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Patrick Keiller has remarked that we now live in futurism's future, that future, which, from the historical avant-garde to last mid-century's space age, aspired to the radically new.
Moreover, things are not so very different after all. This is not unrelated to another meta-historical comment made recently, Fredric Jameson's claim that today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.1 Dystopic science-fiction scenarios notwithstanding, we find ourselves living in a future without a future, in a future that is already the past, living on a map of the world where that place called utopia has, for this modern memory at least, never been so out of sight.
I want to catch sight of that illusive thing called utopia, using as my illumination the bright glow that emanates from that thingest of things called the commodity. To begin his chapter of Capital called 'The Fetishism of Commodities (and the Secret Thereof)', Marx wrote:
It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry,
changes the forms of
the materials furnished by Nature, in a way as to make them useful
to him. The
form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of
it. Yet for
all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing,
wood. But so
soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something
transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but,
in
relation to all other commodities, its stands on its head, and
evolved out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas,
