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that commodities are not what they seem.
Commodities have strange, perhaps ‘meta-
physical’, effects. For example, the fact that a
beautiful Caravaggio painting is a commodity –
and correlatively, that it is private property
and only within the means of the extravagantly
rich – fundamentally shapes my experience
of the work, and of my ability to enjoy its
magnificent beauty in some unalloyed way.
Its commodity status has tainted and coloured
my appreciation of it.
A commodity, then, appears to be a trivial
thing but it is in fact bewildering, even theo-
logical. The commodity, said Walter Benjamin,
has a phantom-like objectivity, and it leads its
own life after it leaves the hands of its maker.
What on earth might this mean?
One way to think about the commodity
is derived from Karl Marx, who begins his
massive treatise on capitalism (Volume 1 of
Capital) with a seemingly bizarre and arcane
examination of the commodity, with what he
calls the ‘minutiae’ of bourgeois society. The
commodity, he says, is the ‘economic cell
form’ of capitalism. It is as if he is saying that
in the same way that the DNA sequence holds
the secret to life, so the commodity is the
economic DNA, and hence the secret of mod-
ern capitalism. For Marx, the commodity is
the general form of the product – what he calls
the generally necessary form of the product
and the general elementary form of wealth –
onlyin capitalism. A society in which the com-
modity is the general form of wealth – the cell
form – is characterized by what Postone
(1993, p. 148) calls ‘a unique form of social
interdependence’: people do not consume
what they produce and produce and exchange
commodities to acquire other commodities.
But the commodity itself is a queer thing.
because while it has physical qualities and uses,
and is the product of physical processes that are
perceptible to the senses, itssocialqualities –
what Marx calls the social or value form – are
obscured and hidden. ‘Use value’ is self-evi-
dent (this is a chair that I can use as a seat and
that has many fine attributes for the comfort of
my ageing body) but value form – the social
construction of the commodity – is not.
Indeed, this value relation – the ways in which
commodities are constituted, now and in the
past, by social relations between people – is not
perceptible to the senses. Sometimes, says
Marx, the social properties that things acquire
under particular circumstances are seen as
inherent in their natural forms (i.e. in the obvi-
ous physical properties of the commodity). The
commodity is not what it appears. There is,then, a hidden life to commodities and under-
standing something of this secret life might
reveal profound insights into the entire edifice- the society, the culture, the political economy
- of commodity-producing systems. It is pos-
sible to construct a diagrammatic ‘biography’
of the broiler from production to consumption,
which depicts many of the actors involved in
the commodity’s complex movements and
valuations. This is acommodity circuitor acom-
modity chain(in French, it is referred to as a
filie`re). Commodity circuits can depict different
types of commodity chains and contrasting
commodity dynamics.
Marx invoked commodity fetishism to
describe the ways in which commodities have
a phantom objectivity. The social character of
their making is presented in a ‘perverted’
form. By this, he meant a number of complex
things: first, that the social character of a com-
modity is somehow seen as a natural attribute
intrinsic to the thing itself; second, that the
commodities appear as an independent and
uncontrolled reality, apart from the producers
who fashioned them; and, third, in confusing
relations between people and between things,
events and processes are represented as time-
less or without history, they are naturalized.
Another way to think about this is that com-
modity production – the unfathomable swirl of
commodity life – produces particular forms of
alienation and reification. In his bookSociety
of the spectacle(1977), Guy Debord argues that
in a world of total commodification, life pre-
sents itself an as immense accumulation of
spectacles. The spectacle, says Debord, is
when the commodity has reached the total
occupation of social life and appears as a set
of relations mediated by images. The great
world exhibitions and arcades of the nine-
teenth century were forerunners of the spec-
tacle, celebrating the world as a commodity.
But in the contemporary epoch, in which the
representation of the commodity is so inextric-
ably wrapped up with the thing itself, the com-
modity form appears as spectacle, or as a
spectacular event, whether four men trying to
play chicken or a chef playing football with a
frozen broiler. Whatever else it may be, the
terrifying events of 11 September 2001 and
the collapse of the twin towers of the World
Trade Center represented an enormous spec-
tacle in the Debordian sense; and a spectacle
for which there could be no spectacular
response of equal measure. Necessarily, this
spectacle of spectacles was a product of com-
modification and necessarily it has become a
commodity itself. Within weeks of the attacks,
Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 100 31.3.2009 9:45pmCOMMODITY