Conclusion - Can we undo the fetishization of simulacrums?
In order to change a product’s social value, one would have to change the system that assigned the value.
The first step would be to transform the idea or concept that the simulacrum is representing by focusing on the connotations that compile it. The “interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content and the interpretive activities of readers and writers” formulate the secondary, cultural meaning (Hayes). The “pieces” in Pieces of Herself express gender stereotypes that women are forced to comply with such as women cooking meals for and cleaning after their family. If the connotation of the pastry can be transformed from its original cultural significance, then one can undo the fetishization of simulacrums – therefore disillusioning consumers to the lack of pumpkin in a pumpkin spice latte.
Marxist fetish theory explains this as false consciousness – “based upon an objective illusion (hence alterable only by institutional transformation, not mere subjective ‘consciousness raising’): material objects turned into commodities conceal exploitative social relations, displacing value-consciousness from the true productive movement of social labor to the apparent movement of market prices and forces” (Pietz).
Structuralism encourages the creation of fetishized simulacrums because of how easily the social value of objects can be manipulated. This becomes problematic with the construction of identity because one will never be able to determine what parts of themselves stem from their own ideology and which are based on societal expectations of what they should be. Consumers are like pumpkin spice lattes in that they define the values of a society, but never realize that they actually contain no trace of pumpkin.
My challenge to you: question social values - why products are seen as important or necessary, educate yourself on the structure of your society, disillusion others to simulacrums and expose them as the copies they are. We may be the underdogs, but, if we can together change the social norm, we can end the fetishization of simulacrums.
