In The Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer write ‘All reification is a forgetting.’

In How Modernity Forgets this cryptic remark is unpacked by Paul Connerton. He says:

Marx and others after him.... quite frequently speak of forgetting, and when they use the verb to forget as a synonym for what they write about in technical vocabulary as fetishism or reification, and in metaphorical language as defective vision, they are perfectly aware of this alternative linguistic usage and of what they mean by it. So they write that the commodity seems enigmatic because people forget how it was produced; or they say that people forget that the origin of profit is in the surplus value extracted from human labour; or they insist upon the fact that the human agency that creates manufactured objects gets forgotten; or they draw attention to the fact that the more concentrated and extensive city markets become the easier it is to forget the ultimate origin of the things that are bought and sold there. It is quite legitimate, therefore, to redescribe the process most frequently diagnosed as reification or the fetishism of commodities as a process of forgetting.