On Ruthless Objects
How commodity fetishism keeps us ruthless
Winnicott’s Theory of Ethical Development
In writing out a theory of human development based on his experience working with children, Winnicott split with his teacher and prominent figure within the British Psychoanalytical Society, Melanie Klein.
Klein, whose theory of development took Freud’s death instinct literally, argued that infants are born with an aggressive drive that manifests as hatred. Winnicott, however, was not convinced of this and always doubted the theory of the death instinct. Instead, he proposed a theory of motility very similar to that of John Bowlby and other post-Kleinian theorists.
The way that he saw children was more neutral (indeed, even positive). Infants would begin to move around at an early age as a way to explore the world and communicate through their bodies. Since language is not accessible until 12–18 months and mastered until many years later, the infant must find a way to express itself; to articulate, that is, it’s “actual existence.”
In this stage of existence, there is no concern for the other, be it the infant’s mother, father, or siblings. The child moves without recognition that there is a world outside of its own, with a separate existence that can be effected by its movements. For example, the child might scratch or bite the mother while being fed; not out a natural proclivity to hatred, but because of the random movements the baby was experimenting with. He was trying to test his environment in the only way he knows how: by moving. If the motility causes pain or discomfort to the mother, well, this was not the baby’s intention. It was merely an unfortunate, but unintentional, consequence of the emerging motility. Hatred and aggression, in this scenario, comes from the mother to the child.
For Winnicott, then, hatred and aggression (and other unpleasant motives for doing things) are projected onto the child from the outside. Klein, he says, is the hateful one. Why can’t the baby hate?
The baby cannot hate because it does not relate to whole objects, and hating is evidently done only to things which are separate from us. (This makes self-loathing an internalized phenomenon.) Winnicott leans into the stage of development that Freudians called ‘primary narcissism.’ In this stage, the child has not development a relationship to objects outside of itself as fully fledged objects. For the new human being, mother and father are part of its internal world (especially mother; the function of the father has an interesting and somewhat different role in Winnicottian theory).
Hatred is something done from one person to another, or one group of people to another group of people. If a being did not have a conception of ‘not-me’, it would then be impossible to hate.
This is Winnicott’s theory of ruthlessness, or the pre-ruth stage. We all begin doing this spontaneously with our body, exploring the world, without concern for other people. Not maliciously (and this was his break with Klein), but out of accident — of ignorance of the fact that there are other people and that those people can effect by us.
Eventually a stage of concern develops in the child (this is done naturally, in optimal environments) wherein the budding human begins to take into consideration other people when it moves around in the world. But at the beginning, narcissism and ignorance of the not-me abounds.
Commodity: The Fetishized Object
To act and do and be without knowledge of the other: that is Winnicottian ruthlessness.
It also happens to be the base of Marx’s observations regarding commodity fetishism in Section 4 of Chapter 1 of Capital:
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
The theological niceties that over-determine that exchange value, and hence the social value, of the thing are not inherent in the thing itself. Wood, he tells us, is transformed via labor into a table; it is now something else. Depending on where you get the table, it’s exchange value might shift. From a second-hand store, it might be valued less; from a luxury home-goods store, it’s value will mystically increase. But its essence — wood — has not changed.
But we don’t buy the wood, do we? We purchase the table, and this is quite different. By purchasing the table (rather than wood), we are fetishizing the commodity aspect of the thing; we are operating at the level of its exchange value, and not its use value. We buy the table because we need something to eat on; but we buy this specific table because it matches our chairs. Or it’s a “good” brand and will last a while. And so on.
We are acting, in other words, without concern for the social processes that constituted the table. The transition from wood-to-table takes place among real people in concrete and material places with specific labor practices. Those people have families, religions, cultures, psychologies, art, and they also purchase commodities from somewhere else.
But this is not important to us when considering which table fits our other furniture the best. If we buy coffee from a farm that keeps their workers on the bring of starvation or with industrial-long work days/weeks, that doesn’t impact how good the coffee is, or how cheap it is. But we don’t do this maliciously. We don’t go out of our way, that is, to find out what the most harmful companies are in order to fetishize more of their commodities. This process is wholly unknown to us.
By buying commodities, by fetishizing them, we are acting in a ruthless way; out of ignorance of/for the other. The other, in this case, being the social and material process behind the commodity.
Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.
We move throughout the world of social hieroglyphics, especially in a globalized age such as ours. It would be impossible (and exhausting if it was) to sort out and get to know the social relations behind each commodity.
But this one of the reasons why capitalism works so well; or, at least, in its current hyperreal form. It appears as though we are existing within an age of simulacrum, as some have pointed out. But that only reinforces the ruthlessness. To be ethical subjects means to have a concern for the other: to realize, that is, the impact that our actions directly have on other people. The first step is to realize that other people are not-me.
Our current culture keeps us in a stage of ruthlessness. This is why we, in the states, were able to celebrate Christmas-as-usual while the birthplace of the religion lost over 20,000 of its inhabitants. This is a harrowing example of how the thing itself (the religious ritual of celebrating Christ’s birth) is overdetermined by its exchange value, its commodity form (Christmas).
One is left to wonder, in any case, if a world of concern is even achievable at this point. Or if our current politico-economic structures will keep us as infants forever, throwing about our bodies and biting and scratching without even realizing that other people exist.
