I was thinking about Marx’s discussion of the “fetishism of commodities” and remembered this shtick from the IFC show Portlandia:

Is the chicken local?

Scene from the new IFC show Portlandia.

Now, the hipster culture that Portlandia skewers is hardly Marxist, but the running joke here does speak to the dynamic Marx explores in this excerpt from Capital. What’s missing? The frictionlessness of using a price as shorthand for the value of the commodity: the chicken breast is expensive because it’s the best quality, served in the most pleasant environment, with the most creative cookery, and so on. All we need is the price, and the “conversation” the chicken has with other commodities in the brutally simple quantitative language of prices.

What replaces this usual way? Here, it’s a rich narrative (if absurdly so) about the qualitative dimension of the commodity: the chicken breast is less a thing than a process that has emerged from a complex set of developments, institutions, laborers, expertise, and so on. Of course Marx would be less interested in the sentimental narrative of the pastoral freedom of “Colin’s” life than in the more hard-nosed narrative of the human labor that brought delicious Colin into being, but very broadly speaking, this bit performs a similar inversion of the usual self-presentation of that “queer thing,” the commodity.