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

Pollution, Contradiction, and Salvation 125
the devil contract. The emergence of this trope is occasioned by the
meaning that a use-value culture ascribes to the tropes generated by
the market organization of society, production, and exchange. The
devil contract registers the human meaning of this type of organization
and stamps it as evil and destructive, and not the result of morally
neutral forces that are naturally inherent in socially disembodied
things.
The manifestations of the culture in magic, in beliefs about plantation
crops, and in the contrast of peasant with agribusiness production,
are subject to a dialectical reading of things as sacred texts.
On the one hand, there is the reading made by the lower classes
themselves, a reading beholden to the metaphysical principles of
use-value, as those principles are confronted by commodity culture.
On the other hand, there is the reading imposed by the analyst, and
this is an inescapable activity. The two readings converge, emblazoned
in the texts that the neophyte proletarians have themselves
provided.