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

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstiuction j
ject-relations beholden to marketing strategies. Because the ethnography
with which I am dealing pertains largely to what are sometimes
called precapitalist societies, these dangers become pressing
problems. For such social formations easily seduce in precisely this
problematic way the mind trained and honed by capitalist institutions.
Set against the images that capitalist society presents of itself,
precapitalist life can appeal (or frighten) on account of its apparent
idealism and the enchantment of its universe by spirits and phantoms
that display the course of the world and its salvation. Furthermore,
precapitalist societies acquire the burden of having to satisfy
our alienated longings for a lost Golden Age.
Faced with the unsatisfactory and indeed politically motivated
paradigms of explanation that have been insinuated into the mental
fiber of modern capitalist society—its mechanical materialism as
well as its alienated forms in religion and nostalgia—what counterstrategy
is available for the illumination of reality that does not
in some subtle way replicate its ruling ideas, its dominant passions,
and its enchantment of itself? As I see it, this question is both necessary
and Utopian. It is essential to pose the challenge, but it is Utopian
to believe that we can imagine our way out of our culture without
acting on it in practical ways that alter its social infrastructure.
For this reason, what I call negative criticism is all that is possible,
apt, and demanded at the intellectual level. This implies that we adhere
to a mode of interpretation that is unremittingly aware of its
procedures and categories,- thus, our thought is exposed to itself as a
process of escalating self-criticism in which self-consciousness finally
establishes itself in the realm of the concrete phenomena that
initiated our inquiry and led to the first empirical abstractions and
distortions of it. But if the mode of comprehension that we espouse
is this ever-widening network of self-aware description of the concrete,
then it must also be clearly understood, as Fredric Jameson
has insisted, that this self-awareness must be acutely sensitive to
the social roots and historicity of the abstractions that we employ at
any stage of the process (1971).
This self-awareness prefigures the concept of culture and the theory
of perception that I employ, as invoked by Sidney Hook's early
interpretation of Marxist epistemology. "What is beheld in perception,"
he writes, "depends just as much upon the perceiver as upon
the antecedent causes of perception. And since the mind meets the
world with a long historical development behind it, what it sees, its
selective reaction, the scope and manner of its attention are to be explained,
not merely as physical or biological fact, but as social fact as
well" (1933 :89). It is, of course, the peculiar and specific character of