Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

from interstate agribusiness, has appropriated the
organic label. Stonyfield’s corporate genealogy
[iii] exemplifies this tension between ethical
standards and market standardization. Its
expansion into international markets [iv], big box
retail outlets, café chains [v] and an array of
processed "food products" asserts a capital
growth model that dominates its localized picture
of health for cows, people and their
'environment'. Guthman reveals the underlying
paradox:
[Organic labeling] fetishizes the
process of social change itself, by
suggesting that purchasing a
commodity is sufficient to effect
such change. If organic food was
truly an antidote to processes of
commodification, the ‘organic
commodity’ surely would be seen
as an oxymoron. (245)
What terms and conditions are operative in the
capitalized field behind Stonyfield’s cow fetish?
Marx, Guthman notes, writes of a veiling of
human-nature relations by exchange value and
fetishism. He argues, "the objective appearance
of the social characteristics of labour” (Marx,
1990, 176) and its products obscures their social
constitution. Marx distinguishes the contradictory,
“twofold” form of the commodity, as both
physical object of utility (possessing use-value)
and virtual depository of exchange-value.
Conflation of the physical/natural object (e.g.
yogurt) with its value form ($3.49) masks the
socially dominant conditions of its production (by
Stonyfield Farm, Incorporated). Marx examines
the role of seeing in the making of commodities:
the products of labor become
commodities, sensuous things
which are at the same time suprasensible
or social. In the same way,
the impression made by a thing on
the optic nerve is perceived not as
a subjective excitation of that
nerve but as the objective form of
a thing outside the eye. In the act
of seeing, of course, light is really
transmitted from one thing, the
external object, to another thing,
the eye. It is a physical relation
between things. As against this, the
commodity-form, and the valuerelation
of the products of labour
within which it appears, have
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absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity
and the material relations arising
out of this. It is nothing but the
definite social relation between
men themselves which assumes
here, for them, the fantastic form
of a relation between things. (165)
Marx’s insight might return us to the
Enlightenment's rational-empirical divide, but for
his recognition of the fetishized
commodity’s twofold configuration as
object and exchange value, yogurt that is $3.49.
He points to the self-contained interdependence
of its dual value form, and further the
“antagonism… developed concurrently within
that form itself” (160). Despite – and because of –
this inherent self-contradiction, Stonyfield’s twofold
formation of ‘organic yogurt’ has led to a 20%
annual growth rate and $360 million in sales in
2010 for it and multinational owner Groupe
Danone (van Rensburg, 6-7).
How does the commodity fetish refigure
the bodies of cows and people? The bodies
under question here are those of cows, people,
and by extension their environments. The social
processes at issue are those of capitalized food
trade and the marketing practices of
Stonyfield. In “Bodies and Power, Revisited”
(2002), Butler turns to another model in revisiting
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The model
directly associates bodies and power as terms
and conditions of each other. They figure each
other. Butler writes of a “constitutive paradox”
embedded in recognition (17). This built-in
antagonism binds the body to social processes
that delimit yet lend it the terms necessary to
formulation as a viable subject in the world.
Foucault examines “a certain ambiguity between
subjects and power” (14). He attaches ‘body’ to
both prisoner and prison as material structures.
The reiteration articulates his formulation of the
body as not exclusively human, or singular. It is,
also, social, taking form in the prison. The double
reference abstracts at the same time that it rematerializes
the term’s signification. It enables a
representation that is twofold in its materiality and
virtuality. Both subjects, the prisoner and the
prison, are quite material things – as are the cow
and the (stony) field, the consumer (‘I’) and the
grocery store. But their materiality does not
represent the full extent of their identities, which
are constituted also through their relation with one
another. Bodily imprisonment is one configuration
of power relations. Capital is another. The