In Capital (1867-1894), Marx explains that under capitalism, the value of commodities has three elements. Use value concerns the ways in which commodities are useful: a chair can be sat on, a tomato can be eaten, a work of art can be admired. Socially necessary labor time is the amount of labor time that it takes to make the product. Market value is the price of the commodity when sold on the open market. In the absence of one of these, the commodity has no value. So if something is useless, no one would want it; if something is useful, but does not require labor to produce it, no one would buy it (air is a good example of this); and if something has use, and requires labor, but is not brought to the market, then it is outside of capitalism (for example, if you eat tomatoes that you have grown yourself). 

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The second half of the term concerns fetishes. A fetish is something with a magical, supernatural or generally unexpected power; a religious idol for example. 

Putting the terms together, Marx observes that under capitalism, commodities are seen as having powers that they do not actually possess. This is because the value of a commodity is generally understood to reside in the commodity itself. A lump of gold is worth $100, so people would assume, because gold is simply a valuable thing. In this case, the market value dominates our understanding of value and we fail to take into account the human labor that was necessary in the production of the commodity. Commodity fetishism allows people to forget that for the gold to have value, humans need to dig it out of the ground and refine it. A lump of gold deep underground does not have value since it cannot be used or sold.

Marx’s point is that under capitalism, consumers can obsess over commodities while failing to see the human labor that has gone into them. We therefore ignore the exploitation of other humans that is an intrinsic part of production under capitalism.

Most closely associated with the theorist Michel Foucault (1926-1984), discourse most often refers to the groups of statements which form knowledge about a particular subject area, profession, institution, identity, political camp, technical speciality or religion. For example, there are discourses of medicine, film making, cookery, Buddhist philosophy, computing and education. Critical Theory is also a discourse. A discourse can be thought of as the group of acceptable statements which can be made in a particular area or as the set of rules which preside over the statements. Discourses, therefore open a space for certain things to be said while prohibiting others. Crucially for Foucault, discourse is connected with power. Only specific people are given access to each discourse and there are strict limitations on what can be expressed within each discourse. Finally, so long as someone is making sense, they are speaking or writing within a discourse. There is no outside to discourse.

A fetish is an inanimate object believed to have magical powers. More broadly speaking, we can think of a fetish as something obsessively or excessively admired. In both of these senses, a fetish has meaning attributed to it that may not be deserved or expected. 

In the sexual sense, a fetish is an ordinarily non-sexual object or body part which is connected with sexual desire or gratification. For example, when a shoe generates sexual excitement, we would consider it to be a fetish object since shoes are not ordinarily connected with sex.

Freud writes a short essay on “Fetishism” (1927) in which he claims that “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and [...] does not want to give up.” He comes to this surprising conclusion as a part of his theory of the castration complex. Put very simply, Freud claims that small boys understand the penis to be the default genital organ. When they realize that females do not have penises, they conclude that women must have been castrated. This causes them to fear that they too may be castrated one day. To alleviate this fear, they fantasize that their mothers do in fact have penises and therefore have not been castrated. A part of growing up is the abandonment of this fantasy, but the sexual fetish object acts as a substitute for this phantom penis for some individuals.

This is a key term for Marxist thought and concerns the ways in which ideas are used to make sense of the world. One way to understand ideology is as what Marx calls false consciousness. This describes the ways in which people’s understanding of society is systematically distorted and misleading. For Marx, capitalism is an oppressive and exploitative system, so a belief that Western societies are free and fair would be an example of false consciousness. As Marxist critic Terry Eagleton writes, ideology concerns “the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness.” He means that ideology, at its most pernicious, causes people to believe in ideas that actually harm them. 

In a different sense, ideology comprises someone’s ideas about how they would like the world to be. So a vegan ideology states that the world would be better if people stopped making nonhuman animals into products for human consumption. A major difference between the vegan and the person who thinks that society is free and fair is that the vegan is aware of their ideology, whereas ideology which supports the status quo may be unconscious. The less conscious of ideology that a person is, the more powerful the hold that it has over them. 

Later Marxists like Louis Althusser see ideology as deeply embedded in social institutions like the family and the education system. Althusser goes on to argue that the very idea of the self as a subject is an ideological construction. In this sense, we are all made in and trapped by ideology. But if  we are all affected by ideology, which prevents us from seeing reality properly, then how do Marxists manage to step outside of ideology in order to see the world as it really is? One significant challenge to Marxist thought is to justify why their ideology is the correct one.

In The Republic (375 BCE), Plato likens the majority of humans to prisoners in a cave. The only light in this cave comes from a fire which casts shadows of various puppets onto the walls. The prisoners are in chains, cannot turn their heads and have been in this situation since childhood. Since the cave is the only reality they have ever known, they believe that what they see and hear simply is reality: “the truth would be nothing but the shadows of the images.”

What Plato means is that when we look at the world, we do not see reality itself. The objects that we see around us are like the shadows on the wall since they are just poor imitations of reality. When we see a chair, for example, we see something which functions well enough as a chair, but any physical chair in the world will fall short of what Plato takes to be the idea of a chair, or to put it another way, the ideal chair.

This relates to Plato’s theory of Forms. Plato believes that anything we see in the world partakes of a Form. And just as a painting of a chair is less real than a physical chair, so a physical chair is less real than the Form of a chair. And while a physical chair depends on the Form of a chair for its existence, the Form of the chair does not depend on anything at all.

The job of the philosopher is to leave the cave of shadow objects and through philosophical study, go out into the light of the world of Forms, where reality is to be found. The most important form of all, the Form of the good must be uncovered and its truth must be brought back to the other prisoners in the cave.

Queer theory is concerned with sexualities which do not conform to heterosexual norms. In this sense, queer sexualities encompass a vast range of desires and practices. Queer theory focuses on the socially constructed nature of sexuality and examines how desires are channeled into socially acceptable forms. At its most radical, queer theory considers each individual’s sexuality to be different and claims therefore that one way or another, we are all queer.

The mirror stage is one of Jacques Lacan’s most significant contributions to psychoanalytic theory. It accounts for the formation of the ego (the rational, self-conscious part of the mind) and occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months.

Infants enter the mirror stage when they begin to understand that the image seen in a mirror is an image of their own bodies. This recognition is associated with pleasure. During the mirror stage, babies have poor control over their bodies; they may not be able to walk, have limited motor control and are dependent on others. In this sense, rather than seeming whole and unified, the child’s body seems to be fragmented.

The image in the mirror, on the other hand, is whole and unified. By identifying with the image, the child will also feel whole. This identification with the image is the formation of the ego. But the flipside of this process is that rather than identifying with their actual body, the child is identifying with an image of the body. This is an image which will always be outside of and separate from the body. Therefore, the formation of the ego is also an alienating process; the self does not coincide with the body, rather, it is an imaginary version of the self.