Benjamin in China, or the Silk Market Project: On the changing nature of the commodity
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Matthew Archer
Matthew Archer (b. 1989) is a PhD student at Yale University. His research interests include contemporary capitalism, environmental anthropology, the commodity, and labor.
Abstract
The nature of the commodity is changing in the face of the digitalization and financialization of capital and wealth. Using a counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag from Beijing’s Silk Road Market as a metaphor for the commodity in general, this paper applies theoretical insights from Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and others, to explore the role of perception and representation in new modes of value ascription. I also examine commodification in contemporary capitalism as an object-sign process, concluding with a brief discussion of the ways the “counterfeit” metaphor connects to other economic processes and theories.
About the author
Matthew Archer (b. 1989) is a PhD student at Yale University. His research interests include contemporary capitalism, environmental anthropology, the commodity, and labor.
Acknowledgement
I am immensely grateful for the advice and encouragement of Professor Henry Sussman at Yale and for the comments from Marcel Danesi and anonymous reviewers. I am also thankful to the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies for providing much-needed funding for travel to Beijing in June 2013.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- How do we understand the meaning of connotations? A cognitive computational model
- Benjamin in China, or the Silk Market Project: On the changing nature of the commodity
- From words and sentences to interjections: The anatomy of exclamations in Peirce and Wittgenstein
- Signs of probability: A semiotic perspective on the Heisenberg principle
- The edusemiotics of Tarot: Recovering the lost feminine
- The structural semiotics paradigm for marketing research: Theory, methodology, and case analysis
- Semiotic analysis of the observer in relativity, quantum mechanics, and a possible theory of everything
- Signaling equality: On humor and other semiotic resources that serve disagreement and display horizontal hierarchy
- Is a rose is a rose is a rose? Appropriating polysemy in film: The case of rose imagery in American Beauty
- Schémas des interactions sémiotiques dans la construction du sens délirant
- Over a dead body: International coverage of grief
- The semiotic dimensions of vertical social (self)classification
- Semiotics and writing systems
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- How do we understand the meaning of connotations? A cognitive computational model
- Benjamin in China, or the Silk Market Project: On the changing nature of the commodity
- From words and sentences to interjections: The anatomy of exclamations in Peirce and Wittgenstein
- Signs of probability: A semiotic perspective on the Heisenberg principle
- The edusemiotics of Tarot: Recovering the lost feminine
- The structural semiotics paradigm for marketing research: Theory, methodology, and case analysis
- Semiotic analysis of the observer in relativity, quantum mechanics, and a possible theory of everything
- Signaling equality: On humor and other semiotic resources that serve disagreement and display horizontal hierarchy
- Is a rose is a rose is a rose? Appropriating polysemy in film: The case of rose imagery in American Beauty
- Schémas des interactions sémiotiques dans la construction du sens délirant
- Over a dead body: International coverage of grief
- The semiotic dimensions of vertical social (self)classification
- Semiotics and writing systems
