The Power of the Machine by Hornborg Alf

Author:Hornborg, Alf [Hornborg, Alf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759116917
Publisher: AltaMira Press
Published: 2013-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE FETISH AS INFRA- AND SUPERSTRUCTURE, TRUE AND FALSE

Prior to the breakthrough of social constructivism in anthropology, a fundamental paradox of the Marxian notion of fetishism was its implication that a misrepresentation of social reality was simultaneously a condition for the reproduction of that reality. In one of the earliest anthropological discussions of Marxian fetishism, Friedman (1974b:56–57) defines fetishes as structures (of “the social mechanisms which distribute social labour”) that do not contain “the true representation of their material effects” (italics added). Writing at a time when it was still fairly unproblematic to speak of “true” and “false” representations of social realities (or, in Marxist terms, “transparency” versus “opacity”), Friedman addressed the problem of how it is that “a fetish, which is supposedly a fantastic misconstrual or inversion of material reality ... can simultaneously be that which determines that reality” (Ibid.:36). While anthropology was still anticipating constructivism, Friedman had to resort to convoluted theoretical acrobatics to account for his quite valid conviction that the place of fetishism is neither in the infra- nor the superstructure, but “in the center of the social formation” (Ibid.:60). He establishes that “money is not a mere mystified image of something more real” but “the operator of the system, determining the particular social form of exploitation as well as its misrepresentations” (Ibid.:35).

Friedman’s modification of the conventional, Marxist model was timely but soon eclipsed, along with other versions of Marxism, by the symbolic turn in anthropology. Citing Bourdillon (1978), Crick (1982:304) some years later concludes that “cultural phenomena simply do not divide into informative and disguising systems.” The new, discursive space of constructivism did not have truth versus falsity on its agenda. It has proven difficult in postmodern anthropology to juxtapose discourses about cultural representations of reality, on one hand, and about a material reality “transparent” only to researchers, on the other. The discipline has thus split along the same Cartesian line that divides the academic community as a whole into “objectivists” and “relativists” (Bernstein 1983), or “Scientists” and “Humanists” (Ingerson 1994). It is ironic that this split became more pronounced at a juncture when it was becoming increasingly apparent that it would have to be transcended. The structural-Marxist discussion of fetishism and Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976) were important elements in this revelation but seem to have provoked a regressive reaction diametrically opposite to their post-Cartesian, theoretical implications. Today, contributors to journals like Cultural Anthropology and Human Ecology, respectively, speak in different tongues, and it is rare to find studies seriously concerned with the interfusion of symbolic constructs and, for example, energy flows in human society. But the imperative of addressing such interfusion of participants’ representations and some less accessible level of “reality” is obvious once representations are recognized as “real” not only in the sense of emerging from objective conditions (cf. Harvey 1989, 1996) but also—and more important—in the sense of being active ingredients in those conditions.

In a recent reconsideration of his application of the concept of fetishism to social processes among the

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