In Praise of the Bespoke and the Singular
How we might withdraw from the commodity form
In “Property is always potentially a commodity,” I decried the ways that the future possibility of an object entering into a market of similar objects for which it can be exchanged exerts an invisible and pernicious effect on the types of objects which are produced and the methods of their invention.
To illustrate this, I used the example of how a house must always be able to be priced and sold at market in the future, this means that ‘good-enough’ shelter becomes illegal, and the creation of private objects increasingly becomes a sphere of public concern (and control!)
However, in this piece, I want to explore that problem further by talking about the “commodity form” as an abstract concept, in order to show how that abstraction has leaked into our everyday lives and how we might begin to withdraw from its influence.
The Commodity Form
While it harbors many valences, in this piece we will let the term ‘commodity’ denote the concept of an “object which is interchangeable with other objects in a market,” and it will serve as shorthand both for objects which have been standardized or homogenized by market incentives, but also for the gravitational pull which the market exerts on all private objects, threatening to reduce them to interchangeable ‘widgets’ comprehensible from within economic calculation.
Karl Marx uses the term ‘commodity’ to describe the fundamental structure of capitalism — M-C-M’ — Marx’s formula means that the flows of a capitalist economy can be formalized as a circuit where ‘money’ (M) is converted into commodities (C), which are then converted back into money, but with a little surplus value created along the way (that’s the little ‘ on the side of the second M). Capital thus forms a network of linkages constantly reproducing itself through this simple formula of financial alchemy.
That little apostrophe (‘) indicating surplus value is what the entire system of capital exists to produce. Indeed, the functioning of Capitalism depends on how this surplus value is re-invested in the production process or used to fuel the consumption process which itself drives the demand for production. Like a self-turning wheel, the system of Capital keeps generating evermore surplus value which feeds the next cycle of growth (and supposed abundance for all).
Of course, when we formalize it this way, it’s hard to see where this little apostrophe could possibly emerge from. How does the process of converting money into commodities and back into money produce more money than we had before? Did we create something out of nothing? Marx argues that the missing component is the work of the laborer — the one who puts in the work to produce the commodity adds the value of their work to the commodity, and it’s the value of this labor which re-appears as the surplus value. The one who owns the productive capital which was used to create the commodity takes a cut of the surplus value and returns it to the laborer, then reinvests this surplus value the business, and also helps himself to a fat check as a reward for his role.
Marx’s labor theory of value needs significant modification, for we now understand that economic value is basically a function of supply and demand — wherever supply is low or demand is high, people will pay more for things (sometimes much more!) regardless of the amount of labor put in. Something is not more valuable because more work was put into it — one could work very hard producing something, but if no one will pay for it, the market reckons its value at 0. Conversely, seemingly worthless objects (like jpegs of monkeys) can trade hands for more than a laborer may earn in his entire life, even if the NFT took virtually no effort to produce.
Further, I would also add that the labor theory of value does not account for nature’s labor. The miner’s labor may retrieve the coal from the bottom of the mineshaft, but did the miner make the coal? No, dead organic creatures and millions of years of natural processes put in the work to actually create the coal which we simply hoist out of the ground. The farmer may plant the seeds, water his fields, and harvest the crops, but it’s the plants which actually do the growing. I have not read Capital closely, so perhaps Marx addresses this, but I see this as a crucial missing component which we would do well to keep in mind as we reflect on our relation to nature and ourselves.
I would note that is what Bataille means by his notion of ‘solar economy’ — that the study of economics begins with the genesis, analysis, and reckoning of all energy in the universe. Regarding the earth specifically, all the work on earth derives from the energy of the sun and the influence which it exerts upon the planet. Thus, for Bataille, human economics consists in an infinite chain of conversions by which the sun’s energy is transmuted into some new form in order to be expended through gratuitous acts of wasteful consumption.
What then is left of Marx’s theory? The formula for capitalism’s underlying circuit (M-C-M’) still seems valid to me if we discard or modify Marx’s theory of value. We experience ourselves within a form of life where money’s pursuit of surplus value produces objects as commodities, engaged in the limitless transformation of ordinary objects into products which could be bought or sold within a market which assigns them value, either as the commercial material for more refined products or for the direct consumption of private individuals and groups. The commodity form, the mediating step in the production of surplus value, supplies the underlying conceptual form of all objects within the modern world, determining them both as objects and as to their meaning.
The tendency towards commodification
Every object in our world comes into existence under this pressure to be already-legible in economic terms because Capitalism runs on this circuit of M-C-M’. Therefore, within a capitalist market economy, natural or artificial objects will tend towards commodification, that is, the reduction to preexisting forms determined by the productive and consumptive demands of the market.
I think that we can see this tendency manifest itself in at least three ways:
Homogenization — objects tend to look more and more like each other, even across cultures. This has been called the “global urban monoculture” which infects every local culture, but we might also look to mimetic dynamics where more and more people’s desire converges on similar objects and forms.
Loss of the nonstandard or bespoke — objects which have been developed for private use, tools which involve a bricolage of materials or functions, objects which do not conform to established aesthetics, practices which are non-optimal or ritualistic, customization, salvaging, modification, and many other forms of ad hoc innovation are obscured or never conceived.
Narrowing of general possibilities — this homogenization and loss of the nonstandard closes the general horizon of possibilities for the solutions or tools which we might conceive to experiment with or create simply for fun. These trends in commodification restrain our capacity to use what’s at hand to solve present problems, and instead pushes us towards a mindset of consuming existing products and services.
During the latter half of the 20th century, the Japanese notoriously developed waves of products which were experimental, bizarre, and failed to find a market (chindogu). They tried to meet a seemingly mundane need, but did so in a way which either created new problems or did not account for the role of aesthetics in consumption (read: they made you look ridiculous). Further, they often introduced minor inconveniences or brought two disparate processes together in an unintuitive way.
While markets can be efficient ways of filtering which tools are truly helpful or remarkable, they also play a key role in the social visibility of consumption, shaping not only the selection of particular objects, but also informing our own expectation of what it should feel or look like to consume that product. Social media has only heightened the importance of the visual and aesthetic in our consumptive practices as a culture, for now we wade through a swarm of circulating images and videos which unconsciously inform how we envision the use of products, even restricting the possible field of new innovations.
The theme of oddities which resist market legibility came to me afresh as I recently drove through the deserts of Nevada on the way to Grand Canyon. My family and I traveled along Highway 95, through desolate towns like Hawthorne, Tonopah, and Beatty. Sprawled throughout these nowhere places, you’ll occasionally glimpse some bizarre attraction, like Goldfield’s “International Car Forest” or the wreckage of an old plane now proudly displayed in front of an old pink manufactured home which once served as a brothel (you’ll see this sight as you near Beatty). Nearby, you can also check out Rhyolite, a town which boomed for only a couple years during the Gold Rush, but quickly emptying out to become a ghost town.
All of these singularities in some important way resist commodification, either because they are so unique as to have nothing to compare them to or they defy any attempt at being 'useful’ or ‘productive’ in economic sense. No one sets out for a family vacation to the International Car Forest (much less expects to discover that it’s run and maintained by “the last church”) because it doesn’t fall within the commonly understood set of entertainment or leisure experiences which one anticipates consuming within the larger commodified experience of ‘vacation.’ While these oddities must to some extent attempt to make themselves legible within the terms of the market to keep their doors open, they will never quite fit. They will never be fully comprehensible within our current socio-economic logic.
I especially like that many of these examples choose to repurpose the waste of the capitalist system, taking up the detritus of our immense system of production to produce something which the system can no longer fully recognize or integrate — from the speculative rush which abandoned Rhyolite as quickly as it gave birth to it to the failed marketing stunt which crashed an airplane in front of a desert brothel, I see an immense potential for creativity and subversion in the way that we engage the ocean of unwanted and wasted material which our global economic system constantly spits out.
How we engage waste naturally dovetails into the creation of non-standard or bespoke objects, as we can glimpse in this post from another Substacker:
This type of work stands to disappear under the pressure of commodification which drives us to purchase recognizably standard products from branded purveyors, presumably because their output has consistency of color, shape, and material, or hasn’t been enjoyed by another person yet. The reused object harbors a suspicious uncertainty, the invisible stain of another’s enjoyment. Even repurposed material has this pall around it of being sub-par, possibly waiting to betray or surprise us in ways which might be inconvenient.
In particular, it’s clear that this amateur craftsman made this shelf purely the enjoyment making — he had no intention of starting a business, selling a product, or turning a profit when he picked up the scrap wood in his barn. His creative urges seized upon the material at hand, satisfying the craftsman in the transformation of his world. The only thing which could have made the enjoyment more complete would have been never telling anyone at all about it (do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing!), although we can be thankful that he shared it with us as an inspiration for our own creative endeavors.
In this particular example we might intuit a key component of how we might begin to withdraw from the commodity form — that is to enjoy our own enjoyment in making. Instead of allowing our enjoyment to be exploited by those who own the means of production, we may begin to divert and re-circulate our enjoyment within our own bodies, our families, and immediate communities. Instead of allowing our enjoyment to become an object of calculation or capture by another, it may invigorate our life and the life of those we live in relationship with, giving birth to new forms of work and play together.
Creating technology to solve problems of individual and communal concern in sustainable ways places technology and tool-making back within the sphere of care in which we find ourselves moment by moment. The web of relations of concern which contextualize our existence, helping us to prioritize, direct, and limit our actions, enables us to imagine objects in ways not subordinated to the commodity form. What can happen if we rise up to give ourselves gifts rather than to render the fruit of our labor to the market?