Commodities

In the simple economically classical sense, a commodity is "a thing produced for use or sale; a piece of merchandise; an article of commerce, in later use spec. a raw material, primary product or other basic good which is traded in bulk and the units of which are interchangeable for the purposes of trading" (OED). Part of the reason I find this term of less use in C19 print culture is this sense of a printed book object has been implicit from the beginning: though not identical for the purpose of descriptive bibliographical analysis, for trade even the hand-press book is a fungible object (see St Clair 2004). The relations between a book object, aesthetic-ness and commodity-ness have shifted, however, in the history of print. In a book history context, this is perhaps what Freedgood 2006 means when she talks about when imploring us to think about pre-Marxian object relations (7-8). What really does change in the C19 is the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism, when "commodities are endowed with autonomous existence and intrinsic economic value independent of the labor that went into their production" (OED). This is, says Stallybrass, one of Marx's least-understood jokes: "to fetishize commodities is...to reverse the whole history of fetishism [for] it is to fetishize the invisible" (Marx's Coat 184). It's the opposition between subject and object that shifts, and our way of reading them (185).