The animating feature of consumer culture is the perceived capacity for an object to hold agency. Engineered surfaces, shimmering like water, opaque as night and light as air carry a psychic charge which evokes the possibility of difference in the face of relentless repetition. Marx identifies such commodity fetishism as the result of the estrangement of labor necessary to produce valuable goods. Fetish is formed within “the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”¹ Put simply, to Marx the commodity fetish is a unique symptom of capitalist modes of relation wherein people are estranged from the fruits of labor. We cannot have a wholesome relationship to the products of our labor because our labor is fragmented. Capitalism demands wholeness while rendering us fragmented as ever. The fetish, a symbolic excess which stems from this estrangement, is often described as a shine which is imperceptible to all except the beholder. In a 1927 essay on fetishism, Freud introduces the example of a patient who irrationally fixates on “the shine of the nose” (‘Glanz auf der Nase’ in German) concluding that the young man, raised in England and speaking exclusively German, elides the German word Glanz , literally meaning ‘shine’, with the English glance .² The resulting (mis)translation leads Freud to argue that the patient attributes his ‘glance at the nose’ with an imperceptible shine. Looking and shining are thus conflated in the blinding semantic nexus of glare. To Freud this shine is constitutive of fetish as such.
The phenomena of luster, the ability for a material to reflect light, is typically produced through the prolonged erosion of a material with increasing refinement: a process one might call polishing. Such surfaces are the result demanding labor, or extensive natural pressure over extended periods of time. Gemstones, looking glasses, gold and gilt captivate us by way of their perceived slickness. To produce shine is to abrade that which is uneven, corse and unseemly. Put differently, shining material is an index which displays its own erasure. Regarding the development of Marxian economics, Esther Leslie asks the following:
“What happens to value theory when wax, glass or mother-of-pearl can imitate the lustre of pearls? Or when, as in the nineteenth century, artificial pearls could be made by blowing hollow beads of glass, then filled with a mixture of liquid ammonia and white matter from the scales of fish, and pearl essence is produced from crushed herring scales.”³
In the distinction between the artificial and the authentic or between abundant and rarified goods, value remains through the presumption of scarcity.
Throughout the postwar period, the price of consumer goods decreased due to new global supply chains and cheap foreign labor. Never before in history were beautiful clothes, household goods, cars and electronics so readily available to working and middle class people within the western world. What emerged from this dingwelt of consumption was the massive proliferation of trash. Some geologists have named the present moment the ‘Plastocene’, after the deposits of plastic which have become embedded in sedimentary deposits and thus part of the historical record.⁴ As Leslie explains, images of substitution, the ability for one material to transform into another, reside not merely in the domain of alchemy but primarily in the world of chemical engineering. The ability to turn waste products into vibrant pigments, and phosphorant glowing compounds marked a turning point in the industrial revolution. Distinguishing between waste and commodity while maintaining and enforcing scarcity is an apparently alchemical operation of market economies. At risk of stating the obvious, waste is a good desired by nobody, and although the conversion of waste into value may appear as the product of consumer choices, it is in fact a procedure which is enforced with lawyers, police and militaries.
Engineered plastics, first marketed as a luxury good, proliferated to the point of ubiquity. The world appears replete with synthetic compounds produced from fossil fuels; immeasurable death and tectonic pressure produce the ghostly accumulation of residual carbon. An incalculable array of microplastics span from the deepest ocean through to our respiratory organs and our digestive tracts. The conversion between petrochemical and plastic once more turns coarse raw material into temporarily useful good.
A brief but revealing article by Caity Weaver titled “What is Glitter” shows the highly proprietary nature of the plastic glitter industry.⁵ The first plastic glitter was as the waste product of a cellulose film cutting factory when machines would shutter and produce small fragments of shiny plastic.⁶ By the 1960s the first large-scale industrial glitter production was operated by Meadowbrook Inventions Inc. out of New Jersey; what was once waste was redeemed. Aside from its more expected uses in cosmetics, nail polish and holiday decorations, industrial glitter is used equally in logistics management, forensics and other more proprietary applications. Plywood manufacturers embed small unique micro plastics into their products in order to verify the authenticity and guarantee the quality of the material. The contemporary manufacturing of glitter demands incredibly small and extremely high precision etchings which refract light in unexpected and novel ways. To an engineer, each variety of glitter is highly particular in its characteristics and identifiable as such. As Weaver notes in the article, “confidentiality is a top-down requirement from clients.”
Lutz Bacher’s work “Divine Transportation” (2016) provides a case study for the aesthetic and affective capacity of glitter. First displayed in the show titled “Magic Mountain” at 356 Mission Los Angeles, the installation is comprised of glitter strewn across a large gallery floor. As viewers walk through the gallery, the micro plastic particles cling to their bodies and spread beyond the space. Upon first glance, “Divine Transportation” may seem obtuse or perhaps irreverent— and we must not miss this point— but upon closer reading there are further affective and literary dimensions with which the work engages. “Divine Transportation” could be initially read as a logical extension of the Duchampian readymade wherein the autonomous work of art is extended and carried beyond the gallery to the point of complete diffusion and dissolution. This reading situates the work within the legacy of post-studio art practices wherein production becomes increasingly based on score as opposed to (skilled) craftsmanship. Put briefly, the post-studio artist is not a producer of material goods but rather a participant in the knowledge economy wherein the value of her work is derived from the associated certificate of authorship. Prototypical of Bacher’s practice more broadly, “Divine Transportation”, remains ambiguous as to whether it critiques or extends boundaries of aesthetic autonomy as such.⁷
The exhibition title, ‘Magic Mountain’, alludes not only to the similarly named Thomas Mann novel, but equally to the theme park situated in the LA suburbs. Mann’s novel tells the story of the young man’s journey to visit his cousin at a sanatorium in Davos. Despite anticipating a brief stay, the protagonist becomes ill and interns as a patient for the next seven years. Though it remains unclear whether the amusement park called ‘Magic Mountain’ is named after the novel, some similarities can be identified. Like the sanatorium, the theme park is a highly regulated space wherein visitors are subject to strict expectations of good behavior and limited mobility. One might call this, as Foucault does, a hyperspace. Michael Sorkin puts things in more polemical terms:
“This is the meaning of the theme park, the place that embodies it all, the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulations without end. The theme park presents its happy regulated vision of pleasure—all those artfully hoodwinking forms-as a substitute for the democratic public realm […]"⁸
The theme park is thus situated between modernist architectural utopia, and postmodern surveillance space. Thus, Bacher’s obliquely referenced Magic Mountain crosses high and low, German and Californian; resonances between the sunshine state, and German philosophical traditions abound. It is worth noting that Lutz Bacher, the pen name of the anonymous Berkley born artist typifies the historic and imagined affinity between Californians and Germany more broadly. Mann’s biography further informs us of this relationship: as a refugee during World War II, Mann lived his final years in Los Angeles, a wealthy man dispossessed by the fascist turn of his native Germany. Magic Mountain, written prior to his flight from Germany, ends with the impending onset of World War I, foreshadowing the authors similarly imminent exile.⁹
“Divine Transportation” is rich with reference and yet withholding in its appearance, an approach common in Bacher’s oeuvre. Trash and value seem abundant and untenable in their proximity here.
Glitter is a technology which is in excess of itself. Beyond its beautiful surface, the particulate plastic is used to effectively track, identify and condemn those considered, criminal or beyond the law. Horkheimer: “He who does not wish to speak of capitalism should also be silent about fascism.”¹⁰ Gleam is the erased index of labor power and of death incalculable. The engineered surfaces which fill us with desires for other worlds hold equal potential to command fantasies of domination. The construction of highly desirable goods necessitates highly obscured sites of extraction. I cannot help but recall the scene in Uncut Gems (2020) when through the gleam of the stolen gem, we observe phantasmic images of Ethiopian Jews who toil away endlessly and suffer needlessly as they mine for precious and unrefined commodities .¹¹
A brief aside regarding the so called affective turn may be instructive here. Affect, defined as the unarticulated, felt world of the senses, “will exceed, always exceed the context of [its] emergence, as the excess of ongoing process.” ¹² Affective labor is often invisibilized, putatively feminine, domestic and unpaid. The critical turn towards affective labor since the turn of this century has benefited through its location of politics specifically, and agency more generally within intimate spaces. History in the affective register, is not a sequence of great events but rather an unfolding of contingent and often speculative encounters.
Perhaps a similarly psychic charge can be found in the ever small spaces between particles engineered and obscure. Such particles, both highly proprietary and untenably diffused, are distinct from commodities which are apparently wholesome. What I am proposing is that glitter and glimmer, through their disappearing of labor regimes, and chemically extractive complexities contain worlds of unknown, and unfelt affects. At stake in this argument is a definition of agency which is not ontological but is rather inscribed by our desire for beauty in an order defined by the persistence of scarcity. Gleam is the contradiction between the mutability of an object, and its reified ability to speak in the social order of capitalism. The gleaming surface elides notions of labor regimes, chemical engineering, and geologic time, in place of these things an affective charge promises the chance for a different and perhaps more beautiful life to be lived.
¹ Marx, Capital, 165.
² Freud, Miscellaneous Papers, Vol.5, 198.
³ Leslie, Synthetic Worlds, 14.
⁴ Skinner, “The Plastocene” https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/ssp/2019/01/09/the-plastocene-plastic-in-the-sedimentary-record/
⁵ Weaver, “What is Glitter”, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html
⁶ Mangum, “Glitter, a Brief History”, https://nymag.com/shopping/features/38914/
⁷ I use autonomy (literally meaning: self rule) to denote the exceptional status granted to art by Enlightenment writers such as Kant. Autonomy remains the central pillar of aesthetics, and the art world in particular. Controlled spheres of self governance and anarchy alike are critical to the effective distribution of power within Post-Fordism.
⁸ Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, xv.
⁹ Mann, Magic Mountain
¹⁰ Horkheimer, The Jews and Europe.
¹¹ Rich analysis could be drawn between the portrayal of Jews within Uncut Gems and Freud’s ‘Glantz auf der Nase’ wherein racial difference becomes inscribed through two distinct portrayals of fetish. This, of course, would be beyond the scope of a blog post.
¹² Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 5.
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