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

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction 9
way of seeing the world in his concept of the commodity fiction. It is
a fiction, he states, that land and labor are things produced for sale.
"Labor is only another name for a human activity that goes with life
itself," and "land is only another name for nature, which is not produced
by man" (1957:72). Yet in a market organized society this fiction
becomes reality, and the system of names that Polanyi draws
upon loses its meaning. In its market form society engenders this
fictional reality, and it is with these abstractions or symbols that we
are forced to operate and comprehend the world.
Yet, to overcome the reifictions imposed on thought by the market
organization of reality, it is not enough to realize that the reified
appearance of social products is symbolic of social relations. For in
such a society symbols acquire peculiar properties, and the social relations
signified are far from being transparent. Unless we also realize
that the social relations symbolized in things are themselves distorted
and self-concealing ideological constructs, all we will have
achieved is the substitution of a naive mechanical materialism by
an equally naive objective idealism ("symbolic analysis"), which reifies
symbols in place of social relations. The social relations that
the analyst reads in the symbols, the collective representations, and
the objects that fill our daily life are more often than not conventions
about social relations and human nature that society parades
as its true self. I think this is particularly clear with Emile Durkheim
and neo-Durkheimians such as Mary Douglas who analyze
symbols and collective representations as emanations of something
they call "social structure," reify structure, and in so doing uncritically
accept society's distorted projection of itself. The point is that
we can abandon mechanical materialism and become aware that
facts and things stand in some way as signs for social relations. We
then look for the meaning of these signs in this way. But unless we
realize that the social relations thus signified are themselves signs
and social constructs defined by categories of thought that are also
the product of society and history, we remain victims of and apologists
for the semiotic that we are seeking to understand. To peel off
the disguised and fictional quality of our social reality, the analyst
has the far harder task of working through the appearance that
phenomena acquire, not so much as symbols, but as the outcome
of their interaction with the historically produced categories of
thought that have been imposed on them. Karl Marx directs our attention
to this where he writes that the signs or "characters that
stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary
preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already
acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life,