56RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSclasses who own and invest capital. His discussion of the commodity is
primarily articulated around the adoption of pragmatic examples relying
on inanimate objects/substances, such as linen, gold, diamonds, wheat,
and sugar. When animals appear in his writing, they do so as “providers
of labor,” like the proletariat. It is not, therefore, a coincidence that Marx’s
attention turns to domesticated animals: “In the earliest period of human
history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have been bred for the
purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labor, play the
chief part as instruments of labor along with specially prepared stones,
wood, bones, and shells.”^58 Considering the commodity status of taxi-
dermy objects through Marx’s theorization of “all those things which
labor merely separates from immediate connection with their environ-
ment,” we see that things are identified as subjects of labor, a means of
production: the subject of labor that is “seized upon and modified as de-
sired” can prove productive.^59 “Such are fish which we catch and take
from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and
ores which we extract from their veins,” states Marx.^60 In light of this
theorization, let us therefore argue that human/animal relationships can
be said to be substantially informed by commodity values and that live
animals can acquire commodity value at different points during their
lives or just upon dying. From a Marxist perspective, wild animals that
have been captured for the purpose of producing taxidermy objects ini-
tially constitute a subject of labor, at least before they acquire the status of
exchangeable commodity.
However, the ontological ambiguity of taxidermy objects appears to be
problematized by the concept of commodity fetishism more than by a
transcendental or elusive inherent aura. Incorporating Foucault’s genea-
logical methodology to Marvin’s approach can help us better grasp the
agency of taxidermy animal things. A split register of inquiry quickly sur-
faces. On the one hand, this approach enables the recovery of the cul-
tural afterlife of the animal, and on the other, it proposes a possibility of
piecing together the discourses, practices, and power/knowledge relations
that led to the animal’s death. Both registers of inquiry are substantially
shaped by the materiality of animal bodies as agency-imbued entities ca-
pable of affecting, and reflexively shaping, human/animal relations.
Appropriately positioning the moment in which the animal may have
been endowed with commodity value therefore becomes important to the
writing of the biographical account of the object itself. Some animals ac-