CAPITAL AS FETISCHCHARAKTER AND PHANTASMAGORIA.

A genealogical analysis of fetishism and phantasmagorias in Karl Marx

and Walter Benjamin’s methodologies.

Fabrizio Panella

Centre for Cultural Studies, 2016

Professor Scott Lash

Goldsmiths, University of London

Introduction

Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin’s methodological approaches present different

oppositions and interrelation. They will be taken in consideration due to the
seminal legacy they have brought in the way the notion of capitalism can be
understood today. This methodology report will also investigate the origins
and different modes of interpretation of common notions, by mostly referring
to the authors’ magnum opus: Capital and The Arcades Project. Both
philosophers seem in fact to be amongst the first to have reflected upon the
notion of die Moderne and on the analysis of commodity fetishism. Both have
looked upon 19th century society, and at determinate geographical places,
Paris and England, as gathering locus for the construction of a meaning of
history, however with different approaches. Karl Marx’s seminal legacy is
considered to be the first to have thoroughly analyzed the radical changes
Western societies encountered with the advent of the Industrial Revolution
and hence of what maybe understood as ‘modernity’. The genealogy of
notions such as commodity’s fetischcharakter and phantasmagoria will be
investigated, particularly looking at the aspects of their concealing and illusory
agency. Marxian theory of commodity fetishism will be analysed through
secondary literature by Isaak Illich Rubin, György Lukács and Hannah Arendt,
who seem to agree that, although is presented separately from the rest of the
analysis in Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,
the theory represents a central argument of Marxian analysis if not of all his
economic system and theory of value. From Marx’s understanding of capital
as the hegemonic economic concept that englobes within itself all the material
basis and social relations developed during nineteenth century’s capitalist
Western society, the report will move onto Benjamin’s conception of Paris as
the 19th century capital. Conversely Benjamin’s method, by taking as point of
departure Marx’s notion of the phantasmagorical power of commodities upon
the new products offered by nineteenth century Paris, will be evaluated for its
use of the notion of phantasmagoria as one of the keystones for The Arcades
Project. As argued by Cohen (1989: 87), Benjamin’s phantasmagoria
constitutes the emblem of one of the Passagen-Werk’s methodological tasks.
As the Enlightenment critical practice seems to be no longer functioning in a
commodity-saturated reality, it will be explored how the phantasmagoria is
utilized to represent a new tool for critical activity (1989: 102). Benjamin’s
exploration of Paris as a display of modernity’s obsession with novelty, will be
also be investigated for essentially being the representation of the “ever
same” and of the inability of modern society to liberate itself from the
obsoleteness that haunts all expression of the new. This aspect ultimately will
constitute a framework from which to consider the contemporary as pervaded
by the obsolete.

Karl Marx: labour as method

Karl Marx’s method of analysis and critique of commodity fetishism, as Arendt

stated (1952: 277), has been the first to philosophically enquire the issues that
have developed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and “the distortion
of which means at once the loss of an important […] help, in dealing with real
predicaments that ever more urgently continue to confront us.” (Arendt, 1952:
278). Given the radical change Western societies encountered with not only
the Industrial Revolution, but also the wide spread political revolutions of the
eighteenth century, Marxian analysis could not have been a mere application
of a traditional method of thought, but conversely a new methodological
analysis. Those changes in society, that initiated what can be understood as
the modern world, brought forth also two central issues “independent of all
political events in the narrow sense of the word: the problems of labor and
history.” (Arendt, 1952: 278).

Karl Marx methodological critique was different from traditional philosophical

thought especially due to the place the notion of labour and working class was
given within its structure. Not only Marx has provided an unprecedented
analysis of labour, but as Arendt suggests (1952: 283), he also advanced a
dignifying process of labour, placing it as the most fundamental of all human
activities and as nineteenth century’s central event, finally rightly treated
philosophically. The very notion of labour had also shifted with the changes
brought forth by modernity, transformed into the main source of wealth and of
all social values. However the most decisive change seems to have lied within
the transformed conception that all men will become labourers independently
from their social class and the consequent reinterpretation of all human
activities as labouring activities (Arendt, 1952: 279).

Such changes are also encapsulated within the new notion of commoditised
goods. In the 1867’s preface of the First German Edition of Das Kapital, Marx
introduces the reader to the understanding of the first chapter, containing the
analysis of commodities. The notions of value or money are also introduced
within an analytical approach that is compared to a biological study of the
human body: if to understand the whole body as an organic unity is necessary
to go through the meticulous analysis of the individual body cells, likewise
bourgeois society must be understood through the microscopic anatomical
analysis of its minutiae, namely the product of labour, the commodity-form, as
the ultimate “economic cell-form” (Marx, 1867: 7).

In Marx the conditions of such modes of productions are grounded within a

spatial location, that is to say 19th century England. England is in fact “used as
the chief illustration in the development of [Marx’s] theoretical ideas” (1867:
7), however keeping in consideration that “the country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its one
future.” (1867: 8).

Furthermore, not only the phenomena of labour or of commodity are observed

as economic cells, but also the individuals that are part of a capitalistic society
are taken in consideration, as they are essentially personifying determinate
economic categories and embodying specific class-relations and class-
interests (Marx, 1867: 8). Marx’s method hence envisions the development of
economic configuration as a natural historical process, making the individual
responsible for the socio-economical positon he constitutes.
This is inscribed within the Marxist tradition of dialectical materialism. Even
though Marx himself did not use the term dialectical materialism, it is from
Hegelian dialectic that he begun his investigation. As “the pupil of that mighty
thinker” (Marx, 1867: 14), Marx credits Hegel for being the first philosopher
who gave dialectics an exhaustive and conscious presentation, but he also
criticise him for the mistake of displaying it from the wrong angle: “With him it
is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would
discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” (1867: 15). It is
essentially considered as a mystified form of dialectic that, transcending
material content and the whole sensuous realm, is only preoccupied with the
mental world of ideas, hence promoting an “affirmative recognition of the
existing state of things” (1867: 15). Instead Marx’s dialectical method is
concerned with the material world of production and economic activities, an
empirical - but not empiricist - study of society through its most concrete
materiality, namely their modes of production.

In Marx the logic of the infinite dialectical movement (thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis) allows the union of spirit and matter where “man becomes the
author of a meaningful, comprehensible history because his metabolism with
nature, unlike an animal’s, is not merely consumptive but requires an activity,
namely, labour.” (Arendt, 1952: 309). As Arendt pointed out, the concept of
labour, becoming the fulcrum of Marxian analysis, may be considered as the
key link to unite man and matter, nature and history (1952: 309).

The Marxian approach is however well different from “all hitherto

existing” (Marx, 1845: 10) materialism and idealism. Even though materialism
seems to understand physical reality, Marx distance himself from such
approach as, like György Lukács writes (1919: 7), it risks to lack of recognition
for the role of the human subject as active, without going beyond the
reproduction of the immediate. Conversely, Idealism, by blurring the cognitive
reproduction of reality with reality itself, shapes a world created upon
rationally imposed categories. Marxian analysis can hence be seen as a
dialectical synthesis of those diametrically opposed methodologies, where the
subject is enabled to transform reality not in thought but through actual
material activity. A point of view from where “self-knowledge coincides with
knowledge of the whole so that the proletariat is at one and the same time the
subject and object of its own knowledge” (Lukács, 1919: 16) and from where
the object can be understood as human activity. Man, or the proletariat, can
hence be “conscious of himself as a social being, as simultaneously the
subject and object of the socio-historical process” (Lukács, 1919: 16).

This “dialectical conception of totality” seems to be in Marx the only method

able to understand and reproduce reality, where “concrete totality is,
therefore, the category that governs reality” (Lukács, 1919: 16).

Capital and the fetischcharakter

Tout object historique est fétiche.

(Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Pietz, 1985: 1)

Marx, from the outset of Capital, in order to enquire the material substratum of
capitalist society, begins to investigate the commodity under capitalist society,
and its ‘value and ‘use-value.’ A commodity is understood as an external
object useful for man and produced for exchange. Marx starts investigating
the ‘use-value’ of a commodity, its concrete usefulness, which only after
entering a relationship of exchange, can be abstracted into value (Marx, 1864:
28). During the exchange process, commodities are rendered equal even
though being qualitatively different. This is possible only due to the existence
of a ‘third’ factor that allows the establishment of a relation of exchange
between substantially different commodities. The third factor is understood as
value, “the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange-value of
commodities” (Marx, 1867: 28).
The value, the “third thing” or “common something”, the “total abstraction from
use-value” (1867: 28) in Marx’s critique haunts the social bond of capitalist
society, where social relations are substituted and expressed by relations
between objects, and where the pretersensual commodity veils the real. The
theory of fetishism advanced by Marx encapsulates this scenario, illustrating
one of the most disquieting results of the advent of bourgeoisie society. As
Isaak Illich Rubin argued, (1928: 3) many scholars have regarded the theory
of fetishism as a mere supplementary critique to the theory of value, probably
also for the structural separation it is given in the text. However, even though
it is given a different heading, the theory represents a central argument of
Marxian analysis, if not the fundamental basis “of Marx’s entire economic
system, and in particular of his theory of value.” (Rubin, 1928: 3).

But there is one term the indiscriminate use of which, I

believe, has done infinite harm, the word 'fetish'.
(Rattray in Pietz, 1985)

The notion was adopted by Marx and other late eighteenth century scholars
from Charles de Brosses 1760’s The Cult of Fetish Gods (Pietz, 1985: 5). As
Pietz writes (1985: 5) the notion has originated during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in the cross-cultural costal area of Western Africa, from
the pidgin word Fetisso, derived from the Medieval Portuguese word feitiço
meaning ‘magical practice’ or performed ‘witchcraft’. Feitiço instead derived
from the Latin facticius, (manufactured). The illusion of a natural unity within a
diversity is what Pietz claims Marx was attracted to (Pietz, 1985: 9) and the
genealogy of the term helps to sheds light onto the history of its relation with
social values and material objects, and also its veiling, displacing and
concealing characteristics.

“Material objects turned into commodities conceal exploitative

social relations, displacing value-consciousness from the true
productive movement of social labour to the apparent movement
of market prices and forces.” (Pietz, 1985: 5).
The fetischcharakter of the commodity in Marx, the illusion that englobes still
today within itself all products of capitalist society, is ascribable to a tradition
of magical mystification of the real, a witchcrafted “enigmatic character” of the
commodity, “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties” (Marx, 1867: 47). As Hamacher argues (1999: 176), this mechanism
goes to deform also to the more general forms of knowledge that concealed
behind the fetish becomes phantasmagoric and mystical parts of commodity-
language. The language of commodity “objectively veils” society, where
“objectively” is understood as the objects themselves, constituting the
concealing agent, “the objectivity of objects is the fetish” (Hamacher, 1999:
176).

Within this mystified scenario is going to be understood Marx’s notion of

capital, namely the dominating economic concept that encapsulate within
itself all the material basis and social relations developed during nineteenth
century’s capitalist society. Marx’s proposes a process of demystification
through the dialectical method, through the activity of praxis, seen as superior
over speech, where the latter becomes a “mere ‘ideological’ talk whose chief
function is to conceal the truth.” (Arendt, 1952: 291).
Marxian methodology, claiming that “Theory becomes a material force when it
grips the masses” (Marx, 1844: 56) aimed to enable the proletariat, through its
practical and critical activity, with an instrument to tear apart the concealing
veil of 19th century capital.
Walter Benjamin: phantasmagorias as method

The flowery realm of decorations, the charm of landscape, of

architecture, And all the effect of scenery rest solely on the
law of perspective. (Böhle in Benjamin, 1939: 11)

Benjamin’s acknowledges the wide breath of Marx’s legacy in his Konvolut X

from The Arcades Project, assigned to a large collection of fragments and
quotation from Marx, Engels and various second literatures. Maxime Leroy’s
epigraph placed at the beginning of the section set a framework of
understanding that underlines the epistemic qualities of economic exchanges:
“The man who buys and sells reveals something about himself more direct
and less composed than the man who discourses and battles” (Leroy in
Benjamin, 1939: 651).

Nevertheless, Marxian historical materialism after being diverted from its

original aim from events such as Stalin’s Russia, was strongly criticized by
Walter Benjamin for the mechanistic turn it had taken. In these terms,
Benjamin could be seen as a proudly unorthodox Marxist. Even though he
developed an interest and had familiarized with Marxian analysis through the
readings of Lukàcs History and Class Consciousness (Osborne, 2015) he
later criticized its system in his 1940 essay On the Concept of History.
Historical materialism is notably compared to the late eighteenth century fake
chess-playing device called The Turk: “the puppet called ‘historical
materialism’ is always supposed to win” (Benjamin, 1940: 1). Being compared
essentially to an hoax, ‘historical materialism’ is seen as a quasi-religious
system, a mechanical illusion that conceal behind a puppet a human
presence who pulls the strings to control the machine.

What seems to be at stake however in Benjamin’s critique of a distorted

version of Marxism, is its infection with an ideology of progress, on which
examples such as the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) were grounded
upon (Osborne, 2015). The Social Democratic notion of progress arguably
constituted one of the main fuels for the construction of Benjamin’s final
composition The Arcades Project, as the author established as one of the
main “methodological objectives” of the work to “demonstrate a historical
materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress”, and as its
“founding concept […] not progress but actualization.” (1939: [N2, 2], 460).

However Benjamin’s furthers Marx’s concept of commodity culture,

associating it in his 1935 resumé with the notion of phantasmagoria, the
experience of material and intellectual products already used in Marx’s
Capital. By extending Marx’s notion of the phantasmagorical powers of
commodities upon the new products offered by nineteenth century Paris,
Benjamin starts elaborating a concept that constitutes one of the keystones of
The Arcades Project. As Margaret Cohen argues (1989: 87) Benjamin’s
phantasmagoria constitutes the emblem of one of the Passagen-Werk’s
methodological tasks. The 19th century visual spectacle that inspired the
concept consisted of a popular performance invented in the late 1790’s by
Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, where a magic lantern was used to project
parades of ghosts and silhouettes. Those entertaining visual apparitions,
resembling the phantasmagoria of the arcades, also capture the method of
critical illumination proposed by Benjamin.

The 1867 World Exhibition is the climax event where the new creations “enter
the universe of a phantasmagoria” (Benjamin, 1939: 1256) however it is not
through “theoretical” or “ideological transpositions” that the creations are
glorified (verklärt) but in their “immediate presence, in a sensuous
way.” (1939: 1256). The sensuous commodity becomes a method of analysis
for the culture of modernity. Material conditions are examined to understand
the broader narrative: the textile trade and iron boom as the condition for the
emergence of Parisian industrial luxury and arcades (Benjamin, 1939: 3), that
with its utopian architectural use of glass represent the dream of the epoch
that will follow.

The conception of Paris as the capital of nineteenth century, is however in

Benjamin not only a recognition of the hegemonic position the city acquired
during the century, but rather as Friedlander argues (2012: 5) the concept that
“tendencies spread out in time are gathered by a way of place”. (2012: 5).

The use of the arcades as the predominant phenomenon investigated in the

project illustrates how they embody a broader historical meaning, by gathering
within them a unity of a place and an epoch. The contingent materials of the
arcades, from the glass roofs to the marble-paneled corridors, are
philosophical elements that having a gathering power, are concerned with the
recognition of a broader meaning. This is what may be understood as
Benjamin’s metaphysical realism, where the transcendental or supersensuous
is found as immanent within the concrete, and where ideas are not only
intellectual intuition but are also sensuously representable.
The philosophic constellation that constitutes the way the material is
presented in The Arcade Project is a philosophical project in itself. By not
constituting a theory but a concrete presentation of reality, the method has
been criticized by Adorno for the risk of falling into mere facticity and for
invoking a lack of critical distance in the readers without the help of a
theoretical interpretation (Adorno in Friedlander, 2012: 3). However Benjamin,
being aware that “Criticism [kritik] is a matter of correct distancing” argues that
such method belonged to a “world where perspectives and prospects counted
and where it was still possible to take a stand point. Now things press too
closely on human society” (Benjamin, 1929: 89). Enlightenments critical
practices are no longer functioning in a commodity-saturated reality hence the
phantasmagoria becomes the new tool for critical activity (Cohen, 1989: 102).
But how can a post-Enlightenment process of critique take place “when its
traditional metaphysical configuration breaks down?” (1989: 103).

Benjamin’s critical analysis draws from Robertson visual technologies,

associating critical activity with “artificial vision to suggest its non-ration and
mystified aspects” (1989: 104). Benjamin’s project, refusing the traditional
opposition between mystification and reason of the Enlightenment, invokes a
critical praxis that destroys the traditional epistemological methods (1989:
104). The ability of the phantasmagoria to mystify ideology becomes the
critical tool for illumination. In a commodity-saturated society, where the
bourgeois class is the generator of the ideological collective dream “sun-filled
real” is unable to ‘illuminate’ man, and “critical thought remedies enclosure in
the cave of ideology by producing technological spectacles of its
own.” (Cohen, 1989: 105).

The Arcades Project, conceived as a project of critical illumination, is in itself a

phantasmagorical spectacle. The elaborate collection of fragments and
excerpts that constitutes the work, also reflect the illuminating and awakening
task Benjamin aims to attain. The literary montage, with its juxtaposed
fragments, abstracts from their original context poetic images and literary
expression from the most diverse range of authors –Baudelaire, Hugo,
Blanqui, Nietzsche – and analysis of past historical elements and customs –
panoramas, Parisian arcades, bourgeoisie interiors. The methodical use of
quotations can indeed be considered as a method in itself, in which through
the formation of a mosaic-like intertextual pastiche, and the dissociation of
different contents, a higher unity of meaning is achieved. Through the
experimental methodological montage borrowed from the Surrealists of
decontextualization and defamiliarization, the fragments enter a new dialogue.

The point of connection is that those elements share within themselves

certain means of conduct and experience and the theoretical aim to “combine
the accomplishment of Marxist method with heightened sensuous emergence
of presence [Anschaulichkeit]” (Benjamin, 1939: 575). In fact if Marx aimed to
describe the connection of causes between economy and culture, what
Benjamin conversely is concerned with, is the relation with its expression:
“Not the economic genesis of culture, but the expression of the economy in
culture –this must be described.” (Benjamin, 1939: 573-74). This is to be
attained through the understanding of the economic process as a “sensuously
presentable primal phenomenon [anschauliches Urphänomenon] from which
proceed all the manifestations […] of the nineteenth century” (1939: 574).
These views allow a better appreciation of Benjamin’s application of
commodity analysis and phantasmagoria as method for interpretation of
cultural phenomena. As Markus argued (1989: 16), Benjamin’s “physiognomic
materialism” helps to define not only the origin of modernity, but to also to
defamiliarize the process of apprehension of reality as phantasmagoria,
“invoking its early-transitory manifestations that are now present only in ruins,
whose strangeness strikes us.” (Markus, 1989: 16).

The process of estrangement seems to call forth a collective awakening from

the dream-images which modernity has brought. The vast collection of
commodities, the empty shells of exchange value that veils modernity, is what
physiognomic materialism propose to challenge.

Obsolete newness

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's. 


Tense as in a delirium, I drank 

From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate, 

The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills. A
lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty -

By whose glance I was suddenly reborn, Will I see you no more
before eternity? (Baudelaire, 1857)

Benjamin’s exploration of the concept of die Moderne, derives from Charles

Baudelaire’s notion of modernitè described in his 1864 essay The Painter of
Modern Life, where the ephemeral experience of life is embodied by the figure
of the flâneur. Benjamin also refers to Baudelaire’s poem À une passante
(1939: 10), to describe the dialectical image that is composed and produced
in modernity: the synthesis of an image of a woman, with the one of death
“intermingle in a third: that of Paris” (1939: 10). The image of the prostitute
becomes the representation of the commodity’s fetish, “seller and sold in one”
(1939: 10). The enchanting world of commodities allures the subject of
modern and capitalist society with continuously new fetishised commodities,
novelties that maintains the phantasmagoric appeal.

The notion of newness enters the project since the first pages of the 1935
exposé, drawn from Baudelaire’s Le Voyage, the last poem of Les Fleurs du
Mal: “Deep in the Unknown to find the new!” (Baudelaire in Benjamin, 1939:
11) where the ultimate journey of the flâneur is death, and his new destination
nouveauté (1939: 11).

Independent from the commodity’s use-value, the advent of newness acts as

the “source of the illusion that belongs inalienably to the image produced by
the collective unconscious. It is the quintessence of false
consciousness” (Benjamin, 1939: 55).

As Benjamin states since the 1939 exposè (1939: 14), The Arcades Project
aims at reflecting the paradoxical illusion also expressed by Schopenauer,
that “to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the
morning newspaper” and “it corresponds to a viewpoint according to which the
course of the world is an endless series of facts congealed in the form of
things” (1939: 14). Hence the modern novelty is nothing else but the constant
expression of obsoleteness. The “eternity of hell” (Benjamin, 1939: 676) of die
Modern lies in fact within the “ever-same”, the inability of the “physiognomy of
the world” to “change at all” (1939: 679). As essentially obsolete, the newness
of the new under modernity is a previously unknown product of the dialectic of
commodity production, that manifest itself with the rhythms of mass
production; its antinomy encapsulates the essence of modern fetishistic world
experience (Benjamin, 1939: 676).

History is like Janus; it has two faces. Whether it looks at the

past or at the present, it sees the same things.
(Maxime Du Camp in Benjamin, 1939: 14)

As Friedlander noted (2012: 5), Paris for Benjamin represented essentially a

meaning of time, and hence not a mere geographical place but the gathering
of a particular form of time. The observation of the research material that
Benjamin collected, it is hence utilized to illustrate how Paris represents 19st
century expression of newness, the representation of aspects of history that
are already obsolete. The French capital is surrounded by the presence of
those obsolete archaic traces, which shows how “everything new it could
hope for turns out to be a reality that has always been present” (Benjamin,
1939: 15), and, as argued by Benjamin (1939: 485), illustrate how they
essentially represent the preconditions for the development of fascism.
Fashion, with its constant proposal of the ‘new’ becomes nothing more but the
representation of death itself: “Fashion: “Madam Death! Madam
Death!” (Leopardi in Benjamin, 1939: 8).
Similarly, the conception of culture is regarded as belonging to “an early stage
of Fascism” (Benjamin, 1939: 485) referring to the way culture is considered
to integrate past and present events into a tradition that strips them from their
genuine effectiveness, transforming those events into mere “cultural objects,
[...] sedimentation of memorable things and events that never broke the
surface of human consciousness because they never were truly, that is
politically, experienced.” (Benjamin, 1939: 477). Culture hence become the
phantasmagoria where “the bourgeoisie enjoys its own false
consciousness” (Benjamin, 1939: 55)

“The magic columns of these palaces, show to the amateur on

all sides, in the objects their porticos display, that industry is the
rival of the arts.” (Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris in Benjamin,
1939: 3)

Benjamin’s statement: “The experience of our generation: that capitalism will

not die a natural death” (1939: 667) reminds however about the element of
praxis that, under some aspects similarly to Marx, surrounds its project.

Ultimately in fact The Arcades Project, as Adorno argues (2001: 14) it is not
an attempt to make philosophy surreal, or to aestheticize Marxism in a
symbolist way, but it is related to the theoretical basis and practical aims of his
thought, that is to provide “the past with ’a higher degree of actuality than it
could have posses in the moment of its existence,’ for it is the ability to
dialectically penetrate and to bring to sensuous presence
[Vergegenwärtigung] its past which constitutes ‘the test of truth of
contemporary action” (Markus, 2001: 13).

Conclusion

In order to establish a groundwork upon which it can be possible to advance

an evaluation of contemporary capitalism, this methodology report has
investigated the genealogy behind the notions of capital, commodity fetishism,
and phantasmagoria. By looking at Karl Marx’s and Walter Benjamin’s major
projects Capital and The Arcades Project, it has been examined how the
dialogue between the different methods that the philosophers adopt
interrelates.

Marx, considered one of the first to philosophically enquire the changes that
have developed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, through the
meticulous analysis of bourgeois society, aimed to understand from its
minutiae –the product of labour, the commodity-form – the broader scope of
society. Furthermore with the theory of value, by observing the exchange
value of commodities, the “third thing” or “common something” (Marx, 1867:
28), it has been investigated how the philosopher intends the social bond in
capitalist society, essentially formed by social relations that are substituted
and expressed by relations between objects, veiled by the presence of the
commodity.

Given the relevance for today’s understanding of capitalist society relations,

it has been also investigated the genealogy behind the notion of fetish used
by Marx. Through William Pietz’s 1985 anthropological analysis The Problem
of the Fetish, it has been explored the historical and etymological origin of the
notion of fetish (Fetisso, feitiço, facticius), which deriving from meaning of
magical practice, have been later applied by Marx as an essential character of
the commodity. The mechanism of Marxian fetish manipulates and conceals
reality behind the phantasmagorical and mystical aspects of commodity-
language. The language of commodity “objectively veils” society and
commodities themselves constitute the concealing agent (Hamacher, 1999:
176). It has been also observed how Benjamin’s after borrowing Marx’s
concept of commodity culture, in his 1935 resumé, has furthered it with the
notion of phantasmagoria. The genealogy of this notion has been investigated
in the popular 19th century entertaining visual spectacle created by Robertson,
which has inspired and captures Benjamin’s method of critical illumination.
The Arcades Project, has been hence understood as a project of critical
illumination, which in itself constitutes a phantasmagorical spectacle, aiming
to awaken the reader through the methodical juxtaposition and
decontextualisation of fragments and quotations. In conclusion it has been
explored what Benjamin meant by considering Paris as the capital of 19th
century. Paris is not conceived as merely the predominant city in the century,
but as the representation of the focal point of gathering of a new meaning of
time that the advent of modernity has developed. The collection of material in
The Arcades Project is utilized to illustrate how Paris can be considered to
represent 19th century expression of novelty, which as Benjamin theorized,
essentially represented aspects of history that are already obsolete. The
capital, in fact is pervaded by the presence of those futuristic commodities
which represent modernity’s obsession with newness, and that encapsulate
Blanqui’s scenario where “humanity will be prey to a mythic anguish so long
as phantasmagoria occupies a place in it” (Benjamin, 1939: 15). 19th Century
capital, although aiming to represent novelty and futurity, is nevertheless tied
by the modern temporal conditions, to its obsolete archaic traces.
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