This is an extract from an occasional lecture I'm writing on the origins of spectacular society (well, that's my understanding). Its rather notational.
The commodity is an object whose use value has been postponed; an object laid aside, an object taken out of circulation (Denis Hollier)
Commodities are appropriated by consumers as wish images.. For this to occur estrangement of the commodities from their initial meaning as use-values produced by human labour is in fact prerequisite (Susan Buck-Morss)
The commodity has become an abstraction. Once it has escaped from the hand of its producers, and is freed from its real particularity, it has ceased to be a product controlled by human beings. It has taken on a ‘phantom-like objectivity, and leads its oown life. “A commodity appears at first glance a self-sufficient trivial thing. Its analysis shows that it is a bewildering thing, full of metaphysical sublties and theological capers.”’
Magic is a function of detachment. The city dweller is asked constantly and very day to survey a range of physical objects, goods on display, with no idea as to their provenence or laborious origins. The value of the commodity in the marketplace appears arbitrary, unpredictable: “How the price of the commodity is arrived at can never be wholly foreseen.” For value has been arrived at through processes which are not transparently available to the consumer, hence, its value seems to be ‘magical’.
But the commodity in the shop window is doubly estranged: from the labour that produced it, yes, but also, temporarily, from the circulation process, from the domain of potential use, to be displayed. One is asked merely to look at it, not to employ it: to gaze at its ‘suspended animation’, at the impression it conveys. Increasingly, and more generally, there is a valourisation of acquaintance, taste, surface, impression. The casual, desiruous investment, the cursory evaluation, the bracketing off or suspension of practical enjoyments in favour of a fetishism of the visible – these were the pleasures brought into being, encouraged, by the commodity world. These were in turn ties to the pleasures of dreaming. Divorced from its original productive context (to which it is value is ties invisible, mysteriously) and suspended from circulation to become an object of visual and fetishistic pleasure, the commodity can now be invested with wishes, like some archaic icon:
Commodities that, in their mere visible presence [..] veil the production process, and – like mood pictures – encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams.
This disembodies magic is consolidated by advertising: “Within advertising, a new dissimulating aura is injected into the commodity, easing its passage into the dream world of the private consumer.” It is through advertising that properties and and promises ascribed to the object wholly unrelated to its productive origin or use-specific destination. In other words, commodities – detached and injected with glamour – can be made to mean just about anything at all. A commodity is a modern allegorical object.