white 2013 materiality-libre

SUMMER 2013

Materiality, Form, and Context:

Marx contra Latour

Hylton White

Major theoretical projects are organized as much by what they dispute as what they propose. What has come to be called the “ontological turn” in the humanities is no exception,

and little has been been more important for advocates of that turn than the effort to repudiate the claims of critical theory.1 Take Rita Felski’s call to understand texts as nonhuman actors, participating in fluid relations with other actors—readers, for example—that they come across as they circulate in an open-ended world. As Felski writes in a recent article entitled “Context Stinks!” (a reference to Bruno Latour), before we can comprehend texts as actors that enter into diverse, unpredictable associations, we first need to estrange ourselves from conventions of critical inquiry (denominated as the “hermeneu-tics of suspicion”) that interrogate texts for ties to arrangements of power in specific historical settings. In Felski’s words:

While suspicion can manifest itself in multiple ways, in the current intellectual

climate it often pivots on a fealty to the clarifying power of historical context.

What the literary text does not see, in this line of thought, are the larger circum-

stances that shape and sustain it and that are drawn into the light by the corrective

force of the critic’s own vigilant gaze. The critic probes for meanings inaccessible

ABSTRACT: Bruno Latour’s critique of so-called anti-fetishism is central to the “onto-logical turn” that has spurred the recent decline of historicist approaches in the humanities. According to Latour, anti-fetishists such as Karl Marx believe themselves to be exposing the illusory projection of human agency onto things. This leads them, says Latour, to overlook the actual roles and powers of nonhuman actors in constructing actor-networks. Here I suggest that Latour has fundamentally misrecognized the object of Marx’s analysis, however. In Marx’s account, the fetishism of commodities is not an ideological projection but a historically specific form of life. A critical materi-alism would focus not simply on demonstrating again and again the facts of nonhuman agency, but rather on examining the historically diverse forms of material association that organize possibilities for agency. Marx’s analysis of the commodity form as a form of estranged interaction provides rich resources exactly to that end.

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to authors as well as ordinary readers, and exposes the text’s complicity in social

conditions that it seeks to deny or disavow. (574)

In rejecting critical inquiry thus described, Felski draws intellectual inspiration from Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), one of the most influential projects within the broader anti-critical movement. The primary goal for ANT is to show how assorted nonhuman actors—material things, particularly—participate in creating complex networks or assemblages of action that cannot be understood as products of purely human agency.2 ANT aims to reconsider the interplay between forms of materiality, forms of connection, and forms of action: precisely the domain in which critical theory has staked its preeminence. For Latour, therefore, the turn to ANT is inseparable from a turn away from critique—a turn he has charted most famously in his 2004 essay, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” In calling on us to renounce critique, and to rethink the entanglements of material objects in modes of asso-ciation and action, Latour insists that critical theory has fallen short in understanding the links between material facts and social ones.

This essay suggests that Latour is mistaken in ways that should matter to the historians, literary scholars, and others who are now adopting approaches based on his program. Nowhere is this problem clearer than in Latour’s misunderstanding of the “fetish,” as invoked in Karl Marx’s seminal critique of commodity fetishism in the opening chapter of Capital (1867). For Latour, the very notion of the fetish is iconic of the suspicious methodology that seeks to look behind things rather than at them, in an alleged privileging of depth over surface. Latour calls that suspicious methodology anti-fetishism and uses this term repeatedly within his refutation of the claim that Marx’s critique helps us grasp the roles of things in ordering human affairs. That refu-tation fails, however, because it fundamentally misrecognizes its object. There is little correspondence to be found between Marx’s critique of the fetishism of commodities and the anti-fetishism that Latourians see in Marxist theory. When Latour targets anti-fetishism, he describes it as a misguided epistemic crusade, whereas Marx’s account of the fetishism of commodities is an immanent critique of a form of life. To conflate the two is not just an error in theory or in the history of ideas, although it is certainly both of these. It is also a move with self-defeating effects. If the point is to move beyond a critical method that merely exposes power at work behind the veil of representation, then Latour’s

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critique of critique is in fact an obstacle to that exact goal. It gets in the way of developing a more dynamic approach to the role of material form in mediating relations, actions, and consequences. Victorianists who are interested in material objects should (to borrow a locution from Thomas Carlyle) put down their Latour and pick up their Marx.

Latour’s opposition to Marx rests on his conviction that Marx’s very idea of commodity fetishism betrays ill will toward the concrete lives of the things placed under this description. In Latour’s account, to call a thing a “fetish” is to show no care for the technical complexi-ties of its creation or the sheer fragility of its existence. The Marxist critic effectively smashes the object to satisfy a suspicion that behind its surface lie the aims of human domination. That is to say, in Latour’s rendition of Marxist critique, Marx depicts the fetish as an illusion that has not yet been exposed for what it is: a mask that graces power. But this is a mistake. Marx does not conceive of commodity fetishism as a surface illusion superimposed on the facts of human agency; he does not, in other words, conceptualize the fetishism of commodities as a consequence of the (false) beliefs that people hold about things. In Marx’s Capital, fetishism inheres instead in the social effects of the way the commodity form is organized, qua form, as a template for assem-bling connections between a host of objects, actors, and activities. In thus describing the commodity as an element of capitalist society, Marx focuses on features that may not be characteristic of objects in non-capitalist systems of exchange (148–51). These connections between actors and activities are inseparably historical and material, and they have the very real (fetishizing) effect of making subjectivity peripheral to the construction of material action in capitalist society (168–69). In no way, then, does Marx suggest that the fetishism of commodities is a mask obscuring the underlying powers of human subjects. Latour’s critique of critical theory is a misdirected caricature. It is, dare one say, a supremely unempirical account of things—and one that occludes the importance of Marxist historicism in renewing a materialist approach to critical practice in the humanities.

What Is Anti-Fetishism?

Latour’s attack on the concept of the fetish is a theme that links up works produced over twenty years of battle against the scholar-ship of suspicion. Across these polemics, Latour constructs a picture of

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anti-fetishism as the way of thinking he wishes to oppose. It is crucial to recognize that, for Latour, anti-fetishism is not just a misguided set of critical claims, but also the outcome of a weakness in the ethos or the character of the critic. As Felski puts it in a clear Latourian echo, “suspicious reading” is “a distinctive disposition or sensibility that is infused with a mélange of affective and attitudinal components” (575). The product of this disposition, according to Latour, is an antipathy for the fetish that subtracts from rather than adds to our assembled grasp of the things that share the world with us (“Why Has Critique” 232). But this impoverished understanding, in his view, starts with the posture that the critics bring to bear on their engagements with the world. Before it is an epistemological error, then, anti-fetishism is an affective, even a moral, one. Its intellectual failures stem from a failing in the spirit or the ethics of its practitioners.

Much of Latour’s account of anti-fetishism is thus focused on a portrait of the critic as a character governed by fatal flaws and vices. The language Latour brings to these sketches is so unremittingly mordant that it is difficult to summarize without falling into melo-drama. Critics of the fetish are described as puritanically austere, suspicious to the point of paranoia, and barbarically aggressive in their handling of the things they make into targets for their critical atten-tions (Latour, “Why Has Critique” 228–40; On the Modern Cult 67–72). They define themselves as “Whites” and “Moderns” in self-satisfying contrast to those who suffer under fetishistic illusion (On the Modern

Cult 2–7). Worst of all, they impress themselves with the cleverness of their activities. As Latour says in a typically caustic passage:

You are always right! When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects,

claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their

cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and

humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection,

that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by

some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike

them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that,

whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of

powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes

you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth

going to graduate school to study critique? (“Why Has Critique” 239)

Latour clearly believes that the failures of an “anti-fetishist” critical practice come from a kind of conviction that is in turn predicated on


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the critic’s belief in the uniquely scientific status of his or her own forms of knowledge. Disposition and proposition thus merge in the arrogant act of exposing fetishistic errors: “The fetishist is accused of being mistaken about the origin of the power in question. He has built an idol with his own hands . . . yet he attributes this labor, these fanta-sies, and these powers to the very object that he has created” (On the

Modern Cult 8). On this account, Marx leads the critic to portray fetishism as a type of self-deceiving human agency. The real agent at work in the act of fetishism is the human fetishist, not the fetishized object. Most importantly, the anti-fetishist critic thinks the kind of human agency at work is specifically cognitive: what animates the fetish is the fact that humans believe in it. Critique, on this view, is a project of showing how fetishists have been deceived by their own beliefs into attributing powers to lifeless things. But how did fetishists come to think so wrongly in the first place? At this point, anti-fetishists suppos-edly inflict Latour’s “second uppercut.” They claim scientific knowledge to show how human beliefs are shaped by hidden mechanisms— especially the functional imperatives of social domination (“On Interobjectivity” 236).

According to Latour, this two-step operation produces a paradox. The power of things over human affairs is first exposed as a product of misguided beliefs, after which these beliefs are exposed as products of thing-like social mechanisms that govern human affairs. How can critics subscribe to both assertions simultaneously, without seeing how they controvert each other? This is only possible, says Latour, insofar as anti-fetishists themselves believe something special about belief, namely that beliefs drive human actions. Since their own beliefs are scientific ones, these critics are granted the stature of world-making heroes, while ordinary fetishists are caught in a web of illusion that prevents them from acting freely or effectively (On the Modern Cult 14–16). One of Latour’s main conclusions is, thus, that the concept of belief does essential enabling work for the anti-fetishist project by allowing critics to paper over the cracks of a performative contradiction. Ironically, the category of belief allows anti-fetishist critics—not fetishists, note—to deceive themselves about the role of beliefs in their own behavior.

Finally, what is it about anti-fetishist critique that the concept of belief hides from view? The answer lies in plain sight, says Latour. Once more it is an irony, but now it concerns the category of society and operates with devastating effect against the supposedly social aims

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that provide the mandate for anti-fetishist criticism. Anti-fetishists think, that is, that fetishism has a double link to the constitution of social life. On the one hand, they convince themselves that fetishistic beliefs about the powers of things reproduce the social order. Beliefs project social forces onto apparently material ones, thus constituting the object as a fetish—an entity stuffed with the weight of social oppres-sion. On the other hand, anti-fetishists also think that ordinary people’s beliefs in things interrupt the composition of human relation-ships. Because they are in thrall to lifeless objects, people are unable to use their human powers to forge more free and flourishing commu-nities among themselves. Fetishism—and through it the world of things at large—is an instrument inflicting social death.

But Latour proposes that all of this is wrong, an error not just farcically but also tragically self-contradictory. By way of correcting the critic’s mistaken faith in the reality of the social, Latour adduces his ontological turn: the argument that things operate precisely in order to connect us to the full range of actors, human and nonhuman alike, with which we share a world of association (“On Interobjectivity” 235; On the

Modern Cult 25–27). They are not inert containers wherein social forces are channeled and concealed. It is only in the paranoid cosmology of the critic that society becomes an overpowering context working secretly through things. If anything, it is the critic’s activity that builds a social prison around the object of critique (Felski 579). Worst of all, concludes Latour, this paranoid delusion draws the critics into acts of aggression against the very communities of association they say they want to promote. Convinced that things are masks disguising the operations of power, the anti-fetishist brings a critical hammer to the fragile scene of connections that things facilitate for their human companions and allies. In the end, it is not the uncritical delusion of the fetishist but the “critical barbarity” of the anti-fetishist project that presents the greater harm to our hopes of advancing a more felicitous grasp on the composi-tion of collectives (Latour, “Why Has Critique” 240).

Is Marx an Anti-Fetishist?

Although my main concern here is a defense of Marxist histori-cism against its Latourian critics, Latour’s attack on anti-fetishism is not an exclusively anti-Marxist construct. In fact, anti-fetishism is the credo for a very broad church indeed in Latour’s account. He thinks it describes


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the positions of parties as disparate as mainstream sociology on the one side and the American National Rifle Association—which insists that it is people, not guns, who kill people—on the other (“On Technical Media-tion” 31). Throughout the congregations of this anti-fetishist fold, Latou-rians hear the theological echoes of the early modern Protestant war against the religious veneration of icons. On this view, the Reformation becomes the model for all the anti-fetishist Moderns. Whether the latter be missionaries in the colonies or Marxists in the humanities, they are all described as Puritan militants bent on the work of purifying humanity of its entanglements in the fictitious powers of things.3 Marx, however, is singled out in this company for (somehow) being the most Protestant of all. The Marxist critique of commodity fetishism is a station to which Latour frequently returns as he prosecutes his claim that critical theory is the hidden heir to the Protestant mission of saving humanity from enthrallment to its own idols.4

I want to challenge Latour’s interpretation of Marx as a secular iconoclast: not just to salvage Marx from Latour, but also to save Latour’s materialist project from the fatal effects of his misinterpreta-tion of Marx’s claims. As I will argue, Marx describes the world of commodity fetishism with reference to a dynamic that is inseparably material and historical. There is simply no way to read him as a theo-rist of collective illusions embedding themselves secondarily and exter-nally in things. So what has led Latour and his followers to make such rudimentary mistakes in relating Marx’s claims?

I suggest that Latour’s account of so-called anti-fetishism confuses Marxist theory with forms of criticism that begin from funda-mentally different, ultimately incompatible premises. Most proxi-mately, these include Michel Foucault’s works and other forms of poststructuralism (from which Latour unsuccessfully strives to extri-cate his own thinking). But they also have older precedents, most notably in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Latour’s confusion of Marx with these Rousseauian lines of criticism revolves around the status of collective cognitive artifacts—beliefs and representations—in the constitution of social life. Latour has incorrectly grafted Marx, that is, to a lineage of critique that charts how states of mind support oppres-sive political and social institutions. Whatever auxiliary roots these latter approaches may or may not have in Protestant theology, what distinguishes them conceptually is a very un-Marxist emphasis on the role of representations in establishing injurious collectives.

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Take Rousseau’s famous argument, in his Discourse on the Origin

of Inequality (1755), that power depends on manipulating the conscious-ness of subject populations:

The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this

is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of

civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the

human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the

ditch and cried out to his fellow-men: “Beware of listening to this imposter.” (44)

Rousseau’s account is striking because he embeds this fatal event in a longer story about the composition of social life as such. He tells us that, before we could reach the point where an imposter’s representations institutionalized political injustices, we first had to constitute a common realm that was organized both through and as the flow of representa-tions among the minds of its participants. Rousseau describes this devel-opment as the growth of human communities where personal life is contingent on the regard of other subjects—in other words, where social life is intrinsically intersubjective. Thus did the solitary human indi-vidual of the state of nature fall from a condition of robust indepen-dence into one of living instead through the perceptions of others. To flourish in this common space required the ability to manage the circu-lation of representations through others’ minds, thus nurturing the arts of civil duplicity: rhetoric, costume, manners (34–43).

Rousseau’s argument combines three theoretical axioms. The first is a claim about what society is: namely, a space of collective mind. The second is a claim about the character of interactions within that common cognitive space. Social interaction is conceived primarily as representational practice: the range of acts that circulate collective repre-sentations. The third is a normative postulate: representations bring burdens and distortions of mind to bear on concrete lives. If society is a space of collective cognition, then representations function as laws that discipline and distort the concrete world. The critic’s task is thus to inter-vene in an epistemo-political struggle in which lively bodies strain against the violence of representation. Taken together, these three claims form a set that recombines in arguments from Rousseau to Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim in the nineteenth century and to the linguistic turn of structuralism and poststructuralism in the twentieth. Yet, even though a nuanced critique of the hermeneutics of exposure would therefore have to engage Foucault’s influence rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) that of Marx, Latour hardly ever takes issue with Foucault or poststructuralism


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at large. This is doubtless because poststructuralism is a crucial ante-cedent for ANT. The end result is that Latour’s account is incoherent: mistaken about Marx and silent on those aspects of the hermeneutics of suspicion that derive from linguistic emphases.5

In contrast to the dualism between objects and representations that pervades this latter tradition, historical materialism is inspired by a completely different philosophical anthropology. It begins from a phenomenological (and anti-dualist) focus on the problem of the subject in its relations with the world and, specifically, the potential of the subject to determine its relations with its activities: in other words, on freedom as an emergent worldly condition. As Marx says in The German Ideology (1932), the subject only develops in the midst of its relations with things: the history of its relations with those things is, thus, the history of the subject and its freedom (36–37). The question is therefore not how to free the subject from the world, but rather what kinds of worldly arrange-ments might create a subject capable of self-consciously relating itself to itself through its relationships with objects. Far from seeking to purify humanity of its material entanglements and dependencies, Marx’s approach to the question of freedom is therefore focused precisely on the question of how we create ourselves materially.

But we do not even need to resort to statements of philosophy here. When Marx puts forward the theory of the commodity form as fetish in the opening pages of Capital, he does so in order to compre-hend not social life in general, but one specific, historically relative form of it: “societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails” (125). And he understands this form of life, for reasons we shall see, as one in which activity is specifically resistant—even unsusceptible—to influence by processes of intersubjective or cognitive mediation. The last point is fundamental. At the very point where Marx invokes the concept of the fetish, his argument diverges most dramatically from approaches to social analysis that, like Rousseau’s, explore the ways in which forms of collective thought legitimate oppressive institutions. Latour thus misde-scribes Marx so profoundly that his assault on anti-fetishism simply has no purchase on the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism.

How Do Objects Associate, Historically?

Near the opening of the most extended version of his argu-ment, Latour positions Marx in the iconoclastic Protestant tradition by

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selectively quoting the famous lines from Capital in which Marx says “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” in order to find “an analogy” with the fetishism of commodities in capitalist society:

In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings

endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the

human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.

This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as

they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the

production of commodities. (qtd. in Latour, On the Modern Cult 10; see Capital 165)

With that Latour rests his case, if not his accusation. But of course, the passage makes nothing like the claim Latour reads into it, namely that the fetishism of commodities projects the illusions of minds onto things. Latour cuts off this important passage not just from the argu-ment that follows, but even from the balance of the chapter it concludes. The effects of this are decisive, since Marx’s account of capitalism is designed to be read as a whole. In the very next line, for example, Marx writes, “as the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the

labour which produces them” (165, my emphases). However, even a careful reading of the cited passage in isolation shows that Marx is not asserting what Latour would have us believe. What makes two things “analogous” is not that their parts are identical, but that there is an isomorphic structure in the ways those parts are arranged. When Marx compares the “products of labour” to those of “the human brain” attending religion, he is not proposing we understand the fetishism of commodities as something the mind has created. He is saying that in the fetishism of commodities, as in religion, we see a kind of activity displacing its own human subjects. In this instance, displacement issues not from what those subjects believe, but from the “peculiar social character” of their acts. In the detail just as much as the bigger picture, Latour simply misrepresents what he is describing.

In the bulk of this chapter on commodities, Marx assembles a complex set of relationships between iron and coats, producers and political economists, and ultimately value, temporality, and the lives of things, both magical and mundane. In other words, he provides a detailed account of what Latour ought to see precisely as a type of “actor-network.” Take this well-known passage, in which Marx claims


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that the metabolism of labor into a product, far from being a reduc-tively physical act, is diverted through the manifold of associations converging in the commodity form as form:

It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of

nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for

instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to

be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it

changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet

on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and

evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were

to begin dancing of its own will. (163–64)

Commodification, then, is the device through which the object (a table made of wood) is translated into an element of capital (a commodity form that “transcends sensuousness”). The distortions that result from this set of social relations—the “grotesque ideas” through which the table (in un-table-like fashion) “stands on its head”—are not projected onto the thing in human thought, but emanate inexorably from the mode of connection itself or, in other words, from the form (figura-tively expressed as the table’s “wooden brain”). Marx therefore spends much time on carefully tracing the ways in which the commodity form is itself a concentration of a series of relations or modes of connection. He associates these relations with an unfolding series of value forms, which take their turns appearing while commodities circulate through diverse juxtapositions with the range of subjects and objects they encounter in the society of capital. Every form of value entails a different kind of relationship and a different implication for the dynamics of human activity. In use value, for example, we find a rela-tion in which the material thing is part of a chain of subject-object mediations. Producers reshape objects with specific material qualities that enable their consumption to particular ends in other kinds of activities (125–26). In exchange value, by contrast, the use value or the material form of the object is a vessel for another relation entirely. Not, let us note, a human relation disguising itself in things. Rather, in rela-tions of exchange, where objects are related as commodities, the mate-rial form of one thing is quite literally the social representative of the value of another thing (138–63).

This is the first appearance of the society of things that Marx denominates the fetishism of commodities. It is not a product of mind.

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Nor is it the property of a thing as such. It is literally a structure of rela-tionships associating things with one another. As a structure of associa-tion for things, it also brings human actors into peculiar kinds of secondary relationships. For Marx, however, being brought into relation through material things is not the source of the problem. On the contrary, as makers of useful things, human actors potentially relate to others precisely through the properties of things that allow for the inter-change of needs, desires, intentions, and skills (131–34). This has nothing at all to do with fetishism. In fact it is the necessary material condition, as Marx writes in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1927), for the flourishing of a self-conscious subjectivity in rich relations with others (72–78). In a setting in which the means of production have all been turned into capital, however, human actors find little opportunity to engage in this material sociality, except as the producers of things that circulate as commodities. But as makers of commodities, human actions do not follow from the plans that subjects have for themselves, for things, or for other subjects. Instead they act as agents of an expenditure of different proportions of “human labour in general” (Capital 142): the quantities of labor-power that capital has bought from them. In other words, human actors are brought into relation here as elements of capital. As producers of commodities, their ties to their own activities and to those of other actors are extensions of the agency of capital itself (Postone 148–57). This is the fetishism that “attaches itself”—returning to those lines that Latour misreads, but noting now the full force of the impersonal construction—“to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities.”

This is necessarily a very brief account of Marx’s argument and one that will be familiar to many readers; but let us note three evident points. First, Marx’s argument, once again, has nothing to do with projections of illusory representations. Second, Marx’s critique of the structure of capitalist activity has nothing to do with ridding human life of material entanglements. Quite the opposite: the problem with the fetishism of commodities is exactly that it works to demateri-alize the material conditions for a flourishing of intersubjectivity. Third, what makes this condition pathological in Marx’s view is not that it contradicts the pure condition of the human (as if the human were not itself historical in his account). It is rather that it crystallizes a self-contradictory structure of activity, the effect of which is to discon-nect the subject from its own materializations.


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That last point takes us directly to the question of context—at issue for Felski and other critics following Latour—and the status of “the ends of history.” As participants in the technically elaborate ecology of our age, humans have a historically grounded potential to construct a richly material space for intersubjective becoming: a space in which they could recognize themselves in their open engagements with a complex world of human and nonhuman others. But in more and more situations, they find the material world already appropriated as capital (Marx, Capital 927–30). In order to act materially, they are forced to act as the producers of commodities (or marginally, or not at all). As producers of commodities, however, they interact as extensions of the impersonal dynamics of valorization. Where they could be subjects, then, they cannot act materially. But where they act materially—as in their relations of labor—they do so non-subjectively.

Perhaps the most economical way to put this is that Marx’s critique describes a historically relative, richly material structure of social action, in which the human subject is displaced from its own mate-rial activity. We can thus read Marx as the theorist of a sort of actor-network, as I have said. But that is only one outcome of recovering Marx from Latourian distortions. If Marx is able to give us a language for comprehending a non-subjective form of sociality, or one in which inter-subjective ties have lost material mooring, he gives us something more than Latour’s theoretical apparatus can provide. For all Latour’s insis-tence on an open-ended ontology, his actor-networks are always chains of interplay between two and only two kinds of causalities. There are plans or designs on one side, and the lives of things on the other. Tech-nical mediation is the name he gives to convergences of these elements in potentially complex pathways of combination, displacement, and recombination (“On Technical Mediation”). But somehow Latour’s examples of these convergences or translations never move beyond a repetitive back-and-forth narrative in which mind is joined to matter and matter subsequently relays, exceeds, or displaces mind. At the post office counter, the agent and the customer interact in accordance with a plan designed in the architect’s office (Latour, “On Interobjectivity” 238). The civil engineer translates the policeman’s command into speed humps that address quite different motives in the driver of the car (“On Technical Mediation” 38–39).

The irony is clear, of course: much more than critical theory, it is ANT that traps the object in a relationship with mind, instead of

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placing it carefully in the world of all its historically particular connec-tions. But the missed opportunity is also clear. Restricted by this intel-lectual framework, Latour cannot see the world of objects sitting right in front of him in his own historical setting: commodities that asso-ciate human activity in a non-subjective mode. No amount of focus on the translation of subjective designs will show him the formal pathways where commodities separate subjects from the material conditions of their intersubjectivity. To see that would require attending to how the commodity form, as form, arranges subjects and objects in a histori-cally specific kind of relationship—the one that critical theory labels capital, or the fetishism of commodities.

In other words, a materialist account of the existing world could build much more from historical materialism than it can within the narrow confines of Latour’s atemporal cosmology. To do so, it would have to adopt a conception of the historical existence of the commodity form. It would have to move away from the metaphysical abstractions of the interplay between plans and things, toward a histor-ically grounded account of the work of the form in associating activi-ties. It would thus have to do the hardest work of all in critical theory: holding to a rigorous sense of sociohistorical relativity. For this is where the question of illusion really emerges in the course of Marx’s critique. It is not that human subjects are unable to see themselves and their human agency in the products of their labor. They quite correctly see that their productive acts are actually dictated by the impersonal dynamics of political economy. What occludes itself is the fact that this is one historically relative form of life. It is not so much that human work is hidden here, as that this is a peculiar way of arranging the interaction of human activities. The mode of interaction is what appears, illusorily, as natural fact, as an outgrowth of necessity instead of historicity. By refusing to theorize social form as such, Latour ends up simply replicating the way that the society of the fetishism of commodities presents itself: as the only way of life we can possibly have.

Context Follows Form

And so we return to the question of critique, suspicion, and context. How does our discussion of the fetish help us rethink the turn away from historical context as the ground for critical inquiry in the humanities? In the passage with which I opened this essay, Felski correctly


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points to the stultifying grip of a mode of criticism that interrogates things for hidden meanings that make them vehicles of power in surrounding social contexts. But in taking Felski’s advice to heart, we must remember that Marx’s account of commodities as fetishes does nothing of the sort. The relationship to context is precisely not a relation-ship of “meaning” in Marx’s analysis. In order to be a relationship of meaning it would have to be set in the first place in an intersubjective space, and that is what the commodity form has already put to the side. Nor is the commodity’s context best understood in terms of a focus on “power,” whether in Rousseau’s terms or Foucault’s. To frame the problem of freedom in the language of political oppression would require, again, that social life be essentially intersubjective, but as Marx shows in Capital, that is just what the fetishism of commodities interrupts. Finally, neither is the commodity’s “context” best understood as something that surrounds the form on the outside, as it were. The form is itself the relationship here and, thus, it is the historicity of the commodity form that lets us see the historicity of the mode of association it creates. In Marx’s argument, context follows form, not the other way around. Here is something that seems to exceed, not just the “critique” that Latour presumes has now run out of steam, but also the confines of an anti-criticism that fails to grasp what materialist critical theory actually claims.

University of the Witwatersrand

NOTES

This essay originated in a panel on “Things of Nature, the Nature of Things,” convened

by Sarah Nuttall at the fourth Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism (see

White). My thanks to her and the other participants in that session. I am also very

grateful to Lauren Goodlad and Andrew Sartori for invaluable editorial guidance, and

to Jean and John Comaroff, Bernard Dubbeld, Charles Piot, Achille Mbembe, Cathe-

rine Burns, Julia Hornberger, and an anonymous reader for comments on earlier

versions.1Broadly speaking, the “ontological turn” refers to a movement away from

questions of representation, discourse, subjectivity, and identity, and toward a new

attention to the roles of material and other nonhuman agencies in constructing

concrete events, collectives, and forms of life. In anthropology, for example, this has

inspired new experiments in posthumanist or multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and

Helmreich). In literary studies, book history is related to the same trend. One of the

signature features of this movement is its explicit repudiation of critical questions and

its unabashed embrace of an empiricist agenda.2On ANT, see Latour, Reassembling 1–17; Callon.

682 HYLTON WHITE


3Latourian anthropologist Webb Keane, for example, compares the Marxist

critique of commodity fetishism to the anti-idolatrous projects of Calvinist missionaries

in Indonesia (Christian 8–13).4See Latour, We Have Never 36; “On Technical Mediation”; “On Interobjec-

tivity” 241; On the Modern Cult 10.5It is important to note that theory in this Rousseauian tradition hardly ever

makes use of the notion of the fetish, preferring instead the metaphor of the mask

(Mauss; Levi-Strauss passim). Since Latour so often writes about the critique of the

fetish as if it were a critique of the dissembling representational work of the mask, it is

all the more incongruous that he directs his ire at Marxism and not at his own post-

structuralist inspirations.

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