The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

xii Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
ful to spell out that concept in a step-by-step analytic manner. In
those days I was probably too unsure of myself to do it any other
way, especially given that I was dealing with such strange material
(meaning the concept of commodity fetishism and the devil contract).
To bring the fetish into Marxism and into the economic history of
what was then called "the Third World," was at one stroke to challenge
economic reductionism and to bring in culture and religion
as forces in their own right. This was what revolution in the Third
World meant to me, the idea of Che Guevara that the revolution
could be made without waiting for the "objective conditions" to
reach maturity. The subsequent mythology of Che was in itself evidence
of the importance of myth and folktale, as was the crucially
important film by the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, Antonio
das Mortes, made in 1969, the year I first arrived in Colombia.
Hence what seemed as important as or more important than the
so-called "objective conditions" when I first went to Colombia was
what Marxists called "consciousness," which students of my generation
saw not as a reflex of the economy but as a force for defining
reality and the possibilities for changing it. We lived that experience
in the 19605, and in the 19705 that experience gave birth, through
people such as Stuart Hall, to the idea of "cultural studies." The
concept of commodity fetishism helped me feel my way into "consciousness,"
but what I didn't take was the next step, which was to
ponder the forms and feel of "expression," of how ideas work emotionally
and paint a picture of the world on account of the way they
are put into language. Today I would say that only literature, meaning
fiction and forms of documentary overlapping with fiction—
what I have elsewhere called "fictocriticism"—can do this.
As the years rolled by and the situation got increasingly grim in
Colombia—to which I returned every year—the ideas of Nietzsche
and then Georges Bataille claimed my attention because they seemed
so relevant to the violence and extremity that characterized life for
poor rural people. In my shamanism book (Shamanism, Colonialism,
and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing) published seven
years after the devil book, I struggled to better understand the violence
of the atrocities of the rubber boom in the Putumayo region of
the Upper Amazon around 1900, and that understanding made me
focus increasingly on the talking and writing of terror, coupled with
mounting sensitivity as to how most writing on violence makes it
worse.
My theory then—as now—was that stories of terror and extrem-