In the first chapter of Capital, Marx describes the fetishism of
commodities that is unique to capitalism. It is his way of explaining a
peculiar form of misperception: as he puts it, in a capitalist system
people come to see the products of their own labor as objects that are
objective in an unmediated way (ie, people naturalize the products of
their labor, and fail to recognize that these are actually mediated through
human labor and the socioeconomic system). Lots more could be said about
Marx' analysis, which I am not able to myself, but I would recommend
Moishe Postone's book *Time, Labor, and Social Domination* for a reading
of Marx that uses the commodity, and not social class, as the central
analytic concept.
Adorno and Horkheimer took the concept of a commodity from Marx, and added
the Weberian idea of bureaucracy. In *Dialectic of Enlightenment* they
give an analysis of "the culture industry," and cultural products, in
terms of the commodity. Simplified quite a bit, the commodities they
describe involve three central aspects:
(1) Standardization. Commodities are standardized, such that everybody
buys the same thing.
(2) Passivity. In cultural products, this sort of standardization leads
to consumer passivity. Just as we are faced with little intellectual
stimulation when choosing between brands of toothpaste -- we just pick
among the standardized offerings -- commodified cultural products also
offer little intellectual stimulation. We just passively consume the
canned plot of the sitcom, without engaging in any substantial way (as it
is just a variant of a formulaic script, with slightly different content
slotted in). Adorno contrasts this with the engagement required to listen
to non-commodified music, for instance (he means Brahms, etc.)
(3) Reification. This is the peculiar misperception we have of
commodified products. Despite their standardization and our passivity in
consuming them, we perceive them as genuine and natural. For example,
look at the advertising for mass produced cars -- we are supposed to think
that the Monte Carlo really expresses my individuality, when thousands of
people are driving them. Or look at popular music: fans will tell you
that it really expresses the subjective experience of the performer, when it
actually is just formulaic.
Now this is probably more detail than Mike bargained for. But it
represents my take on the issue. I have a paper on this if anyone's
interested. I would, however, welcome ANY references
on the commodification of classroom discourse -- even those that use a
different interpretation of the concept (eg, one derived from Bourdieu or
Habermas), or those that talk about standardization, or misperception,
even though they do not use the concept "commodity."
Stanton Wortham