Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment
- Commodity Fetishism and Commodity Enchantment
“A study of commodity culture always turns out to be an exploration of a fantastic realm in which things act, speak, rise, fall, fly, evolve...”
T. Richards[1]
Swinging Khakis
Picture a world where wondrous events compete with acts of cruelty and violence, where magical gestures occasionally displace instrumental reason, where molecular activity is both surprising and responsive to scientific investigation, where governments and economies are neither as competent as many hope nor as overwhelming as some fear, and where the social fabric is continually re-assembling rather than progressively fragmenting. There, wonder and fascination cohabit with realism and fear; there, enchantment is a real possibility. Enchantment, as we’ve seen, is a mood of lively and intense engagement with the world, and I’ve been trying to think about how it plays into an ethical comportment of generosity toward others. Enchantment consists in a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain, to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities.[2]
For me, the 1998 GAP ad “Khakis Swing” both induces and expresses this state of enchantment. American Swing music from the 1930’s and 40’s is, as a GAP executive says, “very energetic. Its ebullience calls you in from the next room.”[3] The ad is set in a large space where about twenty young people in beige pants are dancing to Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive and Wail.” At several points in the video, as the music continues uninterrupted, the camera freezes the image of the foreground dancer in mid-flight.
Although everyone’s stopped in their tracks, the vitality of the scene continues, for now it’s the room that — thanks to the “stop and pan” camera technique — spins and swings. Then, after that frozen yet mobile moment, the organic connection between music and dance resumes. The ad first turns the dancers into statues, as if victims of the wrath or whimsy of an Olympian god. As such, they can be panned around, as one would video a sculpture garden. But then, again as in Greek mythology, the frozen beings reanimate. The ad suggests some irony on the part of the videographers, as if to issue a challenge: “You say these are mere pants! I’ll show you pants!”[4]
I position this GAP ad, wherein the room and the khakis dance along with the human bodies in them, in a tradition of works of art that explore the phenomenon of animation— of dead things coming alive, of objects revealing a secret capacity for self-propulsion. Several of Kafka’s stories, for example, depict the crossing from an inert thing to a thing that can exert itself. In “The Bucket Rider” a pail transports a cold man in search of coal:
Seated on the bucket, my hands on the handle, the simplest kind of bridle, I propel myself with difficulty down the stairs, but once downstairs, my bucket ascends, superbly, superbly; camels humbly squatting on the ground do not rise with more dignity... Through the hard-frozen streets we go at a regular canter; often I am upraised as high as the first storey of a house; never do I sink as low as the house doors.[5]
And in “The Cares of a Family Man,” Kafka’s star-shaped spool for thread reveals an inner capacity for playfulness, not to mention speech: “Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him — he is so diminutive that you cannot help it — rather like a child. ‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs...”[6]
As Freud points out in “The Uncanny” about Hoffmann’s tales, and as Bruno Bettelheim notes in his study of fairy tales, such animations can disturb as well as delight.[7] They disturb...
