Texture of Commodity: Some Considerations on its Geometrical Dimension -Garima Dhabhai
Geometry and Commodity
Marx, in Chapter 1 of the first Volume of Capital, deliberates on ‘commodity’. What is
‘commodity’ according to Marx? It is anything, which may be exchangeable with another object- each with a different ‘use value’. What binds them in this relation of exchange is the principle of ‘equivalence’, something which is common to them both. To this
question of equivalence, Marx adds on the idea of ‘relative value’- which transforms one commodity within a specific exchange relation into ‘equivalent’ form, against which is measured all other commodities’ value. This determines the difference in the value of all commodities. They are bound together in a chain-like relationship, the value-chain, as Marx would call it. However, the absurdity of commodities determining each other’s value is explained in Marxist analysis through the notion of ‘social relation between labour.’ The world of commodities is a world of total labour, which is divided to produce different use-values at specific junctures of history, creating a social division of labour.
Each labourer produces commodities independent of the other in an apparent sense, creating an illusory freedom. However, the labourer is face-to-face with another labourer in the world of commodity exchange. Hence, her labour time is weighed and measured against the labour time put in other commodities. Thus, the seemingly abstract principle of ‘equivalence’, which reaches its full glory in the ‘money-commodity’ (p. 162), conceals, as per Marx, the ‘relation between labourers and labour time.’ All concrete forms of labour are subsumed by a homogenous congealed labour. The use-value of commodity, which the labourer produces, is also not for subsistence wholly, making it
‘social’ in nature, creating a new basis for exchange- social necessity. The common undergirding factor, which makes commodities exchangeable, is what Marx calls
‘socially necessary labour time’. In all of this, what concerns this paper is the form of commodity in the relation of exchange. One has now understood that though
commodities may have so-called physical and material attributes, they cannot be
‘commodities’ per se merely through that physical property. There needs to be a process
of abstraction. However, this abstraction in Marx is structured within capitalism itself. No pure form exists. It is only made to ‘look’ universal and equivalent.
Marx clearly states that the geometrical dimensions of the commodity cannot be its measure of equivalence. He states, ‘…exchange values of commodities must be reduced to a common element, of which they represent a greater or lesser quantity. This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of
commodities…the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values’ (p 127). Preceding this sentence, he contends that the exchange relation between commodities is reducible to a ‘third thing’, something that is materially absent from both. This ‘third thing’ he illustrates through a ‘simple
geometrical example’ (p.127). The example goes, ‘in order to determine and compare the areas of all rectilinear figures we split them up into triangles. Then the triangle itself is reduced to an expression totally different from its visible shape: half the product of its base and altitude. In the same way exchange values of commodities must be reduced to a common element, of which they represent a greater or lesser quantity’ (p. 127). On the one hand, geometrical dimension is a physical aspect of the commodity-its shape, area or volume. On the other, geometry also provides an abstraction of these physical
dimensions, which can only be expressed in terms of relation between certain variables- like base and altitude.
Mathematical and more specifically geometrical abstraction has been a part of philosophical conceptualizations, right from Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein and Leibniz to Badiou. For Kant, ‘geometry was used to define the entire diversity of objective phenomena, from macroscopic to microscopic infinity, without relying in the least on external, objective conditions’ (cf. Dutta, 2007: p 83). Mathematical logic, with its set of symbols enabled cognition and reason, leading to purely abstract categorizations. As Henri Lefebvre would say in his introduction to Production of Space, mathematics lent itself to creation of ‘mental spaces’ (p. 2). Marx uses this all too familiar language of geometrical abstraction and inverts it to create an understanding of the social world of Capital. Methodologically, in the initial parts of Volume I, he takes his reader towards an
analytic of abstract relationship of ‘exchange’ between commodities in a value chain while exposing this very abstraction as the basis of class power. He then introduces the complexity of labour time congealed in commodities and their value-form arising from this, finally leaving the reader with the dazzling and mysterious money-form in the end.
Hence, to go back to Lefebvre’s expression, the transition from a mathematical or logical abstraction to a ‘theory of social life’ is made in the Marxian analysis of commodity.
However, in a seeming contradiction, Marx brings back the geometrical examples to explain the relation between commodities in an exchange chain. What is the role that geometry then plays in Marx’s explanation of commodity? Is it a mere example to unravel relations between commodities or is it playing a methodological role, in that it inverts the mathematical abstraction of political economy upside down and brings out the nuances of commodity fetishism and the aesthetic regimes set in motion by it?
This perhaps requires further exploration. Is there a geometrical dimension in Marx’s notion of commodity? On the one hand, he clearly negates this proposition, while on the other he brings forth a possibility of a formulaic abstraction, which is common to all deductions in Geometry. Even though, one will figure, commodity in its abstract
equivalence with the other objects actually conceals a social relation between labourers, mediating between them, it retains a mysterious and auratic form that Marx configures as
‘fetishism’. There is no pure abstraction in Marxist analysis, as opposed to Classical Political Economists whom he critically engaged with. However, the abstract form or
‘value-form’, which a commodity acquires within the exchange relation, indicates a symbolic and magical form, which has over the years, linked Marxist analysis to
anthropological works such as those of Mauss and Taussig. Geometry also in Marx’s own example of the area of triangle does a similar function, creates a representational formula for understanding spaces and shapes around us. The dimensions of geometry may then easily translate from abstraction to a visual form or appearance- from an architect’s workshop to a solid material structure, creating an aura of ‘home’. The temporal and visual logic of a commodity is linear and two-dimensional. The third dimension is mostly a fetishistic form. However, as soon as a textured surface enters the picture, it interrupts
the relations within the value chain and adds ‘depth’ as the third dimension- a much more palpable visual experience.
Here I would like to deviate a little into the historical narrative of masonry and artistry in 19th century India, to bring home the point about dimensions of commodity. The colonial system of knowledge and taxonomies undergirded by reason pushed the artistic endeavor of craftsmen, masons, painters, and dyers into oblivion, creating a new technology of surface and colour. Colours were being reproduced as chemicals and natural dyestuff was commercialized under the auspices of the colonial planter. One may infer this as an example of commodification. The world of colour was bracketed within the Oriental discourse, making them exotic at most. One still hears general quips about ‘colours of India’- making it fascinating to a white tourist. As Natasha Eaton, in her study of colour and empire would say, ‘colour is not merely a secondary characteristic to be regarded with dreary Kantian suspicion as subordinate to drawing, but it is also the site of original potency. Both Taussig and artist David Batchelor identify this ambivalence towards colour with its material sources in the East. Here Orientalism caves the world into chromophobes and chromophiliacs- those who, like the seventeenth-century French academician Roger de Piles, celebrate an eastern-style of painting and those who despise- and are frightened of- colour’s substantive relation as a form of surface: colour as a deceptive scarf of little shimmering mirrors’ (Eaton, p. 10). This potential ‘nomadism’ of colour as Eaton calls it, led to the anxiety among colonialists, who then handled it
through pedagogical tools and introduction of new ways of ‘seeing’- such as the perspective vision and the category of ‘picturesque’. Walter Benjamin explains this phenomenon through visual culture aided by the lens of the camera, which obliterates the
‘authentic’ and the ‘original’ in the context of technological advancements (1936).
What happens when a commodity becomes ‘standardized’ and reproducible like colour in the 19th century? Does it perform the function of equivalence for other commodities in relation to it? The standardization would also automatically make labour ingrained into it as ‘socially necessary’ and turn artistic endeavours into a quantifiable labour time. Here I have in mind practices of standardization, which Arindam Dutta mentions in his work
‘Bureaucracy of Beauty’. The mystical object of beauty is turned upside down by Marx, when he brings out its material basis in terms of congealed labour time. The economies around authenticity and heritage restoration also revolve around the creation of an auratic object- buildings and surfaces being a major part of the enterprise. These, though roping in ‘traditional’ artists and communities eventually commodify the time they need to expend to make a perfect representation of another time. The time thus produced is symbolic and in material sense, congeals the labour time of the artisan. The artisan turns into a worker and his craft is measured in ‘labour time’ to give it ‘value’ in the exchange relation, which ensues. It is no wonder then, as Dutta points out that artistic subversions were meant to suspend temporal moment of modernism (2007: p 80). It is in this
temporality of commodity and its subversion that the geometrical dimension is either found or dismantled.
Exposition of the Visual
The other interrelated concern of the paper is in trying to find a visual language to understand commodity, which is equally abstract as geometry, but the variables of which are rather distinct. Marx delves on this aspect of visual form in the section on commodity fetishism. One may perhaps extend this analysis further to understand the dynamics of representation in Capital Volume I, which takes one beyond geometry. This, the paper seeks to do through bringing in surface as a metaphor to understand the nature of
commodity. Surface, through an abstraction of texture into two dimensions of length and breadth, conceals its own depth and material basis. Its appearance heightens the fetish around it. The magic of surface conceals the labour processes, which have created them.
Indigo, a pigment, which came out of a plant cultivated in Indian under British
colonialism, became the epitome of Oriental aesthetic and a part of Indian visual history.
The ‘picturesque’, another category in the colonial period undergirded by Oriental form of seeing, was reflected in indigo. However, this very visual form represented a history of exploitation, land degradation, hunger and colonialism. As Eaton puts it, ‘the indigo aesthetic admired plantocratic order’ (p. 42). The artist and the designer emerged as the
‘socially necessary labour’ while marginalizing the body and labour of the dyer (Eaton, p.
68). Over time, colour lost its materiality to a physical abstraction, which attributed it to play of light. This is a similar movement like geometrical abstraction- reducing physical spaces into dimensions and formulaic enunciations. The plant component in indigo was slowly ‘reduced to surface and geometry through design’- flattening the texture to make it reproducible as an appearance (ibid). Or as Dutta would contend, ‘the boom in the technologies of surface brought with it a ravenous hunger for patterns. Patterns were the unifying element that could establish continuity among unlike objects…patterns indicated consanguinity between the teapot and the teacup, the saucer and the milk jug, identifying them as a “set” or “service” against the tablecloth…the surface not so much a blank canvas as a value producing one’ (Dutta, p. 127). It is this relation of one physical object representing another in the value chain of exchange that creates a matrix of
representations generating a patterned relationship. The analogy of the surface becomes useful owing to the disappearance of concrete forms of labour in this kind of surficial representation. The commodity becomes reproducible. Taking cue from the above quoted examples, the planter, the dyer, the mason or the artist fade into the margins of the visual regime of commodities. To quote Marx here, ‘in the value relation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the form of the coat counts as the form of value. The value of commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat; as value, it is identical to the coat and looks like the coat’ (p. 143).
Through Marx’s insights, one may infer that commodity transcends its materiality to become exhangeable- and this equivalence is only measurable through formulaic abstractions, which have nothing to do with the qualitative aspect of it. Even a physical object like a rectangular ground cannot really be measured without reducing it to a symbolic formula, using supposed variables. Hence, commodity is representable only symbolically, not materially. Or more interestingly, a single material form can become an expression of all commodities in the chain of exchange. In the classic example of Marx,
‘coat’ becomes the shape and material which determines ‘value’ beyond use- by
becoming an ‘equivalent form.’ Marx says, ‘to become an equivalent form, a commodity represents another commodity’s magnitude of value through its physical shape.’ Hence we see a presence of materiality in Marx, which has an abstract function. When that
materiality is socially normalized the congealed labour time in it acquires a proportion beyond use-value to create a ‘money-commodity’. This money’s body (coat, gold, silver, paper) is ductile enough to make us visualize other commodities (like, linen). The
magnitude of values of each against this equivalent money-form is determined by
‘socially necessary labour-time.’ What makes commodity into a thing of beauty, since it does not have any intrinsic quality, which makes it valuable? Marx explains the
commodity’s aesthetics through the concept of ‘fetishism’. It is the source of
commodity’s ‘mystery’- mere use-value cannot make commodity a fetish object. A social form of labour creates this mystique that goes beyond subsistence only. Hence fetishism is a social vision, collectively nurtured. As Guy Debord would contend in his analysis of modernist spectacle, ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather; it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ (Thesis 4). Though the spectacle creates an illusion of abstract aesthetic- but it is a representation of commodity exchange par excellence.
Conclusion: Visualizing the Commodity
A few points may be inferred from the above discussion:
a. Commodity has a representational form, in that it embodies the concrete labour process, however, abstracts itself from it to become exchangeable and hence, becomes a perfect representation of another commodity in the value-chain.
Perhaps one may say that every commodity potentially acquires the money-form in a certain exchange relation.
b. As much as the commodity form conceals concrete forms of labour, it lacks depth as a dimension. One may thus think of a commodity as a two-dimensional
surface, similar to a reproducible pattern, where the texture or materiality does not matter. This is also underlined by socially necessary labour time, averse to the temporal rhythms of specific labour processes. Hence, surface may become a metaphor to understand the abstract representation of commodity.
c. The fetish around the commodity brings it back to a world of magic, rituals and authenticity. Communities grow around fetish objects, symbolic forms. These new social relations weaved around commodity fetishism conceal the social
relations of production, which capitalism induces. Hence, commodity ironically performs the contradictory function of concealing relations of production, while heightening the community, as it were around the fetish object. As an instance, in recent times, indigo prints and fabric has become a part of the burgeoning
economy around ethnic and naturally-dyed garments, making it into an ‘authentic’
and somewhat unique piece of object, while glossing over the histories of its production and the material texture of its raw material, that grew in colonial plantations under exploitative labour conditions. The multisensory quality of an object is reduced to its visual aspect, aggravating the appearance over the rest.
References:
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books.
Dutta, Arindam (2007). The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility. London: Routledge.
Eaton, Natasha (2013). Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and Nomadism of Representation. London: I. B. Tauris.
Benjamin, Walter (1936). ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 1969. New York: Shocken.
Debord, Guy (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. trans. Donald Nicholson Smith.
Cambridge: Blackwell.
