and capital on the formerly enslaved, indigenous peoples, and waves of immigrants, all of whom continue to be at once in need of its meagre protections and marginalized by its legacies and prescriptions.^[20]

Though the nuclear family can in some instances provide relations of reciprocity, care, love, protection, and support, its structure is, as Sophie Lewis notes, a “microcosm of the nation-state… [manufacturing] ‘individuals’ with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness.”^[21] Kay Lindsay, moreover, refers to the family as a “white institution” used to “perpetuate the state.”^[22] Tiffany Lethabo King likewise conceives of the family as a site of violence and dehumanization, despite the ways in which family relations might support the continuation and livability of everyday Black lives.^[23] These thinkers clarify how the nuclear family is not only an issue for radical feminists. This hegemonic structure of kinship relations is linked, structurally, to other forms of oppression and domination. The reification of the family form – and all the complexity that it entails – transpires in and through ordinary life and ordinary spaces.

Ordinary functions of the nuclear family are made possible by domestic unpaid labor. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James note, the advent of capitalism forced the factory to be the center of the socialization of production.^[24] This shift transformed understandings of domestic labor, severing the labor of women and mothers from the center of social production. The centering of factory labor stripped domestic labor of its social value, expelling it from the sphere of value under capitalism. Domestic labor is precisely not wage-labor, and therefore cannot itself be seen as productive by capitalism, though it does ultimately contribute to the production of labor power.^[25] “Like an infinitely renewable energy” writes Sophie Lewis, “[the family] performs free labor for the market.”^[26] Domestic unwaged labor might take the form of cooking, cleaning, meal planning, grocery shopping, childcare, other-than-human animal care, bill keeping, emotional support to partners and other family members, intimacy, reproduction, or something else. While these forms of labor may not be recognized by capital insofar as they are unwaged, capitalism both depends on and benefits from these forms of labor as they produce labor power for the market.

Though various forms of domestic unwaged labor contribute to the production of labor power, the uterus plays a crucial role in the reproduction of capital and the propagation of the commodity form, as it is the initial site for the reproduction of labor power. Rationalization and abstraction fragment the pregnant subject as “capital construct[s] the female role.”^[27] The body of the pregnant person becomes reified insofar as her body becomes a basic unit of production for the overarching economic system. Dalla Costa and James write that “[c]apital established the family as the nuclear family and subordinated within it the woman to the man, as the person who, not directly participating in social production, does not present herself independently on the labor market.”^[28] Women, then, may be expelled from social production in their performance of domestic unwaged labor, but they nevertheless participate in capitalism’s structures through consumption and the reproduction of labor power. The nuclear family form is produced and maintained through domestic unwaged labor. The home thus becomes the center of consumption as consumption remains central to the production of labor power that begins within the nuclear family.^[29] That the family and the family home become the center of consumption is of crucial importance for understanding how the reification of the family form works to uphold and reproduce capitalist hegemony.

The ideology of the nuclear family, as Jack Halberstam writes, “almost always introduces normative understandings of time and transmission. Family as a concept is employed in popular culture as well as in academic cultures to gloss a deeply reactionary understanding of human interaction.”^[30] Christened by the state, the nuclear family receives support in the form of tax breaks and marital support programs. Though younger generations are putting off marriage, queering its structures, or rejecting them altogether, the state and conservative “pro-marriage and pro-family campaigns” tether the nuclear family form to financial stability and intimate security.^[31] This structure of kinship relations is re/produced in the supermarket, in and through the necessity of eating which demands continual returns (or aspirations to return) to these ubiquitous food spaces. The reification of foods in these spaces supports the naturalization of the family form through the sensibilities supermarkets construct. The ubiquity of these food spaces and the foods they supply facilitate the normalization of abstract, detached, and instrumentalizing subjectivities in the sense that Lukács conceptualizes as reification.

Insofar as supermarkets are normalized in their ubiquity, the presence and preservation of the nuclear family form in these spaces is likewise naturalized and de-historicized. Materially, one might consider the ways that plastic shopping carts are constructed to be lightweight, large, and built in such a way that a child fits neatly into it alongside piles of food commodities. The cart reifies the family form, normalizing childrearing in these ordinary spaces. Such normalization obscures the reliance of multinational capitalist food systems on the nuclear family form to sell products and, crucially, the reliance of families on food systems utilizing instrumental logics to govern food cultivation, production, and distribution.

Moreover, the archetypal model of the mother pushing the child in the shopping cart still serves as a model through which women might envision adulthood, shaping the ways the role of women in the family structure is conceived. The very rendering of woman-as-mother in the grocery store points to how the reification of the nuclear family form in the supermarket shapes the behaviors of subjects who might not be able to imagine domestic life outside the confines of the dominant form. The collective imagination is, at least in part, structured in and through what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt while navigating the supermarket. Globalized and industrialized food systems and their commodities make sense in the supermarket because they partake in the making of sense in and through this space and the food commodities offered there.^[32] The nuclear family makes sense in the supermarket.

The shopping cart, in accordance with capitalism’s instrumentalizing reason, is a tool of efficiency, helping people (and mothers in particular) move through the store quickly while nevertheless accumulating a plethora of commodities. These commodities are often made with the nuclear family in mind. Consider the sale of “family sized” items that benefit those shoppers that can consume more rather than less. Recipes printed on boxes and bags are also often made for family serving sizes, rather than for one or two. This is not merely a matter of individual consumption, but rather a matter of the size of the household doing the consuming. Likewise, there are often price benefits for buying in bulk, a practice made possible by at least one strong income, large domestic space to store goods, and the mouths to consume such items.

Additionally, the products stocked in supermarkets make their ubiquity in contemporary society feel like a necessity. The things seemingly necessary to produce and sustain domesticity are found in supermarkets. Supermarkets and their products are universalized; the hegemony of supermarkets consists not only in their ubiquity but also in the expectations of the products sold there. Domesticity is taken up by mass markets and can therefore be replicated anywhere. Moreover, while earlier grocery stores might have only sold food items, even today’s smaller food markets sell things like household cleaning products, children’s toys, medicine, flowers, diapers, pet foods, and more. The extent of items sold in the contemporary supermarket shows these food spaces as more-than-food spaces through which the ideals of an organized, clean, productive domestic life might be actualized.

Hegemonic notions of domestic life partake of colonial, patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative framings of the good life, shaping attachments to fantasies of what life ought to look like. Moreover, they take part in the sensibilities constructed by capital’s fetishization of the commodity form. In the context of ongoing climate crises, the hegemony of the nuclear family and the notions of domestic life it reproduces are especially dangerous, not only because they perpetuate systems of oppression, but also because these systems of oppression conceptually support the production of “business as usual.” Insofar as hegemonic ways of being, relating, and eating are bound up with the production and consumption of fossil fuels which make possible the forms of globalized capitalism shaping the contemporary world, these ways of being, relating, and eating play a role in the production of climate chaos. Or more succinctly, the reification of food in the reifying spaces of the supermarket detaches subjects from the ecological realities their everyday lives produce.

3 Conclusion

In framing the nuclear family form as that which is reproduced and reified in and through the ordinary and ubiquitous space of the supermarket, I demonstrate how the propagation of capital’s instrumentalizing logic remains a problem in contemporary society, a problem that is perhaps more fractured and nefarious than Lukács could have predicted. In thinking about the nuclear family form as a product of reification emerging from the domestic sphere, and its specific processes transpiring in the ordinary spaces of everyday life, I aim to reveal how this structure of kin relations is historical, and therefore within the bounds of human transformation. Within the context of climate chaos, these transformations are crucial if humanity is to avoid four or six or eight degrees of warming. In recognizing the reification of the nuclear family, and its ties to globalized, mechanized, chemicalized food systems built on exploitation, expropriation, and oppression, I point to the complex operations creating hegemonic relations of the everyday. Transforming such relations will take immense effort from numerous disciplines. But perhaps the first step in transforming such relations is making the hegemonic processes of reification discernible. I hope that my contribution to these efforts will point to related processes requiring further examination.