A friend of mine asked me to meet her today to talk about Marx' theory of commodity fetishism. We duly met up and had a really good chat about the labour metaphysics that led to that point and different interpretations of what the fetishm entailed. The last moment, as I see it, of the fetishisation of the commodity is the point where the consumer of a given product is socially drawn into a masochistic relation to their own needs. As Deleuze points out, in Coldness and Cruelty, the masochist gets his kicks (read 'has the same basic needs as') the non-masochist. He does, however, have the meta-need that his initial need requires its own deference as a neccesary precondition for the need's fulfilment. There is no point within Venus in Furs where we can legitimately suggest that Wanda is not sexually coveted, however, consumation cannot be achieved until the game of deference (which creates its own peaks and troughs of intensity and proximity to the desired body) reaches its own ultimate endgame, where an organised contract expires, leaving one free from the continuation of servitude but having exhuasted the qualitative possibilities of deference.In consumerist speak, then, X is unable to fulfil his basic need of getting from A to B without the deference of its fulfilment through the buying of a certain kind of car, without which the qualitative comfort of the fulfiled need is impossible.
What, then, if the contract never ends? In Marxian terms, what if we find ourselves with this created need but don't have the funds to afford the deference. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position of permanently being defered from our deference.How does such a state manifest itself?
Whilst I will not disagree for a second with the Marxist thesis that all our experiences are dictated by the material distrobutions we find ourselves under, the manifestations do not always occur in direct relation to our own roles within structures of production.
The deference of deference is absence or presence. in the positive case (where I say I'll stop smoking tommorrow while lighting up) it manifests itself as a continuing engagement, a presence, in the negative as intentionality/comportment towards a displaced thing in the world. But how does this show up for us? How can we comport ourselves towards something not there?
This 'something' is further complicated by the commodification of human beings themselves. When we anthopomorphise the object and objectify the human, we find ourselves in a position where we can claim no ontological difference between the deference of the commodity fetishism and, say, the practice in Masoch's novel. While no-one in their right mind can pretend that we've reached a point where we universally value things as much as people, we must recognise that in the dual movement shown above there is a worrying tendency that is difficult to characterise. The final question, then, is how we even distinguish the commodity deference from our longing for another human being?
