Thoughts on material culture studies

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

A Thought on Capitalism, Commodity and Fetish

"Yesterday I pawned a coat dating back to my Liverpool days in order to buy writing paper."  
-- Marx 1983a [1852-55]: 221.

In an article entitled "Marx's Coat," Peter Stallybrass discusses how a separation between people and objects became increasingly taken for granted through the development of capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century.  With this normalization of a clear and solid boundary between people and objects, the notion of something called a fetish was developed to describe when this boundary appeared to be less solid.  The act of fetishizing an object, or understanding it to have important value based upon personal, social or sentimental reasons, was understood to be something done by Others.  People living and participating in the bourgeoning capitalist economy knew an object's most important worth was determined by its exchange value (how much it cost, how much it could be sold for).  As Stallybrass states, for those in the West, the association between fetishism and the Other “implied a new definition of what it meant to be European: that is, a subject unhampered by fixation upon objects, a subject who, having recognized the true (i.e. market) value of the object-as-commodity, fixated instead upon the transcendental values that transformed gold into ships, ships into guns, guns into tobacco, tobacco into sugar, sugar into gold, and all into an accountable profit.”  He continues, noting that this emphasis on exchange value “demonized in the concept of the fetish . . . the possibility that history, memory, and desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and loved and worn."

The demonization of the potential for material culture to hold memories, evoke emotions and desire, results from what Stallybrass describes as “the radically dematerialized opposition between the ‘individual’ and his or her ‘possessions’ (between subject and object).” This, he argues, “is one of the central ideological oppositions of capitalist societies.” 


But this way of relating to objects, this fetishization, as it were, wasn't the problem, for Marx.  As Stallybrass tells us:  "The problem for Marx was . . . not with fetishism as such but rather with a specific form of fetishism that took as its object not the animized object of human labour and love but the evacuated nonobject that was the site of exchange." This idea, Stallybrass explains, was at the root of Marx's Capital.  "In the place of a coat," Stallybrass writes, "there was a transcendental value that erased both the making and wearing of the coat. Capital was Marx's attempt to give back the coat to its owner" (184-7).

Now, anyone who has ever found themselves upset over breaking a mug that belonged to a dear family member, or fallen in love with a pair of shoes, or destroyed gifts in a cathartic act when scorned by a lover, has experienced the discordant value of objects inside and outside of their exchange value.   For the working-class Marx, as Stallybrass shows, his overcoat carried numerous valuations throughout its life: "[t]o have one's coat, to wear it on one's back, was to hold onto a memory system that at a moment of crisis could be transformed back into money" (202).

Along with other items belonging to his family, it went in and out of pawnshops, its worth determined by its exchange value. 

When he had possession of it, wearing the coat not only kept Marx warm,  but it indicated his belonging to a certain group, and with that, it opened doors.  Literally.  It allowed him access to the British Museum where he did research.   

Stallybrass' article on Marx's Coat concludes with a thought-provoking statement about people, things and value:

"It has become cliche to say that we should not treat people like things.  But it is a cliche that misses the point.  What have we done to things to have such contempt for them?  And who can afford to have such contempt?  Why are prisoners stripped of their clothes, if not to strip them of themselves?  Marx, having a precarious hold upon the materials of self-construction, knew the value of his own coat" (203). 


Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998): 183–207. 

No comments:

Post a Comment