Título en español.

Abstract

In the last two decades there has been severe criticism of several projects in the area of cultural history which aim to provide an explanation of the histories of things in relation to the construction of modernity. This criticism centers on the error of studying commodities without revealing the meanings of their autonomy as markers of historical processes; in other words, without discovering their fetishistic forms. According to such critics, historical narrative should advocate a style of representation that is sufficiently reflexive to make its own production visible as knowledge that resists fetishistic forms and, at the same time, captures the historical resistance to processes of domination associated with the autonomy of commodities. In this article, such a cultural critique is examined in relation to a debate concerning the conditions of the possibility of symbolic representation and its codification. Without disqualifying any of the positions examined, it is shown that the cultural critique project itself is more limited in its aims and focus than the cultural history and cognitive science projects.