The Future of Commodity Fetishism

Abstract

This paper examines the status of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and Adorno's theory of reification given recent challenges in poststructuralist theory, particularly by Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. It is argued that the poststructuralist “deconstruction” of oppositions key to the critical theories — use / exchange value, materialist / idealist — forces revisions of the theories. In particular, it is argued that Marx and Adorno's views of the producing and consuming subject, as well as the commodity object, are grounded in a Western “metaphysics of identity” — of autonomous, self-enclosed subjectivity and objectivity. The paper calls for the development of a post-structuralist view of subject and object relative to the theories of commodity fetishism and reification. The consequences of this poststructuralist view necessitate changes in the grounding of critical theory. The work of Walter Benjamin, with his emphasis on language and his work on the translation of texts, is seen as the best direction for the development of a critique of commodity fetishism in a poststructuralist context.