Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1519 ^ 1525

DOI:10.1068/a3464

Commentary

Commodity fetishism, geographical imaginations and imaginative geographies

A little over a decade ago David Harvey, in an essay on the geographical imagination,
argued that ``we should deploy the Marxian concept of fetishism with its full force''
(1990, page 423). Though, ten years on, he would doubtless wish to talk about geo-
graphical imaginations in the plural, the fascination with fetishism remains. Thus, in
the introduction to Spaces of Hope, Harvey has recently insisted that a ``consideration
of the commodity fetish'' can yield ``extraordinary insights'' (2000, page 7). I propose to
agree with this statement, but in a way not entirely consistent with Harvey's trenchant
brand of Marxism. In this commentary I want to give a geomaterialist answer to two
related questions: First, has the motif of fetishism outlived its usefulness as a tool for
commodity analysis? And second, if it has not, what kind of critical practice does
`defetishisation' license in a world where, as Allan Pred (1998, page 151) would have
it, ``every nook and cranny of everyday, everynight life is subject to colonization by the
commodity form''? My answers, as will become clear, entail more than a vestigial
attachment to the concepts of Marx's political economy. Though the signifier `Marxism'
is now so polysemic as to be virtually incoherent, Iölike such seemingly disparate
figures as Harvey himself and Gayatri Spivaköthink it can still usefully denote a set of
explanatory and political resources that are relinquished only at a considerable cost.
That said, the point of my argument will be that the critique of the commodity fetish is
of contemporary relevance only to the extent that it can escape the epistemic straight-
jacket in which many Marxists since Marx have arguably confined it. My conclusion will
be that a Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism is today a necessary but never
sufficient critical practice.
More particularly, I want to claim that this practice can attend to ``the importance of
social relations with all of their associated inequalities'' öI borrow those words from
Peter Jackson (1999, page 104), a geographer with an ambivalent attitude towards
Marxismöwhile serving simultaneously as what Emily Apter (1993, page 4) calls ``a
vehicle for resisting confining essentialisms'': be they cultural, economic, geographical,
or otherwise. To critique the commodity fetish thus raisesörather than answersöa key
question: what imaginative geographies both of ourselves and of distant others are
entailed in any attempt to make visible the geographical lives of commodities? Unpro-
blematised answers to that question in the neoliberal version of globalisation, I would
argue, serve only to show that in a capitalist world the hypostatisation of `cultures',
`places', and `economies' etc is all too functional to the logic of accumulation.
Getting with the fetish?
Commodification, it seems, is all-pervasive: genes, cells, atoms, bacteria, organs, and
human limbs are just some of the new frontiers of commoditisation.(1) Indeed, in June
last year, as a satirical response to the ceaseless dilation of the commodity sphere, the
British poet Donna Maclean applied for a patent on her entire self (The Guardian
2000a, page 8), while, less humorously, Glaxo Smith-Kline, Novartis, Monsanto, and
other life-science transnationals are now frantically trying to enclose the genetic
commons by passing off the regulatory norms of Western intellectual property law as
global `common sense' (Parry, forthcoming). And yet, if the current geographical interest
(1) And, it is worth adding, the global consumption level of commodities has never been higher

(Monbiot, 2000).
1520 Commentary

in commodities is timely, my suggestion that we should still practice defetishisation

seems not to be. For example, consider how the current disciplinary generation of
commodity analysts have reacted against Harvey's (1990, page 423) insistence that we
``lift the veil on ... geographical ... ignorance''. True, defetishisation does important crit-
ical work: think, for example, of the US-based Stop Sweatshops Campaign (Johns and
Vural, 2000), J S G Boggs's humorous counterfeits of the dollar bill (Weschler, 2000),
the profane illumination offered by Elaine Hartwick's (1998) account of the diamond
trade or the broad-based appeal of Naomi Klein's (2001) No Logo ö a critique of
fetishism if ever there was one. But the limitations of the fetishism motif are now
obvious enough. First, the trope of `unveiling' not only underplays the positivities of
consumption butöas Jean Baudrillard showed öalso fails to take seriously the semi-
ology of commodity surfaces. Second, defetishisation hintsöimplausiblyöat a `deeper'
reality that it is the privileged job of the analyst to uncover (Smith, 1988). Third, thisö
for critics at leastöis linked to the urge to ground commodities in a specific site and a
particular constituency: namely, the site of production and the constituency of spatially
dispersed labour. Yet, fourth, as Spivak (1988), Jacques Derrida (1994), and Tom
Keenan (1993) have shown, this attempt to specify the `origins' of commodities is
haunted by spectres: for upon closer examination Marxists have typically found it
hard to name these sociospatial origins without essentialising places, cultures, and
localities (Serequeherban, 1990). This connects, fifth, to a vital point made some twenty
years ago by Michael Taussig in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
(1980), a point that repays repetition here: ``Unless we realise that the social relations
thus signified [once commodities are `unveiled'] are themselves signs and social con-
structs defined by categories of thought that are also the product of society and history,
we remain victims of and apologists for the semiotic we are seeking to understand''
(1980, page 9, emphasis added). Finally, the critique of fetishism can all too easily
shade into what Jackson (1999, page 96) calls ``a rhetoric of moral outrage and blanket
disapproval''.
Because of all this, most contemporary social, cultural, and economic geogra-
phers prefer other metaphors in the pursuit of commodity analysis. Thus Phil Crang
(1996) talks of commodity `displacement', Jackson (1999, page 104) of the ``social
geography of things'', Debbie Leslie and Suzanne Reimer (1999) of `commodity-
chains' and Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne (1998), in an analysis of Cafë
Direct, of `actor-networks'. These various ways of understanding the geography and
significance of commodities have been immensely fertile. They have helped geogra-
phers work past a set of neo-Kantian dualisms that have for too long splintered
disciplinary understandings of social reality; they have called into question the
depth-metaphysics of the fetish metaphor; and they have helped us to see commod-
ities as complex, mutable, and mobile sites of social relations, cultural identity, and
economic power. In other words, they engender a pluralised, multiperspectival,
reflexive geographical imagination attuned to the relational dynamics whereby multi-
ple cultures, places, and ecologies, in Ian Cook and Crang's (1996, page 131) words,
``bleed into and mutually constitute one another''. Not everyone approves, of course.
Hartwick recently launched a blistering geo-Marxist attack on this new work on
commodities, talking about the need to ``reconnect back to the material reality of
the producers'' (2000, page 1190) ö in the process arguably confirming to non-Marxist
analysts the limits of defetishisation as a critical practice.
So, where does this leave a geographical critique of the commodity fetish? Cook
and Crang (1996) argue that in late-capitalist societies consumers are always already
subject to a double fetish: namely, the thing-like quality of social relations that Harvey
and Hartwick want to go beyond and the constructed imaginative geographies that are
Commentary 1521

used to sell commodities via adverts, labels, trademarks, copyright, or billboards

(Coombe, 1998). These performative knowledges, Cook and Crang show, all too fre-
quently fill the vacuum of geographical ignorance with questionable, but commercially
effective, images of other places and cultures: think of Del Monte man, Uncle Ben's
rice, or Jeep Cherokee2. In light of this ``cultural materialization of the economic''
(1996, page 134), they propose that commodity analysis be less about `deepening' or
`thickening' knowledge as to the origins and spatial life of commodities and more
about ``working on commodity surfaces'' (page 147)öwhat Taussig (1992), in The
Nervous System, called ``getting with the fetish''. I have no particular wish to dissent
from Cook and Crang's argument. Indeed, I think they usefully highlight the compli-
cated dual politics of representation involved commodity analysis: to wit, the hard
labour of disclosing the spatial lives of commoditiesöwhat Hartwick (2000,
page 1178) aptly terms ``geographical detective work''öis itself implicated in construct-
ing imaginative geographies that are as material as they are noninnocent. Geographical
imaginations and imaginative geographies are, therefore, mutually implicated. None-
theless, I do think it possible to recuperate defetishisation as a practice in ways that
retain the powerful `glocal' vision promised by a Marxian critique of political economy
while, at the same time, attending to the complex, even dangerous, representational
politics in any and all attempts to imagine the sociospatial constituencies whose interests
that practice supposedly serves.
Capital commodities
As a way into this let me briefly offer a Marxian interpretation of the commodity
before illustrating what a contemporary critique of the fetish might look likeömy
illustration relating to the private appropriation of indigenous knowledge-culture by
Western biotechnology firms.
Fetishism is, in Pred's (1998, page 153) words, ``a selective non-consciousness'' and
defetishisation an injunction to re-cognise. Arguably, all Marx's huff and puff about
`metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties' comes down to two key observations:
first, that ``there is more to commodities than their physical properties ...'' (Watts, 1999,
page 306); second, that, as Apter (1993, page 4) puts it, ``a constant displacing of
reference occurs, paradoxically, as a result of so much fixing''. Capitalism, in short, is
distinguished by an ``object-centred sociality'' (Knorr-Cetina, 2001) in which the social
character of private labour is expressed in the thingness of commodities. For Marx,
therefore, commodities are not just goods available for exchange (compare Appadurai,
1986); rather, they are things that, at some or all stages of their sociospatial biogra-
phies, are subject to the logic of `accumulation for accumulation's sake' within a
market framework.
This is why Appadurai's question is particularly apt when considering the specificity
of a Marxian commodity analysis. He asks: ``what kinds of properties do objects,
knowledge and people take-on when they become commodities?'' (1986, page 6). A
Marxian answer is that capitalist commodities take on a value-form: that is, in their
irreducible specificity they become implicated in a decentralised, transnational process
of labour-value expansion that is peculiarly abstract. This explains Marx's injunction to
see capitalism less a self-sufficient `system' and more `an immense accumulation of
commodities' öeach with their own sociogeographic trajectory. It is an injunction
that still has a number of important implications:
(1) It means that the properties of commoditiesöphysical, social, virtualöare not in
any way exhausted by, or reducible to, their implication in capital accumulation.
(2) It means that capitalism is one particular `regime of value' which, via commo-
dification, convenes multiple other value spheres within the same social universe.
1522 Commentary

Commodities are thus foci of diverse modalities of social relationality that are somehow
made commensurable during the capitalist phase of their existence.
(3) It means that commodities are transgressive: they are both things and relations,
particular and general, local and global, here and there. The capitalist commodity world
is a space of flows and a web of interconnections where the `insides' and `outsides' of
places, peoples, and ecologies become ever harder to fathom.
(4) It means that commodities duplicitously represent more than simply `labour' in the
instrumental, physicalist sense (compare Habermas, 1978) because the production of
commodities also involves knowledge and communicative interactionöthemselves
framed by various cultural norms that are relatively autonomous öand environmental
inputs. Commodities thus represent an indissociable union of material and discursive
practices (see Robertson, 2000).
(5) In the current context of post-Fordist, postnational, Triadic glocalisation, it means
that commodities represent ever more complex encounters between ever more people
over ever greater distances in ever more compressed time periods.
(6) It means that diverse socioenvironmental spatialities and temporalities become
forcibly articulated with the spatiotemporal horizons of capitalism.
So far so good. But I have said nothing to suggest that a contemporary Marxian
critique of the fetish would do anything more than resurrect what Cook and Crang
(1996, page 145) call a ``traditional and well-sanctioned didactic role of providing more
accurate ... knowledge, correcting the misapprehensions ... propagated in ... consumer
culture ...''. But it is here that I want to consider the imaginative geographies entailed
in geographically representing the hidden life of commodities. The fundamental ques-
tions that deconstructing the fetish begs are these: What does a commodity represent?
In what does the sociality of the commodity consist? Who, what, and where are
`crystallised' in commodity bodies? Historically, many Marxists have tried to answer
these questions literally and empirically, assuming that commodities as social repre-
sentations `stood for' something else that might be punctual and nameable: sites of
production, working communities, exploited labour. However, like Spivak (1988) and
Moishe Postone (1996), I think it more productive to see a Marxian critique of the fetish
as posing ö rather than answeringöa most radical and troubling question which rests on
a rather different understanding of sociospatial representation. The question is this: how
is it possible for critics of global capitalism in the early 21st century to name öto draw
social and geographic boundaries around öthe sites commodity fetishism `hides' when
those sites no longer exist sui generis? Where, in other words, does the unseen sociality of
commodities actually lie?
Defetishisation, culture, and knowledge: the political economy of intellectual property rights
By way of a conclusion, I want to illustrate the importance of this question and suggest
that premature answers to it can make Marxists complicit with what Leslie Sklair
(2000) calls ``the transnational capitalist class'' for whom the hypostatisation of locality
and identity is all too functional to the quest for surplus value.
AstraZeneca currently has patent EP0 970 222 pending on a cinnamoyl reductase
derived from eucalyptus plants (The Guardian 2000b, page 8). With profits of $4.1 bil-
lion in 2000, AstraZeneca is one of a cohort of very large life-science companies who are
energetically ``bioprospecting the public domain'' (Brush, 1999). Today, there are over
9000 patents pending on over 200 000 genes, most of them lodged in the last three years
(The Guardian 2000c). One day soon, you or I might, in effect, purchase cinnamoyl
reductaseöit helps regulate biomass and could be used in commercial crop production.
But, if we bought it, what does the food commodity containing cinnamoyl reductase
represent?
Commentary 1523

The obvious answer is that it represents scientific labour conducted in AstraZeneca's

advanced biotechnology laboratories and field-testing sites. The less obvious answer is
that it represents the hidden, tacit knowledge that indigenous groups in centres of
biological diversity have used to artfully modify plants such as eucalyptus over succes-
sive generations. Indeed, what Rifkin (1998) calls our ``biotech century'' will doubtless
see a truly massive net transfer of germplasm and cultural knowledge from Third
World communities ``that are economically poor but biologically affluent to others
with the opposite attribute'' (Brush, 1999, page 537).(2) As the case of Shawn Fanning's
Napster and the stand-off between Craig Venter's Celera and the Human Genome
Project's John Sulster show,(3) capital typically seeks free access to public images,
knowledge, resources, and ideas only to privatise them via trademarks, copyrights, and
patents (Jessop, 2001). These tools of intellectual property are at once discursive and
material: they function as a kind of holding operation on the flux of social life in order
to identify commodity authors and name the recipients of surplus value at given
geographical scales.
As is well known, in the brave new genomic century, so-called `bioprospecting
contracts' are currently being championed by the WTO, the World Resources Institute,
the Biotrade Initiative, and other Western-based transnational bodies in order to
redress what Vandana Shiva (1997) calls `biopiracy' (a contemporary form of what
Marx called primitive accumulation). These contracts are intended to identify and
reward those communitiesöfrom Fiji to Gujaratöwhose knowledge and labour are
invested in agricultural biodiversity. However, as John Frow (1996) rightly observes,
they amount to an enclosure of the biological and knowledge commons. In turn,
bioprospecting has been facilitated by the rapid upscaling öto the global levelöof
Euro-American intellectual property law under the auspices of the European Patent
Office, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and now the Trade Related
Intellectual Property Rights agreement coupled with the protocols of the Convention
on Biological Diversity (see McAfee, 1999)ötogether forming what Mike Featherstone
(1990, page 2) calls a ``proto-universal culture''.
What is so interesting about this process is that it seeks to identify the spatially
distanciated `donors' and `users' of germplasm while deploying Occidental distinctions
between nature and culture, discovery and invention, tacit and explicit knowledge in
order to fix originators and recipients according to a contract model. That is, rather as
a scientist might isolate a gene, the currently hegemonic intellectual property regime
simplifies the restless complexity of biological, cultural, and informational exchange
and instanciates the fiction that commodities are the product of sovereign individu-
als, groups or ö as with the category of `cultural property' ö whole communities (see
Handler, 1991).
So I ask again: once one defetishises the commodity, where and with whom does its
sociality lie? As Merck and Company's mid-1990s biotrade agreement with Costa Rica
showed, the question defies easy answers (Flitner, 1999). Whose knowledge and bio-
resources should be compensated? How can indigenous communities be defined
socially, spatially, and temporally when their practices are intergenerational, their

(2) Aprocess that, in any case, has been occurring since the earliest days of European colonialism.
(3) Napsterwas the free Internet service that permitted the public swapping of commercially
marketed music. Its founder, Shawn Fanning, recently lost a court battle to the world's five largest
record labelsöWarner, Sony, EMI, BMG, and Universal. Celera is a biotechnology company
founded by US research scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter, and has sought to commodify
information about the human genome. John Sulster, a socialist biological researcher at the Sanger
Centre in Cambridge, is an outspoken defender of the public status of knowledge about humanity's
genetic make-up.
1524 Commentary

identity historically constructed, and their physical movements transgress the modern
boundaries of nation-states (see Escobar, 2001). Where, more generally, do public or
common resources and knowledges begin and where do they end?
This, to my mind, is the kind of difficult question a contemporary Marxist critique
of the commodity fetish allows us to ask. Answering it involves the messy, contingent,
context-specific work of politics: of naming the sites and subjects of social, cultural,
economic, and environmental exploitation without somehow doing symbolic injustice
to them.
Noel Castree
Acknowledgements. A spoken version of this editorial was given at the 2001 AAG meeting in New
York in a session entitled ``Commodities/economy/culture''. Many thanks to Gavin Bridge and
Adrian Smith for giving me the opportunity to think out loud about commodity fetishism.
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ß 2001 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain