CHAPTER 1
· Fetishism in Theory: Marx, Freud, Baudrillard
· In his discussion of commodity fetishism, Karl Marx spoke of an objectâs hidden valueâits fetish characterâas a âsecretâ: âValue, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language.â1 Marxâs conception of the fetish as socioeconomic hieroglyphic and opaque verbal sign emerged, in the course of my writing, as curiously compatible with Freudâs sense of the strangeness of fetish consciousness: a state of mind divided between the reality of noncastration and the fear of it all the same. Both enigmas, in turn, seemed to arrange themselves around a âthird term.â Michel Leiris (distilling his impressions of Giacomettiâs neoprimitivist sculptural artifacts) identified his own embattled, Eurocentric fetishismâthat mimetic âobjectivized form of our desireââwith an ethnopsychiatric condition of âaffective ambivalenceâ:
· I love Giacomettiâs sculpture because everything he makes is like the petrification of one of these crises, the intensity of a chance event swiftly caught and immediately frozen, the stone stele telling its tale. And thereâs nothing deathlike about this sculpture; on the contrary, like the real fetishes we idolize (real fetishes, meaning those that resemble us and are objectivized forms of our desire) everything here is prodigiously aliveâgraciously living and strongly shaded with humor, nicely expressing that affective ambivalence, that tender sphinx we nourish, more or less secretly, at our core.2
Where the âsecretâ joins the âstrange,â and the âstrangeâ encounters that âaffective ambivalence, that tender sphinx we nourish, more or less secretly, at our core,â is precisely the nonlocatable spot where these investigations theoretically and methodologically situate themselves.
In his chapter on fetishism and ideology in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard characterized the term fetishism as almost having âa life of its own.â âInstead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking of others,â he argued, âit turns against those who use it, and surreptitiously exposes their own magical thinking.â3 Baudrillard here identifies the uncanny retroactivity of fetishism as a theory, noting its strange ability to hex the user through the haunting inevitability of a âdeconstructive turn.â
Neither Marx nor Freud managed to escape the return of the repressed fetish. Freud endowed the fetish of the (castrated) maternal phallus with an animus when he wrote: âIt seems rather that when the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interruptedâit reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesias.â4 Marx, endeavoring in Capital to define the commodity fetish, lures the reader into a labyrinth of discomfiting allusions. âA commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,â he began, only to retract: âIts analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological nicetiesâ (C 81). The same paragraph ends on an even more âfantasticâ note, when an ordinary table, transformed into a commodity, âevolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than âtableturningââ (C 82). If here the metaphor is table-turning, later the mysterious value of the fetish commodity floats before the eye like an apparition. After constructing an optical analogy for the relation between man and commodity, Marx advises ârecourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious worldâ (C 83). Alternately confusing and conflating appearance and reality, Eidos and materialism; alienation and belief, Marx, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, âdisabledâ his discourse through the very master tropes that gave his arguments the power to imprint themselves on the political unconscious.5 The camera obscura was his preferred figure for ideology, and fetishism his preferred figure for commodities, but the two terms were frequently âcrossed,â for as Mitchell points out, both signify false images, with the former connoting an âidol of the mindâ and the latter, in Francis Baconâs wording, an âidol of the marketplace.â At some level, these idols become indistinguishable, rendering commodities dangerously interchangeable with the âtrueâ currency of ideas. Mirroring each other as âiconsâ of illusion, both tropes, according to Mitchell, ultimately subvert their authorâs attempt at demystification. âIdeology and fetishism,â he ascertains, âhave taken a sort of revenge on Marxist criticism, insofar as it has made a fetish out of the concept of fetishism, and treated âideologyâ as an occasion for the elaboration of a new idealism.â6
Now even if we disagree with Mitchellâs conclusion that Marxist criticism has reified the elements of its own theory or allowed fetishism to masquerade as demystification, it does seem true that within contemporary discourse a kind of fetishism of fetishism is in the air. And this hypertrophic character is hardly confined to Marxist usage; it seems, as Baudrillard suggests, endemic to fetishismâs history as a metaphysical construct.
In what follows, I want to examine briefly the history of fetishism as a theory, emphasizing (1) its simultaneous critique of and implication in the very sociosymbolic phenomena that it seeks to unveil (from commodification to castration anxiety), (2) its importance as a specular meeting point for psychoanalytic and materialist discourses, and (3) its implications for a radical theoretical praxis in the domain of contemporary aesthetic production.
In the course of its etymological life from its Chaucerian prehistory to its post-Enlightenment usage in the twentieth century, the word fetisso and its phonological cognates have provoked a chain of divergent interpretations, all generated according to the codes of a romance linguistics forced to accept the untranslatable Other into its thoroughly Western genealogy. Used in the eighteenth century by Charles de Brosses (dubbed âthe little fetishâ for his pains by Voltaire) to describe the idolatrous worship of material objects in âprimitiveâ societies, the term was traced to fatum, signifying both fate and charm. A century later the British ethnologist Edward Tylor derived the term from a different though related root (factitius), comprising both the âmagic artsâ and the âwork of art.â7 The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Marx (fetishism of commodities as false consciousness) and Freud (the fetish as spurious, surrogate object of desire), deduced from the Latin facere neither charm nor beauty but rather the degraded simulacrum or false representation of things sacred, beautiful, or enchanting.8
Though a semantic disjunction clearly emerges each time the word fetishism is displaced from language to language, discipline to discipline, and culture to culture, it is precisely this process of creative mistranslation that endows the term with its value as currency of literary exchange, as verbal token. Thus the word charme, a favored key word of MallarmĂ© and Valery commonly used to denote the incantatory power of music (carmen: psalm, oracle, sacred song), was seen as the carrier of an authenticated neoprimitivism, a sign linking symbolism to an exotic repertory of votive objects including the gri-gri, the juju or the phiphob. Like a good-luck charm or native artifact offered to the European traveler, the verbal fetish, surrounded by an aura of otherness, was aestheticized by the French poets of the turn of the century from StĂ©phane MallarmĂ© to Victor Segalen and Guillaume Apollinaire. As fetys, âwell-made, beautiful,â the fetish emerged as a catalyst of symbolist artifice; as fatum, or fateful chance, it recalled the master narratives of shipwreck, solitude, and confrontation between civilized and âsavage mindâ from Robinson Crusoe to âUn coup de dĂ©sâ; and as âChrists of another form, another belief, inferior Christs of obscure wishesâ in Apollinaireâs poem âZoneâ (1912), it became a protosurrealist icon, mediating between urban anomie and a âphantom Africa.â9
The literary history of fetishism may reveal a discursive pattern of difference, but its philosophical history deconstructs in the form of a rhetorical chiasmus. William Pietz has given us the most historically nuanced account of the philosophical fetish, which, he argues, points to the âemerging articulation of a theoretical materialism quite incompatible and in conflict with the philosophical tradition.â10 Following his scheme, one sees that from Kant (fetishism as a degraded sublime, a âtrifleâ) and Hegel (fetishism as a âfactitious universal,â an unmediated particular) to Whitehead (âa fallacy of misplaced concretenessâ) and Heidegger (an Ereigenes, an Appropriation), fetishism has been portrayed as theoretically worthless.11 As a word, it was not even admitted into the French language by the AcadĂ©mie Française until 1835. But it is just this quantity of negative value that ultimately enables fetishism to undermine monolithic belief structures from Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy to the ârationalâ laws of capitalist exchange. For example, the Portuguese trading word fetisso stood not just for the native idol but also for the âsmall waresâ or trinkets that European merchants used for barter or upon which they would swear an oath to honor a commercial transaction. According to William Pietz, these trading rituals inevitably led to âa perversion of the natural processes of economic negotiation and legal contact. Desiring a clean economic interaction, seventeenth-century merchants unhappily found themselves entering into social relations and quasi-religious ceremonies that should have been irrelevant to the conduct of trade.â12 Pietz implies that Africa perverted Western capitalism (forcing it to adopt the superstitious worship of material objects) just as European capitalists perverted indigenous economics through exploitation. One may further deduce from this historico-philosophical chiasmus two central consequences: first, that the âcivilizedâ mimesis of âprimitiveâ object worship was only the explicit acting out of Europeâs own (masked) commodity fetishism; and second, that almost as a result of Europeâs initial contempt for âtribalâ artifacts, the exotic fetish âreturnedâ to Continental shores, where it was henceforth recommodified as art. Developing these points, and insisting on the irrecuperably âsavageâ nature of the African feitiço, V. Y. Mudimbe has seen the history of the aestheticization of the fetish from its âculturally neutralâ origins as a curio collected by the trader-observer in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to its gradual mystification as âstrange and ugly artifact,â as an unregenerate example of Europeâs notion of African art.13
Pierre Lotiâs Le Roman dâun spahi (The novel of a colonial conscript; 1881) provides an exemplary illustration of Mudimbeâs argument in its coded framing of Europeâs racist, exoticist construction of the African fetish. The novel recounts the story of a French soldier posted in Senegal who, having âgone nativeâ (donning the Muslim fez, living with a black concubine), is rudely recalled to his European origins when his mistress secretly sells his watch in exchange for âworthlessâ pacotille (shoddy goods). Described as a crude silver watch to which he was as attached as Fatou was to her amulets, the spahiâs paternal heirloom is guarded in a âboĂźte aux fĂ©tichesâ (fetish box), thus emphasizing the cross-cultural transference of fetishisms that has occurred. But the lesson of this episode rides on its revelation that such transferences are nothing other than a concession to barbarism. Black fetishes, in a picturesque market scene, are presented as profanations of Western sacred objects:
· Marchandes de poisson sale, marchandes de pipes, marchandes de tout;âmarchandes de vieux bijoux, de vieux pagnes crasseux et pouilleux, sentant le cadavre;âde beurre de Galam pour lâentretien crĂ©pu de la chevelure;âde vieilles petites queues, coupĂ©es ou arrachĂ©es sur des tĂȘtes de nĂ©gresses mortes, et pouvant resservir telles quelles, toutes tressĂ©es et gommĂ©es, toutes prĂȘtes.
Marchandes de grigris, dâamulettes, de vieux fusils, de crottes de gazelles, de vieux corans annotĂ©s par les pieux marabouts du dĂ©sert;âde musc, de flĂ»tes, de vieux poignards a manche dâargent, d...