Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T04:22:13.432Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 5 - There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2022

By
Leigh Claire La Berge
Edited by
Colleen Lye  and
Christopher Nealon
Colleen Lye
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Christopher Nealon
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
Get access

Summary

This essay offers a historical scope of the concept of “commodification” as it has come to dominate Marxist and liberal critiques of contemporary capitalist culture. It traces how the term “commodification” emerged out of Marx’s original term, “the commodity form,” and it explores the gap between these two important but different concepts. The essay asks: what is commodification, and why do so many critics understand it to be a process of intensification and historical change? Further, it questions whether it is possible to conceive of commodification as a term of stasis and not progress. Ultimately, the essay argues that the received understanding of “commodification” as a capitalist process needs to be rethought to consider how the term also functions as capitalist narrative, one which structures how critics analyze history, periodization, and transformation under capitalism.

Keywords

commodificationcommoditycommodity formperiodizationhistorical transformation
Type
Chapter
Information
After Marx
Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century
 , pp. 86 - 100
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Beech, Dave. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Brill, 2015.Google Scholar
Bottomore, Tom, et al. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Harvard University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2014.Google Scholar
Filsfeder, Matthew. The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Google Scholar
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism . Zero Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Frank, Thomas and Weiland, Matt, eds. Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler. Norton, 1997.Google Scholar
Harootunian, Harry. Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Howard, Dick. “A Politics in Search of the Political.” Theory and Society, vol. 1, no. 3, 1974, pp. 271–306.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
La Berge, Leigh Claire and Slobodian, Quinn. “Reading for Neoliberalism, Reading Like Neoliberals.” American Literary History, vol. 29, no. 3, 2017, pp. 602–614.Google Scholar
Leary, John Patrick. Keywords: A New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket, 2019.Google Scholar
Lunn, Eugene. “Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of Brecht and Lukács.” New German Critique, vol. 3, 1974, pp. 12–44.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. Penguin, 1978.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin, 1993.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, Vol. 2. Penguin, 1973 . Google Scholar
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The German Ideology. Prometheus, 1998.Google Scholar
Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time. Verso, 1992.Google Scholar
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Political Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Reiter, Rayna. Monthly Review Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Tairako, Tomonaga. “Versachliching and Verdinglichung: Basic Categories of Marx’s Theory of Reification and Their Logical Construction.” Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar
Tomba, Massimiliano. Marx’s Temporalities. Brill, 2013.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, George. On Historical Time. 2015. Kingston University, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Toscano, Alberto. “Why We Still Need Communist Thought.” The European Magazine, 2014, https://m.theeuropeanmag.com/mark-fisher--2/8494-why-we-still-need-communist-thought?head_id=alberto-toscano--2.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×