Date: Mon, 6 Jan 97 13:31 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (M.Eldred_artefact)
Subject: Utility & fetishism


Cologne, 06 January 1997

Hi Bob,
You write: 
>>The utility of a thing in the weave and flux of the actual world is meant, not
in a technological, but, iconic sense.<<

Icon: "Gr. eikon likeness, image, portrait, semblance, similitude, simile, from 
eik-ein, to be like. 1. obs. An image, figure or representation; a portrait; a 
picture... 2. Eastern Church A representation of some sacred personage, in 
painting, bas-reliefs, or mosaic, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a 
relative worship or adoration. ... 4. A realistic representation or description 
in writing. Now rare or obs." (OED) 

Technology: Knowledge that enable things to be manipulated in such a way as to 
realize a set aim, the telos. 

So usefulness, in your view, is a likeness or representation and not involved in 
bringing forth desired aims? In what sense is a thing's utility a likeness or 
representation? 

You continue:
>>A thing's at-hand-ness guarantees invisiblity.<<

In use, a thing is absorbed in the action of using it and thus disappears. In 
non-use a thing can be stared at and is thus visible (but not in its being). 

And further: 
>>The phenomenology of "thing" and "presence" describes pre-theoretical man's 
perceptual experience, his totemistic "worlding".<<

"Totemistic" is here related to "iconic" above. Totem: "1. Among the American 
Indians: The hereditary mark, emblem, or badge of a tribe, clan, or group of 
Indians, consisting of a figure or representation of some animal, less commonly 
a plant or other natural object, after which the group is named; thus sometimes 
used to denote the tribe, clan, or division of a 'nation', having such a 
mark;... sometimes considered to be ancestrally or fraternally related to the 
clan, being spoken of as a brother or sister, and treated as an object of 
friendly regard, or sometimes even as incarnating a guardian spirit who may be 
appealed to or worshipped." (OED) 

So things in use are a kind of mark perhaps with apotropaic significance? What 
is being warded off here? What kind of mark is this, what kind of representation 
or symbol? 

Further:
>>It describes how bourgeois culture reifies and fetishizes things in proportion 
to their relative commercial "being".<<

Reification and fetishism now make the conceptual link from bourgeois worlding 
to icons and totems. This is the territory of Marx, _Das Kapital_, Chapter 1, 
Section 4. The social relations between people under capitalism take on the form 
of, are represented by, relations between things, i.e. between commodities and 
commodities and between commodities and money, making the 'living' social 
relations of production themselves invisible. The "relative commercial being" is 
the exchange-value of a commodity, its worth in money. The ultimate fetish 
object and totem of bourgeois social relations is money, especially money as 
capital: the totality of the bourgeois world represented in a totemic thing. 

But for Marx, commodities have two faces: use-value and exchange-value and only 
in this doubledness can a commodity be such. The social relations of production 
fetishized in relations between things refer precisely to this use-value side of 
things. So there would seem to be another layer of things in the usefulness; 
otherwise there could be no talk of reification or fetishism. The phenomenon of 
fetishism in bourgeois society is quite different from the oblivion to being, 
however. Nevertheless, the setup of enframement and the circling of capital 
which employs living labour as an essential ingredient of its never-ending 
expansion are intertwined in the contemporary world. 

to continue, Bob Scheetz: 
>>And the PC, itself having become a bourgeois icon, is clearly "thinging" 
iconically, (tool bars, grammar/spell checkers, data bases, form libraries, 
etc.),  reifying  writing/thinking.<<

There seems to be quite a different meaning of "icon" at work here, viz. "icon" 
in the simple sense of a picture representing a function in a computer program, 
not in the deeper, Marxian ontological sense of commodity fetishism. 

>>Can there be any doubt Heidegger would have deemed the PC (like Warhol's 
marilyn/soup cans/etc) a naught, a nullifier of being? So the phenomenology of 
"thing/thinging" appears the antithesis of ontology?<<

The PC in itself is not the nullifier, but the world in which a PC is a thing 
for maximizing the efficiency of digital operations is. This world is also a 
certain understanding of being that remains invisible to those immersed in it. 
In making the simple play of world in which things are granted visible, the 
phenomenology of "thing/thinging" appears to be indeed the antithesis of 
ontology which does not look beyond things in their givenness to the interplay 
of world that gives. 

Cheers,
Michael
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