Objects/commodities - value - politics: detached from human interaction?

This week's readings, Carrier’s “Introduction: approaching objects” and Appadurai’s “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value,” illustrate the doubled-edged sword of reading chapters in isolation from the larger work of which they constitute. While I firmly believe that an introductory chapter does not need to be a stand-alone piece of scholarly work, such a chapter must be able to coherently and fully encompass the author’s argument(s), themes and method. Appadurai, in his somewhat jumbled and verbose introduction lays out for readers his claims, the themes, and the objectives of his chapter, and the book more generally. Carrier, on the other hand fails to even fully elucidate his claims and arguments, instead focusing upon a mix of seemingly unrelated (yet potentially interesting) sub-issues. My chagrin at the lack of logical argumentation along the lines discussed in last week’s class in Carrier is slightly subdued by Appadurai’s piece, yet this fails to fully assuage me due to the tangential nature of his writing: a question I continually came back to when reading was “how does this fit into the claims?”. Explication can be repetitive, yet in an introductory chapter, particularly an edited volume compared to a monograph, it should be reiterated somewhat. The lack of this in Appadurai’s chapter results in a seemingly-jumbled piece.

Substantively, Appadurai covers a lot of ground in the chapter, with a decent argumentation trajectory. His stated objectives are (1) to provide an introductory context for the following pieces in the work, and (2) to “propose a new perspective on the circulation of commodities in social life” (1986, 3). The more concrete claims he puts forward place commodities in a context of economic organization (or exchange) and value, with the connection between these and commodities being of a political nature. Indeed, he concludes that this political link has many guises, each one of which he elucidates throughout the chapter by way of examples. (Which we could, I believe, tentatively call ‘evidence’.)

He examines a variety of economic-related issues pertaining to value; Marxist modes of production, the role of exchange in capitalist structures, the differences between commodities and gifts, etc. The main objective of Appadurai is, however, to illustrate how an analysis of commodities’ (or “things’”) trajectories. We must understand the trajectories of commodities independent of the “human transactions” involved with these (1986, 5). This is essentially the same as as the notion of object biography which the readings in last week introduced. Nonetheless, the placement of object biography, or trajectories, is greatly enhanced by Appadurai’s contextualization of this in the sphere(s) of economic organization.

Carrier, comparatively, lacks the explicit stating of argument or claims. Indeed, s/he plows head-first into the chapter, with little attention to laying out the trajectory of the work. An exception to this the distinction between two main sociological approaches which Carrier wishes to illustrate, with particular emphasis on the semiological approach (1995, 2). The role of objects’ symbolic component is thus the explicated aim of the chapter, yet Carrier does not present any particular claim or argument. There are certainly some interesting snippets throughout, which do pertain to the symbolic component of objects, but these are not presented in a convincing argumentative manner. For example, Baudrillard’s assertion that there is a relationship between objects’ symbolic structure and the structure of societal relations of power is interesting. The example of a 1970s ad for a perfume illustrates how advertising engages in the boundary construction of classes, i.e. draws in those in the higher echelons of society while repelling (or so the claim goes) the so-called lower classes. A further golden nugget is the notion of “identikit”: the construction of self through the acquisition of “impersonal, prefabricated goods” (1995, 7).

I find it interesting that both pieces touch on similar issues: advertising, economic organization and ‘development’. Therefore, I’d like to pose the following questions:

1. Is it possible to conceptualize commodities, or rather, Appadurai’s thoughts on these, separate from economic considerations, e.g. the modes of production?

2. Relatedly, can we in fact think about and analyze commodities’ trajectories, or object biographies, separate from their human interaction and involvement, given the role of politics (as stated in Appadurai) as the link between commodities and value? If politics involves interests, a human capacity, can we truly divorce objects from humans?