In this respect, spice is really a sexy word for `currency', or even
`capital', to a certain extent. Currency is not literally a flow of coins
and notes; but this is how it is often imagined. Capital is even less a
physical entity; it functions rather as a kind of re-mark of commod-
ities. The first chapter of Marx's Capital is quoted by ZÏ izÏek: `the
``expanded'' form [of the commodity] passes into the ``general''
form when some commodity is excluded, exempted from the
collection of commodities, and thus appears as the general equiva-
lent of all commodities, as the immediate embodiment of Com-
modity as such, as if, by the side of all real animals, ``there existed the
Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom'' ' -
or as if, by the side of all real spices, there existed the spice.[47]
Spice,
on the other hand, really is a flow of brightly coloured, fragrant,
delicious powder. It is that `particular commodity' in which value is
constituted according to spice's `quasi-``natural'' ' properties.[48]
But its
status as a physical entity is in question. As an item of trade and
consumption it has undergone a severe and manifold number of
transformative processes, including the growing, drying and pulver-
isation of the original plant, its substitution for currency or promis-
sory notes in a series of trading manoeuvres, its transportation across
huge global distances, its combination in a palette of flavourings or
its use in medical preparations and other sorts of treatment. Part of
the luxury status of spice, I contend, has nothing to do with the ways
in which it is consumed, but with the ways in which it sensualises
certain fantasies about the nature of money and capital.
Spice, as a fragrant substance, is ideal for an expressive use in the
discourses of fetishism. A fetish, simply described, is a self-moving
object, an object that seems to have a will of its own. Money, for
example, in Marx's famous critique of capitalism, appears to act `all
by itself ' without the mediation of what he considers to be the more
fundamental social force of labour. In their trade with western
Africa, the Portuguese were the first to coin the concept of the fetisso
in order to deal with modalities of culturally constructed objects and
Figure 2 The spice trade as poetic discourse: Maximilianus Transylvanus, De
Moluccis insulis (1523), title page. There could be no better illustration that the
representation of the spice trade was bound up with thoughts about poetics: note
Apollo and the dancing Graces. Maximilian poeticises the voyages of the Portuguese
to the Hesperidean Moluccas, and declares that they have out-troped the myth of
Jason and the Argonauts (A2v, B7v).
circulation which were seen to differ greatly from theirs.[49]
Spice,
without doubt, is farmed, produced, subjected to all sorts of labour
processes, which down the transnational chain are highly gendered
and racialised, as well as falling under the sign of class. Slaves farm
spices in the Moluccas and women prepare spicy meals in the
kitchen. However, as odoriferous substances, spices appear to owe
their power or virtue to nothing but their own sweet or pungent
selves. The richness of Blackmore's imagery, for example, depends
upon his conception of the spontaneous, odour-emitting properties
of spices: just so, he figures, trade itself wafts across the ocean. The
production of smell appears to involve no labour. This bestows upon
spice both a highly naturalised quality, and a supernatural or
spectral one.
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