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Karl Marx presented his theory of commodity fetishism as an explanation of the mysterious appearance of social relations in a system of commodity production as natural phenomena. The standard interpretation of this as a failure to perceive capitalist social relations correctly depends on a particular modern sense of 'natural'. If classical political economy and Marx used 'natural' in the Aristotelian sense, commodity fetishism appears quite differently: not as a cognitive error but rather as a manner of living under commodity production, one that is not wrong but absurd, the word fetishism tying commodity production to pre-Enlightenment, preliterate peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Nancy Mac Granaky-Quaye's 2008 film Beento through Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and Hamid Naficy's work on diasporan and exilic cinema in Accented Cinema to explore how the main character trades commodities as an exercise in resisting his opponent's staunch nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is our contention that the process of higher education could be read as a commodity and in both Marxian and Freudian assumptions, a fetish. Instrumental in this discussion are Marx’s theorising of the commodity fetish that deceives by conflating the distinction between use and exchange value; and Freud’s re-visiting of his theory of fetishism, where he considers the fetish in the context of dealing with separation and loss in everyday life. This paper highlights how the consequence of fetishised behaviour has led to violent outcomes, such as the policy decision in England to introduce a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF). We argue that the TEF may bring about the death of learning in HE and diminish the role of academic staff. Nevertheless, influenced by Winnicott, Cixous and Biesta, we offer a more hopeful ‘Teaching that is Good Enough Framework’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a defense of Lukács’s original formulation of the concept of reification (Verdinglichung), with a particular emphasis on defending the Marxist social-ontological commitments at work in that conception. An attempt will be made to demonstrate that these commitments cannot be summarily dismissed as they have been in Axel Honneth’s “rehabilitation” of the concept. Honneth’s project, it will be argued, consists in an attempt to dispense entirely with the Marxist character of the concept of reification, as well as an attempt to reconstruct the concept in purely normative terms as a “forgetting” of the intersubjective recognition which he takes to be both logically and chronologically prior to the cognition of which reification participates. In outlining this project, a defense of Lukács’s original conception of reification will be offered by means of a critique of Honneth’s criticisms of Lukács’s Marxist commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mexico, One Plate at a Time, Rick Bayless presents himself as a tour guide who exports an idealized version of Mexican culture for the U.S. bourgeois seeking an escape from his/her banal work-driven existence. Viewers can see Marx's "commodity fetishism" and Žižek's cultural vampirism, since Bayless acts like a "vampire" by sucking Mexico's cultural heritage up and ripping its gastronomy out of its local context, making the complicated geopolitical relationship between both cultures invisible. To corroborate this, the author juxtaposes the representation of gastronomical products with historical-anthropological sources to trace their trajectory of commercialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) can be read as a retrospective narrative which seeks to understand how the Panic of 1837 and the global economic crisis that followed in its wake happened, though it does not offer reassurance. Rather than any broad-ranging narrative of comforting teleology that explains how the panic fits into acceptable economic orthodoxy, Martin Chuzzlewit zooms in on the deeply personal, fundamentally subjective and unconscious processes which precede a panic. This article shows how Martin Chuzzlewit denaturalizes the acquired sociocultural self-evidence of confidence through an examination of its exploitability and studies the ways in which Martin Chuzzlewit represents confidence as asserting itself through affective heuristic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the role that fetishistic concrete abstraction plays in Henri Lefebvre’s writings on everyday life, cities and space. I begin by distinguishing between Lefebvre’s theories of alienation and romantic domination and fetishistic social domination. I then reconstruct the latter showing how Lefebvre interprets Marx’s critique of political economy as an account of the social constitution of the fetishistic concrete abstractions of economic social forms, which as supraindividual and autonomous entities invert to collectively dominate, but not entirely determine, the individuals within the social relations that collectively create them. Finally, I show how this conception of fetishistic concrete abstraction runs through Lefebvre’s work, where it serves as a ‘basis’ for his attempts to ‘elaborate, refine and complement’ Marx’s critique of political economy by conceiving how abstract social domination is constituted, embedded and resisted in everyday life, cities and space while also pointing out where it is amalgamated but not reduced to Lefebvre’s expansive theory of alienation and romantic domination. Consequently, rather than simply seeing Lefebvre as the ‘reigning prophet of alienation’ with an expansive transhistorical notion of alienation and romantic domination founded on a problematic opposition between quantity and quality, I show that Lefebvre’s work on everyday life, cities and space should also be seen as possessing a historically specific theory of abstract domination based on the critique of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Investigación Económica is the property of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Facultad de Economia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A brand is a complex construction. In addition to its tangible and intangible dimensions, it implies an intrinsic relational dimension associated to any brand building process. The relational dimension is even more visible in the case of the political brand. The political brand brings with it a symbolic construction in which the experience of a diffuse form of sacredness is central, by the presence of the inadequate report specific to the manifestations related to the sacred representations. On the one hand, we are experiencing a meeting that creates the context of identity, and on the other hand a cohabitation that highlights the role of alterity. The brand imposes itself as a symbolic construction based on this game of identity and alterity in a global communication market. Communication advisers must pay attention to this symbolic dimension. It is the expressive form in which interpersonal relationships manifest themselves as assuming the values and meanings that individuals place under the idea of having a better life. The orientation towards the development of political brands understood as personal brands corresponds to a phase of professionalization of politics and political communication in electoral campaigns, but also in the stages between campaigns. At the same time, political brands grow in importance in times of crisis, both because they offer exemplary models and because they synthesize the mythological elements of the imaginary of abundance, trust and authentic dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of contingent self-definition, whereby place brands employ flexible self-definitional approaches in constructing their place brand architecture. Adopting a view of regions as social constructs, the article builds on and extends previous work on place brand architecture by identifying the underlying factors that drive contingent self-definition decisions. Based on an empirical study of professionals tasked with managing region brands in the Netherlands, 11 factors are identified as drivers of contingent self-definition by place brands. These factors are grouped into four thematic categories: (i) external perceptions, (ii) proximity, (iii) brand relationships, and (iv) politics and power. A dynamic approach to place brand architecture is advocated, foregrounding the amorphous character of regions as social constructs that defy reification solely as fixed territorial-administrative spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few recent topics in marketing have met such immediate popularity and critique as Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic (SDL). While many have criticized SDL scholarship for a lack of cultural sophistication, coherence, and relevance, it has nevertheless maintained and expanded its own distinct stream of ideas. Recently, Vargo and Lusch have proposed that SDL could be extended into a theory of society. We criticize this notion by contrasting their views on commodity value with Marxist and post-Marxist literatures, finding SDL ill-equipped to understand consumer culture, but also continuing to propagate simplistic and misguided views of “value” in commodity markets. We conclude by challenging SDL’s suitability as candidate for all-encompassing social theorizing because of its tacit neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that children's literature and political economy developed a common language to articulate the bewildering world of consumer culture, which took shape following the 1851 Great Exhibition and flourished in the 1860s and 70s. At the centre of consumer culture was the mysterious and mystifying commodity, an object that took on subjective traits when it entered the marketplace and earned exchange value. Karl Marx famously attempted to illustrate the commodity through a metaphor of a wooden table. As a material object, the table is only wood, but it comes to life during the process of exchange, a phenomenon later termed reification. During the same process that animates objects, labourers become objectified. Social relations are filtered through things rather than subjects. Mid-Victorian children's literature simultaneously began to explore the wonders and dangers of the marketplace by placing young protagonists in worlds where objects come to life. In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), the intrepid Alice enters upside-down and inside-out worlds where commodities become subjects. Alice ultimately learns that the real world that she inhabits resembles nonsense. Capitalism is based on rules that are just as arbitrary as the games she plays in wonderland. Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874) develops similar themes and environments, but takes a decidedly darker approach to illustrating the danger of the marketplace. In her imaginative worlds, children become commodities - objectified, replicated, and consumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work presents an investigation about the relations between the communication-form and the fetishistic character of the commodity. Starting from the central elements developed by Marx in chapter 1 of Capital, I turn to the particularization of information at the time of simple circulation, according to the exposition of César Bolaño. In recognizing the objective character of the information, I find, however, its phantasmagoric dimension, which Bolaño refuses by not considering the commodity fetishism. From the Marxian text, I demonstrate how Bolaño's exposure gains in criticism if developed from the fetishism of the commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between sociological and Christian approaches (focused on the Bible and the Church Fathers' teachings) regarding the relationship between materialism and life satisfaction. The theoretical analysis gives reasons that advocate the view that there are resemblances between the two perspectives regarding materialism (greed or avarice in theological language) features and the impact of these values on life satisfaction. Both approaches argue for a less materialistic way of life in order to become generally happier. Nevertheless, if science gives research-based proofs to this relationship, Christianity states that worship of God, and not material goods, is the only way to get true happiness. Finally, the paper attempts to give some possible explanations for these similarities between sociology and Christianity. First, similarly to the Christian religion, some sociologists (i.e. Marx, Veblen, and Beaudrillard) criticise materialism and consumption society. Second, the scale construction can rely on popular notions of materialism, thus some items can have religious backgrounds. Eventually, the Bible and the Church Fathers' special concern with the human nature lead to some thoughts about man that have been confirmed by researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A student essay for the Special Student Issue of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology accompanying the art exhibition 'Artist's Waste, Wasted Artists', which opened in Vienna on the 19th of September 2017 and was curated by the students of social anthropology at the University of Vienna. This essay considers the ways in which our need for differentiation on one hand and identification on the other shapes our relation to commodites and fuels their magical, fetishistic properties. Using the case of Peter Moosgaard's art project SUPERCARGO, it is argued that this art piece can unsettle the way we conceive of commodities, and reveal what may have previously been unconscious.

The migration of British individuals in rural and coastal areas of Europe and beyond has received an outstanding attention in media, with TV programs, movies, news articles or news magazine entirely dedicated to it and with a plethoric entertainment literature of “travel writings” and memoirs. In this paper I will present a critical analysis of such a literature, which explores how it is participating to the fetishisation of lifestyle migration, producing commercial argumentation for a lifestyle change via positive narratives and depictions of the migration processes, of the French rural places and of autochthone populations, marked with the socioeconomic structural conditions of lifestyle migration.