Cultures of Fetishism (38 page)

It would be all too easy to blame the machines, which, of course, have no needs, desires, or motives for transforming humans into a species just like

themselves. Humans are inventing the machines and humans are here to receive them and also to determine the manner in which they will be received. In order to understand the transformations of human existence that are taking place at the beginning of the twenty first century, we have to exam- ine the susceptibilities of human beings. Why are human beings so vulnerable to the allure of the machine? What makes us so accepting of dehumanization, alienation, and commodification? Have we begun to feel more comfortable in a monologue with a machine that simply mirrors whatever we need and desire, than in a relationship that requires the uncertain and ambiguous give- and-take of human dialogue?

The “sterile corporate culture,” which manipulates human desires and appetites through its duplicitous marketing practices, is a variation of the com- modity fetishism that alienates human beings from other human beings and from themselves. Corporate culture, these days personified by the omnipres- ence of Donald Trump and his TV show
The Apprentice
, is a powerful force not only on reality TV but in real, everyday life.

When interviewed by
The New York Times
about what kinds of new technologies they would wish to see invented, most people reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of gadgets they had to lug around with them on a daily basis. “I find myself toting two cellphones and a P.D.A. and a laptop and a Swiss Army Knife . . . and even with all these tools I find I am unable to make the kinds of connections I want at the times I want.”
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This frustrated human being, John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, solves his problem by wishing for the invention of “the brain implant . . . Presumably that would be an ultimate interface between your nervous system and the larger accretive nervous system that you could switch on or off in different ways that would be constantly reconfigurable so that you wouldn’t have to upgrade it by buying a new one every six months.”
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Another frustrated interviewee, Donald Trump, echoed Barlow’s wish for brain implants. “I would like a computer chip that I could attach to all the brains of my contractors so that they would know exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it and at what price I wanted it. This would save me a lot of time and a lot of yelling.”
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If wishes like these could be granted, technically speaking, Barlow himself and Trump’s contractors would be called cyborgs. Cyborgs are human beings that have had silicon-based machine parts introduced into their bodies, usually to enhance their own powers but sometimes to extend the powers of their master, who wants to make them more amenable to his wishes.

Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the Universtity of Reading in England, made news when he became one of the world’s first cyborgs by having an active computer chip implanted in his arm. “The computer in my building knew where I was at anytime, so my lab door opened for me, lights came on, and the computer welcomed me with a ‘hello.’ ”
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Warwick, emboldened by the success of his first implant, attempted another experiment, which became the basis of his book
I, Cyborg
. Warwick

had his nervous system linked to a computer. The computer and he sent signals to each other, back and forth. It gave him a kind of extra-sensory thought power. He could switch on lights. He “could manipulate a robotic hand directly from the neural signals” he emitted, and even feel how much force the arm was using.
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Using his neural signals, Warwick could control technology on the other side of the world. He followed up with the “first direct nervous-system-to-nervous-system communication experiment.”
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Warwick could communicate with his wife (who also had electrodes inserted in her nervous system). When these implants were removed after three months, Warwick said that he and his wife felt “much closer, more intimate,” than they had before they became a cyborg couple.
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The cultures that breed and nourish the fetishism strategy did not origi- nate in the sterile corporate culture of the early-twenty-first century. They have been around for a long time. In the first chapter I called attention to Hal Foster’s commentary on the fetishism strategy in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life,
Nature Morte
, Pronk paintings. He compared the Reaganomic culture of fundamentalism mixed with greed to the seventeenth-century Dutch religious and political structure that simultaneously encouraged the imperatives of moral restraint and economic expansion. The fetishism strat- egy displayed in the Pronk paintings were an expression of those inherently contradictory social imperatives. Foster observed: “Pronk still life was asked to represent these imperatives simultaneously—thus its negotiation between order and disorder, godliness and greed, a negotiation that helps to explain emotively conflicted tableaus such as a spilled chalice immaculately composed or a spoiled pie exquisitely glazed.”
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When I described Foster’s “The Art of Fetishism,” I remarked that it reminded me of analogous trends in our contemporary Bushomics, where the interplay between spending and saving, luxury and frugality, acquisitive- ness and asceticism is plainly evident. In chapter three, I also recalled Foster’s ideas when I thought about the social contradictions of nineteenth-century Neo-Confucianism, with its oscillation between a moral restraint that was meant to eliminate desire, and a license for extravagant indulgences in sensual pleasures, especially food and sex. Nor should we forget footbinding, a writing on the skin that expressed the contradiction of keeping a woman bound to the hearth, while at the same time transforming her body into the very embodi- ment of lavish sensual pleasures. Nineteenth-century Neo-Confucianism, twenty first-century Bushomics, like twentieth-century Reaganomics and the economic acquisitiveness of the seventeenth-century Protestant Dutch gov- ernment, encourage a moral climate that allows human beings to have it both ways: exquisite moral purity on the one hand and profligate economic indulgences for the already affluent, on the other.

Thus an entire culture can be pulled in two directions simultaneously. We can indulge in the moral scrupulosity of a pro-life, anti-abortion position, but also simultaneously be drawn to an anti–birth control platform that inadver- tantly expresses cruelty toward the poor and misfortunate who end up contracting AIDS and giving birth to children who are likely to starve to

death before they finally die of AIDS. This mingling of moral scrupulosity and cruelty was vividly displayed in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film
The Passion of The Christ
, where the blood and bloodied scraps of Christ’s flogged skin were sopped up by a cloth given to his mother by a compas- sionate onlooker, who very likely assuaged her voyeuristic guilt by her act of charity, as did the thousands of moviegoers who “wept their eyes out” after indulging themselves in two hours of gazing intently at the unspeakable suf- ferings of Jesus Christ.

Having it both ways is not only an expression of the fetishism strategy, it is the sine qua non of sexual fetishism. As Freud described in “Fetishism,” the man knows that the woman does not have a penis. But with fetish in hand or in mind, he obliterates the genital differences that are so threatening to him. He reassures himself that the woman’s genitals are identical to his. “Yes, the woman does have a penis.”
Disavowal
, the psychological defense of having it both ways, is now thought to be one of our basic and primary defense mechanisms, prior to and more fundamental than repression, originating in the earliest years of childhood, at a time of life when the blurring between what “is” and what “is not” is characteristic.

The relationships between the fetishism strategy and the moral and ethical contradictions in most political and social structures are also fundamental. The contradictions have been there for centuries—and possibly for all of human history, ever since the first human societies came into existence. The fetishism strategy is intrinsic to the human mind. It is a powerful defense that can be evoked, whenever there is a need to exercise control over what is experienced as an enigmatic and uncontrollable force—a force of nature, a force of human creativity, a force of human vitality, a force of violence and aggression.

The fetishism strategy is also activated by fears of death and destruction. Unfortunately, when the fetishism strategy is enlisted to regulate and control aggression, violence, or destruction, it is likely to fail. The fetishism strategy is habituated to partnering death and following its lead. Disavowal, having it both ways, seems to be built into the fetishism strategy. Therefore, as the fetishism strategy attempts to regulate the full strength of potentially mur- derous impulses, it simultaneously gives some expression to these impulses to f log the skin, chew it up, cut into it, tear it apart, hack it to pieces, burn it to ashes. Although the fetishism strategy cannot always tame aggression and violence, an understanding of the principles of the fetishism strategy can be a “weapon” against the forces of destruction.

In the chapter “Writing on the Skin,” I alluded to some of the biological underpinnings of the psychology of the fetishism strategy. Its fundamental inspiration derives from our distrust and fear of the uncontrollable vitalities of the human body. Studies of self-mutilation identify the physiological sub- strate for the psychological need to control, tame, and subdue anything or anyone that represents an uncontrollable and dangerous aliveness. The delicate-self-cutter imagines that menstruation is her enemy. If menstrual blood, tears, feces cannot be controlled, they might leak out to cover and

demolish the world. Analogously, if sparks of creativity are not controlled or extinguished, they might burst forth and set the world afire.

Unknowingly, though not guilelessly, the “sterile corporate culture” plays on these elemental fears by developing marketing techniques that seduce consumers to purchase more commodities than they could possibly need. The psychoanalyst Paul Wachtel observed that most human beings “are aware that something is awry in the kind of consumerism their societies spawn. . . . What is less likely to be clearly perceived is that the ways members of our society organize their lives in pursuit of these continually escalating consumption standards are not always beneficial to their children.”
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Wachtel describes how a life spent in pursuit of commodities is a life spent alienated from our own selves and from those we love. Parents who purchase more and more consumer goods must work more and more hours to afford them. They assuage the guilt and shame they feel about their greed for material goods by repeating the mantra, “I am doing this for my family.”
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“The irony is that these very choices, which deprive children of the things that really matter in their lives, are likely to lead these children to turn to material goods for comfort, to define their needs not in interpersonal or experiential terms but in terms of status and the right material objects.”
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In all times and in all places, the greed for material objects has been an intrinsic aspect of the human experience. The material objects that humans have lusted after may have been beads and canoes, or jewels and furs, or palaces and mansions, or automobiles and yachts, or Pronk paintings and steel sculp- ture. But, now the greed is for objects that alienate us from human dialogue.

At the start of the twenty-first century, we find parents buying more elaborate and interconnected computers for their homes. In this way they can just stay home after they return from a day of work and still have a fairly full life. Their kids can have fun and enjoy themselves and keep in contact with their friends without ever having to leave the house other than to go to school—and maybe soon they can have computers that enable them to go to school at home. It is said that the computer will soon become the “heart” of the information age.
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It will make us feel as warm and cozy as those old-fash- ioned fireplaces once did. In fact, Intel, in collaboration with Microsoft, has designed a teenage bedroom “where the sleek all-in-one PC has become part television tuner, part video game machine, part stereo jukebox, part DVD player, part photo archive.”
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In the same spirit of insulating human beings from irritating and potentially humiliating human interactions, more and more consumers are reaching out to the touch-screens that have been installed at the checkout counters of supermarkets, automated ordering stations at McDonalds, airline and train ticketing booths, and movie ticket pickup stations, to name just a few of the machines that now offer consumers the opportunity to avoid “frustrating, hostile or guilt-inducing interactions with service workers,”
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and employers the opportunity to reap the profit benefits of the “robotization of large chunks of the service sector.”
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I do not wish to imply that technology is some evil spirit intent on man- gling and destroying the human spirit. As with the telephone and email and

the railways and airplanes, technology can foster intimacy by bringing people closer to one another. In a global economy, in fact, without technology, the physical distances between people would be an impediment to communi- cation. Within a modern household, technology,
used appropriately
, increases efficiency, and thereby liberates family members from everyday tasks like shopping for food and balancing checkbooks, giving them time to sit and talk, read to their kids, and enjoy leisure time. The problem is the way technology is often being abused. Human beings are using technology as a substitute for human intimacy. We could say that any activity that
substitutes
material objects for human communication and personal interaction is a symptom of the fetishism strategy. In this age of globalization, most societies are dominated by commodity fetishism. Material objects are being imbued with life, while the personal, human life is being stultified and deadened.