Abstract
Though the term “commodification” is used broadly, a theory of the processes by which goods become exchangeable and in fact objects of monetized exchange reveals a key site for technological politics. Commodities are goods that are alienable, somewhat rival, generally with low exclusion costs, and that are often consumed in use. Technological advances can affect all of these traits for certain goods, effectively bringing about a process of commodification by technological means. However, in order to function with specific contexts, technologies are designed and manufactured according to technical standards, standards that in turn take on features of what David Grewal (2008) has called “network power.” As such, standard setting processes become the potential locus for political argument over the legitimacy of a commodification process. Theorists hoping to develop more democratic theories of technological governance should thus recognize the significance of standards and the role they play in either promoting or controlling social relations organized according to the norms of monetized exchange.
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Notes
The theoretical gap between Smith, Marx, and Polanyi, who do not use the word “commodification,” and the bioethicists who do was created by the collapse of the classical paradigm in economics and the reconstruction of Marxist themes that Marcuse and other first-generation critical theorists undertook in the 1930s. As classical economists, Smith and Marx both presumed that the labor theory of value provided the underpinning for exchange relations. Marx argued that the technology-driven industrialization process that was turning labor into a commodity was also creating unsustainable class relations that would only be resolved through social conflict. For Marx, the commodification of labor adumbrates through the economic system. When machines make it possible for work to be parsed by the hour and any workman’s hour at the distaff is as good as any other, a market is created that drives wages so low that even subsistence needs cannot be met. The mystification of human relations that occurs in conjunction with this market is reflected in commodity fetishism, where the subjective allure of price competition obscures the underlying economic reality of exchanges based on the contribution that labor makes to the value of a good. But, the labor theory of value was being discarded by economists even as Marx was writing his critique of classical theory. Under neoclassical assumptions, exchange value is a function of scarcity and marginal utility. Not only do neoclassical theorists abjure any reference to metaphysical underpinnings for the value of goods, even subjective value ceases to hold any interest for them except insofar as it can be modeled as an arbitrary preference function “revealed” in the actual exchanges that people make. Contemporary economists do not use the term “commodification” at all and tie the term “commodity” to standardized wholly fungible goods such as wheat, corn, or pork bellies.
The rise of marginalism left Marx’s remarks on commodity fetishism without foundations in the material world of economic exchange. Yet, Marx’s discussion of the way that market relations invade the psyche and pervade interpersonal relationships has continued to be persuasive for many readers. Deprived of any link to actual production or material practice, early critical theorists drew on aesthetics as well as on Freudian theories of repression to reconstruct commodity fetishism as a theory of culture (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944; Marcuse 1955). As a construct of literary and cultural theory, there is no particular reason why this kind of commodification would be theorized as a process that is closely tied to material practice, economic relations, or technical change. Indeed, a fairly recent trend in the literature substitutes the word “reification” for the aesthetic and politically salient forms of objectification that the critical theorists associated with the commodity form. Yet, as Andrew Feenberg has argued, Marx’s focus on technology lurks in the background of first-generation critical theory, even if theorists of the first generation generally lacked a sophisticated account of how science and technology were effective in transforming human relations (Feenberg 1991).
In support of Feenberg, I offer a theory of technical changes associated with commodification processes that stresses concepts from institutional economics: alienability, exclusion cost, and rivalry (Thompson 2006, 2007). These themes link literatures in critical theory to the way that Bruno Latour characterizes technical artifacts as “actants” that become enrolled in social networks, sometimes functioning as the pivotal node within a network with respect to realization of key network effects (Latour 1997). “Postphenomenology” as explicated by Ihde (1990), Selinger (2005, 2008), and Verbeek (2005) provides a complementary analysis of the way that human agents interact with tools and techniques. Here, as in Husserlian phenomenology, the emphasis is on richly detailed interpretative description of experience but with the difference that the ready engagement with tools and techniques is acknowledged to transform perceptual and agential abilities that are classified by traditional phenomenology as noetic—as the exclusive preserve of subjectivity. In postphenomenology, technology penetrates so deeply into the unity of embodied experience that its alterity is rendered moot (Kaplan 2009). This theme carries over into work by Donna Haraway on cyborgs, as well as work by Feenberg on the multiplicity of possible affordances that engagement with technological artifacts and technical systems might realize (Thompson 2006).
Locke might have told us that it is the admixture of one’s labor with the apples in a bag that establishes your property right in the harvested apples. The connection between property rights and commodities is multilayered and is not my principal concern. Conventions of buying and selling imply at least some minimal notion of property, as do conventions of gift exchange. Locke’s influential theory of property suggests that a universal property right in one’s own person becomes the basis for all property claims in virtue of the way that labor is mixed into artifacts, as distinct from items in the natural world. The chief competitor for this view has been jointly argued by Hegel and by utilitarians. It holds that property rights are pure social conventions, best adjudicated by observing which configuration and assignment of rights serves the social ends for which these conventions are devised. The notion of exclusion cost transects both of these views. Exclusion cost figures in the cost of enforcing a given system of property rights and as such could figure in a calculation of whether recognizing your right to own the apples in your bag serves the larger social end of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, for example. At the same time, nothing seems more in line with natural law theory than to suggest that items with low exclusion cost are natural candidates for being owned, while the labor criterion simply tells us who owns them. Low exclusion cost is also commensurate with the adage “possession is nine tenths of the law.”
Today, we take the phrase “inalienable rights” to mean something close to “super important rights” or rights that shouldn’t be taken away. There was, however, a reason why Jefferson shifted Locke’s phrase “life, liberty and property” to “life liberty and pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Property rights govern alienable goods and, like the goods themselves, can be transferred from one owner to another. It would have been absurd for Jefferson to classify property rights as inalienable, since alienability (and exchange) is part of what makes a property right important and valuable.
What is more, basic functionality—what a device or system of devices can do—relates very closely to what Feenberg has in mind in talking about affordances. In a somewhat confusing adaptation of terminology, Feenberg refers to a particular configuration of affordances arising from a given technical system as the “technical code.”He argues that this code is the source of coercive political power we associate with technical systems (Feenberg 2002). In contrast, the word “code” is used in the technical community to indicate that a technical standard has legal force. The difference between a code and an ordinary standard is that codes are standards that have been adopted as legally enforceable mandates. If the Congress were to decide that digital audio devices should all utilize the MP-4 format, that standard would become a code. Digital devices using alternative standards could not be sold. Codes are commonplace for features of buildings or products that are crucial to safety and are less frequently adopted to ensure compatibility among devices.
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Thompson, P.B. “There’s an App for That”: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means. Philos. Technol. 25, 87–103 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0029-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0029-4