About that fetish

Alas, there is so much to which I would like to respond, in both of Ian’s reports, as well as the blog. For now, this will have to do:

Regarding that fetish, I have always wondered whether the trope of tearing aside the veil ever did justice to Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish. The notion of the commodity fetish, with its emphasis on the violence of the abstraction, does much, much more than invoke a ruse that must be exposed for its truth. And it is different, I think, than ideology. In any case, I find it unfortunate that far too much work that employs political economy (and sometimes even other work that analyzes representational practices) does indeed get caricatured as “tearing away the veil” (see Goodman and DuPuis).

But this begs the question as to whether commodity chain analysis and/or the construction of alternative/ethical trade networks was ever about defetishization. While that was certainly the call of Harvey and Hartwick in terms of commodity chain analysis and has also been applied to ethical trade networks (see Hudson and Hudson), the defetishized (ethical) commodity feels like a post-hoc read, and probably an oxymoron (Guthman in Hughes and Reimer volume).(1) It seems that much has been read onto these ethical/alternative commodity production and trade networks, but investigations of the real politics(2) of these things has revealed so much, well, less.

I think Aimee Shreck, whom you cite in the “following” piece, does a good job of spelling out the possibilities and limitations of fair trade specifically in terms of its own claims. She seems to say that fair trade is redistributional at best. Shifting where “value” is produced and appropriated is not tantamount to defetishizing, however. And some more recent work on fair trade sheds doubt even on its practical redistributional qualities (see Tad Mutersbaugh’s work, also Bradley Wilson, a graduate student at Rutgers, who has unpublished work on fair trade in Nicaragua). I have written quite a bit over the last several years addressing the distributional consequences of organic regulation mostly through the analytics of political economy, and specifically rent. My most recent piece in Antipode is a sort of capstone of this work where I consider several different types of voluntary food labels, which others have posed as resistant to neoliberal globalization. I argue that these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market; among other things they also support neoliberal rationalities of rule. Given the way most of these labels are almost always incentivized through intentional barriers to entry, I would say that ethical consumption practices are necessarily for the better off (cf. Hulme’s posting), and that is putting aside how “organic, local” hails a particular sort of consumer.

Notwithstanding the hard-boiled political economy approach I have taken with many of these questions, these days the questions that most interest me regarding alternative food networks are whose desires they reflect and what kind of political subjects they make. I think the latter is also what Barnett et al were getting at in their 2005 article I find myself in agreement with them when they question the presumption that spatial distance diminishes felt responsibility and, hence, that proximity produces (unveils?) it. The desire for transparency(3) in alternative supply chains/ethical trading networks does not seem to be a reciprocal one between producers and consumers. This point was first raised by Mike Goodman at a mini-conference I attended last spring on transparency and accountability in ethical trade – I hope he publishes on it soon. There he “shouted” the conceit of reciprocal transparency (in the interest of care) by imaging coffee producers gazing at the faces of conference attendees as consumers. Fair trade, he and others suggested, may not be so much a window than a mirror. This is echoed in Catherine Dolan’s recent work on fair trade tea, where she shows that producers of fair trade tea know little about consumers and assume that fair trade is a form of charity. So Mike’s earlier work on the “ethics of care” in “developmental consumption” remains apt, but is perhaps more tempered by the ethical ambiguity (and guilt) that has always been intrinsic to Development. Freidberg’s work already cited on this blog seems to make a similar point.

So this is the connection to my recent work on whiteness and alternative food institutions in the states. I really appreciate the posts by LHallett who effectively corroborated my (controversial) findings. Yet I don’t think my purpose is so much to unveil the commodity fetish. Here, again, is where the term over-reaches. What I am trying to do is much less ambitious and that is to suggest whose desires are being enacted in these spaces and to what effect (in this case to reinforce the social divisiveness that Louise Crewe writes of). The farmers’ markets and CSAs I write of are in practice developed to provide markets for farmers (see Guthman et al) so in some ways it is of little surprise that farmers needs are privileged. But I still think it is worth considering who these institutions and networks do or don’t hail and what are the ethical-political consequences of that uneven hailing. I have a forthcoming piece in Cultural Geographies that speaks directly to this latter question. It is based on my observations and interactions with my undergraduate students who are indeed hailed by alternative food (deeply so) and want to spread the gospel of the local, seasonal, and organic to others (read: low income African Americans). During their required six-month field studies,(4) many experience profound disappointment when they find that their excitement doesn’t resonate. It seems this goes right to the questions about mixing that you raise in your second review. Do these alternative food networks and/or food explorations evoke a politics of care or do they promote (poverty) tourism? Well, I would say they do both – and more. Through these experiences my students see how they are projecting their desires onto others and learn something about an anti-racist praxis, making me a little more sanguine about touristic ‘mixing” than I might have been (which is what Rachel Slocum’s work considers, I think). But I am not sure of the effect they have, although I am pretty sure they reinforce a coding of alternative food space as “white.”

All of this is to say that we should at least pay attention to who is asking for the mixing, for the transparency, for the defetishization. And if such encounters and new knowledges do evoke care, what comes next? Ah, the complexity . . .

-Julie Guthman

Footnotes:
(1) Please excuse the excessive self-citation, although it was in some sense provoked by Ian’s invitation.
(2) “Real” not as in revealed/unveiled, but in the realpolitik sense of how these things work in practice.
(3) Is transparency a gloss for unveiling? I am not sure. But note that the language of transparency also links up with traceability, the letifmotif of contemporary food regulation.
(4) This is explained in the article.

References:
Dolan, C. 2008. In the Mists of Development: Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields. Globalizations 5(2): 305-318.
Goodman, D., DuPuis, E.M., 2002. Knowing food and growing food: beyond the production-consumption debate in the sociology of agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis 42 (1), 5-22.
Guthman, J., 2004. The "Organic Commodity" and Other Anomalies in the Politics of Consumption. In: Hughes, A., Reimer, S. (Eds.), Geographies of Commodity Chains. London, Routledge.
Guthman, J., 2004. Back to the land: the paradox of organic food standards. Environment and Planning A 36 (3), 511-528.
Guthman, J., Morris, A.W., Allen, P., 2006. Squaring Farm Security and Food Security in Two Types of Alternative Food Institutions. Rural Sociology 71 (4), 662-684.
Guthman, J., 2007. The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance. Antipode 39 (3), 456-478.
Guthman, J., 2008 forthcoming. Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative food practice. Cultural Geographies 15, 425-441.
Hudson, I., Hudson, M., 2003. Removing the Veil? Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment. Organization and Environment 16 (4), 413-430.
Mutersbaugh, T., 2002. The number is the beast: a political economy of organic-coffee certification and producer unionism. Environment and Planning A 34 (7), 1165-1184.
Mutersbaugh, T., 2005. Just-In-Space: Certified rural products, labor of quality, and regulatory spaces. Journal of Rural Studies 21 (4), 389-402.