The logic of the fetish in the present

ABSTRACT

Building on Pietz’s speculation about the construction of a “history of the fetish’ that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz’s volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” might be thought of as failed fetishes, objects that work to occlude the material infrastructure that supports blockchain, yet do not cohere because due to contemporary technology, they lack the sensuous materiality required by Pietz’s phenomenologically-shaped understanding of Marxism. Regardless of the correctness of this speculative claim about NFTs, this discussion suggests that Pietz’s original, groundbreaking argument on the fetish still has relevance to, and a great deal of creative promise for, analysis in the current day.

KEYWORDS:

• Fetish
• materiality
• NFTs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some hybrid digital/physical FNTs can be redeemed for a physical object; while too rare to warrant a full discussion here, one can see how they also attempt to create something sensuous.