Nature and commerce

The aspen are turning color in Santa Fe this week, and my parents are visiting from Colorado, so we decided to take a day off and climb the mountain and hike through the turning leaves.  In spite of a nasty stomach ache, Helena loved the walk through the woods, both because of the colors and because of the many people she met on her trip: a family from Texas, a little Tunisian girl named Noor, dogs and their owners...  It was a beautiful autumn afternoon in the New Mexico mountains.  For Helena, whose favorite activities involve being with people and playing with nature (particularly grabbing flowers and messing with herb gardens to conjure up the smell of thyme and basil), it was as wonderful a trip as she could imagine.

Then, this evening, we went out to an African-Carribean fusion restaurant in a little strip mall on the other side of town. The food was spectacular (pomegranate and videlia onions over beef kebabs!), but the place is, unfortunately, in a strip mall, and when Helena inevitably got impatient with the restaurant and her inability to eat food like big people, she wanted to go out and walk.

In a strip mall, there are no flowers.  No trees.  No changing aspen.  And at 7 PM, not too many people.  So to entertain Helena, I showed her the posters and mannequins in shop windows, the bright colors of a video-game store and the swaths of fabric on a plus-size women's clothing vitrine.  Fortunately, she didn't seem to find any of this as interesting as the orchids in the garden in Brazil or the tomatoes and basil in front of our house here in Santa Fe.

The contrast between nature and commerce opened a nice chance to talk with her about Marx's theory of the commodity.  If you'll permit me a rather long quote (only the first part of which I remembered as I talked with Helena before the shopfronts):

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…  There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. 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. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

The products in a shop window are "really" just things, things that may or may not be useful to us.  Unfortunately, that "really" is quite false, because we all know that a shoe is more than just a shoe.  A Blahnik symbolizes one thing, a Nike another, and a shoe with a brand we don't recognize, something else entirely.  We envelop ourselves in these products in order to present ourselves to other people, to win prestige, to impress.  And in the end, we often turn ourselves into these images, the eyes of a subject a real person, lost behind the Prada sunglasses.  In fact, when I buy shoes, I am buying the labor of an anonymous boy in Indonesia who sewed the shoes, and so the exchange of money should be, in some way, the creation of a relationship with him.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.  In fact, my Nikes enter into a relation with your Adidas, and you, me, and the boy in Jakarta are all forgotten.

Talking with Helena, I told her how lucky we are to live in places where we can see flowers and trees and bees and birds, to talk with people on the sidewalk in front of the house.  These things aren't yet commodities, and when (many) people stop to talk with a baby, it's because they want to look in her eyes, not because they admire the clothes she has on.  Other people don't have such good fortune.  To satisfy the infinite curiosity of a baby, they have only malls and stores, one bright and shiny commodity after another.  Helena has the good luck that this land of pure commence only intersects with hers form time to time, instead of being her only world.