Fetishes are terribly difficult to define. Yet the history of the West in the modern era makes clear that they could easily be defined by what they were not: sacramental-objects. Despite this problematic and colonial distinction, however, there is really little theoretical difference between these all-too-similar material realities. The history of Christianity contains within itself a deep record of faithful expectations that the relics of a revered saint or other holy figure might produce some supernatural, miraculous intervention within the world. Many hopes and dreams, especially during personal and collective times of crisis, have routinely been centered on the perceived ability of a particular holy object to protect, heal, or assist an individual in their lives and beyond their own capabilities. Medieval European Christians, for example, often expected supernatural outcomes from the use of, or proximity to, various sacred relics and the Eucharist in particular, to such a high degree that, for many believers, an essential practice of the Christian faith was simply to journey to the shrines of such objects in order to discover a desired relief from illness, torment, or affliction. The act of pilgrimage itself, which began to flourish in Europe around the turn of the millennium, developed into a pious religious ritual that emphasized a movement toward such material objects at the same time as it underscored the ultimate significance of these objects in the first place.
What should fascinate us historically, and perhaps more than has been the case thus far, is that this rise in the prominence of relics within western society has run parallel to (though really also in conjunction with) the constitution of an instrumental logic (causa instrumentalis) in the twelfth century, the rise of the Enlightenment and historical-critical methods in general and, eventually, a specific social understanding of the use of technology.1 Such developments were not removed from theological understandings of sacred objects; indeed, the notion of the sacrament, as Ivan Illich has described it, seemed to evolve a technological, instrumental side during this time period, one that placed unique emphasis upon the sacrament being an instrument of the divine (instrumenta divina), so to speak.2 In the words of Giorgio Agamben, âModern technology does not derive only from the dream of the alchemists and magicians but also and more probably from that peculiar âmagicalâ operation that is the absolute, perfect instrumental efficacy of the sacramental liturgyâ.3 This suggestion was formulated alongside the insights of Illich explicitly, and it signals the appropriation of a modern technological context for comprehending sacramental-liturgical ends as well, ones that certainly overlap with what modernity would often label as the âfetishisticâ, as we will see soon enough.4
What has subsequently become clearer to this context is that the rise of an instrumental, technological logic is one that dominates the modern landscape and our conceptualization of the human person (an anthropology), though it is a logic that is rarely perceived historically for what it is. The lack of nuance or comparative understanding in our usage of the terms âsacramentâ or âsacramental-objectâ, âfetishâ, and âtechnologyâ should alone indicate the difficulty in discernment that has plagued modern theorists and theologians alike. As Bruno Latour has suggested, technology has been utilized more recently mainly to foster the modern division between theory and practice that would have been wholly unfamiliar to the premodern world, leaving us moderns mainly bereft of a more comprehensive vision for how all of these various pieces actually fit together in reality. That is, we are left to wonder how something like the technological-sacramental might generally cohere with the technological-fetishistic.5 If Latourâs intuition is correct, then technology may be that which âfreezesâ a particular historical moment within a much more complex metamorphosis or network of relations that actually underpin a given identity or situation.6 Technological intervention, from this angle, might be seen as an oversimplification or reduction of a more complex set of relations (an âecologyâ in his phrasing) that is yet necessary to formulate at times in order to preserve a shared sense of cultural intelligibility. Though such clearly defined identities (as technologies) will often appear as neutrally existing, mere objects, they are anything but âobjectivelyâ situated. Technological objects are always engaged in our world in either positive or negative ways, embodying a dualistic valence that we will likewise observe in the dichotomy between the sacrament (historically taken in the modern West to be the positive element) and the fetishistic (often conceived and critiqued as its negative counterpart). Though the facile dichotomy between the fetish and the sacramental-object will be shown in the end to fail to hold firmly together, it has become the predominant modern dualism in the West that must be invoked and explored in order to be simultaneously, and continuously, de-constructed.
Though tracking the development of technology in the modern period falls outside the scope of the present work, I do want to advance the conversation concerning technology in the modern era that much further through a direct look at one of the most significant, overlapping terms for materiality in our world: the fetish. I pursue this term in the present study because I believe that the ways in which fetishism has been understood in modernity actually say a good deal about what constitutes our relationship in the West to modern technology, as well as how we might be able to move beyond the philosophical and theological impasses that continue to obfuscate the developments of both categories. By implication, and as I will note occasionally throughout this study, the various conceptualizations of the fetish within modernity have tremendous significance for how we perceive not only humankindâs relationship to technology but also the fetishâs religious counterpart, the sacramental-object.
The present study was undertaken with the intention of providing a foundation for a comparative approach between modern and late modern theories of fetishism and contemporaneous sacramental theologies insofar as both discourses share an obvious but rarely juxtaposed affinity for locating a divine presence within specific material realities. I believe, in fact, that no theory of technology or especially of sacramental theology can be explored today without taking the modern legacy of fetishism more seriously than it has. This is a point that is of course not hard to suggest, for such connections up to this point have been almost entirely unexplored. Perceiving the nature of the fetish-object anew, as I hope to show, yet has the potential to completely refashion our conceptualizations of sacramental-objects and sacramental realities in particular.
The âSacraments of Simple Folkâ
What is often encountered in the search to define the fetish are those typical connotations of fetishism in popular culture that resonate deeply with the religious languages of âdevotionâ.7 The overlap in general devotional and liturgical practices between âfetishâ worshippers and traditional western religious practices is so pervasive that we should more often than not have cause to rethink religious categories entirely, though western viewpoints have been overly cautious to keep a firm boundary between them. For example, we might note how widening theories of the sacramental in order to address any object that has been sacralized in any form, such as what R. R. Marett sought to outline in his Gifford Lectures of 1932â1933, titled Sacraments of Simple Folk,8 allows us to perceive an overlap between fetishes and sacramental-objects that had been mainly ignored beforehand. This insight should, of course, be nothing new to Christian theological thought, as historical examples of such overlaps abound: one need only think of how certain objects, both indigenous âfetishesâ and western âsacramentsâ, literally become invested with the presence of the divine upon their consecration in order to note such a parallel theoretical formulation. Yet, as one commentator at the end of the nineteenth century equally noted, âAs to the Holy Cross qua fetish, why discuss such free-thinking credulities?â9
The tendency rather among western, Christian theologians at leastâand this was to be indicative of western trends on the wholeâwas to ignore any alleged similarity between the sacramental-object, or any other Christian religious object, and the fetish, in order to pretend as if their obvious correlation were an insult to an established western, superior culture and not worth discussing in the same breath. This distinction, one that is barely able to sustain itself in a contemporary postmodern culture intent on self-critically assessing its own identities and their failings, no longer holds sway. Yet the stereotypes formed have been incredibly slow to cede their hold upon cultural, political, and religious categorizations and divisions. We might take note, for example, of how certain temples in India house holy objects said not to be created by human handsâa notion often quickly dismissed by western touristsâwhile the âpeople of the Bookâ, who may in fact be the very same tourists to India, fiercely claim that their scriptures were written by Godâs own hand. Detecting such sentiments of cultural, ethnic, and even racial superiority proceeds from a vantage point that is willing first to enter into a critical appraisal of oneâs own (often inherently theological) foundations, performed with an openness toward recognizing the almost inevitability of the fetishistic within the sacramental and the possibility of the sacramental within the fetishistic, whatever such realities may or may not be in the end. Without such a willingness to see these forms of an otherness within the construction of the self, we westerners, at least, remain at a permanent loss to articulate a truer sense of identity and so continue to do violence to those who remain unseen or underrepresentedâa problematic that must be considered anew within a quickly growing postcolonial world.
The questions I am asking in...