The Commodity

RELATED TERMS: Alienation; Reification; Historical materialism – Marxism

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

Marx (1976: 163)

“The belief systems of consumption and commodity have been exposed as empty.”

(Brody, 2010)

One common notion associated with designs is that they are commodities. In the context of design practices, it may be of value to consider the meanings attributed to the commodity and commodification in order to understand the specific modes of performativity and actantiality of the material elements of designs such as, for example, their potential roles in the performance of identity or their role in performing relations of domination, discrimination, exclusion and exploitation; in short, their potential roles in ongoing injustices.

Commodity fetishism is key concept in the work of Karl Marx. Marx sees capitalism as driven by the need to produce commodities for consumption in an ever-expanding market. In the process the ‘use-value’ of the objects produced by human labour is replaced by their ‘exchange-value’, expressed generally in monetary terms (Brooker, 2003).

In its primary function as a commodity under capitalism, the resulting object becomes a ‘fetish’, substituting itself for the social relations it has occluded or repressed. In his book, Capital, Marx speaks of reification, rather than alienation, a term that he had used in his earlier work, to describe this process of becoming objectified. Not only the products of labour but the labourer also becomes a commodity and is induced to see himself or herself in this way.

In the era of mass consumption, a re-conceptualization of the commodity has taken place. The commodity is now seen as having positive and flexible social, cultural and personal meanings, indeed ‘use value’, and not simply the exchange and monetary value that enforce reification, as discussed in Appadurai (1986). The idea of the commodification of labour power, along with other key Marxist concepts, has also been critiqued by critical thinkers, such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985), for example, who see it as a ‘fiction’ brought into being by a commitment to a theory of inflexible laws of economic necessity.

‘Shopping’ and Commodification

The Harvard Project on the City’s chapter on ‘Shopping’ (Koolhaas, et al., 2000: 124-184) argues polemically that ‘architecture = shopping’ and that this equivalence has infiltrated the design of museums, airports and public spaces as well as cartography, urbanism and city planning, such that all urban environments are now constituted as shopping malls in an endless interiority. In his review of this text, Fredric Jameson (2003) discusses how the Project’s notion of ‘shopping’ is, in one sense, a synonym for what has been understood in the Western Marxist tradition as the process of commodification, but by understanding commodification as shopping a new twist is added. 

As Jameson explains, Marx saw commodification as ideological. It operated as a form of false consciousness, the function of which was to mask the production of value from the consumer, a group limited at that time to the middle classes. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács develops this analysis within the history of philosophy. In doing so, he re-situates commodification, seeing it as crucial for understanding the social processes of mental and physical reification (Jameson, 2003: 78)

In the aftermath of World War II, a moment when the sale of commodities and luxury items becomes generalised across a wider population in the prosperous areas of Western Europe, the United States and Japan, the orientation towards commodification takes a different turn. 

In Europe, this novel perspective on commodification, invented by the Situationists, and in particular by Guy Debord, took the form of a reiteration of the emphasis on commodity fetishism. Debord argued that the final form of commodity fetishism is the image. On this basis, he developed his theory of the society of the spectacle: what was previously discussed in material terms as wealth had now become an immense agglomerate of spectacles. 

This perspective, Jameson comments, is close to our current assumptions about the commodification process: that it is less a matter of false consciousness than of a new consumerist life style, one that is similar to an addiction more so than a philosophical error or a poor political choice. This is part of a more general view that a, pervasively commodified, culture is the substance of everyday life, a view pioneered in the post-1945 period by the likes of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for example.

Pursuing this line of thought, Jameson contends, the images discussed in the Harvard Project on the City’s text are images of images (of images …). They should, by rights, facilitate a kind of critical distance, by returning the notion of commodification to its original situation in the commercial exchange. 

Jameson points out that these developments indicate that what we do with commodities as images is not simply to look at them. It is already a valuable defamiliarisation of the notions of commodity and image to say that we buy images. However, the idea that we shop for images has even greater value because it displaces the process of commodification onto a new form of desire which situates commodification and desire well before any actual sale takes place, the moment of purchase being, theory has it, when we lose all interest in the object as such and we move on to the next ‘object of desire’ in an act of acceptance of the impossibility of satisfaction. 

Consumption is dematerialised: materiality simply serves as a pretext for cognitive pleasures. The upshot of the Harvard Project on the City’s research and polemic suggests there will be little else for us to do but shop but with a particular understanding of shopping: for (material) commodities as (mental) images (of images of images …), as fantasy, our own imaginary self-sufficient, self-entertaining spectacle.

Jameson concludes that this could be seen as, “an extraordinary expansion of desire around the world”. He suggests it gives rise to,

“a whole new existential stance of those who can afford it and who now, long since familiar with both the meaninglessness of life and the impossibility of satisfaction, construct a life style in which a specific new organization of desire offers the consumption of just that impossibility and just that meaninglessness?”

(Jameson, 2003: 79)

Given these horizons, one crucial question for design practices is where they sit within this extended urban mall-space, in other words in relation to a life-style centred on ‘shopping’. Are they framed by it (how could they not be?) and if so, to what extent? Are they capable of creating or inventing an opening through which to reach that which exceeds the mall-space, as ‘junkspace’¹, in Koolhaas’ (2002) term?

Notes

[1] “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built … product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.” (Koolhaas’, 2002: 175)

References

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

Brody, N. (2010) Anti-Design Festival Manifesto, Design Manifestos. Available at: https://designmanifestos.org/neville-brody-anti-design-festival-manifesto/ (Accessed: 27 March 2024).

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

Jameson, F. (2003) Future city, New Left Review, 21(May/June), pp. 65–79. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city (Accessed: 22 March 2024).

Koolhaas, R. et al. (2000) Mutations: Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Barcelona, ES: Actar.

Koolhaas, R. (2002) Junkspace, October, 100, pp. 175–190. Available at: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28200221%29100%3C175%3AJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M (Accessed: 22 March 2024).

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

Marx, K. (1976). The Fetishism of the commodity and its secret. In Capital: a critique of political economy. Volume 1. Edited by B. Fowkes. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. pp.163-177.