Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 48.
See Sven Lütticken, “Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball and Duchamp’s Carrot,” e-flux journal, no. 13 (February 2010); “Art and Thingness, Part Two: Thingification,” e-flux journal, no. 15 (April 2010); and “Art and Thingness, Part Three: The Heart of the Thing is the Thing We Don’t Know,” e-flux journal, no. 16 (May 2010).
Lütticken, “Art and Thingness, Part One” and W. J. T. Mitchell What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 112.
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital (1867), available at → (accessed June 29, 2010).
I thank Noam Yuran for drawing my attention to this ad.
See Georges Lefebvre, “The Bourgeois Revolution,” in The French Revolution, vol 1, trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 102–116.
Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York: Psychology Press, 1990), 51.
Ibid., 201–202.
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 40.
Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 106.
See for example Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the anthropology of things in “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–64
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 151.
My aim here is to preserve the Marxian notion that to some extent, the commodity has a mind of its own, and that this “mind” is actually what we see in the exhibition. For a critical analysis of use value and exchange value, and fetishism in relation to labor, see the chapter “Fetishism and Ideology” in Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos, 1981), 88–101. For a discussion of various “pure” and “loose” definitions of the commodity between exchange and value, see Arjun Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value.”
Jean Baudrillard describes commodities as seductive yet lacking desire. See Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
→ Continued in “Neo-Materialism, Part II: The Unreadymade.”