Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:2 (2005)<\/p>\n
The mystery of the commodity, like the enigma of femininity, resides in its social form expressing the value of social labor, which in turn is intertwined with the value of \u201csocial construction.\u201d This contradiction in the double value of the commodifi ed bodies points to the total dissociation of social form from the sensuous body, which, as a result of this separation, is reduced to passive, coarse matter. What Marx\u2019s concept of the commodity diagnoses, therefore, is the indifference and the separation of social form from the \u201ccoarsely sensuous objectivity\u201d of matter and concrete labor under the capitalist conditions of exchange (90).<\/p>\n
These three kinds of abstraction performed by the commodity form<\/p>\n
are mutually interdependent. As Adorno argues, what is at stake in separation of the abstract labor from physical work is the denial of the necessary dependence of concrete labor on its other: on the material, on \u201cnature,\u201d on the remainder of the nonidentical, which cannot be appropriated by the laboring social spirit.<\/p>\n
By eliminating this \u201ctie\u201d to the material and nonidentical, the abstraction of social form denies that there is any \u201coutside\u201d to the principle of capitalist exchange based on equivalence. In so doing, abstraction turns labor into an ideology, which is coextensive with the appropriation of the labor of others and the domination of their bodies. Working in the service of equivalence and domination, this ideology of abstract, sovereign labor dissolves not only every qualitative difference but also every trace of the nonidentical and the incommensurate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:2 (2005) The mystery of the commodity, like the enigma of femininity, resides in its social form expressing the value of social labor, which … Continue reading “ziarek abstract value social death 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3410"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3413,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410\/revisions\/3413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}