Kid A In Alphabet Land/Commodity-fetish
Commodity-fetish
Kid A In Alphabet Land Confronts the Curious Commodity-fetish!
The commodity-fetish names the strange animation of objects under conditions of exchange. What appears as a neutral thing is endowed with value, agency, and desire, obscuring the social relations that produced it.
In psychoanalytic terms, fetishism operates through displacement. Desire attaches itself to an object that promises completion while concealing the lack that structures it. The commodity becomes captivating not for what it is, but for what it seems to contain.
For Lacan, the fetish functions at the level of signification. The object is staged as if it possessed a hidden enjoyment, a surplus that cannot be located but must nevertheless be believed in.
Within *Kid A In Alphabet Land*, the Commodity-fetish marks the moment when objects begin to shimmer with borrowed desire. Kid A encounters not a thing, but a lure.