Page 24 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

8 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

fetishize goods because of the kinds of social arrangements in which they
encounter them. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the result of a system of
exchange, mediated by money, which disguises social relationships between
people as relationships between things, and a system of production in which
workers become alienated from their own products. In this situation, commod-
ities seem to have a value of their own, and even an ability to move by them-
selves. Marx’s famous description of the transformation of a wooden table into
a commodity emphasizes this aspect. The table, having become a commodity
‘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 free will’ (Marx
1976: 163–4). For Marx, the commodity is anthropomorphic in several respects:
first, because the ‘social characteristics of men’s own labour’ appear as its own
natural qualities; second, in that it appears to its producer as an alien thing with
a ‘life of its own,’ when the modern division of labour, factory production and
deskilling estrange or alienate the worker from the product (Marx 1977: 61–74);
third, as writers since Marx have shown, the commodity is further fetishized
through product design, display and advertising which attribute human char-
acter to goods. Thus, for example, a dress, a chair or a car come to ‘express’ the
personality of their owners and bring with them associations of status and
lifestyle unrelated to their actual use, price or the material properties of the
commodity itself (Sennett 1993: 144–7).
Commodity fetishism suggests an anthropomorphic relationship with mate-
rial things, which we treat as valuable and meaningful in themselves, and cap-
able of endowing us with certain desirable qualities. These relationships do not
cease at the door of the museum; museums are not immune to the changed
relationships between people and things brought about in capitalism. The
ethnographic curator Stewart Culin saw the Victorian museum’s dry display
techniques as killing the objects, and so pressed for more sensual and aesthetic
exhibits, department-store style (Bronner 1989: 232). An expert in ritual
objects, including fetishes, Culin saw the potential of new and innovative dis-
play techniques to make objects come alive. Indeed the reinvention of the
museum in the twentieth century is closely associated with developments in
commodity display. Even the glass case itself was a display technique shared
across the store and the museum. The glass case fetishizes objects by conferring
an instant aura of preciousness. It places them in a space and time distinct from
that which visitors occupy – protecting it from deterioration, pollutants, and
changes in temperature. Like commodification, it disguises their relationship to
the human beings who make and use them. In other words, the arrangements,
techniques and acts of attention by which museums turn things into meaningful
objects may even reaffirm the sense that things are somehow alive insofar as it
fetishizes them.