On the beauty of the commodity

 There is, as it seems, virtually nothing that couldn’t be set a price. Some commodities offer themselves willingly to the interest and the budget of the purchaser, while in some dealings the thing to be sold didn’t know in advance that it was for sale. Apparently, the point at infinity of any deal is the determination of the value of what is unique. In a sense, every product and every consumption is unique, which is a truism. Between the isolated, scattered sense impression and the one substance of money disclosed by different prices there must be some kind of interregnum or mediator creatures that allow for some equalizations and replacements in these same impressions. Consumption is so immediately non-transparent that it is difficult for it to distinguish between what is his use and what are the thing’s guidelines in this use. The complete helplessness of consumption in discerning what it is about its ‘needs’ is made up for by the market. The market is the real user of scientific and technological accuracy. If knowledge poses epistemological questions that involve the human material, this is just to remind us not to detach what is held as human from the market and economical processes, not to segregate consumption, as what people do, from the financial world. The market is the society. There we recognize which are the limits that distinguish a pear from an apple, for example. Price equivalences are completely solidary with the equivalences ruled by universals: things, what is and what is not the same. Uniqueness is not, then, what anyone can make of anything, be that more or less justified, but something the product has by itself, that is to say granted to it by the market. The hugely high prices of artistic creations and some collectibles, which is actually the same as the creativity and gleam of big capitals, is but another way of telling that any use of technology is out of reach: the use of procedures on an industrial scale is confiscated by the blind fluctuations of the stock market and the use of artistic procedures is deterred by its agreed and necessary non-existence.