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

122 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
ventionally agreed upon connections masquerade as facts of nature.
Ultimately, even this construction is revealed to be a magico-religious
world, in which the arbitrary but conventional character of
the sign is daily consecrated in rituals affirming its naturalness. So it
is that people's daily participation in the market becomes the guardian
of their spiritual coherence.
But this coherence can never be achieved. The quest for the significance
of things is a tenacious one and reaches out beyond the excruciatingly
narrow straits of the new axiomatic structure that defines
thinghood. Market rationality succumbs to its self-induced
irrationality, and commodities become animated with human significance.
The new social form may turn men into numbers, but it also
turns plantation crops like sugarcane into monsters or gods. Life,
distorted to be sure but life nevertheless, surges into things, transforming
social products into animated beings. All ideal imaginations,
Burtt writes, are banished into impotence. But are they? In
their subjugation these ideal imaginations struggle against the fetishism
of commodities: the sugarcane of the plantations becomes
"the terrible Green Monster," the "Great Cane," the "God of the
landlords," an animated being that is said to slowly devour the men
who bring it to life.
Fetishism and Hermeneutics
Against the rationalizing mystique of our times, Benjamin
insisted on applying his hermeneutic urge to read and understand
"texts" that are not texts in any conventional sense. "The
ancients," as Peter Demetz elaborates, "may have been 'reading' the
torn guts of animals, starry skies, dances, runes, and hieroglyphs,
and Benjamin, in an age without magic, continues to 'read' things,
cities, and social institutions as if they were sacred texts" (1978:
xxii). He did so, it needs emphasizing, motivated by the viewpoint of
historical materialism. If his enterprise appeared to oscillate constantly
between magic and positivism, as his friend Adorno chided,
then the comparison of this type of hermeneutics with that of the
neophyte proletarians of the southern Cauca Valley is all the more
appropriate.
This reading of things as though they were sacred texts, this penetration
into and articulation of what Benjamin called the "silent
language of things," was, in his own eyes, conditioned by melan-