An brief excurse on the nature of modern objects. In the fourth part of the first chapter of Capital entitled “the fetishistic character of the commodity and its secret,” Marx proposes a commodity metaphysics:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, wether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.¹

For Marx, this mysterious and clearly mystical quality of the commodity which brings it closer to a religious fetish, arises from its separation into two forms of value: use value and exchange value; the first, which an object acquires by supplying a specific human need, and the second, that comes from its capacity to acquire a monetary and, as such, abstract value when entering the market. While the use value expresses “a physical relationship between physical things,” the exchange value expresses “the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities”. This products, however,

have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.²

The mere mention of a “fantastic form” of the commodity gives us a clear idea of what Marx had in mind: a hidden, ungraspable and mysterious quality that any object obtains by acquiring an exchange value in the market and that, by virtue of of its immateriality, exerts an enchantment which renders it closer to a primitive fetish, something infinitely more similar to an image or an essence, than to the physical commodity from which it emanates. Let’s think here of the “coat that is not a coat” we examined in the previous entry: its “essence”, which is abstract and immaterial, is equivalent to the exchange value, while its appearance, evidently material, determines its use value.³

Thus, the magical aura that surrounds commodities, the very root of their powers of attraction and enchantment, is the product of its dissociation in two simultaneous forms of value which, nonetheless, cannot be perceived simultaneously by the senses. Either its use value is perceived, forgive the redundancy, by using the object, or we get an abstract impression of its exchange value, but as one of those double figures that when viewed from the top down or from the bottom up show the face of a young woman or an old hag, it is not possible to perceive, and above all, to enjoy both value forms simultaneously. For Marx this commodity metaphysics constituted the “germ cell” of capitalism. Seen in this light, it is not at all strange that humans living in this economic system “catch” these metaphysics through its market operations.  

The question here would be: could there be an overt relationship between the metaphysics of merchandise and that of dandyism (2.3)? According to Agamben, this is the case.

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1. Karl Marx, Capital, 81. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 83. ↩︎
3. Here it is important to make plain that considering exchange value an “essence” presents a problem in Marxian thought. According to Marx, all forms of value are abstract and immaterial but not essential. We could then speak of value as a substance but this is not entirely true either. The value in Marx’s thought is something external, abstract and immaterial, that commodities acquire by being compared with each other in the market. Thus, when comparing Brummell’s coat with a commodity, we must limit ourselves to speaking of value as that which seems abstract and immaterial, but is nevertheless tied to its material existence. It is something more akin to an image or a phantasm, in the medieval and renaissance meaning of the word.↩︎