ABSTRACT
The slippery continuity between person and thing in accounts of table turning means that nouns and verbs that do not usually go together can do so in the context of the seance. A table can throw a tantrum and stomp across the room. Tables could move on their own—distantly influenced by the nervous force of cerebration: thinking. Tables have always been celebrities, philosophically speaking. Marx argues that use value calibrates the value of a man-made object. He claims that in a process of abstraction, people lose a sensual relationship to things and to their makers. Marx further argues that commodities cannot express their own value, except through their relation to other commodities, and furthermore these comparative commodities must form a qualitative identity and be commensurable. Regardless of the embedded assumption of requisite homogeneity in Marx's "Commodity," it suddenly seems clear why people at a séance and drawing room tables should become fast friends.
