Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Fig.3.
Stonyfield yogurt carton left, right and back, photograph by author.
cows, people, fields and stones? What I’m after is
the responsiveness that Donna Haraway (2008)
conditions in terms of “respecere”, drawing on the
Latin ‘to look again’, but also “the act of respect”
(19) with its combined meanings of consideration,
perception and looking back [ii]. The Stonyfield
cartoon-cow looks at me, but I am not seen to
look back. The more privileged subject that is ‘I’
sits swallowing her yogurt outside the carton’s
frame. But I am not alone. Who and what else is
out here, beyond the frame, re-producing ‘my’
relationship with the cows and ‘our’ environments?
Can these ‘I’s be brought into the frame to
stretch, or bend (without necessarily breaking), the
reiterative identities of the commodity chain? For
a Haraway-inspired response, I begin with Julie
Guthman’s chapter on “The ‘organic commodity’
and other anomalies in the politics of
consumption” in Geographies of Commodity
Chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004), which takes
me briefly back to Marx and Capital on the
commodity fetish. From there, I turn to Judith
Butler’s investigation through Foucault into political
economies of the body in her talk “Bodies and
Power, Revisited” (2002). Butler leads me to a
reconsideration of materiality and virtuality,
examined in relation to contemporary capitalism
by James G. Carrier, Daniel Miller, Leslie Sklair and
Nigel Thrift in Virtualism: A New Political
Economy (Carrier and Miller, 1998). I then look to
artist Michael Mercil, whose project The Virtual
Pasture (2008-2011) re-forms the frame in a
manner suggested by Butler in The Psychic Life of
Power (1997).
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A cow fetish: What is represented?
The multiply abstracted cow-commodity is
imprinted with domesticated standards of health.
Its plastic container fetishizes not only the “Smooth
and Creamy” bodily substance within, but also its
representations of consumer and environmental
protection, localized agricultural practices, and
fair trade for small farmers. Guthman (2004, 234)
writes of a politics of consumption that centers on
eating as 'green', ethical and local. This politics
implicates a Marxian commodity fetishism – that
is, a concealment of the hierarchical relations
productive of commodities. The masking of
capitalist interests behind organic certification
ascribes to the commodity an innate mystical
“preciousness” (245). Yet its valuation and
formation in a market-based system of
production belies its ethical representations.
Guthman shows that the multinational market
structure behind the organic label contradicts
and in practice de-links it from idioms of “smallscale,
populist agrarianism” (240). Organic
certification does not limit the scale or mechanics
of production, does not inherently or effectively
regionalize food systems, does not minimize food
processing, and does not promulgate labor or
localized trade standards. Rather, ‘Organic’ is now
relegated to standards for production practices,
and more specifically to ‘organic’ inputs,
themselves incorporated into an ‘organic’ market
for fertilizers, pesticides, soil modifications, etc.
(240-1). An internationalized industry, evolved