Commodity fetishism, geographical imaginations and ...



Commodity fetishism, geographical imaginations and imaginative geographies

A little over a decade ago David Harvey, in an essay on the geographical imagination, argued that “we should deploy the Marxian concept of fetishism with its full force” (1990: 423). Though, ten years on, he would doubtless wish to talk about geographical imaginations in the plural, the fascination with fetishism remains. Thus, in the introduction to Spaces of Hope, Harvey has recently insisted that a “consideration of the commodity fetish” can yield “extraordinary insights” (2000: 7). I propose to agree with this statement, but in a way not entirely consistent with Harvey’s trenchant brand of Marxism. In this editorial I want to give a geomaterialist answer to two related questions: first, has the motif of fetishism outlived its usefulness as a tool for commodity analysis?; and second, if it has not, what kind of critical practice does ‘de-fetishisation’ licence in a world where, as Allan Pred (1998: 151) would have it “every nook and cranny of everyday, everynight life is subject to colonization by the commodity form”? My answers, as will become clear, entail more than a vestigial attachment to the concepts of Marx’s political economy. Though the signifier ‘Marxism’ is now so polysemic as to be virtually incoherent, I – like such seemingly disparate figures as Harvey himself and Gayatri Spivak – think it can still usefully denote a set of explanatory and political resources that are relinquished only at a considerable cost. That said, the point of my argument will be that the critique of the commodity fetish is of contemporary relevance only to the extent that it can escape the epistemic straightjacket in which many Marxists since Marx have arguably confined it. My conclusion will be that a Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism is today a necessary but never sufficient critical practice.

More particularly, I want to claim that this practice can attend to “the importance of social relations with all of their associated inequalities” – I borrow those words from Peter Jackson (1999: 104), a geographer with an ambivalent attitude towards Marxism – while serving simultaneously as what Emily Apter (1993: 4) calls “a vehicle for resisting confining essentialisms”: be they cultural, economic, geographical or otherwise. To critique the commodity fetish thus raises – rather than answers – a key question: what imaginative geographies of both ourselves and distant others are entailed in any attempt to make visible the geographical lives of commodities? Unproblematised answers to that question in the neo-liberal version of globalisation, I would argue, only serve to show that in a capitalist world the hypostatisation of ‘cultures’, ‘places’ and ‘economies’ etc. is all too functional to the logic of accumulation.

Getting with the fetish?

Commodification, it seems, is all-pervasive: genes, cells, atoms, bacteria, organs and human limbs are just some of the new frontiers of commoditization.[1] Indeed, in June last year, as a satirical response to the ceaseless dilation of the commodity sphere, the British poet Donna Maclean applied for a patent on her entire self (The Guardian, 2000a: 8), while, less humorously, Glaxo Smith-Kline, Novartis, Monsanto and other life-science transnationals are now frantically trying to enclose the genetic commons by passing-off the regulatory norms of Western intellectual property law as global ‘common-sense’ (Parry, forthcoming). And yet, if the current geographical interest in commodities is timely, my suggestion that we should still practice de-fetishisation seems not to be. For example, consider how the current disciplinary generation of commodity analysts have reacted against Harvey’s (1990: 423) insistence that we “lift the veil on … geographical …ignorance”. True, defetishisation does important critical work: think, for example, of the US-based Stop Sweatshops Campaign (Johns and Vural, 2000), J. S. G. Boggs’ humorous counterfeits of the dollar bill (Weschler, 2000), the profane illumination offered by Elaine Hartwick’s (1998) account of the diamond trade or the broad-based appeal of Naomi Klein’s (2001) No Logo – a critique of fetishism if ever there was one. But the limitations of the fetishism motif are now obvious enough. First, the trope of ‘unveiling’ not only underplays the positivities of consumption but – as Baudrillard showed – also fails to take seriously the semiology of commodity surfaces. Secondly, de-fetishisation hints – implausibly – at a ‘deeper’ reality that it’s the privileged job of the analyst to uncover (Smith, 1988). Thirdly, this – for critics at least – is linked to the urge to ground commodities in a specific site and a particular constituency: namely, the site of production and the constituency of spatially dispersed labour. Yet, fourthly, as Spivak (1988), Derrida (1994) and Tom Keenan (1993) have shown, this attempt to specify the ‘origins’ of commodities is haunted by spectres: for upon closer examination Marxists have typically found it hard to name these socio-spatial origins without essentialising places, cultures, and localities (e.g. Serequeherban, 1990). This connects, fifthly, to a vital point made some 20 years ago by Michael Taussig in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, a point that repays repetition here: “Unless we realise that the social relations thus signified [once commodities are ‘unveiled’] are themselves signs and social constructs defined by categories of thought that are also the product of society and history, we remain victims of and apologists for the semiotic we are seeking to understand” (Taussig, 1980: 9, emphasis added). Finally, the critique of fetishism can all-too-easily shade into what Jackson (1999: 96) calls “a rhetoric of moral outrage and blanket disapproval”.

Because of all this, most contemporary social, cultural and economic geographers prefer other metaphors in the pursuit of commodity analysis. Thus Phil Crang (1996) talks of commodity ‘displacement’, Jackson (1998: 104) of the ‘social geography of things’, Leslie and Reimer (1999) of ‘commodity-chains’ and Whatmore and Thorne (1998), in an analysis of Café Direct, of ‘actor-networks’. These various ways of understanding the geography and significance of commodities have been immensely fertile. They’ve helped geographers work-past a set of neo-Kantian dualisms that have for too long splintered disciplinary understandings of social reality; they’ve called into question the depth-metaphysics of the fetish metaphor; and they’ve helped us to see commodities as complex, mutable and mobile sites of social relations, cultural identity and economic power. In other words, they engender a pluralised, multiperspectival, reflexive geographical imagination attuned to the relational dynamics whereby multiple cultures, places and ecologies, in Cook and Crang’s (1996: 131) words, “bleed into and mutually constitute one another”. Not everyone approves, of course. Hartwick recently launched a blistering geoMarxist attack on this new work on commodities, talking about the need to “reconnect back to the material reality of the producers” (Hartwick, 2000: 1190) – in the process arguably confirming to non-Marxist analysts the limits of defetishisation as a critical practice.

So, where does this leave a geographical critique of the commodity fetish? Cook and Crang (1996) argue that in late-capitalist societies consumers are always already subject to a double fetish: namely, the thing-like quality of social relations that Harvey and Hartwick want to go beyond and the constructed imaginative geographies that are used to sell commodities via adverts, labels, trademarks, copyright or billboards (Coombe, 1998). These performative knowledges, Cook and Crang show, all-too-frequently fill the vacuum of geographical ignorance with questionable, but commercially effective, images of other places and cultures: think of Del Monte man, Uncle Ben’s rice or Jeep CherokeeTM. In light of this “cultural materialization of the economic” (1996: 134), they propose that commodity analysis be less about ‘deepening’ or ‘thickening’ knowledge as to the origins and spatial life of commodities and more about “working on commodity surfaces” (1996: 147) – what Taussig (1992), in The Nervous System, called ‘getting with the fetish’. I have no particular wish to dissent from Cook and Crang’s argument. Indeed, I think they usefully highlight the complicated dual politics of representation involved commodity analysis: to wit, the hard labour of disclosing the spatial lives of commodities – what Hartwick (2000: 1178) aptly terms “geographical detective work” – is itself implicated in constructing imaginative geographies that are as material as they are non-innocent. Geographical imaginations and imaginative geographies are, therefore, mutually implicated. Nonetheless, I do think it possible to recuperate defetishisation as a practice in ways that retain the powerful ‘glocal’ vision promised by a Marxian critique of political economy while, at the same time, attending to the complex, even dangerous, representational politics in any and all attempts to imagine the socio-spatial constituencies whose interests that practice supposedly serves.

Capital commodities

As a way into this let me briefly offer a Marxian interpretation of the commodity before illustrating what a contemporary critique of the fetish might look like – my illustration relating to the private appropriation of indigenous knowledge-culture by Western biotechnology firms.

Fetishism is, in Pred’s (1998: 153) words, “a selective non-consciousness” and de-fetishisation an injunction to re-cognise. Arguably, all Marx’s huff and puff about ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ comes down to two key observations: first, that “there is more to commodities than their physical properties…” (Watts, 1999: 306); second, that, as Apter (1993: 4) puts it, “a constant displacing of reference occurs, paradoxically, as a result of so much fixing”. Capitalism, in short, is distinguished by an “object-centred sociality” (Knorr-Cetina, 1997) in which the social character of private labour is expressed in the thingness of commodities. For Marx, therefore, commodities are not just goods available for exchange (cf. Appadurai, 1986); rather, they are things that, at some or all stages of their socio-spatial biographies, are subject to the logic of ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ within a market framework.

This is why Appadurai’s question is particularly apt when considering the specificity of a Marxian commodity analysis. He asks: “what kinds of properties do objects, knowledge and people take-on when they become commodities?” (1986: 6). A Marxian answer is that capitalist commodities take-on a value-form: that is, in their irreducible specificity they become implicated in a decentralised, transnational process of labour value expansion that is peculiarly abstract. This explains Marx’s injunction to see capitalism less a self-sufficient ‘system’ and more an ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’ – each with their own socio-geographic trajectory. It’s an injunction that still has a number of important implications:

• First, it means that the properties of commodities – physical, social, virtual – are not in any way exhausted by, or reducible to, their implication in capital accumulation.

• Second, it means that capitalism is one particular ‘regime of value’ which, via commodification, convenes multiple other value spheres within the same social universe. Commodities are thus foci of diverse modalities of social relationality that are somehow made commensurable during the capitalist phase of their existence.

• Third, it means that commodities are transgressive: they are both things and relations, particular and general, local and global, here and there. The capitalist commodity world is a space of flows and a web of interconnections where the ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ of places, peoples and ecologies become ever harder to fathom.

• Fourth, it means that commodities duplicitously represent more than simply ‘labour’ in the instrumental, physicalist sense (cf. Habermas, 1978) since the production of commodities also involves knowledge and communicative interaction – themselves framed by various cultural norms that are relatively autonomous – and environmental inputs. Commodites thus represent an indissociable union of material and discursive practices (see Robertson, 2000).

• Fifth, in the current context of post-Fordist, post-national, Triadic glocalisation, it means that commodities represent ever more complex encounters between ever more people over ever greater distances in ever more compressed time periods.

• Finally, it means that diverse socio-environmental spatialities and temporalities become forcibly articulated with the spatio-temporal horizons of capitalism

So far so good. But I’ve said nothing to suggest that a contemporary Marxian critique of the fetish would do anything more than resurrect what Cook and Crang, (1996: 145) call a “traditional and well-sanctioned didactic role of providing more accurate … knowledge, correcting the misapprehensions … propagated in … consumer culture …”. But it’s here that I want to consider the imaginative geographies entailed in geographically representing the hidden life of commodities. The fundamental questions that deconstructing the fetish begs are these: what does a commodity represent?; in what does the sociality of the commodity consist?; who, what and where is ‘crystallised’ in commodity-bodies? Historically, many Marxists have tried to answer these questions literally and empirically, assuming that commodities as social representations ‘stood for’ something else that might be punctual and nameable: sites of production, working communities, exploited labour. However, like Spivak (1988) and Moishe Postone (1996), I think it more productive to see a Marxian critique of the fetish as posing – rather than answering – a most radical and troubling question which rests on a rather different understanding of socio-spatial representation. The question is this: how is it possible for critics of global capitalism in the early 21st century to name – to draw social and geographic boundaries around – the sites commodity fetishism ‘hides’ when those sites no longer exist sui generis? Where, in other words, does the unseen sociality of commodities actually lie?

Defetishisation, culture and knowledge: the political economy of intellectual property rights

By way of a conclusion, I want to illustrate the importance of this question and suggest that premature answers to it can make Marxists complicit with what Sklair (2000) calls ‘the transnational capitalist class’ for whom the hypostatisation of locality and identity is all-too-functional to the quest for surplus value.

AstraZenenca currently has patent EP0970222 pending on a cinnamoyl reductase derived from eucalyptus plants (The Guardian, 2000b: 8). With profits of $4.1billion in 2000, AstraZeneca is one of a cohort of very large life-science companies who are energetically ‘bioprospecting the public domain’ (Brush, 1999). Today, there are over 9000 patents pending on over 200,000 genes, most of them lodged in the last three years (The Guardian, 2000c: 23). One day soon, you or I might, in effect, purchase cinnamoyl reductase – it helps regulate biomass and could be used in commercial crop production. But, if we bought it, what does the food commodity containing cinnamoyl reductase represent?

The obvious answer is that it represents scientific labour conducted in AstraZenenca’s advanced biotechnology labs and field-testing sites. The less obvious answer is that it represents the hidden, tacit knowledge that indigenous groups in centres of biological diversity have used to artfully modify plants like eucalyptus over successive generations. Indeed, what Rifkin (1998) calls our “biotech century” will doubtless see a truly massive net transfer of germplasm and cultural knowledge from Third World communities “that are economically poor but biologically affluent to others with the opposite attribute” (Brush, 1999: 537).[2] As the case of Shawn Fanning’s Napster and the stand-off between Craig Venter’s Celera and the Human Genome Project’s John Sulster show[3], capital typically seeks free access to public images, knowledge, resources and ideas only to privatise them via trademarks, copyrights and patents (Jessop, 2001). These tools of intellectual property are at once discursive and material: they function as a kind of holding operation on the flux of social life in order to identify commodity authors and name the recipients of surplus value at given geographical scales.

As is well-known, in the brave new genomic century, so-called ‘bioprospecting contracts’ are currently being championed by the WTO, the World Resources Institute, the Biotrade Initiative and other Western-based transnational bodies in order to redress what Shiva (1997) calls ‘biopiracy’ (a contemporary form of what Marx called primitive accumulation). These contracts are intended to identify and reward those communities – from Fiji to Gujarat – whose knowledge and labour are invested in agricultural biodiversity. However, as John Frow (1996) rightly observes, they amount to an enclosure of the biological and knowledge commons. In turn, bioprospecting’s been facilitated by the rapid up-scaling – to the global level – of Euro-American intellectual property law under the auspices of the European Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and now TRIPs coupled with the protocols of the Convention on Biological Diversity (see McAfee, 1999) – together forming what Featherstone (1990: 2) elsewhere calls a “proto-universal culture”.

What’s so interesting about this process is that it seeks to identify the spatially distanciated ‘donors’ and ‘users’ of germplasm while deploying Occidental distinctions between nature and culture, discovery and invention, tacit and explicit knowledge in order to fix originators and recipients according to a contract model. That is, rather as a scientist might isolate a gene, currently hegemonic IPR simplifies the restless complexity of biological, cultural and informational exchange and instanciates the fiction that commodities are the product of sovereign individuals, groups or – as with the category of ‘cultural property’ – whole communities (see Handler, 1991; Simpson).

So I ask again: once one de-fetishises the commodity, where and with whom does it sociality lie? As Merck and Company’s mid-1990s biotrade agreement with Costa Rica showed, the question defies easy answers (Flitner, 1999). Whose knowledge and bioresources should be compensated? How can indigenous communities be defined socially, spatially and temporally when their practices are intergenerational, their identity historically constructed and their physical movements trangress the modern boundaries of nation states? (see Escobar, 2001). Where, more generally, do public or common resources and knowledges begin and where do they end?

This, to my mind, is the kind of difficult question a contemporary Marxist critique of the commodity fetish allows us to ask. Answering it involves the messy, contingent, context-specific work of politics: of naming the sites and subjects of social, cultural, economic and environmental exploitation without somehow doing symbolic injustice to them.

Acknowledgement A spoken version of this editorial was given at the 2000 AAG meeting in New York in a session entitled ‘Commodities/economy/culture’. Many thanks to Gavin Bridge and Adrian Smith for giving me the opportunity to think out loud about commodity fetishism.

References

Appadurai, A. (ed) 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Apter, E. 1993. Introduction In E. Apter and W. Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 1-12.

Brush, S. 1999. Bioprospecting the public domain. Cultural Anthropology, 14: 535-55.

Cook, I. and Crang, P. 1996. The world on a plate. Journal of Material Culture, 1: 131-53.

Coombe, R. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge.

Escobar, A 2001. Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography, 20: 139-174

Featherstone, M. 1990. Global Culture. London: Sage.

Flitner, M. 2000. Biodiversity: of local commons and global commodities. In M. Goldman (ed.) Privatising Nature. London: Pluto, pp. 144-66.

Frow, J. 1996. Information as gift and commodity. New Left Review, 219: 89-108.

Habermas, J. 1978. Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd edition. London: Heinmann.

Handler, R. 1991. Who owns the past?. In B. Williams (ed.) The Politics of Culture. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, pp. 63-74.

Hartwick, E. 1998. Geographies of consumption. Society and Space, 16: 423-37.

Hartwick, E. 2000. Towards a geographical politics of consumption. Environment and Planning A, 32: 1177-92.

Harvey, D. 1990. Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80: 418-34.

Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Jackson, P. 1999 Commodity cultures: the traffic in things. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24: 95-108.

Jessop, B. 2001. The state and the contradictions of the knowledge-driven economy. In J. Bryson et al. (eds) Knowledge/Space/Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 63-78.

Johns, R. and Vural, L. 2000. Class, geography and the consumerist turn. Environment and Planning A, 32: 1193-1214.

Keenan, T. 1993. The point is to exchange it. In E. Apter and W. Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 152-85.

Klein, N. 2001. No Logo. New York: Flamingo.

Knorr-Cetina, K. 1997.

Leslie, D. and Reimer, S. 1999. Spatializing commodity chains. Progress in Human Geography, 23: 401-420.

McAfee, C. 1999. Selling nature to save it? Society and Space, 17: 133-54.

Monbiot, G. 2000. Dying of consumption. The Guardian, 28th December: 22.

Parry, B. Forthcoming. Cultures of knowledge. Antipode.

Postone, M. 1996. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pred, A. 1998. The nature of denaturalized consumption and everyday life. In B. Braun and N. Castree (eds) Remaking Reality. London: Routledge, pp. 150-68.

Rifkin, J. 1998. The Biotech Century. New York: Victor Gollancz

Robertson, M. 2000. No net loss. Antipode, 32: 463-93.

Serequeherban, T. 1990. Karl Marx and African emancipatory thought. Praxis International, 10: 161-81.

Shiva, V. 1997. Biopiracy. Dartington: Green Books.

Sklair, L. 2000 The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith, P. (1988) Discerning the subject. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Spivak, G. 1988. In Other Worlds. London: Routledge.

Taussig, M. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Taussig, M. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge.

The Guardian, 2000a. The story of life. Special supplement. June 26th, pp. 1-14.

The Guardian, 2000b. Patenting Life. Special supplement. November 15th, pp. 1-12.

The Guardian. 2000c. Whose life is it anyway?. November, 15th: 23.

Watts, M. 1999. Commodities. In P. Cloke et al. (eds) Introducing Human Geographies. London: Arnold, pp. 305-15.

Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. 1998. Nourishing networks. In M. Watts and D. Goodman (eds) Globalizing Food. New York: Routledge, pp. 287-304.

Weschler, L. 2000. Boggs: A Comedy of Values. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

-----------------------

[1]And, it’s worth adding, global consumption level of commodities has never been higher (Monbiot, 2000).

[2]A process that, in any case, has been occurring since the earliest days of European colonialism.

[3]Napster was the free internet service that permitted the public swapping of commercially marketed music. Its founder, Shawn Fanning, recently lost a court battle to the world’s five largest record labels – Warner, Sony, EMI, BMG and Universal. Celera is a biotechnology company founded by American research scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter, and has sought to commodify information about the human genome. John Sulster, a socialist biological researcher at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, is an outspoken defender of the public status of knowledge about humanity’s genetic make-up.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download