III. Commodity Fetishism

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This chapter is in the book Fetishism and Culture

III Commodity FetishismThis is the mythology of capital.(Maurice Godelier 1999, 71)1 IntroductionThis chapter is about things that are gifts or commodities. The main focus will bethe discovery of commodity fetishism. Gifts or commodities do not only have tobe things; skills or services, animals or people, ideas or speech acts, festivities,ceremonies, spiritual salvation and so on, can also be given as a gift or sold. Any-thing that becomes a gift or a commodity is always also something other thanjust that. Becoming a gift or a commodity does not add any constitutive qualitiesto things, services or living beings. Rather, gifts and commodities are social and/or economic mechanisms through which objects are mobilised and‘put into cir-culation’. The form of this commerce is exchange or trade. Exchange–in gifts orcommodities–is, as far back into the past as we know about, the oldest or atleast one of the oldest forms of contract in and between cultural communalgroups. Religion, the law, art and the economy do not necessarily need to befunctionally differentiated like in modern societies for it to occur. In societieswith so-called‘primitive economies’–perhaps it is better if we call themproto-economies instead–they are in fact inseparably interwoven. Unlike inmodernity where it seems that the economic system operates according to itsown set of rules–independent from religion, law, morals or emotions. Non-eco-nomic norms or conventions are at best viewed as marginal conditions or as fac-tors whose amount of influence simply needs to be calculated economically;conversely, economic processes are powerful defining factors for values, world-views and politics. At the same time, these represent‘environments’for the sys-tem of economy, conceived of as autonomous, which function according to fun-damentally different codes. However, between the economy and itsenvironments there are also relationships, influences, interactions, networks oftraffic and exchange, but also the transfer and the dissemination of parts or en-tire sections. These links are particularly close between, for example, the eco-nomic and the political system. However, that is not the focus of this chapter.Neither is the focus on what Niklas Luhmann calls the interpenetration of sys-tems: according to this view, consciousness and communication interpenetrateeach other in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. Commodity fet-

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III Commodity FetishismThis is the mythology of capital.(Maurice Godelier 1999, 71)1 IntroductionThis chapter is about things that are gifts or commodities. The main focus will bethe discovery of commodity fetishism. Gifts or commodities do not only have tobe things; skills or services, animals or people, ideas or speech acts, festivities,ceremonies, spiritual salvation and so on, can also be given as a gift or sold. Any-thing that becomes a gift or a commodity is always also something other thanjust that. Becoming a gift or a commodity does not add any constitutive qualitiesto things, services or living beings. Rather, gifts and commodities are social and/or economic mechanisms through which objects are mobilised and‘put into cir-culation’. The form of this commerce is exchange or trade. Exchange–in gifts orcommodities–is, as far back into the past as we know about, the oldest or atleast one of the oldest forms of contract in and between cultural communalgroups. Religion, the law, art and the economy do not necessarily need to befunctionally differentiated like in modern societies for it to occur. In societieswith so-called‘primitive economies’–perhaps it is better if we call themproto-economies instead–they are in fact inseparably interwoven. Unlike inmodernity where it seems that the economic system operates according to itsown set of rules–independent from religion, law, morals or emotions. Non-eco-nomic norms or conventions are at best viewed as marginal conditions or as fac-tors whose amount of influence simply needs to be calculated economically;conversely, economic processes are powerful defining factors for values, world-views and politics. At the same time, these represent‘environments’for the sys-tem of economy, conceived of as autonomous, which function according to fun-damentally different codes. However, between the economy and itsenvironments there are also relationships, influences, interactions, networks oftraffic and exchange, but also the transfer and the dissemination of parts or en-tire sections. These links are particularly close between, for example, the eco-nomic and the political system. However, that is not the focus of this chapter.Neither is the focus on what Niklas Luhmann calls the interpenetration of sys-tems: according to this view, consciousness and communication interpenetrateeach other in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. Commodity fet-

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