Production and the City. Rubén Darío and the (de)Fetishisation of Writing

Abstract

In Book I of Capital, Marx calls fetishism to the commodity that, in order to be constituted as such, hides its production process. In this sense, the essay proposes that Rubén Darío’s writing inscribes the new conditions of production, reception and circulation incipient in the 19th century, and calls into question the classical-romantic status of the literary as an unmasking of the fetishized commodity. The writer is a producer and the city –the passage, the fragmentary– is not simply a content or a subject matter that can be separated from the form of writing. In this way, Darío’s writing carries out a double movement: it assumes the conditions of production and exposes itself to the market as a novelty. The first movement involves what can be called a de-fetishization of the literary object. That is to say, Darío does not hide the conditions of his writing, but incorporates modernization both in the “style” and in its “contents”. On the other hand, as a second movement, he produces his writing as a novelty, that is, along with glimpsing writing that does not hide its production processes, Darío exposes himself to the market under the index of “novelty”. In this regard, Darío idealizes the de-tefichization of his writing.