Commodity Fetishism Research Articles

Climate Science as Counterculture

This article investigates climate science as a cultural object. By pursuing the “logic of its aporias”, it is shown that climate science emerged at the confluence of the objective development of the means of production (constituting a “planetary general intellect”) and the countercultural movement of the 60s, which put ecology at its center, but was broader than mere “environmentalism”. This resulted in the emergence of new forms of sensibility and a qualitative transformation of the natural sciences, which recognized the autonomy and complexity of nature. The constitution of climate science is reconstructed by taking the IGBP’s Amsterdam Declaration as historical archive, and by discussing biographical aspects of representative scientists, in mediation with their work and their world-historical context. Yet, the limits of climate science are those of counterculture. Climate science and its institutions preserve aspects of the previous mechanistic science as well as remaining traces of commodity fetishism

Robinson Crusoe's Watch

AbstractThis article reads Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s 1861 translation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe into Arabic in Beirut alongside Karl Marx's contemporaneous critique of the popularity of Robinsonades among British political economists. Al-Bustānī’s translation of Robinson Crusoe sought to synch Arabic up with a global age of double-column bookkeeping, the telegraph, the steamship, and the newspaper, and in turn supplant the Indian Ocean stories of Sindbad the Sailor among Beirut's merchants. The latter story cycle constitutes Arabic literary capital appropriated, enumerated, and rendered exchangeable by the new novel form in the serialized English press of the mercantilist era. In Capital, Vol. 1, in the chapter “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx represents Robinson not as a well-armed slave trader, but rather as endowed with only a watch (unbeknownst to Defoe), paper, pen, and ink. With these tools Marx's Robinson enacts the theory of value in the time of factory labor and the incomplete abolition of slavery. Al-Bustānī—like Faraḥ Anṭūn forty years later—confronts this unevenly syncopated, up-to-the-minute temporality in Arabic, as imperial finance reshapes the resources of the Eastern Mediterranean and migrant laborers depart its shores to work in textile mills in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Lèche-vitrines: Human Identity and the Mannequin in Au Bonheur des Dames

ABSTRACT The department store mannequin is often read as representative of commodity or sexual fetishism and, consequently, of woman objectified. This article posits that in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), the mannequin can highlight such objectification to the woman in the text. Through close readings of the text's mannequins this article seeks to analyse the combination of estrangement and excitement which characterizes the experience of living under modernity. It asks whether the headless Zolian mannequin empowers the shopper to recognize and thus reject objectification of the self, or if it is simply a disquieting reminder of one’s own powerlessness.

The Economic Wonderland of Thomas Pynchon’s the Crying of Lot 49

ABSTRACT Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is often read through the lens of psychoanalysis and taken as a model of postmodern fiction with its indeterminable, norm-subverting, hermeneutic narrative. Yet, as Pierce Inverarity, the ultimate capitalist, stands as the absent center of the mystery, this paper re-approaches Lot 49 and proposes that buried beneath its detective/mystery threads is a potent critique of the political-economic milieu of the sixties California. The various tropes, from the captive Rapunzel, Remedios Varo’s triptych, the duplicitous Trystero, to the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, knit out a world that is consolidated by economic activities and above all commodity fetishism. The article contends that Lot 49 is a reply to the sociopolitical discourses and the civil movements of the sixties. Drawing on economic and communication activities, Lot 49 breaks down the conventional binary distinction and demonstrates a complex interplay of capital, credit, and rhetoric that fabricates a postmodern world of which “all that is solid melts into air.”

MARX’S LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE AND TRADE DISPUTES IN NIGERIA

Disputes between labour and capital or workers and their employers is endemic, a phenomenon attributable to their divergent interests in the labour process. This paper investigated the processes involved in the resolution of labour disputes and how labour has generally fared since the institutionalization of trade dispute resolution mechanisms. It was the general aim of this paper to explore the theoretical and historical roots of the incessant and perennial disputes between labour and capital or workers and employers, as well as the feasibility of the various mechanisms that have been put in place for the peaceful settlement of industrial disputes for the purpose of attainment of industrial peace and harmony and enhanced productivity. It found that, for the simple fact that trade interventionist institutions are the creation of the state, which is also a party and therefore implicated in the labour/capital contradiction, it is incapable of standing on a neutral ground to resolve such disputes and ensure lasting industrial peace, particularly in dependent capitalist societies. Marx’s theory of the Fetishism of Commodities served as the theoretical framework for the paper. As a qualitative and historical study data were drawn from secondary sources such as newspapers, journal publications, books, reports and internet sources and subjected to logical content analysis. Conclusively, it drew attention to the fundamental irreconcilability of the parties and irresolubility of trade disputes within the context of a capitalist mode of production owing to the instinct for profit maximization of the capitalist enterprise which inevitably imposes a negative effect on workers’ welfare and interests. Accordingly the paper recommended a more socialized pattern of economic organization that would be more labour-friendly.

Animating a neighborhood: The enchanting placemaking of Le Grand Éléphant de Nantes

At the end of an industrial era in which Nantes was the busiest shipping and slave-trading port in France, a giant, mechanical elephant became an animating force in the city's reanimation of the neighborhood left behind. In this paper, I consider the Grand Éléphant de Nantes as a case study of urban enchantment. The elephant occupies the boundary between artwork, machine, and animal, allowing it to captivate spectators and encourage the communal creation of a place in a public urban space. It simultaneously turns away from, rather than grappling with, the site's historical role in the transatlantic slave trade. Following Jane Bennett's conception of enchantment as a method of commodity fetishism, this paper shows that enchantment is a force of placemaking that draws spectators from urban stupor and in doing so, raises the potential for ethical engagement with space.

The Relationship Between History and Mythology in Sondheim and Weidman’s 'Assassins'

This article analyses Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins to explore the way in which historical events are transformed into mythology. Following Barthes’ (1972) Mythologies, I propose that Assassins demonstrates how mythology simplifies history to serve a dominant narrative. Assassins creates a dialogue between contrasting historical narratives through the Balladeer, who embodies a simplified mythology, providing ironic contrast to Sondheim’s complex characterisation of the assassins. The characterisation of Guiteau provides an example to examine Sondheim’s character in comparison with historical and fictional accounts, in order to appreciate how mythology alters the perception of this figure. The scene with Lee Harvey Oswald invites discussion of cultural mythologies defining American national identity: the American Dream, independent freedoms and gun culture. These mythologies arise from historical mythology, but also through commodity fetishism and conspiracy theories. Assassins restores the complexity of characters who are otherwise reduced by mythology to consider how cultural mythology leads to the formation of these assassins, and to challenge the biased narrative of American historical mythology. By comparing Assassins to the historical accounts and folk songs it references, we can better understand the role of mythology in Assassins, illuminating the process by which historical mythology is produced, and indeed produces the fictionalised assassins.

"Improved Countenance": Capitalist Relations in Mansfield Park

There is no neat division between the economic and the domestic. Not only are they connected, but their meaning, structure, and value are decidedly conditioned by one another. Yet, since it is capitalism’s nature to conceal exploitation, domesticity becomes outwardly coded as the domain of tradition, despite the productive forces of the market shaping domesticity through the process of social reproduction. Lise Vogel asks how the worker is produced in capitalism, analyzing the peculiar way women are exploited in this process. Using Vogel’s theory of labor and Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, this thesis analyzes Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a remarkable and salient example of capitalist relations invading and determining the realm of the domestic in the early 19th-century. At the beginning of the novel, Fanny Price, the protagonist of the novel, is intimately involved in social reproduction, but when she is displaced to the extravagant halls of Mansfield Park, her uncle’s estate, she enters the commodity sphere and becomes an ideological weapon, emptied out of her original and unique value to fervently justify the ruling class's power.

Диалог «Language School» и метареализма: поэмы Sun Майкла Палмера и «Нефть» Алексея Парщикова

In this article the author analyzes the interaction and mutual influence of such ways of speaking, which we call Language Writing and metarealism, which he reveals on the example of the poems Sun (1987) by Michael Palmer and Oil (1999) by Aleksei Parshchikov. Palmer's poem is a decentralized statement in which syntactic interruptions, complex symbolism, and an abundance of references create an embodied heteroglossia. The catastrophe of the meaning and the assembly of voices here are somehow structured by the central symbol — the Sun — from the headline of The Sun newspaper of July 22, 1986 (“A headless man walks, lives / for four hours”) to the artificial light of consumption centers. And the semantics of dying, references to Baudelaire in the poem, as well as Palmer's separate “Baudelaire Series” somehow admit that one of the many overtones of Sun poem is “The Voyage”, the final text of Fleurs du mal. Marjorie Perloff points out the difference between the approaches of Palmer and Parshchikov in the article “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?”, where, comparing their texts, she writes that the approach of the second is closer to Arthur Rimbaud, not the split subject Language Poetry. However, the similarity and differences between the approaches of Palmer and Parshchikov are similar to the similarity and differences between Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, when both use the mythopoetics of swimming as death, but incomplete, or rather incompleting. But if the first include it in the context of criticism of commodity fetishism and the subversive power of allegory (according to Benjamin), then the second in the context of “clairvoyance” and observation of the “black and cold” waters of capitalistic Europe. So the poem Oil by Parshchikov is close to the poem Sun by Palmer both in the depiction of the world in a frozen catastrophe, in the collapse of the language, and in the political dimension. And as in the poem Sun through heteroglossia, the symbolism of the crisis meaning, a permanent apocalypse Palmer creates political criticism of the symbolic order of the consumption society, including intellectual commodity fetishism, as in the poem Oil with a multilayered image of raw materials, including as an ideological concept, Parshchikov opens up new ways for analytical political poetry.

Ghost Speed: The Strange Matter of Phantom Vehicles

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.

From Inferiority to Alienation in Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Fikrimin İnce Gülü

Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Fikrimin İnce Gülü is one of the most celebrated novels of contemporary Turkish literature. Published in 1976 and dealing with a variety of themes, the novel tells the story of Bayram, a Turkish immigrant worker’s journey from the Turkish border gate to his native village. This study aims to analyse Bayram’s narrative under two major headings: inferiority and alienation. Specifically, the article argues that the ultimate cause of Bayram’s actions is the inferiority complex which, combined with his obsessive commodity fetishism, eventually ends up with his total alienation from society. To this end, the research initially scrutinises the concept of inferiority complex through the window of individual psychology and its founder, Alfred Adler. In addition, the study also examines the notion of alienation with references to several influential thinkers. Thus, the article reveals that Bayram has become the victim of his traumatic childhood, youth experiences and social background, which give rise to his chronic feelings of inferiority. These feelings of inferiority in turn are aggravated by the capitalist system of production, eventually leading to the alienation, extreme disillusionment and isolation of Bayram as an individual. This research concludes that Bayram is an unconscious victim of his alienation and finally completes the cycle to a self-conscious state of mind after being left on his own, desperate and void of meaningful purpose orhope.

THE EVALUATION OF THE PERCEPTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING, POPULAR WITH TELEVISION SERIES, IN THE CONTEXT OF META FETISHISM: SAMPLE OF KIRMIZI ODA

Since its emergence and widespread use as a mass communication medium, the entertainment function of television, in addition to its basic functions such as idealized education and information, continues to exist as indispensable practices. The most basic television content for the entertainment function is undoubtedly serials. In addition to this basic function, serials have been the most suitable presentation medium for commodity fetishism. In these examples of commodity fetishism, in which facts and events from every field of daily life can be seen as serial contents, serials in which psychological analyzes predominate have come to the fore. This study aims to explain the place of psychological counseling/psychotherapy in TV series and its relationship with commodity fetishism. The study is based on the analysis of Kırmızı Oda series, which was selected by purposive sampling method to examine the subject of fetishism, which has not been researched much in Turkish television. In this context, ‘Kırmızı Oda’, which was determined to reflect the phenomenon of meta fetishism, was chosen as a clear presentation of the psychological treatment process as the content of the series, from the universe consisting of TV series in which the psychological counseling profession and psychological analysis predominate. The aim of the study is to analyze how a private subject such as the patient-doctor relationship is used as a rating element and how it is handled as a commodity fetishism element in the related series. In addition, how the main character is depicted and how he is shown in a relationship with other people will be examined on the basis of the concept of fetishism. Before the analysis of the series, the concept of fetishism and commodity fetishism are also mentioned in order to provide a theoretical background. Kırmızı Oda series broadcast on TV8, one of the series on psychotherapy, was chosen as a sample. In the study, it was concluded that mental disorders and psychological disorders and related psychotherapies, which were generally considered as a situation comedy element in the previous periods, were fetishized for rating purposes simultaneously with the popularization of television series content.

Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.

Workplace Restructuring and its Discontents

This article analyses the role of fetish—unspoken attachments—within and against the 2020 proposal to restructure the College of Sciences at Massey University.I look at the roles played by three forms of fetish: the commodity fetish, the fetishisation of intellectual labour, and the fetish of knowledge-without-consequences. I analyse the restructuring and its opposition by mapping these fetishes and the deadlocks to which they lead. In addition to highlighting insights that the concept of fetish generates into the politics of the restructuring, I speculate on the role of fetish as a political factor in the contemporary moment.

The Influence of Consumerism Culture on the Ideology of College Students Under the Background of "Internet +" Impact and Response Research

As a value concept of Western capitalism, consumerism culture is the manifestation and new carrier of Western ideology in contemporary society. With the development of globalization, the characteristics of extreme individualism, hedonism, and commodity fetishism of consumerism culture have biased guidance and negative influence on the mainstream ideology of college students. As the main front of talent training, universities must adhere to the guiding position of Marxism in the field of ideology, avoid the multiple hidden penetration and diffuse transmission of consumerist ideology, and make full use of the communication advantages of "Internet +" to strengthen the mainstream ideology The guiding role of the students is to guide students to strengthen the "four self-confidence", form an internal ideological and cultural consciousness, and build a reasonable and scientific consumer culture atmosphere.

Cultural labor and the defetishization of environments: connecting ethnographies of tourism in Venezuela and Chile.

This paper compares the development of the tourism industry in two different Latin American locations: a municipality of Chile’s Araucanía and Venezuela’s Gran Sabana. In both locations, part of the indigenous population shows interest in the development of this industry, which presents potential as a source of locally generated income. This comparison focuses on examining how property rights and relations shape and are reshaped by the expansion of tourist activities in these locations, shedding light on two additional questions: first, the socioeconomic conditions that help explain the increasing participation of the indigenous population in the expansion of tourism in these regions; second, a cultural phenomenon that this expansion stimulates: the circulation of discursive representations of local environments as permanently inscribed with a particular form of collective labor. This paper will conceptualize this labor as “cultural labor” and, drawing from theorizations of the fetishism of commodities, will argue that the widespread appeals to this labor constitute a (paradoxical) form of discursive defetishization that is fostered by the logic of the tourist industry. This form of defetishization discursively subverts the principle of concealment that pervades commodity fetishism as theorized by Marx, but it is nonetheless a functional part of a social process that reinscribes and rearticulates capital as a social relation among the populations of these regions.

#Foodporn: Fetishized sharing of food and its images

Once translated into images, food acquires a broader meaning. Food is no longer merely something to eat, but to show, share and look at. The increasing amount of images and pictures of dishes on our social networks, associated with hashtags such as #foodporn, expresses this renewed social, communicative and provocative function of food. However, the exhibition of these images is quite ambivalent when it comes to establishing determined patterns of visual and social relationships with and between users. The aim of this article is to analyze and attempt to provide mediation to this ambivalence. The pornographic exposition of food images no longer presupposes a transitive form of consumption by the user, but becomes pure and self-reflexing spectacle. The images are obscene (Baudrillard [1981] 1994) and characterized by an excess of transparency on their object which abolishes any form of seduction (Baudrillard [1979] 1990). Barthes ([1980] 1981) defines this kind of image as unary. Pornographic images are an emblematic example. In terms of their self-evident objectivity, these pictures lack any punctum, any piercing sign of a relationship with or openness to the observer (see Eco 1962; 1979). Nevertheless, behind their apparent transparency, the images are always products of specific perspective cuts, and still able to convey mystery, meaning and involvement. The unary image of food is a further fragment in a series of multiple perspectives on the same object. Such potentiality is actualized in our (social) media culture in which sharing and continuous remediation of images and pictures of food constitute a complex storytelling of the object. This, in turn, fosters further participation by the users. The ambivalence between the indifference of the pornographic image and the involvement in the serialization of the detail is synthetized by the notion of fetishism (Baudrillard [1972] 2019). The social (and) media scenery seems to exemplify and radicalize a sort of commodity fetishism, in which social relationships between users are shaped and mediated by (social) media relationships between images of food.

Crack-Powder Cocaine Disparity and Commodity Fetishism

Crack-Powder Cocaine Disparity and Commodity Fetishism

Unveiling Musical Production: Strauss, Mahler and Commodity Fetishism in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article locates social relationships within late-nineteenth-century German orchestral music by examining orchestration practices and aesthetics. Wagner's innovations in tone colour, Liszt's use of programmes, and Hanslick's formalism all took attention away from orchestra performers and forged a more direct relationship between audience and composer. This article argues that commercial exchange of serious music displaced social relationships between composer, performer and audience into aesthetic dictums. In particular, the widely agreed upon subordination of orchestration and colour to compositional ‘content’ was a manifestation of the social subordination of performers to composers and resulted in the decreased visibility of performers to consumers.In ultimately breaking from both New German and formalist conventions, Strauss's Don Juan and Mahler's First Symphony brought unwanted attention to orchestration and a renewed focus on performance and performers. In contrast to Wagner's use of doublings, which created timbres without clear instrumental provenance, the orchestration choices of Strauss and Mahler emphasize distinctions between instruments and themes, further highlighting the virtuosic demands they place on performers. Strauss and Mahler made performers into co-producers of their music and raised orchestral colour to the status of content. By employing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which Adorno himself largely obscures, this article goes beyond Adorno's and Dahlhaus's analysis of the ‘emancipation of colour’ to show how concert consumption objectified social relations and hierarchies as issues of mere aesthetic form, while compositions themselves became imbued with life-like subjectivity.