Philosophers and political theorists often confine literature to serve as illustration to their ideas. That literature qua literature could think through specific issues seems counterintuitive, because interpretation is indispensable for such thinking to emerge. At the same time, the new materialist turn of the last few decades, which decenters the human as object of study, has no qualm with appreciating the agentic properties of, say, a hammer. And yet the object has to be banged with to do something. Mutatis mutandis, books, by way of their sheer semantic density, and by nudging readers in various ways, do. Note I do not say texts, or works, or authorial intentions, but point at the material substratum of a series of practices.
Examples of nudging include reminding us of the presence of an author or work we have familiarity with, but have not quite read—Don Quixote, The Complete Works of Shakespeare— or serving as cumbersome affective binds to our earlier selves—via adolescent readings of Herman Hesse, Andrés Caicedo, or Arthur Rimbaud. Books prefigure interpretation like a hammer prefigures banging. There are many things one may do with one or the other, but some behaviors are more commonly scripted than others, and the habit of using books or hammers to, say, swat flies, has not really taken on.1 Nor has regarding Madame Bovary as illustration of Maya astronomy or the Popol Vuh as a critique of social mores in nineteenth-century France. Someone might object that in this last claim I have shifted from the physical properties of books to their spiritual qualities, their cultural belonging, or the “reception” (What’s in a metaphor?) of the stories they “contain” (ditto). Alas, I am a monist, and find that such elements are contiguous, not parallel. Another likely objection is that I seem to leave e-books out of the party, and indeed I do: e-books are no more books than smartphones are telephones, friending someone on Facebook is making a friend, or Amazon is a bookstore. Thinking otherwise is falling prey to ideology. Short of a perspicuous description of the agentic entanglements of a given book, a task I hereby entrust to abler hands, this chapter exposes the conceptual purchase of a selected corpus of books—and, yes, their stories—in affecting our basic rapport with other things.
I understand this domain as always already mediated by the social, but not reducible to it. From part 1, you may already recognize the Scylla and Charybdis that flank my navigation as historical and new materialism. The former, in the Marxist tradition, seeks to denounce the social relations that magically endowed things, such as luxury items or privately owned land, hide from view. The latter, in the more recent Latourian vein, suspends social systemic analysis, or carries it out only in piece-meal fashion. It focuses on the agency of things while eclipsing the question of social relations, particularly of labor. One seeks to debunk an order of things by demonstrating its arbitrariness; the other assumes it as its starting point and intervenes within it through thought-provoking accounts of the techno-social. As discussed in chapter 2, Rita Felski pits one against the other, favoring the latter; I do not so much reconcile them as offer a third position, consonant with transcultural materialism. I am reminded once again of how Borges shattered Foucault’s mental schemes, and seek, in the present chapter, to bring about a similar effect in relation to objects whose exchange value eclipses their use value—in a word, commodities.
My focus is one instance of transcultural materialist intervention, namely, the practice of hyperfetishism. I call “hyperfetishism” an exacerbation of commodity fetishism that disrupts unreflective ways of relating to objects without reducing them to abstractions. Where cultural critics traditionally unmask, hyperfetishists play along so thoroughly with the masquerade that the artifice is revealed and transformed by way of excess. As we shall see, this allows them to chart something of a middle path between social critique and descriptive analysis. The elucidation that ensues contributes to one of the present volume’s central goals, that of examining the ways in which contemporary Latin American literature allows us to better grasp the notion of human-nonhuman history. Whereas part 1 of this book dealt with basic things—food staples, rubber, earth, atoms, corpses—part 2 addresses more complex assemblages—hyperfetishes in the present chapter and digitalia in the following. Complexity here is less about physics than about economics: small, constitutive elements are already plenty complex (the atom whirls with fermions and bosons), and some highly prized commodities are strikingly simple (a purse, say). The primary difference I want to emphasize in this chapter is not one of scale but one of escalation in added value. On the other hand, chapter 5 will look at instances where the market does reward mastery over physical complexity, as in chip manufacturing and quantum computing—nothing is outside the purview of literature.
Three sections follow. First, I further define the concept of hyperfetishism by opposition to Marx’s original coinage. Then I discuss works that successfully carry out this operation: the Colombian José Asunción Silva’s 1925 posthumous fin de siècle novel De sobremesa (After-Dinner Conversation); his countryman Fernando Vallejo’s works, which build a natural bridge between the nineteenth century and the present, notably his 1995 fictionalized biography of Silva, Almas en pena, chapolas negras, and his more recent novel Casablanca la bella (2014). Third, I elaborate on the broader methodological implications with a consideration of the Mexican Margo Glantz’s mordant Historia de una mujer que caminó por la vida con zapatos de diseñador (2005) and her countrywoman Daniela Rossell’s photographic essay Ricas y famosas (1999–2002).
The Case for Exacerbation
I find primitive accumulation and commodity fetishism particularly useful categories for contemporary criticism. The former has provided a subtext to the chapters above, as it informs my analyses of tobacco, sugar, food, soil, subatomic particles, and the body (corpse) in literature. Rather than apply Marx, I have engaged in the critique of value, complementing it with findings from new materialism and Latin American culture. As I now turn to commodity fetishism, I am mindful that, as with primitive accumulation, some adaptation and recontextualization are in order. Accumulation and fetishism will overlap in my discussion of digital technology, as they do in such gadgets themselves—but that is the subject of the next chapter. For now, although they do occasionally intersect, the focus is the fetish.
Marx defines commodity fetishism as when “the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour.”2 It’s a things-are-not-as-they-appear kind of argument. We are under the illusion that transactions revolve around objects, and not the other way around. We forget or fail to appreciate the social relations that are indispensable for something to emerge as a coveted good. Belonging to the often-cited first section of Capital (1867), volume 1, commodity fetishism has received ample attention.3 In terms of exposition, even pedagogy, it comes before primitive accumulation, discussed only until the eighth section of the volume. (Conceptually and historically, primitive accumulation comes first, which is the reason why I have engaged with primitive accumulation earlier.) The persuasive power of Marx’s conceptualization of commodity fetishism rests, I contend, on two things: a simple fact—typical consumers do ignore most things about production—and a thought-provoking reconceptualization of what constitutes fantasy and what constitutes reality. Fantasy is, of course, a literary category. Given the important role it plays in this crucial step of Marxist dialectics, closer examination is necessary.
Picture the most coveted commodity: the car of one’s dreams, the rarest of perfumes, the latest iPhone. For Marx, it seems, the surprising attachment to such things is the fantasy—a dream one can wake up from. The reality is the complex interplay of supply chains, factories, marketing, and especially the labor and social relations that bring about commodities. Capitalism is predicated upon fantasies: you do not really need that car, perfume, or gizmo; social relations that appear reified could always be otherwise. That said, fake needs (luxury) become about as pressing as real ones (shelter, food); social structures are most arduous to transform. If only we could debunk those myths, Marx thinks, in the same way that we have cleared “the misty realm of religion.”4 Religion has turned out more resilient than Marx (or Nietzsche) anticipated: the mist lingers at noon. Leaving aside the question of whether the parallelism between religion and capitalism is entirely adequate, I think Marx is significantly wrong about fantasy and moderately wrong about commodities. The most thorough exposition of the social relations involved in the design, assembly, and commercialization of the car of one’s dreams will hardly sway the infatuated buyer. The commodity is both real and fantastic—a point Marx would concede—but in a different fashion as he claims it to be.
The first of these objections is already present in Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion” (1921). There he couches capitalism as a “purely cultic religion” that “creates guilt [Schuld], not atonement.”5 One difference with Marx is the insistence on the “permanence” and self-sustaining structure of this religion. Guilt or debt here are harder to shake or “wake up” from. The fantasy is not the kind that dispels easily. Marx was certainly aware of this, otherwise he would not have taken the trouble of writing so extensively against it—approximating organized religion and economic system is a partly rhetorical move. However, the opposition of reality and fantasy is compromised, long before Althusser would complicate things with the notion of ideological state apparatuses. By the looks of the looming 2020s, the cult is not only strong, but the lines between reality and fantasy are as blurred as ever. My position in this debate has to do with the truism that a rhetorical move is never just rhetorical: it causes an effect. Marx’s treatment of fantasy in these influential, indeed foundational pages has the regrettable consequence of siding fantasy with capitalism and untruth, versus reality—or realism?— socialism, and truth. This forecloses a promising path: looking for truth in fantasy. Not just as representation or thematization of utopian alternatives (the past most taken) but, as I will illustrate in the next section, as something that may outright affect commodity fetishism—counter cultish practices with different chants, to borrow Benjamin’s metaphor.
The second objection has to do with another questionable separation in Capital. Marx strives to be both materialist and analytic: sometimes the latter gets in the way of the former. And so he separates things that belong together, unwittingly becoming an idealist. Read the following under that light: “The existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relations between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom.”6 My quibble is with the “absolutely no connection” part, which hinges upon a strategic and unmaterialist use of the particle “quâ.” Marx is free to define his terms anyway he wants, and he can distinguish a commodity from a thing even while he is pointing at the same object. But this is a slippery slope to dualism and spiritualism. From a certain perspective, a Louis Vuitton bag is a thing like a fishnet is a thing; from another, a commodity like an emerald ring is a commodity. Some objects are endowed with the soul of value—and this is in no way material.
In the interest of questioning the relatively arbitrary connection between thing and value, Marx is being arbitrary himself. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond” he notes triumphantly, to claim that nothing intrinsic makes these things tradeable. (Here Marx is rebutting the classic economic theories of British economist-philosophers Walter Bailey and David Ricardo.) But is this so? For pearls, yes, but diamonds are notoriously scarce and cut through nearly everything. They may not exist for humans, but they are very useful to them and consequently prescribe human behavior—as quasi subjects with agentic properties, a new materialist might say. The existence of things qua commodities will happen, as will any existence, in connection with physical properties and material relations, even if value is not reducible to immediate interactions with an object or to its constitutive elements.
To recapitulate, fantasy and the imagination don’t quite work the way Marx envisages it; commodities are never just commodities, not even at a “purely conceptual” or physical level. There is much to gain from parsing out the material entanglements of objects and their roles in the creation of value. But affecting them is the point, as per the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, from 1845: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”7 A performative contradiction that has been pointed out several times is that Marx remains a philosopher when he utters this. However, arguably the theses do change the world, as they affect ways of thinking. Regardless, one can hold Marx to his own standard, as set forth in the earlier piece, of breaking with old, contemplative materialism (anscheuende Materialismus), which I think lurks behind this radical separation of commodity and thing. Adopting, adapting the notion of commodity fetishism for still newer materialisms calls for the revision of the role of fantasy, simply put, from foe to ally. “We fail to see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labor,” notes Marx, concerned that we measure commodities by the fascination they produce and not by the actual work involved in them.8 Fantasy can expose, not just mask, that process. An added benefit is not reducing object agency, in anthropocentric fashion, to human labor—as important as it is.
Paradoxically, Marx himself anticipates this move. For a work that denounces the fascination with commodities as fantasy, Capital draws quite liberally from it. To demonstrate how articles are mere receptacles, Marx treats them as anything but. Note his rhetorical use of personification:
If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse [Verkehr] as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values.9
This fascinating thought experiment is predicated on the separation of object and commodity—two facets of the same thing. Taking the experiment further: wouldn’t the object have a hard time speaking “just as” commodity? A uniformed employee can speak as a private person when in plain clothes. But it is less apparent what an object must shed to speak exclusively as one of its facets. Here it wears the mantle of exchange value; there it doesn’t. The point is that neither use nor value are intrinsic to the thing—both stem from its interaction with humans. Value is what defines a commodity, and value is brought about by social relations. This is all well and good, but what is the status of fantasy, then? There would be an unsound fantasy of seeing the extrinsic properties of an article as intrinsic, but there would also be a corrective, sound fantasy of extrication—as if value somehow could, after all, alter the chemical properties of a thing. And so the opposition wouldn’t be between reality and fantasy but between fantasies that measure up to the reality of the social constructedness of value. Marx is having it both ways at this point in the book, denouncing fantasy and enlisting its services (he also cites Much Ado About Nothing and Robinson Crusoe.)10 Capital will ultimately continue in the vein of social realism, turning away from such flights of fancy and toward scientificism, preferring equations over metaphors. However, one takeaway for present purposes, consonant with what has been established throughout this study, is the effective role of storytelling in reformulating our relationship to things, valuable and otherwise.
Another takeaway has to do with the broader task of articulating historical and new materialisms. The entire argument of Capital hinges upon the distinction of use and exchange value established thanks to the notion of commodity fetishism. Revisiting that notion could have significant consequences for the whole edifice. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong about it, and am not intent in bringing the edifice down, but I would suggest two actualizations. One is to make room for less inert things. This is something of an urgent task. Marx takes issue with money, the great equalizer, for being the all-powerful stand-in for all things. But he does proceed to analyze the political economy of money, leaving aside, as capitalism does, the specifics of things. (If they are cherished, like a family heirloom is, this is but an expression of exchange value—someone might be willing to pay a lot of money for a certain chair, and not any other, because a late parent used to sit on it.) In chapter 2, on “exchange,” Marx closes the window of opportunity that personification, or outright animism, had opened at the end of chapter 1, on the commodity. He starts by dismissing the fantasy of speaking commodities:
Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the possessors of commodities. Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them. In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent.11
Am I the only one to read here a form of eroticism? We are, after all, referring to intercourse [Verkehr]. I have emphasized word choices that speak to a triangular desire; in René Girard’s parlance, we desire what we think the other desires.12 But the other here is seemingly inert: humans wanting what the object wants. “Docility” is both reading too much (an unnecessary catexis) and too little (a misrecognition of agentiality) into things. Marx abandons the more upbeat animist fantasy via an understatedly sadist one. From receptacles of labor to receptacles of will, things must be reined in, punished. Surely, Marx wants to question the instrumentalization of things by capitalism, but he participates in that process all the same. These days, commodities quite literally do make exchanges of their own account, given the rise of algorithmic trading and artificial intelligence in the stock exchange.13 But long before that development, which no nineteenth-century thinker could have anticipated, there is the underlying arbitrariness of possessing things. Marx will famously debunk private property, but not that basic fantasy. The one-way street of possession, with a clear subject and a clear object, was already questioned by the Latin proverb Qui capit, capitur: “The one who owns is owned.” Marx was surely aware. In this book, I have referred to coevolution and pointed out how domestication is a two-way street. An interesting kindred path to explore, in a revisionist reading of Capital, would be to go beyond object masochism.
The other actualization of Marx, which I shall delve into in what follows, is to consider commodity fetishism as one fantasy among several possible fantasies that “negotiate,” for lack of a better term, our relationship to things. If the fraught opposition of real-social and fantastic-object relations gives way, an alternative emerges: commodity hyperfetishism. Marx anticipates it, as noted, but quickly disavows it. Instead of waking up from the fetish, the gist of this operation is to dwell on it, that is, to follow the fetish to its final consequences. Note that, although I have alluded to sensuousness, I am not thinking of fetishism à la Freud or Sacher-Masoch. There is plenty of eroticism, already, in coveting a luxury good—in wanting what the thing wants. After faltering somewhat, Capital opts for deflating the fascination with things endowed with magic properties that obscure the fact of labor. However, that fact would emerge all the more clearly through the exacerbation of that desire, without overly instrumentalizing things or reducing them to exchange value.
Commodities Speak!
Although modernismo—the art-for-art’s-sake fin de siècle movement that cemented Spanish American cultural autonomy—is often associated with the great Nicaraguan poet-diplomat Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the phenomenon left a deep impression in Colombia.14 A case in point is the early verses of one José Eustasio Rivera, before his turning to La vorágine, or the musings of that novel’s autobiographical protagonist, Arturo Cova. But the figure that most keenly represents the movement’s ethos and pathos in the country is the poet and novelist José Asunción Silva (1865–1896). Silva left behind a blazing trail of writing despite dying, at age thirty-one, of a self-inflicted gunshot to the heart.15 Like his more illustrious contemporary, Karl Marx, Silva toys with the idea of letting things speak. His poem “La voz de las cosas,” published posthumously in 1908, illustrates key aspects of commodity hyperfetishism. (As noted in chapter 1, Rivera’s secondary character, Clemente Silva—What’s in a name?—borrows the phrase.) Under the title “The Voice of Things,” Silva presents two eight-verse, rhythmic, rhyming stanzas about the impossibility of capturing the voice of things in verse. The refrain insists on the conditional: “if my stanzas could lock you in”; “if verse could imprison you.”16 Variations of the refrain appear, symmetrically, at the onset and demise of each individual stanza, as if containing the inventory of things in the six remaining “internal” verses. In the first stanza, this inventory includes Silvana—things readers associate with the melancholy writer—like a withering flower, a ray of moonlight, or a warm May breeze. The second raises the ante, attempting to capture more aethereal things, like feverish dreams, ghosts, or a kiss—a fleshy event rendered spiritual by proximity.
It is a testament to the lopsidedness of cultural flows that my version below is, to my knowledge, the very first English translation in print of this remarkable work—and a very hesitant one at that:
If I locked you into my stanzas
brittle smiling things
pale lily shedding your leaves,
moonray over a tapestry
of moist flowers, and green leaves
blooming to May’s warm breath;
If I locked you into my stanzas,
Pale smiling things!
If verse could hold you prisoner,
gray ghosts, when drifting,
fickle contours of the Universe,
baffling dreams, beings gone,
an osculation sad, soft and perverse
to the soul amid the shadows
If verse could hold you prisoner
From its title onward, the poem calls into question the difference between a thing and a person. I made a number of translation decisions to convey this and to foreground the contributions of “The Voice of Things” for the notion of commodity hyperfetishism. Obviously, my rhyme is less consistent. An unforeseen alliteration, gray ghosts, emerged in the process, a modest compensation for lost musicality. I replaced an iterating relative clause in Spanish (que sonreís, que te deshojas, etc.), which can refer to a thing or a person, with the present progressive. I did so to preserve some of the cadence without rendering the original repetitive, but also because such clauses are arguably less common in English-language poetry. Moreover, relative clauses in English unambiguously refer to a thing (that-plus-verb) or a person (who-plus-verb). I preserved “osculation” to match Silva’s equivalent choice, already a cultism in the nineteenth century. “Kiss” (beso) was always an option, then and now, but it is important, for the poem’s gradual unveiling, that the consummation of love remain somewhat elusive. Who-kisses-what and what-kisses-whom remain open questions, as the painful memory of a blissful spring haunts the second stanza. This befits the blurring of the subject-object, living-dead divides in the poem.
Who speaks? The poetic voice can be attributed to a mournful lover, to a thing, to the month of May, to the universe, to a ghost. It’s tempting to point in the latter direction, as the death of Silva’s sister, Elvira, is a leitmotif in his late poetry, notably in “Nocturno III”—a staple of Spanish-language poetry anthologies. But grief here engulfs all things transient, which is all things. The tangible is ghostly, and vice versa. A universe as brittle as a withering flower is almost saved by less than a kiss. Words remain contained in the poem, despite aspirations to the contrary. The author himself, as the contemporary Colombian poet Juan Manuel Roca suggests in a perceptive essay, becomes the voice of things.18 In a sense, all that is left of Silva, and of his beloved sister, is a perverse (incestuous?) grave in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá (figure 4.1). Anticipating the poet’s death, however, the poem speaks as if from the great beyond. A failed reliquary, it rekindles a profound sense of doubt about the limits and contours of the subject—and, pace Roca, of the object: “a dubitation in the face of the simplest things.”19 Cartesian rationalism is built upon “methodical” doubt, but all too swiftly overcomes it, parsing out the cogito from the res extensa. Silva’s pure, profane love for a ghost, regardless of biographical speculation about incest proper, does celebrate an unnatural marriage of soul and object, voice and deed.
Courtesy of Cristian Felipe Soler, 2018.
Commodity hyperfetishism, like the poem, upsets our relation to things. It is not exactly a rational strategy, but neither is our attachment to luxury goods and coveted items. Marx thought he could reason his way out of fascination; the likes of Silva plunge ever deeper into it. Any elucidation the latter may provide requires reading between the lines. A crucial feature is the role of form: what we learn cannot be parsed out from literary structure or artistic convention. It wouldn’t be “all the same” had Silva chosen to compose, instead, an essay in phenomenology or a still-life painting. (Affinities exist.) Part of what makes the poem compelling is the rich tension between the what and the how, between the substance of substance and its transformation into poetic language. Someone might object that commodities, the kind one trades, are not mentioned in the poem: only things tout court. While this is the case, “tapestry” in the fourth verse leads to a puzzling enjambment that, for the following verse at least, reads both literally as an indoors space with an ornate tapestry or figuratively as an outdoors space with a blooming field. A third possibility emerges, quasi-surrealistically, of a blooming carpet. If I don’t discard the latter interpretation, and read commodities into a poem about the voice of things, it’s because Silva’s work is known to frequent animism.
A case in point is the famous opening to Silva’s sui generis novel, After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa, 1925).20 He rewrote the considerable work, having lost the manuscript to shipwreck in 1895, a year before taking his life. (There are various reasons, as we’ll continue to see, for Silva to cherish lost things.) I cite Kelly Washbourne’s professional translation:
Secluded by the shade of gauze and lace, the warm light of the lamp fell in a circle over the crimson velvet of the tablecloth, and as it lit up the three china cups, which were golden in the bottom from the traces of thick coffee, and a cut-crystal bottle full of transparent liqueur shining with gold particles, it left the rest of the large and silent chamber awash in a gloomy purple semidarkness, the effect of the cast of the carpet, the tapestries, and the wall hangings.21
Three similar paragraphs follow, with light bouncing off and diffusing from candlesticks, engravings, a piano, crossed swords over a shield, and so on. Cigarette smoke introduces cigarettes, cigarettes introduce hands, and only by the fifth paragraph do the hands introduce silhouettes and short descriptions of characters. “Some after-dinner conversation this is!” notes one such character, Juan Rovira, in the sixth paragraph, as if breaking a spell. “We’ve been as silent as three corpses for half an hour.”22 The conversation has been going on, one could say, among things—it’s an animated party, so to speak. As unconventional as this opening gambit is, it does achieve a straightforward, conventional characterization of the protagonist, José Fernández, a rich Colombian parvenu who will recount his European travels in the mise en abyme that follows. (His dandyish sejour in the Old World is all about acquisition, refinement, and exoticized love.) Again, form is indispensable.
Had Karl Marx confronted this lengthy description, he might have noted that china cups are made by, well, Chinese craftsmen, cut-crystal by Bohemian, and so forth. Transnational networks of commerce and patronage make possible this flight of fancy. It’s all invisible to the bourgeois, whereas commodities are front and center. The coffee they sip—after a lavish meal furnished by servants, one may safely presume—titillates the taste buds and contributes aroma to the general ambiance. The highland campesinos that produce it (to this day) and the social structure that sustains such production are invisible. In fact, the closest Marx comes to confronting this passage is through Ericka Beckman’s notion of “import catalogue,” which she aptly deploys in an encompassing reading of modernista fascination with commodities.23 In short, in rather orthodox Marxist fashion, and building explicitly on the notion of commodity fetishism, Beckman claims that such cultural production is the superstructural output of an economic structure built around the complementary forces of raw material exportation (coffee) and luxury good importation (pianos). I agree with this important study insofar as this is an apt application of Marx. My problem with this reading is that a whole lot of words become unnecessary, which is why I think we should reformulate for literary studies, as previously with primitive accumulation, the notion of commodity fetishism itself.24 Reading Silva’s excesses against the grain facilitates this task.
The most lucid, if strikingly heterodox take on the issue can be found in a fascinating contemporary Colombian novelist and memoirist, Fernando Vallejo, a critically acclaimed and widely read author whose work I have previously analyzed.25 Vallejo is most famous for Our Lady of the Assassins (La Virgen de los sicarios, 1994), a gay romantic crime novel set in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín.26 This is ironical, for that work is the furthest Vallejo ventures away from his usual register of semiautobiographical fictionalization. While it is implausible that the actual Vallejo dated underage hitmen—the premise of that celebrated novel—it is certainly the case that he immersed himself in all things José Asunción Silva for Almas en pena, chapolas negras.27 Part biographical essay on Silva, part memoir on the act of conducting literary research, the book, over five hundred pages long, is anything but economical. Vallejo identifies with his object of study to the point of Bovarism. In a knowledgeable but colloquial, often irate style, he discusses well-known and obscure sources. Vallejo blames Silva’s death on prudish Colombia. Along the way, an Annales-style portrait of late nineteenth-century Bogotá emerges and is brought to bear upon the present.
The document Vallejo considers that sheds the most light on commodity hyperfetishism is Silva’s accounting notebook. Debts, incurred and owed, become social relations under Vallejo’s imaginative recreation. The notable poet Ricardo Silva, José Asunción’s father, owned a fine-goods store.28 When Silva took over, mismanagement and a drastically changed economic climate led to ruin. To acquire the luxury goods he wrote about, Silva sold them. He wasn’t breaking even, but he defaulted and brought his creditors down with him. At best, Silva was a naive, lousy entrepreneur—at worst, a crook. Vallejo can only redeem his hero, justified in his pursuit of beauty. But despite himself, Vallejo gives ample evidence of social relations becoming products, becoming financial gains, as in the process of abstraction of labor that bolsters modern capitalism. As it turns out, Silva, the original Colombian bourgeois bohemian, was a failed industrialist. (A foreclosed tile factory was to save him from the store debacle). At the same time, Vallejo turns finance into social relations, transforming accounting into storytelling, and binding the whole affair to precious modernista objects.
Like Marx, Vallejo has to deal with the fact of credit—capitalist parlance for “capital.” Marx progresses in some ways like Hegel before him. The master made his way through dialectical argument from simple perception to complex Spirit. The reformist gave the dialectic a different political sign, arguing from simple commodity fetishism to complex capitalist system. Credit—and debt, its Janus face—is a crucial turning point. The buyer, notes Marx in chapter 3 of Capital,
buys it before he pays for it. The seller sells an existing commodity, the buyer buys as the mere representative of money, or rather as the representative of future money. The seller becomes a creditor, the buyer becomes a debtor. Since the metamorphosis of commodities, or the development of their form of value, has undergone a change here, money receives a new function as well. It becomes the means of payment.29
Note how many times the word and notion of “becoming” appears in this short passage. I read here the remnants of Hegelian eschatology and teleology, but also something wholly animistic. The magical properties of coveted things are connected to the magical properties of those rectangular pieces of paper we call money. This Marx must demystify. Vallejo, rather, remystifies. Extrapolating from Silva’s accounting notebook, he flatly brings theology back into the picture: “For Silva, God didn’t exist, Credit did. God is Credit.”30
Vallejo goes on to elaborate how, for the Silvas, owing was “a philosophy,” according to which, in order to truly exist, a person must owe. Some of this is a play on the book’s pre-text, namely, the accounting notebook. After all, it is Vallejo who needs names to show up there in order to tell his story. But the deeper truth is that debt is never just about arithmetic but has always had religious and moral overtones. As David Graeber notes, since the Middle Ages, moral relations have been conceived as debts.31 For the Silvas, according to Vallejo, being in the red was laudable, almost ascetic, rather than reproachable: “Silva didn’t have anything but empty hands that squandered in luxury what came in from loans.”32 Perhaps the Silvas thought themselves beyond good and evil. Whatever the case may be, owing to the fine-goods stores of the metropolis was indeed a way of life, a shortcut to the riches of metropolitan capitalism from the periphery. Brecht’s famous dictum “What is robbing a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” applies, with qualification.33 The Silvas traded in luxury, not in their individual manpower. Still, from a moral standpoint, they are both in the wrong and in the right. They lied and cheated in a system of debt and credit that was already corrupt.
The quip on the Silva God also has to do with the ebbs and flows of convertibility from money to gold, which conservative president Miguel Antonio Caro had restricted, to the chagrin of importers. (A Catholic zealot and also a poet, Caro re-Christianized the country via the 1886 clericalist constitution; everything about him, down to his classicist aesthetics and religious beliefs, reeked contrary to Silva’s modernismo.)34 Certainly, Parisian luxury providers would not take pesos. Importers gave away the country’s gold in exchange for goods, but then limited access to bullion aggravated what was already a vicious circle of debt. Caro rejected modernity; for Silva, to be modern was to owe. Anyone studying nineteenth-century Colombia will encounter thought-provoking alternatives to the Weberian tale of capitalist expansion—some more failed than others. What interests me about Vallejo’s contemporary rendering of Silva is the revelation of the utter nonsense of the whole enterprise. As the saying goes—I am no expert—finance is not about working for money but about having money work for you. Commodity hyperfetishism takes a step further back, before commodities are abstracted (transformed) into money and arithmetic. Simple economic self-preservation dictates that no object is so sacred, or even cherished, to go bankrupt over. Conspicuously oblivious to labor, and counter to financial common sense and its cognate morality, it points at the underlying absurdity of it all.
How far Vallejo takes this idea is something to behold. In a later installment of his multivolume fictionalized memoir, Casablanca la bella, the biographer turns his attention to restoring a derelict house in Medellín. Vallejo left the city decades ago to settle in Mexico, but frequently returns to it in the imagination.35 His alter-ego narrator, Fernando, is to instill an ersatz dwelling with the grandeur of his long-lost family home, Santa Anita. Endless decisions about construction materials, layout, and décor are necessary, which provides many an occasion for unbridled fetishism. Finding a toilet to the exacting specifications of the character’s nostalgia, which extends to even such mundane things, becomes a major undertaking. The narrator fetishizes the heavyset, inefficient contraptions of yore. As the protagonist walks down the aisles of big-box stores looking for the prized object, to no avail, readers cannot help but wonder about his mental state. (He soliloquizes to the house rats, to boot.) When he finally succumbs to the evidence that such toilets are not on the market, and for good reason, it seems Fernando is coming to his senses. Or is he? Citing at length reveals hyperbole and irony:
[Water-saving sanitaries] truly are the best, given: the space they take (hardly any); the water they save (a lot); the float (infallible: a valve)…. Regard such a lovely “bowl” or “water surface area.” Toilet secured to the ground with PVC, lightweight but firm. Two flush buttons: eight liters for solids and six liters for liquids. I am most pleased with them. Using them is such a delight. So glad I bought them!36
Note the ellipsis: Vallejo actually sings the praises of the toilet for longer than shown in the extract above. Blending promotional catalog with technical dictionary, the style is pompous to the point of comedy, leading to the broken, overenthusiastic syntax of a product review. Part of the effect has to do with the collapse of high and low, that is, with the treating of a profane object as if it were sacred, of a simple artifact as if it had a prodigiously complex mechanism. But there is also is a potent, paradoxical subtext of personification. Just as Silva constructs his characters by portraying their object world, and vice versa, Vallejo is revealing the soul—and bowels!—of his hero with this charade. For an instant, the dysfunctional, impractical misanthrope becomes functional, pragmatic consumer. Social relations and means of production seem to harmonize in the big-box store: customers inadvertently work the warehouse in search of their wares, and so does Fernando, uncharacteristically. He might as well start loving his fellow man. But here we reach aporia, for the ode to the toilet is still a delirious rant.37
True to form, the novel ends in the sweeping nihilism Vallejo is known for. Casablanca, like Santa Anita before it, and, synecdochically, like the entire country of Colombia, collapses. The apparent therapeutic breakthrough at the big-box store—an apparent sublation of the character’s nostalgia, objectified as water-saving toilet—unravels. Fernando is no more attuned to the modern world, nor is he more hopeful about the fate of his country of birth. As Juanita Aristizábal notes in a perceptive essay, this amounts to a negative critique of the rotten foundations still at work in a nation that, at the time of Vallejo’s writing, was experiencing a real-estate boom.38 Vallejo gives voice to the extreme, underacknowledged classism, racism, and misogyny that have marred the country since its nineteenth-century inception. I think he also voices a profound disarrangement with things—the kind of burning love for objects that led Silva, the national poet, to his ruin. (Mutatis mutandis, the gaudy splendor of Pablo Escobar’s estates also come to mind.) The symptom here might be Colombian, but the illness belongs to global capitalism.
Commodity fetishism does not dwell on the object, nor think with it, but hastens to the accumulation of value it may be involved with. Hyperfetishism does not do so, producing instead a more oblique elucidation of an affective structure that is also economical. The toilet in Vallejo illustrates some aspects of what Sherry Turkle would call an “evocative object,” that is, “a companion of life experience.” As she puts it, “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.”39 Vallejo contributes to this line of reasoning by pointing out that such a love can itself be suspect. “It is necessary to name things to call them into existence,” Fernando is told, “but you name them so that they cease to exist.”40 This is a fitting description of Casablanca’s ars poetica as unmemory palace, reminiscent of the wavering “voice of things” in Silva. But it also points to the depth of experience that literature brings to the task of thinking with and about objects, both present and missing. Not to belabor the point, but when Marx discusses Robinson Crusoe, it is only as illustration of what he thinks he already knows about our fascination with commodities. Hyperfetishism, as we have seen so far, complicates the picture.
Conspicuous Consumption Revisited
The most thoughtful interventions I know on the subject of the love of things come from Mexico. Margo Glantz, for one, writes about designer shoes with gusto. As a scholar and an essayist, Glantz is noted for her work on a major feminist avant la lettre, the colonial writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695). Fittingly, as a creative writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry, Glantz rethinks the body and the experience of the female intellectual in modern Mexico.
The witty title of the work at hand, literally Story of a Woman Who Walked Through Life in Designer Shoes, does not translate well. Recall how the Spanish word for “story” is the same as the word for “history”: one version gives the intimate, the other the monumental.41 The book is both. Then there is the matter of The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger’s best seller from two years prior, which exemplifies, critics of the genre note, “chick lit.”42 Deliberate quote or not, Glantz does revisit themes like the purported banality of feminine literature or the infantilization of women via an identification with, and overattachment to, “pretty things.” Throughout her oeuvre, she writes more broadly about women’s issues. (An example is a clever retelling of a doctor visit and breast cancer scare that criticizes, in one deft movement, the medicalization of the female body and machismo in Octavio Paz’s poetry.43) The title of the book at hand is ironic only to an extent, however, for Glantz very much owns her fetish. Beyond providing the occasional soundbite at literary festivals and author interviews—to audiences’ delight—Glantz’s public love of shoes is serious stuff. The path she doesn’t take to get recognition is to go on the defensive, as if arguing for women’s literature were more important than writing it. Instead of opposing misogyny, Glantz subverts it. Instead of de-objectifying women, she subjectifies things: a more effective strategy, as the element of surprise would have it, for a similar goal.
Under the playful heading “Andante con variaciones,”—andante signaling both slow tempo and the act of walking—the book opens with a first-person, autobiographical rumination on the etymology of zapato. We learn the word is of Turkish origin and dates back to the Renaissance. The collective noun calzado takes after a participle for those who wear shoes (calzados), as opposed to members of mendicant monastic orders (descalzos). In Glantz’s retelling of the cultural history of shoes, calzado is liminal: noun and adjective, sacred and profane, religious and secular, high and low, local and universal, luxury and necessity, personal and impersonal, even human and nonhuman—feet themselves are “the original shoe.” Heidegger famously discussed van Gogh’s painting of shoes, focalizing an entire philosophy of art around them. (He problematically identifies the worn-out work shoes as those of a peasant woman, seemingly content with the natural order of things.)44 Glantz attempts a similar undertaking, except these are no pauper’s shoes—this devil wears Ferragamo. Her alter ego, Nora García, ruminates:
I am most interested by the life of Ferragamo, I was thinking to myself this afternoon. It’s, at least, a curious thought coming from someone who has deformed feet and is at the beach in a bathing suit, barefoot; from someone who, moreover, flaunts a bunion she cannot dissimulate when barefoot. And I wonder, how can I be interested by the life of a fat man who spent his life hunched over someone’s feet, taking measurements, studying their anatomy and structure, and then carving wood lasts; on someone who on top of it all was a fascist?45
Talk about things with a history: in this deceivingly lighthearted passage, Glantz bridges personal and world events, providing an embodied reflection about the surface and depth of our attachment to things. Ferragamo, the global luxury brand, is commodity fetishism abstracted, perfected: a “cultural icon,” in Douglas Holt’s parlance. (For years, Holt held the L’Oreal Chair in Marketing at Oxford—such honorary professorships exist.) The links between cherished brands and fascism are sometimes plain to see, as in Volkswagen’s stylized acronym-cum-swastika logo; other times they are buried in corporate history, as in Siemens’s slave-labor-driven Nazi years. That those names were not irrevocably sullied by their connotation gives much to think about. Modestly, Glantz wonders about her own fascination, which endures even after scratching past the timeless patina of the brand (Ferragamo®) to reveal the last name (Ferragamo) and the Italian fascist artisan (a fat man hunched over clients’ feet) who went by it.
The bunion breaks the spell. Even the finest shoe is pedestrian, pun intended; the most iconic brand, mundane. Timeless luxury is historically situated, nasty understories and all. Idols, the protagonist included, have feet of clay. The passage establishes a parallelism between her and the shoemaker, inviting the question of whether the craft of literature is somehow akin to clothing the feet of the rich and powerful in exchange for cultural standing. Glantz’s writing wavers, andante style, between self-deprecation and self-appreciation. Think of a love-hate gaze in front of a mirror, choosing the right shoes to wear to a job interview. The opening movement of Story of a Woman tells the agony of becoming. The protagonist refers to herself in the third person, then assumes the first person. Her thinking of Ferragamo is “curious” because she is a lowly commoner with deformed feet, first, and then because the man is a lowly craftsman beneath her dignity—and a fascist, no less. Throughout, things become words become things: shoes become a name become a corporation—and backward again. Meanwhile, the self-aware, insecure dresser irrevocably becomes a writer:
Resolute, she returns to Ferragamo, tries the shoes again; the saleswoman tells her, you’ve been here before, Nora nods, pleads to be shown the shoes again, contemplates them, caresses them, wears them, verifies that the bunion doesn’t stand out too much, makes up her mind…she will use them solely when she sits down to write, as she does now, with her shoes on, her Ferragamo shoes she has purchased at an exclusive boutique in Bond Street, London.46
A statement of cosmopolitanism and petit bourgeois sensibility, the polysyndetic incantation brings hyperfetishism to its musical climax. Many threads are woven together in the passage, too long to cite in its entirety: stasis and movement, the connection of brand names with both honor and infamy, the purposefully embraced contradiction of taking up the monk’s cloak—asceticism—and wrapping herself in luxury—indulgence. Nora García is neither too poor to afford such fancy shoes nor rich enough to do so without second thought. She sits in a maelstrom of contradictions she can only attempt to resolve by writing, metafictionally, the book itself. Additionally, as Erin Graff notes, the text combines Jewish and Christian referents, including the medieval trope of the deformed, devil-like Jewish foot or the Glantzs’ own shoemaker background as Eastern European immigrants to Mexico.47 (The author’s more sustained reflection on her Jewish ancestry appears in her 1981 Las genealogías, translated in 1991 as The Family Tree.48) Clearly, García is not modeled on the traditional politically committed intellectual. Whatever insights she has to offer about the trappings of capitalism, she offers understatedly.
Now, while she does share the above trait, Margo Glantz is obviously not Nora García. To some extent, the author is vicariously building an author myth for herself by tapping into the mana of the brand to build her own. But these days, authors do this unironically: their literary agents, whose awareness of the product they put on the shelves supplements literary appreciation (however narrowly defined) with market savviness, encourage them to build brands for themselves. Nora takes pains to explore this theme dialectically. The musical subtext (andante), as in Ortiz (counterpoint), mobilizes form to interrogate extractivism in language. As far as “variations” go, the work that ensues after this opening andante section could be described as a short-story cycle or composite novel—it’s also a rewrite of the collection that appeared in Argentina under the title Zona de derrumbe, after a different section.49 Shifting the order of the sections, focalizing one as the title story over another, and adding or subtracting passages are not radical changes. This is consonant with a vision in which shoes are simple and complex, writing is heroic and mundane, inner life is rich and iterative. Extractivism, like brand fascination, is part of daily life.
If commodity fetishism were an illness for a Freudian talking cure to overcome, hyperfetishism would be better fit for a Lacanian exercise of dwelling in the symptom. García, artisan and one-woman corporation, illustrates this. She is also wearing history and vanquishing fascism (outsmarting it, at least), one step at a time—while sitting at her desk. However, there is no turning back the clock to that original scene of craftsmanship. At the time of writing, Ferragamo is already a global luxury brand. Ferragamo himself lived as a jetsetter for half of his life, having clothed the feet of Marilyn Monroe and Eva Perón. Risk here is mainly aesthetic: that of producing prose that is also a commodity. Crucially, hyperfetishism reveals the blurry borders of commodities. It does not take for granted the difference between use and exchange value. Likewise, it shows how commodities permeate language and private life. Thorstein Veblen famously observed that “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”50 Glantz exacerbates this logic to thought-provoking contradiction: García is an industrious, pedestrian gentlewoman of leisure. She debases herself and acquires social status, exhibiting both less than consumption—sitting down, shoes won’t wear or tear—but also more than consumption—buyer infatuation overgrows into author myth. Note the family resemblance with Silva and Vallejo above and, in chapter 3, with Bolaño’s Viennese court shoemaker.
By way of the present chapter’s conclusions, it’s worth considering a final, emblematic case of Mexican hyperfetishism. Roughly contemporary with Glantz, photographer Daniela Rossell gained worldwide notoriety with a series of provocative portraits of young Mexican women—and, less frequently, their mothers and servants—in opulent settings. Silva’s imagined interiors are sparse in comparison. The series grew from a small-scale exhibition to a national mediatic phenomenon, thanks to a scandal about the women photographed: daughters and granddaughters of prominent politicians of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party). These days, Rossell’s emblematic early work is exhibited, alongside superstars like Cindy Sherman and Rineke Dijkstra, at key venues of the art world, big and small, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Berlin’s Olbricht Foundation. Many aspects of these eye-catching photographs have been discussed, notably by Princeton’s Rubén Gallo, who comments on their scathing implicit critique of Mexican plutocracy and on the missed opportunity of making such critique more pointed and explicit. (He accuses Rossell of “bad faith” by omitting the names of the heiresses depicted.)51 Artist intentions aside—the photographer herself was a gilded youth, the subjects her personal acquaintances—I find that commodity hyperfetishism provides a better framework to appreciate them. Conversely, Rossell sheds light on this phenomenon.
Take the case of Rossell’s untitled picture, reminiscent of a harem, ostensibly a revision of an orientalist motif (figure 4.2). Is this a feminist take on an art history motif, à la Martha Rosler’s famous “Hothouse (Harem)” collage of 1972? Rossell’s picture and composition is indeed visually aware of Rosler, who cut out pictures of naked women from Playboy and composed them anachronistically, so as to confront the masculinist gaze in high art and popular culture, seventeenth-century monumental painting and twentieth-century mass magazines. (An illustration would be too explicit and bedeviled by copyright issues to include here.) As there is hardly any space between the mostly reclining bodies in Rosler, the horror vacui that characterizes the motif was taken to its limit: the aestheticizing of the subordination of women rendered into a canvas of flesh. This is part of what made her negative feminist critique so effective, for it visually demonstrates that all the paraphernalia of men’s magazines—at the time they included articles by reputed literary authors—are but frills and justification, like the rich tapestries of a harem. And yet Rossell sharply differs from Rosler, for all that their names are anagrammatic, because the relationship between ornament and subject is suspect, the extensive feminist critical apparatus is lacking, and, more simply, because the women she depicts are legitimately posing in good fun.
This is, of course, disquieting. Such ambiguities uncharacteristically prompt Gallo, a nuanced reader, to request explicit engagement from Rossell. Is she, at the end of the day, criticizing PRI or celebrating its uncontested seventy-year reign? Objectivizing or subjectivizing women? Oblivious to Mexican poverty or summoning it via negativa? The bonsai palms and blackamoor candelabra—eunuchs?—turn the women into powerful giants; the continuity of foreground staging and backdrop painting reduces them to lively decoration. The puma hide sits ambiguously among hunters or prey. One relatively alert woman looks away—toward the arriving prince (whom the tray bearer also faces?)—but lounging seems to be an end in itself. Color overload takes over, and yet the wooden floor visible in the bottom-right corner reveals the artifice. Do we witness an enthusiastic celebration or a comical repudiation of “bad taste”? Impossibly eclectic geometric patterns hint toward postmodernism: a conceptual trompe l’oeuil. And yet the piece conspires against its own compositional perfection, for instance, with the lone plastic water bottle in the bottom left. What brings the work together, in my mind, is an exacerbation of the fetish that prompts critical thinking, providing questions rather than answers. It’s a visual-arts manifestation of the phenomenon the present chapter addresses.
Similarly, another captivating photograph, also untitled, features an unnaturally blond woman draped in revolutionary red, or rather an electric hue thereof, sitting on a coffee table, as if a coffee table book herself (figure 4.3). The backdrop, red as well, features a large-scale portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the indigenous peasant revolutionary, presiding over the chimney like a patron saint or yet another hunting trophy. (The latter is a recurrent motif throughout Ricas y famosas and, presumably, the homes of the better off—notice, in this photograph, the little bear standing on a rock.) As a library scene, this is, on one level, an allegorization of the production of knowledge. Facing away from the camera, a maid dusts redundant encyclopedias, some of which most likely sit there on account of their stately leather spines, which dress the room and contribute to solving the predicament of too much space to fill. At the right, a clock from Porfirio Díaz’s day keeps time. Zapata and the fresa—slang for “preppy,” but also literally a strawberry, which she resembles—lock eyes with the viewer; the maid doesn’t have the chance. Other than the forceful condemnation of a plutocracy that speaks in the name of the people (Gallo has reservations), I see in this photograph an enormous empathy and pathos, as if every human and nonhuman element were held prisoner to every other. The voice of things is overheard. Subjectification of the object and objectification of the subject, the commodity here combines what Bill Brown calls “misuse value” with a stark sense of materialized, if perverse, historicity.52
The above merely scratches at the surface of Rossell’s complex work—but then again, surface is all there is. The photographer complicates Capital’s teleology from use to exchange value to financial abstraction in a striking number of ways that, nonetheless, are more performative than speculative. Her compositions, despite being meticulously staged, reimagine social situations rather than analyze them. Objects are parts and parcel of this operation. In a different work in the series, another svelte heiress, wrapped in gold lamé, lounges on a plush leather coach, personifying ennui while staring at the camera (figure 4.4). Standing beside her, slumping, a plump maid in uniform also stares on, albeit uncomfortably. The two equally young women evoke a master-slave dialectic, but they are hardly the punctum of the grand photograph. Taken from an impossible angle, as if by an angel, the photograph gives away much of the field of vision to a foregrounded crystal lamp. There must be another source of light so as to cast such dramatic shadows. Regardless, the lamp achieves a chiaroscuro effect against the opposing dark corner, a synecdochal maid’s quarters.
In Guy Debord’s definition, “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”53 This is the case here quite literally, with a twist: Rossell’s manicured images depict things and, in turn, become objects themselves with exchange value in the art market. Détournement, Debord’s favored technique, is akin to rearranging a dream, rather than to waking up from it. (His examples include renaming Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica), originally dedicated to Napoleon, as the “Lenin Symphony.”)54 Rossell, activating misuse value, achieves a sort of détournement with things, her own work included. The rippling effect goes in many directions, affecting many constituencies. European and U.S. art buyers may recognize the gaudiness in their own curated interiors. Underprivileged Mexicans peek into the rarified environments of an overclass estranged from the people, or perhaps recognize them as familiar—as those they themselves would inhabit could they afford them. (Gallo cringes.) This multifariousness may very well be what gives her work an iconic status in contemporary Latin American art. Be that as it may, an important takeaway for present purposes is that, in hyperfetishism, conspicuous consumption complicates, rather than affirms, social status. The accoutrements that bolster privilege can also reveal its weaker underpinnings. Social mobility, and lack thereof, are also a function of human nonhuman relations.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that any of the authors or visual artists considered in this chapter are “progressive” in some fashion. They may well be the opposite. But despite themselves, they present a different way of revealing the seams of the commodity. Heideggerian attempts to recover the thingness that exceeds the object, à la Brown, pay scant attention to economical dimensions; Marxist takes ignore thingness, if not objects themselves, to focus on the bottom line. Hyperfetishists build up noninstrumental, expressive language as counterforce to both mystification and economicism. That Latin American cultural products develop that third possibility has less to do with the region’s ingenuity or aesthetic prowess, however much these traits may be in evidence, than with its unique positionality at both the receiving and giving ends of modern extractivism.