Commodities, Upside Down
by Jamie van der Klaauw
The commodity is a strange concept. It doesn’t refer to anything specific — anything and everything can be a commodity. It just has to be produced for the market, i.e. for its possible exchange value rather than its use-value. Leave it up to the English language to make a verb out of it, commodification: an ever more extending process of making things into commodities. Ultimately, nothing seems safe from this colonization. You can’t make a verb out of the original German ‘Ware’. But the idea of an expanding process is truer to Marx’s ideas than we might recall. In the very first sentence of Capital, Marx hints at such a process of subsumption – wealth can only be expressed in commodities, and increasing wealth, the express aim of economics, equals a process of commodification.
What is this abstract element that all things share in their capacity as commodity? A force or, more specifically, a lure. The commodity imbues a thing, person, or service with a lure that pulls us in and disorients us. This attraction gives the material a spiritual power that makes us forget that we are merely dealing with a relation between objects. We get caught in the commodity, or the commodity catches us. This goes both ways: the buyers see through the material of the commodity an ‘x’ factor, a near metaphysical quality that tells us we are buying more than the materiality alone. Prestige, coolness, or moral dignity. It also holds for the producer, who thinks from the perspective of the commodity. In other words, the ‘what’ doesn’t matter, all that matters is ‘how much’ profit.
In her contribution to the Desire + Capital series, Viola Marchi takes on and pushes forward the model Marx uses to understand this lure of the commodity. Marx says that commodity fetishism, the entanglement with the lure of the commodity, works like a camera obscura. This often-small device controls the amount of light projected into a dark chamber to produce a lifelike image of whatever the light bounced off before entering the chamber. Simply put, it is a predecessor to the camera, but needs natural lighting and a certain position to create the effect of a mimetic image. Per the properties of light, just like when it goes through our pupils and hits the lens in our eyes, the image is flipped. The device differs from our eyes in that there is no human brain to correct the image immediately, we can see the flipped image, almost as if we can look into a production process midway at an unfinished product.
This led Marx to understand the process of commodification like the camera obscura. For, what the abstract lure of the commodity covers over is the (social) labor power required to produce the thing. It is as if the commodity is flipped: instead of the labor cost, we see the element ‘x’ that supposedly justifies its price. This works to such an extent that when we see an unreasonably pricy commodity, we assume that there must be more of this ‘x’ we hope to see redeemed upon purchasing.
Marx uses the model around the 1860s. By then camera obscura is no longer as new or exciting as it once was. We think that certain painters may have been using it as a tool to create art for over two centuries at least. Johannes Vermeer, active in Delft (The Netherlands) from the 1650s to the 1670s, supposedly could have only gotten the specific gradient in his skies if he used a device like the camera obscura which accurately reproduced the shading that he could then trace. As Marchi puts front and center in her contribution, we may want to take seriously the idea that for Marx himself already, the camera obscura was an antiquated model. It didn’t quite do the trick. Instead, Marchi points us to the re-emergence of mystical practices like seances or table-turning, which Marx briefly touches upon. Perhaps there we find a more accurate model for the commodity. Not a mimetic, and flipped, image, but a wholly made up spiritual ‘x’ which nonetheless has supposed real effects, all the while hiding the helping hands which move the table or drop a picture off the wall.
The question is: does such a model still hold today? Marx was an avid reader of Hegel, and in the foreword to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes two points: philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, and second, philosophy always comes too late. So, now that we have philosophized about the nature of the commodity, has its time run out? Just as it emerged in the 18th century to become the constitutive element of capitalism, so surely, must it disappear again. And with it, capitalism as well.
