Transitional Subjects by Amy Allen

Author:Amy Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS, GOD, AND MODELING THE COMMODITY FORM

Owen Hulatt

In volume 1 of Capital, Karl Marx offered an account of the “mystery” of the “commodity fetish.” This was developed through careful unpacking of the extent to which relational properties can show up in our experience and was couched in language that can suggest a yet more ambitious and speculative account of the connection between physical practices and the structure of our experience and cognition.

Both these aspects were taken up by Georg Lukács in his seminal account of reification, an account without which the first generation of the Frankfurt School (on which I will focus here, with specific reference to Theodor Adorno) is inconceivable. While Lukács and his descendants expanded on and exploited this more speculative aspect to Marx’s account, it is surprising that they never seriously or thoroughly reconstructed it. The putative effects of the commodity form were analyzed and expanded on by critical theory, and held to range over forms of social structure, exchange, and consciousness. But the precise means by which the commodity form was able to produce these more speculatively robust effects was scarcely considered.

It is my position that critical theory extended and revised Marx’s account of the commodity form and that this extension did not receive sufficient justification or explanation. I will identify Alfred Sohn-Rethel as the only author who seriously confronted this problem and claim that Adorno implicitly relies on Sohn-Rethel’s account to justify his own extended account of the commodity form. I will also show that Sohn-Rethel’s materialist, “object-side” explanation of this extended account is incoherent.

As a consequence I will suggest that a subject-side account is required to underwrite the extended use of the commodity in critical theory. I will suggest that object relations theory provides a clear and compelling way of achieving this. In particular, I will claim that Donald Winnicott’s notion of the “transitional object” should be used.

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