For Everything Else, There's … - analysis of commodification

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by Mary Poovey

IF you watch network television, you have probably seen the commercials. A man and a boy are going to a baseball game. The camera closes in on the boy's expectant face, then on the glove he pounds enthusiastically. We hear a voice-over: "Two tickets to the season opener: eighty-eight dollars and fifty cents. Two programs, a hat, and a glove: sixty-five dollars and ninety-eight cents." Suddenly the crowd leaps to its feet, the boy stabs at the foul ball that comes his way, and the voice intones: "His first fly ball: priceless." Then, the tag line scrolls across the blackened screen and the voice reads aloud: "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard."

More recently, we have had the Super Bowl version. The setting is an auction. Expectant faces swell the crowd. Voices murmur as the first lot is paraded out. "Lot One: The letter B," the voice-over tells us. "It has been used by various notables, among them Shakespeare and the Cookie Monster." The assistant displays the second lot, a placard painted red. "The Color Red. It causes automobiles to stop and bulls to charge." Then the third lot: the assistant drops a ball before the eager bidders. "Gravity. Paperweight of the cosmos. Sir Isaac Newton's springboard to fame." The same tag line then scrolls across the blackened screen: "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard."(1)

There is of course a certain irony in a Madison Avenue firm's decision to promote a credit card with references to the limits of commodification. By invoking the ideology that commodification has a limit ("There are some things money can't buy"), the creators of the MasterCard commercials entice viewers to associate long-cherished cultural ideals, like baseball and the Cookie Monster, with one of the instruments that has helped convert time, sociability, and sustenance into commodities. What is a credit card, after all, but the objectification of the institutionalization of a particular kind of promise? The promise is that one will repay, with interest, the use of someone else's money at a future date. The institution that guarantees this promise is the bank that issues the card; and the card itself is both a symbol of the relationship that links the borrower and the bank (the card is inscribed with both names) and an object that makes that relationship visible to others who do not know the borrower or the directors of the bank. As the objectification of this promise to make good in the future a debt that fills the present with the pleasure that comes from things, a credit card indexes, or points to, facets of the mutually agreed upon social contract that underwrites modern society. This contract unites individuals--who have never met--in relationships of mutually beneficial trust; it creates social relationships between individuals and institutions; and it enables individuals to exchange signs for things. In so far as it also indexes the way that time is routinely converted into money within a global system of finance capital, the lowly credit card also signals how deeply commodification now penetrates forms of experience, modes of being, and ways of conceptualizing experience. Are there really things that money can't buy in this system? Is there really a limit to commodification? Or do the MasterCard commercials invoke the fantasy of an alternative to commodification simply to convert this fantasy into revenue-generating attention--those "eyeballs" that the Web gurus talk about?

In this paper I want to explore the logic that informs commodification as a way of engaging the modern social imaginary of which commodification is a part.(2) I do so not because I have new insights about this logic, whose layers of mystification have been successively stripped away since Marx's Capital, but because I want to show how pervasive and literally life-informing this logic has now become. Indeed, the conclusion to the first section of this paper will be that, within the modern social imaginary epitomized by the global system of finance capital, there is almost no limit to the logic that informs commodification. This logic provides the primary terms in which residents of the modern world imagine value, register sensations, and experience time and space. The logic that informs commodification has become totalizing in this sense partly because the institutions and modes of circulation that embody or objectify the logic have attained a level of complexity, geographical extension, and pervasiveness that makes resistance to this logic virtually unimaginable. Partly, the logic that informs commodification has colonized the terms in which we experience, imagine, and register because this logic is tautological: once one accepts any of its premises, all its presuppositions and conclusions come pouring in, like the flood that follows the proverbial first drop. In the second section of the paper, I perversely ignore this flood. Because a willed assertion is the only conceivable defense against this flood, I simply insist that it is necessary for us to develop and circulate concepts that belong to another, equally tautological logic. In this much briefer section of the paper, I suggest that, even if there are no things that money can't buy, we have to insist that there ought to be--even if only to hold open a space for experiences and sensations whose value we cannot presently conceptualize.