Harry Potter, the Azkaban of the Real, and Commodity Fetishism

In recent decades there have been few franchises as influential as Harry Potter. Presenting a magical alter reality to which any eleven-year-old could be whisked, it is hardly surprising that many of today’s grown-up children have never let go of the wizarding fantasy. 

It is fascinating that so much of Rowling’s magic involves 'living’ objects. Pictures, hats, keys, stairwells, plants, wands – often Rowling wanted to make something magical, she simply endowed it with sentience and free will! 

This has interesting implications for the denizens of Rowling’s fictional world, implications which express themselves thematically throughout the franchise. 

This essay attempts to explore the meanings of these ‘sentient objects’ and how the wizarding world relates to them. Why is it necessary to portray magic in this way, and why does this structure resonate so strongly with the millennial consumer? 

The Wand Chooses the Wizard 

A scene which clearly portrays the new role of objects in the Harry Potter films, and hints at their implications, is when Harry visits Olivander’s shop: 

Harry and Hagrid enter onto a busy, narrow street. The road is roughly paved, and the streetlights are gas-lit lanterns. Everyone on the street is dressed archaically and even Harry’s shopping is wrapped in brown paper and yarn, rather than being carried in a plastic bag. Apart from Harry himself, the entire scene would seem more appropriate in a Dickens novel than in the present-day. 

Harry is directed by Hagrid to Olivander’s, a wand shop. The sign on the shop reads ‘since 382 b.c.’ The interior of the shop is as old-fashioned as the street, being entirely furnished in dark wood and lit by candles. 

As Olivander, the owner of the shop, emerges, it becomes apparent that he already knew Harry from his resemblance to his parents. Olivander imparts that ‘the wand chooses the wizard,’ and, without Harry saying a word, he selects a series of wands and presents them to Harry. Harry waves each of the wands and they signal their agreement or disagreement with being assigned to him. 

As the scene closes, Olivander remarks that it is ‘curious indeed’ that Harry was ‘destined’ for his particular wand. 

Obviously, the wizarding world never developed electric lighting or synthetic fabrics. There is no need to invent cheap, warm fabrics if simple textiles can be enchanted for warmth and durability. There is no need to electrify if lamps can be lit with the flick of a wand, and fuel can be conjured out of air. This explains the archaic fashions depicted in the scene; Diagon Alley appears to be locked in the past because the wizarding world’s technological development is completely stagnant. 

Olivander’s shop sign attests that this stagnation goes beyond technological development. England has seen waves of invasion and displacement throughout its history, but apparently Olivander and his shop have remained fixed in place for over two millennia. Perhaps the entire wizarding world is not just stagnant but eternal. 

This is emphasised by Olivander’s lack of deep understanding of wands’ function. As the sole owner of a generational wand business spanning so many centuries, he should have some understanding of how the wand selects the correct wizard. His expression that Harry’s wand assignment is ‘curious indeed’ betrays that he has no idea how the wands choose, attributing it to destiny. 

The implication is that magical artifacts were never invented, merely obtained by humanity. A wand is more akin to a caveman’s torch, an already-burning branch plucked from a forest fire, than to a technological device which harnesses natural forces like a modern torch. What Rowling has done here is create a world in which the Kantian thing-in-itself is preserved by its own omnipotence – magical objects are not understandable at all, they have no deeper mechanism, they are simply given by God fully-formed with their entire functionality. Magical technology does not exist because it is not needed, the magical objects already fulfil their full potential. 

Furthermore, in The Deathly Hallows the most ‘advanced’ magical objects are not created or discovered but gifted by the personification of death itself. Even the word ‘magic’ implies something mystical, beyond rational understanding. 

As the nature of the commodity-object changes, so does that of the human subject. 

In our world, a back-to-school shopping trip involves the child or parent selecting commodities to purchase. A pen is chosen by the child because it writes well, or because it has a particular colour or brand. In Olivander’s shop, the subject-object relationship is inverted: ‘The wand chooses the wizard’. 

This reversal is emphasised by Harry’s treatment in the shop. For most of the scene Harry is silent and passive, reacting to Olivander and the wands rather than taking any proactive action. To Olivander, Harry is a known entity – his arrival was expected, and his wand was predestined. Harry is incapable of making a choice because the information necessary to choose is not available to him. The wand, on the other hand, can access the depths of Harry’s soul, and the contents of his destiny.  

Olivander immediately recognises Harry by his parents, a recognition which holds some significance. Harry’s destiny is as much inherited from his parents as his face and eyes, recurring themes throughout the series. In parallel, the ‘consciousness’ of the wand is inherited from the feathers that were placed at its core, their avian source providing a basis for Voldemort and Harry’s connection even before their encounter at Godric’s Hollow. 

What fundamentally objectifies wizards is the position of their interface with their commodities. The interface is deep within the wizard’s mind – the wand, can access the deepest recesses of the mind to understand a wizard’s essence. To the wizard, on the other hand, the commodity remains a deeply mystical thing-in-itself. Even if the object itself is crafted (the wooden casing is placed around the wand), the magical kernel that gives the commodity its life is by nature obscure. 

The commodity reduces human agency and malleability to the point of triviality, so that from the wizard’s perspective they are inanimate objects in the stream of destiny – inanimate because the commodity is more fundamentally alive than the human. 

This relationship is a constant feature of the Harry Potter series. The sorting hat reads the soul even more explicitly than the wands. The staircases at Hogwarts “like to move around” (why would someone construct such an inconvenient feature?). The sword of Gryffindor and the room of requirement can read and objectively quantify human needs and values. Even the way time travel is depicted is objectifying; travelling back in time only is predestined, the illusion of agency is proactively accounted for by spacetime as depicted in The Prisoner of Azkaban. 

With this in mind, it is no wonder that so many wizards despise and fear ‘muggles’. They are mindless animals, completely dominated by commodities, while we non-magicians are truer subjects, capable of understanding and manipulating nature. For them, all magic is external, while for us the soul and the mind remain magical. 

The Muggle Chooses Magic 

In Rowling’s world the commodity holds dominion over the purchaser, resulting in a profound intellectual impotence in wizarding society (the character most portrayed as being intelligent, Hermione, is notably an outsider). Despite this, the Harry Potter books maintain a unique grasp on the millennial mind. How can this dystopian picture be reconciled with the series’ mass appeal? 

In his 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard writes how “in order for [a science] to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being ‘discovered’ and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.” Baudrillard also rephrases this as science “destroying everything it touches.” For an object to be scientifically understood, it must be deconstructed and categorised. The object loses its immediate, transcendental character and becomes illusory, a superficial artifact of human perception which belies a deeper reality. The deeper reality in turn reveals itself to scientific analysis, and the ‘true’ reality recedes further and further from immediate perception. 

No-one today truly understands anything about nature, not because we understand less, but because the 'true reality' is so much further from common experience. Reality is no longer comprised of the pre-industrial transcendent objects: Immediate, sensual, and with God-given essences.

Reality is so much more distant today that we all live in a dream-world, or for Baudrillard a ‘simulation’, where objects rendered by code on a screen are no less real than those rendered by nature. 

What Rowling has created is a world where the ‘magic’ of the object has been restored. By endowing objects with powers that defy scientific dissection and analysis, the objects are restored to their transcendent status. By situating magic beyond rationality and the logic of cause-and-effect, the reality of the commodity is restored and returned to the realm of direct experience. 

Science today extends to every aspect of life. We do virtually nothing without the products of science, and there is no object that retains the status of ‘thing-in-itself', except in the realm of pure ideals. Our perception of the thing-in-itself is defined by limitation and unknowability. When science has pushed these boundaries so far from sensual experience, the only respites – the last glimmers of reality – are in experiences that fundamentally defy science: Emotion, impulse-experience, and free will. In other words, for Rowling to restore magic to the object, she must endow it with the most intimate unknowable of the human experience: Consciousness itself. 

This explains the nostalgic pastiche of the magical world. The archaisms of Diagon Alley, and the series at large, provide an aesthetic link to a time before science dissected the magic of the everyday. 

We All Choose to be Dobby 

The appeal of Rowling’s world comes from its magic and as discussed, the magic cannot function without sentient objects. While this naturally results in a stagnant wizarding society, it cannot account for the individual objectification which features prominently through the series with such themes as destiny, essence, and determinism. 

These themes can be partially explained by Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which is “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things”. A commodity embodies the complex network of social relations required for its production, and through fetishism these relations appear as immediate properties of the commodity.  

For example, in the purchase of a commodity the buyer and the seller exchange a commodity for an equivalent amount of money. The value both of the commodity and its money-equivalent express embodied labour-time, the time which went into the production of the commodity relative to that of all other commodities. In the act of exchange, however, this representation is lost – both commodity and money appear to have their own inherent value, and hence take on a mystical form. Every component of value involved in the exchange – even the eventual use-value of the commodity – originates in a social relationship between humans, labour and experience. In exchange, these relationships appear as relationships between objects, the commodities taking on the appearance of identity relative to one-another. 

For Marx, “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.” This results in “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and enter into relation both with one another and the human race.” 

Where in medieval times the monarch fetishistically embodied theological domination through the dialectic of lord and bondsman, bourgeois consciousness embodies this same domination in the commodity. A designer car or watch may appear to grant its owner status, but in reality the status derives from the frivolous expense of human labour involved in production of the item. A high-quality household appliance appears to make household tasks easier, but in reality it embodies crystallised labour – scientific and industrial - which has gone into its production. The use-value of the appliance comes from the subjective expense of labour-time by its producer. 

In Rowling’s world, fetishism is made real and objective. Commodities actually do contain inherent value beyond their labour-cost, and they actually do ‘enter into relation both with one-another and the human race.’ 

We are offered no glimpse of the production process for magical wands, but we can infer that they do not require much labour-time to produce. They consist of a simple wooden shell (beach, ash, etc.) surrounding a biological core (dragon heartstring, phoenix feather, etc.). From Olivander’s words in the shop, and the abundance of simple, inert wood in muggle society, we can infer that the magical essence of the wand is contained within the biological component. This biological element is simply ‘granted by nature’ and takes virtually no labour to produce. Therefore, the wand’s value is not a result of conscious creation of use-value, nor of crystallised labour-time, but inherent to the wand itself. The wand’s exchange-value comes entirely from its relationship with other wands, and its ability to manipulate objects and people. 

The simplicity of the production process for wands, and other magical items as enabled by wands, allows the independent petit-bourgeois shop-owners to proliferate in the wizarding world, individualising social production. 

Furthermore, in the example of Olivander’s shop, Harry and Voldemort’s relationship is actually materially embodied in their wands. There is no symbolism or human subjective action, as the relationship is magical and beyond their control. A consequence of this is that both Harry and Voldemort are rendered impotent – as their relationship is carried out by commodities, they have no control and no subjective power. The wands become conscious subjects capable of relating to one-another, and Harry and Voldemort are objectivised. 

This transfer of subjectivity from Harry and Voldemort to their wands is clearly expressed when they meet in combat in The Goblet of Fire. Their wands form a beam between them which is independent of them both, neither is capable of controlling it and they simply stare at one-another until the wands decide for themselves who will be the victor. To overcome this Voldemort seeks out a more powerful commodity, the Elder Wand. The Elder Wand’s power comes from its inherent superiority to other wands, regardless of user, and it expresses its domination over the human subject with its concrete ‘rules of ownership’ - the wand decides who can and cannot use it. 

This mechanism is thematic in the Harry Potter universe. Perhaps the most obvious is Dobby gaining freedom from a sock. In our reality, a slave’s status is derived from mutual (human) recognition and enforced by violence. In the wizarding world, any member of the slave-race can be freed by being granted an article of clothing. It is not a symbolic or cultural practice (as evidenced by Harry tricking Lucius Malfoy into granting Dobby’s freedom), but somehow an inherent magical property of the commodity and the slave themself. The commodity fundamentally transforms the nature of the slave into that of a free being, granting them their own subjective rights. 

In the wizarding world, slavery cannot be abolished as it does not derive from recognition – it is an inherent, physical condition which can only be alleviated on an individual basis by a ‘divine’ commodity. Ownership of the slave is a natural, physical condition, as the slave must be granted freedom by the owner themself. Again, we can clearly see the commodity being capable of conscious choice (‘recognition’ of the slave), while the subjects – the slave and the owner – have simple objective natures. 

Fundamentally, human subjectivity comes from social relations, from the interplay of consciousness. When relations and consciousness are displaced, the social life and subjectivity of the human are displaced.  

Harry and Voldemort were created with their destinies fully formed, their vaguely good and evil states preordained by prophecy. Students are sorted into houses by their inherent properties (Gryffindors are naturally brave). Dobby was never enslaved but is inherently a slave (until his essence is materially altered by a commodity). Muggles are immutably non-magical. 

We Choose Ignorance 

In recent decades, arguably the most successful corporation has been Apple, whose brand is based on minimalism and user-friendliness. Apple’s products are defined by their seamlessness – a ‘wholeness’ which conceals their internal functions and plays into the fetishistic appeal of an immutable commodity. Its immutability obscures that many of its functions, its symbolic role, and its exchange-value are embodied human social relationships.  

The most significant consumer developments in technology have been drastic shifts away from command-line based user interfaces – where the user can directly interact with the computer in its own language – towards graphical user interfaces, voice control, and with Apple Vision and Neuralink direct physical and cognitive control. The point of interface has been shifted, so that we no longer interact with computers in a virtual environment but instead computers interact with us in a human or meta-human environment. 

I propose that Harry Potter’s wand is the ultimate expression of the Apple design philosophy: An omnipotent object which cannot be dismantled or analysed, and whose internal function is utterly mysterious to the user. It also expresses the development of the seamless user interface, where the wand is capable of understanding human souls and intentions far more intimately than the human can understand the wand. 

We are essentially constructing a fantasy where the roles of subjects and objects are reversed. In the chaotic storm of market uncertainty, we get a deep sense of security from imagining a higher purpose – when we have no control over the outcomes of our choices, we want to imagine that there are in fact no choices at all. Imagining ourselves as objects obscures the deep reality of exploitation, crises of overproduction, and the inevitable crisis of capitalism. In a post-ideological world where alternative modes of production are unthinkable, fantasies of self-objectification deny the deep impact that market vicissitudes can have on our lives. 

This is what motivates the development of new forms of consumer technology which exert more control over the subject than vice versa. This fantasy is expressed in the Harry Potter books with exceptional clarity, and the sense of safety and nostalgia is what gives the franchise its enduring success. 

The objectivisation that follows from this is a key aspect of capitalist realism – the ideological belief that capitalism is the only possible social configuration, and any other system is a perversion of the natural order. When people have inherent, objective properties, their social position can be completely justified as natural and necessary. 

The wizarding world’s petit-bourgeois commodity production depicted through Olivander also realises the liberal fantasy of the ‘sovereign, self-made individual’, independent of social relations. 

The subjective power of the commodity over the human in Rowling’s world also justifies inequality and oppression. Granting commodities the ability to choose between good and evil implies that the wealthy have been chosen by a power which sees their true soul, and finds them worthy of wealth. The inherent value of the magical commodity divorces wealth from its social meaning – exploitation and expropriation, accumulation of extracted labour-time. 

The changing dynamics between people and objects, as depicted through the sentient objects and technological immutability of Rowling’s world, are dark reflections of the modern reality: An extreme dystopia where neoliberalism is no longer a political ideology but a strictly enforced objective truth.