Theory Of Commodity Fetishism Research Articles

Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: REFUGIO by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks

ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.

Artistic Work as Symbolic Capital

Female artists and performers are at the top of the scale of precarious work relations in post-Fordist society. Their work is undervalued and seldom paid. This article deals with the issues arising from the controversial relations between the cultural, social and economic value of their work. How to re-valorize artistic work performed by women? In providing the answer to this central question, the value of artworks will be defined in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and in the context of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. The article argues that a contemporary alternative can be sought in the new chain of value accumulation, in which the surplus-value of the artwork is created by shifting its symbolic value into a direct relationship to the material resources. This point will be illustrated with the art projects presented at City of Women, an international festival of contemporary arts based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Fanon and the Underside of Commodity Fetishism

In the present essay, I argue that portions of Frantz Fanon’s L’an V de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) significantly contribute to, develop, and advance the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. First, I describe and chart Fanon’s theorization of the transformations of the veil, the radio, and medicine in revolutionary Algeria, and map the homologous moments of each of these studies. Next, I give a brief synopsis of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism and argue that this theory leaves open questions about the way in which use-value plays a role in commodity fetishization in colonial contexts, and, by extension, in actual anticolonial political revolutions. The foregoing then paves the way for a re-evaluation of the central insights of Fanon’s studies of the veil, the radio, and medicine.

Error or absurdity? A non-cognitive approach to commodity fetishism

Karl Marx presented his theory of commodity fetishism as an explanation of the mysterious appearance of social relations in a system of commodity production as natural phenomena. The standard interpretation of this as a failure to perceive capitalist social relations correctly depends on a particular modern sense of ‘natural’. If classical political economy and Marx used ‘natural’ in the Aristotelian sense, commodity fetishism appears quite differently: not as a cognitive error but rather as a manner of living under commodity production, one that is not wrong but absurd, the word fetishism tying commodity production to pre-Enlightenment, preliterate peoples.

On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names

This paper asks what kind of modifications we might have to make to our conventional understandings of proper names to accommodate the im/propriety of brand names. On the basis of ethnographic research on a naming crisis at a Mumbai advertising agency, I suggest that the classic anthropological notion of ‘participation’ (as opposed to reference) allows us to consider the play between baptism and the mimetic activation of virtual potentials that characterizes the public life of brand names. I argue for moving beyond the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘real’ proper names sustained by the theory of commodity fetishism, and propose instead that the supposed artificiality of brand identities has come to operate as an alibi for the unsteady authenticity of personal identities.

A Marxian Theory of the Subject: Commodity Fetishism, Autonomy, and Psychological Deprivation

The theme of misrecognition is a common element in the work of Marx, Freud, and Lacan, and it takes as its implicit focus the relationship between autonomy, fetishism, and alienation. Marx's theory of commodity fetishism exposes the mystification of social relations in the commodity as a concealed form of domination that contributes to the creation of alienated subjects. Lacan's ahistorical account of the formation of alienated subjects through their insertion in the symbolic order, while antithetical to Marx's materialist stance, provides a useful framework for exploring the formation of capitalist subjects whose consciousness is shaped by the fetishism of commodities. Lacan's theory of empty speech provides a vehicle for envisioning the full speech that might characterize the consciousness of the socialist subject.

A Rage for Order: Fetishism, Self-Betrayal, and Exploitation in The Secret Agent

�� ��� Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon The maker’s rage to order words of the sea Words of the fragrant portals, dimly- starred, And of ourselves and our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. —Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” Discussing the ideological contradictions at play in The Secret Agent in terms of the novel’s “metaphysical materialism,” Terry Eagleton identifies its central dimension as a product of a “radical conservative subensemble” distinguished by “radical skepticism about progress, change, causality and temporality” (23–32). For Eagleton, the novel’s naturalist form, while endorsing the normative assumptions of the bourgeois world by conflating time and space into an eternal present, simultaneously, through the violent change, motion, and spiritual vision represented by Winnie, Verloc, and Stevie respectively, attempts to present an alternative set of humane values distinct from bourgeois ones. Although Eagleton doesn’t explore it in great depth, the textual process that he describes has a clear parallel in the social and economic mechanisms that Karl Marx identifies in his theory of commodity fetishism. Even as the text works to expose the historical foundations of the subordination of human life to the imperatives of the commodity system, its metaphysical materialism presents the belief in social progress as an illusion shared by the bourgeoisie and revolutionists alike. The destructive effects of the system of commodity fetishism appear both in the novel’s characterization of capitalist society as well as the psychological impoverishment of its central characters. Understood as an attempt to come to terms with the forms of social and economic domination produced by the fetishizing of social relations, the

Critical Considerations on the Fetishism of Commodities

The theory of commodity fetishism, in its received form, is too strong for critical cultural inquiry. However, while inflationary tendencies have been marked in post-Marxian developments of the theory/-/-beginning with Lukács/-/-the problem begins with Marx's original formulation. The analysis of the value form in Capital does not logically support Marx's thesis of universal fetishism in regularized commodity production. Rather, fetishism is a contingent phenomenon, to be probed in properly historical forms of analysis. Returning to its beginnings in a study of narrative disavowal in Conrad's novels, the article then examines fetishism and the figuration of capital in Nostromo.

Marx's Theory of Commodity Fetishism As the Unstated Premise of What Is to Be Done?

(2001). Marx's Theory of Commodity Fetishism As the Unstated Premise of What Is to Be Done?. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 57-68.

The Future of Commodity Fetishism

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.

Social Relations, Commodity-Fetishism and Marx's Critique of Political Economy

Starting from Marx's theory of value and commodity-fetishism, I address the question of how fetishised categories of bourgeois economics are organically linked with the reality of the capitalist class relation of work and of class struggle. The paper is thus structured. I first point out that Marx's critique sees the limitation of classical political economy in the confusion between "substance" and "form" (the case of Smith) or in the inadequate treatment of "substance" and therefore the lack of a theory of "form" (Ricardo). I then discuss Marx's notion of substance of value and relate it to his theory of commodity-fetishism. In this discussion my central reference point is the category of abstract labor as a social relation. Consequently, I discuss the category of commodity-fetishism as cognitive apprehension of this social relation from a particular class perspective, that of capital. I go on to critically evaluate Rubin's interpretation of Marx's theory of fetishism in light of my interpretation of commodity-fetishism and its relation to the category of value. I then illustrate my argument by using the theory of commodity-fetishism to shed light on the social meaning of some economic categories. Finally, I move beyond Marx and suggest a general theoretical understanding of the evolution of economic theory in relation to these struggles and in the organic connection with the capitalist relation of work.