In its most general sense, a commodity is anything that

may be bought, sold, or bartered. In Marxist analyses of culture, the concept of the commodity takes on particular Importance, for it is the form
that products assume when the productlon and reproductlon of the
material conditions of a society are organized through exchange. As a
product within a system of exchange, any commodity has two distinct
properties. The first, identified by the eighteenth-century political economist Adam Smlth, is use value. Thls refers to the commodity's ability to ,
satisfy some human want or desire. The second of these propertes is discussed by Marx and Is labeled simply value, though It is sometim~s
referred to as BXCHANGE VALUE, to distlnguish it from USE VALOB. Tbis
property is a commodity's capacity to command other commodities in
exchange.
From these two properties of the commodlty Marx is able to move
toward a labor theory of value. AlI comm,odities may be dseussed in
terms of value: as use values, each commodity ls unque and thus qualltativeIy different. Whereas a Ioar of bread and a palr of socks mlght
requlre the same amount of labor to be produced, they do not meet the
same human needs, and 80 cannot be compared. On the other hand,
because they both require labor to produce, they can be compared in
terms of exchange value. According to Marx, when commoditles confront each other in exchange, the!r value (the amount of labor requlred
to produce each) becomes apparent as exchange value.
,
Marx refers to the labor that is expended n commodity production as
"soclallabor." The entity produced is not consumed by the laborer, but
by another who obtains it through exchange. In a soclety based upon
commodity producton, subsistence and the means of production are
provlded by others. Nevertheless, in such a society I?roduction appears
privnte: the producer perceives the product of bis labor to exist inde~en'dentof soclety as a whole. Thus the cabinet maker percelves bis cabmets
":' ij~h,ri own products, even though he depended on a number of other .
i/j;r(idili!tiito provide him Wi~~~~~4..~iidtools, and wiU ;~ha,~ge hls :

C:OMMODI'TY.

Fetisbism is the endowment of an object or li body part with

an unusual degree of power or erotic allure, as in the case of cultures that
attribute maglcal powers to idols or human effigies. Use of the term often
betrays a skeptical attltude toward such beliefs; thus, Karl Marx coined
the term commodiey fetishism to express the way that capitalist emphasis
on the abstract value of commodities concea1s the underlying soci~ relations of thelr producers (see COMMODITY). The most common use or the
term, bowever, is in psychoanalysis, which concems itself with the sexual
underpinnings of fetishistic behavlor. According to Freud, sexual fasci*
nation with obJects like shoes or garter belts s rooted in a compromise
made by the male chlld upon discovering that the woman does not have
a penis (see CASTRATION COMPLEX). Since this raises the intolerable possibility that his own penis may be 105t,he partially refuses to accept what
he has seen by turning some other obJect into a substitute for the missIng oriJan (and simultanesouly developing a strong aversion to the
female genitals). The Idea that fetisbism is a way of symbolica1JycontrolUngan unacceptable truth has proven suggestive to some feminist critics,
who have adopted psychoanalytic categories to deseribe the ways that
men ~l1eW()1I1CiUI\r(mg~ the media of film and the visual arts (see MALB
;riJ,\iEiV'ii(J~/:Pi:J:;A/~~!liMi,)"","., ~ ,
. f':~l o~ __

FETISHISM.

f)ESIRE. Under the influence ofthe Prench psychoanalyst Iacques Lacan

"':,..:. ,- and his followers, much contemporary theory, psychoanalytic and otherwlse, makes use of the concept of desire, which represents an attempt
to understand human motivation n a way that is free of bologcal
rcductvsm. 13ri~fly.Lacanians distinguish between need, which can be
satiefied ,byJhncqQisition of a specific object, and demand, which is
t\ddl'('~wj(lt iJJiih~l';iln(lsc<;ks reciprocity. The former is ultimately bioIIIHit'lI\, wl\liI;,H.idli:,lh'it\,.j~~,;;dl.ll'ivcd,.I):pm phcnomcnologicnl anel
,,11"/1('11,11111101;,:1 '.(:~'1~11!,,if.:ly'I\~lljj\'irlv.(jt~;~'1l1)()111),r
111('.~r'sinlpl(:,r~)n"
,~;l;pt/l,J f<l' i;.I10lbi:'tl ,;,~~I'ldllld;;:bnt; iildircJd:tW9(:\EI'I~l' I;~fi\;":;y
'C()il'Ul:tioll$iIHlIgdvc::ill thiScdll.'ss scarch Ior a' SillislhIOi:yf,BjCCt n
the world, a searchthat begins with the CASTRATION COMPLnX (see also
OBJBT PBTIT A). Depending on the bent of the individual theorist, ths
"nexhaustble" quality of desire is sornetimes celebrated and sometimes
offered as an emblem of the restless impermanence of human existence.
Moreover, it should be noted that, in the work of many writers, the concept does not retain the subtleties of the Lacanian position, but is used in
a way that is roughly consistent with the romantic notion of fundamental human energy or longing,

i(~;l'~1~~~~ri)~~:;ii~~~:j~m~i~;l;A~t:,~::;1~hwm;~1;~
..
W';Marx, the complex interrelations that humans have to one ano er are
';<:' reduced to a relation between commodities and their exchangeability.
This relatlonsbip Marx calIs FETISHISM, and while it s not false=-the
cabinetmaker's sbelves do have a relatlon to the woodcutter's lumber. it conceals the human relation between producers.
By utilizing this concept in an analysis of cultural commodities such
as literary texts, paintings, musc, etc., Marxist critics have pointed out
that such products can a1soappear to float free of human determlnation
and take on value primarily n relation ~o one anothe~. As a result, they
mask the social forces that inforJ;ll ther representations. One goal of
much Marxist criticism has been to expose the formal &;ices that a text
employs to effect this masking.

1I

Lacan, Iacques, Ecrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sherldan. New York:Norton,

1977.