Cultures of Fetishism (3 page)

Harold Bloom opens his Preface to
Genius
with a dismissal of those Groupthink representatives of the Age of Information, “who have dismissed genius merely as an eighteenth-century fetish.”
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Bloom is claiming that these misguided academic hacks were deceived when they regarded genius as an idea or object of false worship.

Fetishism is imbued with falsehood. Therefore, even honesty can become a fetish—especially in times of deceit. A
New York Times
editorial column by David Brooks entitled “A Fetish of Candor” demonstrates the several ways that the Bush administration, having become addicted to a “slippery” form of honesty, is now “facing an insincerity crisis.”
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The administration “seems to be drunk on truth serum.”
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Thus rather than taking out Saddam and pretending to abide by the rules, Bush scandalized the world “by announc- ing what he was going to do before doing it.” “. . . The administration has taken to honesty like a drunken sailor. It has made a fetish of candor and forthrightness. Things are wildly out of control.”
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In certain instances, dictionary terms and their commonplace associations are the same or similar. As I indicated, the derivation of the word “fetishism” is usually traced back to the fetish objects that are worshipped by “primitive” or “savage” peoples. Without even knowing about the derivation, many people nevertheless do associate the term “fetishism” with the worship of these “primitive” fetish objects. And, as we arrive at this shared understanding between the dictionary definitions and the commonplace associations to

these “primitive” fetish objects, we begin to approach the essential spirit of the fetishism strategy. The “primitive” worship of fetish objects embodies one of the prime principles of the strategy that informs
Cultures of Fetishism
. We have already come across this principle, which entails the substitution of something tangible for something that is otherwise ephemeral and enigmatic. In the “primitive” cultures, the fetish is typically a natural or artificial object such as a tiger tooth, or crow feather or wood carving of a bear, that is imbued with the power to protect its owner. The fetish object is believed to be inhabited

by a god or spirit that can determine the fate of its worshipper.

Here are some questions about the worship of fetish objects. Why not worship the god or spirit directly? Why is there a need, instead, for a tangible object that represents the spirit? Why do human beings get so emotionally invested in objects that are concrete and tangible? In contrast to the god or spirit who is ephemeral and intangible, the fetish exists within the realm of the real and actual world. A fetish can be held, seen, smelled, even heard if it is shaken, and most importantly it can be manipulated at the will of the fetishist.

In this manner, some essentially unknown, intangible, spiritual, and ambiguous “someone” or “something” that seems to have a will and energy of its own, is transformed into something tangible and concretely real and therefore capable of being controlled and manipulated. However, the belief that the gods and spirits, who we cannot touch or see or hear, can be con- trolled through the possession and manipulation of a fetish is misleading and duplicitous. It is a false belief. And that false belief underlies the principles of the fetishism strategy.

P
rinciples of the

F
etishism
S
trategy

As I list the five basic principles of the fetishism strategy, one by one, and separate them into neat and orderly categories, it should soon become apparent that they are not entirely distinct. They are shades and reflections of one another. They overlap. They usually operate in tandem.

1. Fetishism is a mental strategy or defense that enables a human being to trans- form something or someone with its own enigmatic energy and immaterial essence into something or someone that is material and tangibly real, a form of being that makes the something or someone controllable
   . This first principle of the fetishism strategy comes in many guises. It applies to the religious fetish as well as to the sexual fetish.
   

   We will also encounter this first principle in the several ways in which cul- tures transform human beings into dehumanized commodities. For example, the culture of “Reality TV” depends for its effects and its enormous profits on the commodification of human beings. In contrast to a human being with his or her human energies and vitalities, a commodity is a nonliving thing with no life of its own. However, in the process of submitting to the exploita- tions of Reality TV, otherwise ordinary human beings are dehumanized and
   

   transformed into mechanical, stereotyped representations of actual human beings. They become commodities.
   

   In “The Working Day,” the tenth chapter of
   Capital
   , Karl Marx reveals the “secret” of commodity fetishism. He tells us that a central driving force of Capital is “to absorb the greatest amount of surplus labor.”
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   He then explains how this is accomplished. “Capital is dead labour, which vampire- like, lives only by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
   12
   Thus, Marx’s theory of
   surplus labor
   turns out to be nearly identical with the first principle of the fetishism strategy—
   a human being transforms other human beings, with their own enigmatic energies and vitalities, into things that are material and tangibly real. Through the process of providing sur- plus labor value for the capitalist, the worker is transmogrified into a commodity
   . Though Marx wrote in the mid nineteenth-century about the transformation of working-class human beings into commodities, what he said then has relevance today in many twenty first-century cultural phenom- enon. In a speech, written ten years before the publication of
   Capital
   , he warned, “All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing mate- rial forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force.”
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2. The second principle of the fetishism strategy is a subtle variation of the first one.
   Fetishism transforms ambiguity and uncertainty into something knowable and certain and in doing so snuffs out any sparks of creativity that might ignite the fires of rebellion
   . The material object, the fetish, is employed to still and silence, bind and dominate, smother and squelch the frighteningly uncontrollable and unknowable energies of someone or something that might otherwise express its own ambiguous vitalities. The unknowable and the ambiguous are experienced as dangerous. The fetish reassures.
   

3. Fetishism brings certain details into the foreground of experience in order to mask and disguise other features that are thus cast into the shadows and mar- gins and background
   . For example, the fetishism strategy employs sexuality and sexual behaviors to mask an entire range of desires, motives, and defenses. The all-too-apparent, one could say glitteringly present, right- before-our-eyes sexual behaviors command our attention, hampering our capacity to see anything that might lie beneath the surface.
   The powerful pres- ence of the erotic surface disguises and covers over the absences that would other- wise remind us of something traumatic
   . The dramatic and vivid visibility of the fetish object serves to dazzle and confuse, blinding the viewer from other, potentially more troubling implications that are thus cast into the shadows. The surface layer, the images that captivate the visual field, the words that clamor to be heard, are masquerades.
   

   So, to get beyond the masquerades that pose as erotic turn-ons to some- thing more challenging and meaningful, we have only to look over an official inventory of the various sexual perversions. As our eyes go down the inven- tory, from top to bottom, we cannot help noticing the vast discrepancy between the relatively commonplace and relatively innocent-sounding
   fetishism
   that typically heads up the inventory and the seemingly more horrifying and
   

   bizarre perversion that is usually placed at the foot,
   necrophilia
   ,
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   the need to have sexual intercourse with a dead body.
   

   Unlike
   fetishism
   which can be understood as a homey preference or an occasional enthusiasm,
   necrophilia
   is more blatantly
   outré
   and dangerously unfamiliar. However, after many years of thinking about the encompassing nature of fetishism, which has long been recognized as the ruling and guid- ing perversion that plays a role in all perversions, I have come to believe that necrophilia isn’t so far away from fetishism as I had originally thought. Necrophilia, it turns out, is the key to a less obvious but, in certain crucial respects, more essential meaning of fetishism.
   

   In
   necrophilia
   , sexual arousal, erection, and orgasm are possible only with a corpse or a dismembered, dying body. Usually, for the male fetishist at least, a female corpse is the preferred enthusiasm, but for some male necrophiliacs, the dead or dying body of a male, a child, or an animal does the trick. Necrophilia, so far as we know the rarest of all the perversions, nevertheless expresses succinctly a facet of the fetishism strategy that is common to all the perversions. In its larger, more encompassing meaning, fetishism is about the deadening and dehumanization of otherwise alive and therefore threaten- ingly dangerous, unpredictable desires.
   

   Therefore, though zoophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia seem a far cry from the comparatively normal sounding fetishism, with which our catalogs of perversion usually begin, the household pets and dying or dead humans and animals are as much fetishistic objects as are the already lifeless and inanimate leather boot, lace garter belt, corset, stiletto shoe, rubberized mackintosh, or blue velvet bathrobe.
   

   And this transformation of living, animate substance into something dead or deadening is the fourth principle of the fetishism strategy. We might even call it the necrophilic principle.
   

4. The more dangerous and unpredictable the threat of desire, the more dead- ened or distanced from human experience the fetish object must be
   . By virtue of its fantasized or actual isolation from the woman’s (or man’s) breathing, responding, sensing, pulsating, experiencing body, the fetish object, unlike the sexual partner, can be controlled and manipulated. A sexual fetish, for example, is significantly more reliable than a living person. It expects neither commitment nor emotional engagement.
   When the full identity of the sexual object is alive, with all manner of threateningly, dangerously unpredictable vitalities, the desire he or she arouses must be invested in an object that is knowable and predictable
   . Unlike a fully alive, human being with dangerous, unpre- dictable desires who must be wooed and courted, fetish objects are relatively safe, easily available, and undemanding of reciprocity.
   

   And this leads us to the fifth and final principle of the fetishism strategy, a corollary to the necrophilic principle, an extension of it that exposes the death drive hidden in the folds of the erotic object. This fifth principle, so intimately involved with aggression and destruction, is the one that seems furthest removed from ordinary life and ordinary fetishism. Yet, as I shall be showing in future chapters, it is the key to the strategy of fetishism.
   

   The philosophers who understand the fetishism strategy don’t necessarily transform the fifth principle into something more ordinary and accessible. However, sometimes their dense impenetrabilities do yield a measure of understanding about these very complicated matters. With a little bit of patience and courage, we enter into their unfamiliar worlds and are rewarded with a glow of transparency that feels just right. And even if we don’t get to a full understanding of their words right off the bat, they ring of some truths that are accessible.
   

   I have found that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who is notori- ous for ambiguity and impenetrability, is worth the effort, particularly when I am trying to solve a problem in my own work. His
   Archive Fever
   is a refer- ence point for several of the chapters that follow. In this challenging mono- graph, he spoke of the death drive, the
   anarchivic, archiviolithic
   drive that disguises or paints or tints itself in an erotic color. He says:
   

   This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origins of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. Memories of death.
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   Derrida’s way of giving voice and substance to an ambiguous, intangible force like the death drive helped me to formulate the fifth principle of the fetishism strategy.
   

5. The death drive tints itself in erotic color. The impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin
   . As I shall be demonstrating in several chapters, this tint of erotic color can make deadly practices invisible to the naked eye. But if we learn how to detect the skin that lies beneath the mask, we also learn how to protect it from deadly practices. The chapter “The Body of a Woman: Making Films” concludes with films about the deadly practice of skin cutting, a suddenly popular perversion that inspired a rash of skin- cutting films during the past two decades. By the time we come to that chapter and “Writing on the Skin,” the chapter that follows it, we will have encoun- tered many other instances of the fifth principle of the fetishism strategy. The glow of transparency in Derrida’s dense rumination will shine through.
   

Each of the chapters that follow will illustrate one or several principles of the fetishism strategy. It is impossible to capture this defensive strategy in all its guises, all at once. Nevertheless, at each confrontation with each succeeding illustration of one or another principle of the strategy, there will be some new light shed on the entire, fuller meaning of the fetishism strategy. The dissim- ulations that we will encounter are not outright and blatant lies. As with the Bush administration’s fetish of candor, they may even employ surface truths to disguise and mask falsehood.