Cultures of Fetishism (39 page)

I have written several books on “the human dialogue,” a dialogue that originates in the intimacies of the parent-child relationship. Therefore, I am particularly disturbed by the insidious ways that the fetishism strategy is reaching down from the adult world to infants, children, and adolescents. When parents permit the fetishism strategy to intrude on this dialogue, they are, without knowing it, depriving their children of the emotional vitalities that make them human. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, the fetishism strategy feeds off the parental anxiety of wanting their children to have the best of everything and the most that technology offers.

For example, there is the Baby Einstein phenomenon. In the late nineties, as we approached the turn of the twenty-first century, there was a flurry of publicity describing research that showed how the earliest years of life were the most important for the child’s brain development. In a nanosecond, before we could catch our breath, the baby media blitz took off, creating an extravagant devotion to certain material objects where, once upon a time, parent-child dialogues had sufficed. Parents were induced, if not seduced, into purchasing videotapes featuring voices, music, and accompanying visual effects that were designed to capture the attention of babies and toddlers. Instead of playing with mommy and daddy, babies and toddlers could listen to and watch their personal TV sets, playing the “Baby Einstein” series, which now includes, “Baby Shakespeare,” “Baby Galileo,” “Baby Newton,” and the flashcards and puppets that go with them. And then there is “Right Brain Baby,” “Genius Baby,” “Mozart and Friends,” “Bach and Friends,” and discs with popular nursery rhymes in English, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian.

Only a Grinch would want to outlaw the Baby Einstein series. For example, there is the enchanting Baby Galileo, which features background music adapted for baby’s ears from Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Strauss and Tchaikovsky, and dazzling motion pictures of the sun, the moon, colorful plan- ets, whirling galaxies and shimmering stars set their constellations. This would have been quite enough for an impressive DVD. But, to make sure they touched all the bases, the producers put in the requisite politically correct, multi-ethnic children playing with some planet-shaped toys as well as a cartoon

mommy-baby animal couple and a cartoon mouse that gobbles up a chunk of a cartoon moon. In the end, despite the high-minded musical and artistic effects, Baby Galileo is predominantly a hodge- podge of conventionality.

The problem, however, is not with the contents of any particular Baby Einstein but with the way it will be used by parents. The series was meant to encourage interactions between parent and child. However, in my experi- ence, all-too-often Baby Einsteins are used to baby-sit the baby, who sits alone staring at the images on the TV screen while the parent emails friends, surfs the web, takes a nap, chats on the cell phone—and all without a twinge of guilt. The parent can rationalize that the baby is developing her brain and becoming a genius who will soon be able to identify the heavenly bodies and say, “moon,” “planet,” “constellation,” and “galaxy” when she points her finger at the nighttime sky.

Within a few years, the flourishing market for these DVDS generated another fetish, baby computer equipment. My neighbor’s two-year-old daughter has a special computer table with all the latest technology for infants and toddlers. In addition to the “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” series that she has been watching and listening to since she was ten months old, she now has a bunch of special video-games designed for toddlers, a dozen or so book-marked web sites, and a television remote control designed especially for her tiny fingers and rapidly growing brain.

Technology is reaching into the cradle, with specially designed mobile phones that can be programmed to soothe a wailing toddler. As Doreen Carjaval reported in
The New York Times
, “The target customers are children who may be incapable of a coherent telephone conversation but will cuddle with a portable phone to watch
Sesame Street’s
Ernie deliver an ode to his chubby rubber ducky.”
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Efforts to get parents to resist the baby media-marketing blitz by return- ing to the good old, tried and true human dialogue, meet with considerable resistance. Unfortunately, when parents are told that child development experts are advising against the purchase of these mechanical gadgets— “Children do best with maximum free play, maximum personal interac- tion, and maximum face-to-face time with their parents,”
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or, “We’re programmed as human beings to learn through interpersonal relations”
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— many of them shrug off these words of wisdom with a bit of the day-to-day practical wisdoms that the marketers of brainy baby gadgets have pro- grammed them with. Mothers and fathers explain their hesitancy to give up the quest for brainy babies, “You want to make sure you’re doing everything you can for your child and you know everyone else uses Baby Einstein so you feel guilty if you don’t.”
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What parents may not realize is that so-called smart toys with programmed music and programmed stories do not make a child smarter. They may, in fact, interfere with the development of intelligence. Toys and play help children learn. But the play that is best for children is the kind that encourages them to use their imaginations. Dr. Kathleen Kiely Gouley of the New York University Child Study Center questioned the smartness of “smart” toys. “You want the

child to engage with the world. If the toy does everything, if it sings and beeps and shows pictures, what does the child do?”
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If things continue this way, Rodney Brooks’ prophecy about the robot- human interchange might come true. After a few more decades of the already escalating collaboration between the robotic and biotechnology revolutions, machines will have become more like humans and, more disastrously for the survival of the human dialogue, humans will be more like machines, or more like mere attachments of those machines.

One of the additional symptoms of living in a social order that breeds so many varieties of the fetishism strategy is a side effect of this increasing robo- tization. Some of us suffer from a paralysis of the will. We are unable to take action against the cultures of fetishism that are infiltrating our everyday lives. There are many reasons and motives, both conscious and unconscious, that make all of us want to preserve the deceptive comforts of the social order in which we live. The fetishism strategy robs us of creativity and freedom of choice, but it also makes us feel safe and normal.

We crave to be the same as, if not better than, everyone in our immediate social order. We want and desire, sometimes more than any freedom offered to us, to be considered normal—which means to be just like everyone else. Even after we open our eyes and are able to see the symptoms of the fetishism strat- egy all around us, it is still immensely difficult to choose to be different. For those sorts of changes might make us seem weird—even weirder than the sex- ual fetishist who cannot perform sexually without his stiletto. The fears of being different and out-of-step with our neighbors are sometimes much greater than the desire to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the fetishism strategy.

Psychoanalysts can also be victims of the fetishism strategy, very much like the run-of-the-mill corporate executive and like most ordinary mothers and fathers. When I discussed the training of psychoanalysts, I called attention to the several ways that the fetishism strategy had infiltrated the psychoanalytic enterprise. I pointed out that one of the major impediments to psychoana- lytic creativity was the need for certainty. In that context I turned to the poet John Keats for some words of understanding. To preserve psychoanalytic creativity, and to transmit the benefits of that creativity to her patients, a psychoanalyst must be in possession of
negative capability
.

When Keats formulated the concept of
negative capability
he was referring to a flexible mind and a certain manner of negotiating the ineffable complex- ities of life. He said that a person who “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” eventually arrives at truth.
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However, “a man who cannot feel that he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything . . . will never come at truth so long as he lives; because he is always trying at it.”
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Certainty might be said to be the motto of the fetishism strategy. Uncertainty and a tolerance for ambiguity keeps life alive and in motion. They stand in opposition to the fetishism strategy.

Primo Levi intuited some of the principles of psychoanalysis when he wrote short stories and essays about the subject he loved and knew best,

“Chemistry.” Two decades had elapsed since my first readings of
The Periodic Table
, when Levi’s writings came to mind as I was trying to understand the fundamental differences between the silicon-based life of robots and the carbon-based life of humans and other animals and plants. I concluded the last chapter on robots and humans with his words about carbon’s intimate affiliation with the activity of writing.

Now, as I am writing this last chapter, some other words of Levi come to mind. This time they are about zinc. How satisfying for me, that what I believe to be crucial to psychoanalytic wisdom should be given such apt expression by a chemist who used his extensive knowledge of the elements on the Periodic Chart to enrich our understandings of the elemental forces in human nature. Levi’s words on zinc substantiate my belief that the “aliveness” of psychoanalysis or, for that matter, of any cultural activity, is synonymous with the aliveness of the unavoidable impurities of a human existence.

Levi describes how zinc, when it is tainted with the merest impurity, immediately yields its essence to an acid.
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Zinc behaves very differently when it is pure and untainted. When zinc is pure, it resists the attack of acid, warding it off with great tenacity and determination.
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One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. . . . In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed. . . . Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed. Fascism does not want them, forbids them and that is why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
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Have I been asking you to be pure? Do you feel the message of
Cultures of Fetishism
to be that you must resist every inclination to arm yourself against sadness and depression by shopping and more shopping?
Stop
shopping;
stop
enlisting the fetishism strategy every time you sense that you are about to dare a creative move;
stop
dressing up in stilettos and fetish fashions;
stop
buying computers, iPods, Blackberry notepads, and fancy up-to-date electronic equipment for yourself and your teenage children;
resist
the lure of those Baby Einstein CD’s and cuddling mobile phones that you want to buy for your infants and toddlers.
Toss
them into the trash. But, such demands for purity would be detestable, as authoritarian as the fascism of the fetishism strategy, whose primary aim is to capture the errant vitalities of the human body and mind, bring them under its jurisdiction and

control—and if necessary, stamp out every sign of remaining vitality.

The way I see it, resistance does not have to take the form of a sterile purity, which would turn out to be more damaging to the human spirit than the impurities it is trying to ward off. The resistance to impetuous techno- logical progress, the resistance to consumerism, the resistance to the surplus

labor “rush to the bottom” of commodity fetishism, the resistance to endow- ing machines with life and depriving humans of their vitalities, does not have to come from a purity of motives. In fact, this entire volume could be regarded as “A Plea for a Measure of Impurity.”

An understanding of how the fetishism strategy infiltrates our daily lives can be a powerful weapon in the battle against soul-crippling, social con- formities. And, as I have frequently re-iterated, we have another ally to assist us in this battle: human dialogue. The human dialogue is the heartbeat of human existence. Through the gestures and exchanges of everyday life, the parent transmits to the child the emotional language of his species and eventually the verbal language and symbolic communications that enable the child to participate in human culture.

It is this basic
reciprocal
dialogue between an infant and his caregiver that truly brings a newborn into human existence. The basic dialogue is a language of gesture and action. The basic dialogue is crucial to the learning of love, of hate, of joy, of play, and, in the human being, the acquisition of symbolic language.

I had thought that I would conclude this book with a few more pages on the reciprocities of human dialogue. During that process, I planned to remind my readers to do what they can, whenever they can, to foster the human dialogue not only between themselves and their children, but also between themselves and the other significant (and even insignificant) people they encounter in the course of a day. However, when I read over the last few paragraphs, I realized that I had been on the verge of creating an apocalyptic narrative. Just like the film directors I had criticized in “The Body of a Woman” and “Writing on the Skin,” I was attempting to resolve the vast human dilemmas I have been posing throughout
Cultures of Fetishism
, by taking recourse to the intimacies of mother-infant dialogue.

“Always watch out for the return to the embrace of Mother Nature, a device of the fetishism strategy designed to deny the traumas implicitly displayed in the film.”
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Our long and complicated journey through the traumas and devastations I have been describing would have ended in the milky simplicity of the mother-infant embrace. True, the human dialogue, with all its potential for goodness, begins in that embrace. But almost at once, that basic dialogue goes on to acquire around it an array of human emotions: joy and love, sensuality and sexuality, desire and longing, loss and depression, rage and hatred, violence and destruction.