5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In Critical theory, the key concept needed to understand the specific dynamics of the formation of consciousness (partially formed by the collective unconscious and also spontaneous forms of organization in collective life) is that of reification, inherited from Lukács’ “History and Class Consciousness”. Despite the relevance of this work for understanding capitalist society, one of its disadvantages is its inability to significantly describe the breadth of forms of everyday life that underlie capitalist reproduction. We can see the concept of ‘reification’ as something which captures a specifically prevalent form in North-Western Europe, one which the Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría conceives as the ‘realist ethos.’

It is because of reification that one is unable to perceive the inherit contradictions in social forms today. In turn, it redefines them as ‘things’ which are unquestionable and no longer subject to change. The ‘baroque ethos’, on the other hand, allows us, both to perceive and live with these contradictions without negating or denying them; unlike the realist ethos, it plays with them and refunctionalizes them. On the one hand, what Echeverría calls the ‘baroque ethos,’ which in Latin America coexists with the ‘realist ethos,’ is not adequately acknowledged by classical critique of ideology based solely upon the concept of reification; on the other, it is necessary to note that Echeverría’s theory of the historical ethe pays a certain price for the contributions it makes, thereby falling prey to some of the limitations that have actually been overcome by the critique of ideology.