Fetish/Non-Fetish

This collaboration between the philosopher/japanologist Elena Lange and the artist Haseeb Ahmed thematises what Karl Marx called the 'fetishism of the bourgeois relations of production.' In his Critique of Political Economy, Marx intended to highlight the fetish-forms that come to dominate the people in the capitalist mode of production. To him, the commodity form, money, and capital were fundamental fetishes. Because, instead of being understood as categories of a particular social and historical production mode, they come to be reified as the 'eternal natural forms of social production'. Today, these classic fetishes have been joined by new forms that suggest capitalism can be organised more 'justly' or 'humanely' – think of 'Fair Trade', 'sustainability', the critique of 'consumerism' or 'distributive justice' – and thereby sure enough precluding the idea that capitalism as such can be abolished.

FETISH/NON-FETISH contrasts these 'new' fetishes of capitalism with innocuous and likeable non-fetishes, which in the topsy-turvy world of capital are however perceived as such. Yet, neither the spawns of pop culture, nor collector's crazes, nor sex utensils present the true fetishes of capitalist society. In their work,  Elena Louisa Lange and Haseeb Ahmed want to put the bourgeois understanding of what a fetish should be back to its feet.