Commodity Fetishism
- Fetish defined as: an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
- Freudianuseofthewordfetishism defines a form of sexual desire is linked to an object. This is not how Marx defined fetishism but Freud’s definition does come into play later!
The exchange of commodities obscures the character of the human relations of production, between people in society i.e. who owns what and who doesn’t, who is paid a lot and who is paid a little, who has access to education and who doesn’t who is the employer and who is the employee, etc.
Commodities become the reified/objectified form of social relations. The commodity embodies the relationship between the workers and the capitalist in his employment of the worker to produce commodities.
Commodity fetishism is when an object (commodity) is revered, aspired to, worshiped as having the magical ability to transform your position within society – your relationship to other people. It embodies social fantasies, promises and illusions. It transcends use value to attain exchange value.
If visual culture is the continuous displacement/appearance of meaning in the field of vision and the visible, how can visual culture reinforce the fetishism of the commodity?
Myth
- Saussure suggested that signifiers (sounds) and signifieds (concepts) are connected toghether by the process of signification
- Barthes suggested that this process does not necessarily end at this point,
- A sign can take part in a new level of signification where it becomes the signified at another level (Myth).
Human relationships are no longer only reified in material form i.e. The goods that we use and buy. Human relations are reified in the form of images that circulate and we use like commodities. These include all images, images of the world, images of Commodities, images of ourselves.
The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away in to representation.
When Debord says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord according to Debord, have supplanted genuine human interaction. His fourth thesis is: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have.” “Consequently, social life moves further (from material reality), leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely the appearance of the image.”
Life is no longer directly lived instead we live through a representation of life as a conceptual identity within the framework of the capitalist system of social relations. This is the Spectacle. It pretends to offer unification but in reality it is only unified in that it has generalized separation creating an almost impenetrable false consciousness of human relations based on commodity fetishism and reification.
This system is what keeps the elites in power making their position unassailable. Like the film ‘the Matrix’ it is so effective because we are blind to its operation. The sum of all of our actions, dreams, ideas, and interactionsis the Spectacle so we cannot easily conceive of alternatives.
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