Cultures of Fetishism (4 page)

The second chapter takes a new look at Freud’s six-page paper, “Fetishism.” In that paper, Freud introduces seven characters to illustrate a few of his ideas about the psychological attributes of some typical fetish objects. However, the most important character turns out to be the eighth character, Freud himself, as he unconsciously and unknowingly becomes a victim of the fetishism strategy.

If it weren’t an oversimplification that overlooks the way in which the principles of fetishism operate in tandem, it might be concluded that Freud’s paper “Fetishism” best illustrates principle five:
The death drive that tints itself in erotic color. The impression of erogenous color drawing a mask right on the skin
.

Freud starts out his essay “Fetishism” referring to the erotic advantages of the fetish employed in sexual fetishism. He concludes his paper with a dis- paragement of the female genitals and a description of the Chinese custom of mutilating the woman’s foot. In the beginning of the paper the erotic tint successfully covers over the destructive aggression that finally gets expressed at the conclusion.

One of the things that fascinated me about this essay was the way that Freud sets out to describe the psychological components of the sexual fetishism and, in the process of accomplishing his conscious mission, falls under the spell of the fetishism strategy. Side-by-side, almost simultaneously, fetishism, the sexual perversion and fetishism, the defensive strategy that is the subject of this book, are expressed. Unintentionally, Freud’s “Fetishism” turns out to illustrate the differences between the two forms of fetishism.

Finally, I became captivated by Freud’s off-putting way of understanding the ancient practice of binding and mutilating the feet of Chinese women. After some frequent reading and re-reading of Freud’s bizarre interpretation of this bizarre cultural practice, after a while, I felt compelled to ask, “What did footbinding feel like to a woman subjected to this practice.?” How would such a woman regard the practice, which was usually inflicted on her by her mother and grandmother?” Thus Freud’s paper inspired me to become an impostor-poet.

The memoir presented in the third chapter, which pretends to be written by a woman named A-Hsui, has actually been written by me. I justify my imposture by claiming that I am giving a voice to a woman who would otherwise be unable to speak. In the concluding chapter, I look back on my rationalization and question it.

Each new exploration,—Freud’s “Fetishism” paper, footbinding, the making of films, writing on the skin, the writing of biographies, the training of psy- choanalysts, the fetishism of commodities, the designing of robots—opens up a new dimension or layer of the fetishism strategy, until finally the idea that we are surrounded by various cultures of fetishism will not seem as strange as it does now at the outset.

We will be looking into the fantasies of the men and women engaged in the engineering and construction of robots, those creatures that exist some- where in the twilight zone between living and nonliving matter—mechanical

“creatures” that are created to seem alive and human, tinted by their creators in the erotic simulations Derrida speaks of. They are designed to deceive us into believing that they are as lifelike as we are—perhaps even more so.

Our daily lives are permeated by the cultures of fetishism that substitute material objects for spiritual values, that captivate our attention with glittery foregrounds in order to push more troubling and potentially traumatic meanings into the background, shadows, and margins, where we can barely detect them, where they can haunt us invisibly and silently. My aim in writing this book is to bring these troubles into the foreground so that we may recognize them.

By the time you arrive at the concluding chapter, “Cultures of Fetishism,” you will have been apprised of the many ways that human beings, usually unknowingly and unconsciously, employ the fetishism strategy in their desperate attempts to alleviate anxiety, depression, and the other so-called mental illnesses.

Diagnostic categories of so-called mental illnesses, such as depression and anxiety, and acts of violence and homicide, are usually based on easily observ- able, surface behaviors. In this sense of substituting symptom for inner psy- chological meaning, they could be interpreted as examples of the fetishism strategy. The dramatic and vivid symptom of perversion, for example, pres- ents itself as an attraction toward some kinky sexual behavior and invites our full attention to that behavior, distracting us from the manifold underlying meanings expressed in the sexual acts considered perverse. The fetishism strategy enables these latent meanings to remain hidden; an entire history is enabled to masquerade as a detail, anxiety to masquerade as freedom, depres- sion to masquerade as elation, and hatred to masquerade as love.

These confounding masquerades, where masks of death paint themselves in erotic colors, are not the reserved property of esoteric French philosophers. In the spring of 2004,
The New York Times
weekly
Television
section opened with a feature story evaluating the departing TV series
Sex and the City
. The author, Dinitia Smith, interviewed several well-known feminist theorists who, by and large, went along with the obvious surface message of the alleged sexual freedom exemplified by the show. Fortunately, one of the feminists, Elaine Showalter, caught on to the fetishism strategy and how it had infiltrated the depictions of the lives of the four fictional heroines. For example, Showalter claimed that the heroines’ desperate need to purchase and possess Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo stiletto shoes and high fashion, high status pocket- books and “sexy” underwear, and suggestively seductive outerwear, was not in the service of a liberation of their sexuality. Rather than liberation, these purchases expressed the heroines’ responses to their unconscious anxieties about their potentially anarchic, chaotic, unregulated sexuality. According to Showalter,
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the high status fetish objects served the purpose of anchoring these women in an otherwise frightening “anything goes” social environment. In a social context where sexuality of any kind with anybody, anywhere is permitted and ostensibly celebrated, these status objects do act as fetishes; but, not as fetishes in the conventional notion of that term. Although the fashion fetishes

were consciously used by the heroines to enliven and enhance their sexuality, unconsciously they were used to control, bind, and regulate what might other- wise have been experienced as an anxiety-provoking, unruly sexuality.

The fashion fetishes in
Sex in the City
are examples of principle 2 of the fetishism strategy. “The material object, the fetish, is employed to still and silence, bind and dominate, smother and squelch the frighteningly uncon- trollable and unknowable energies of someone or something that might otherwise express its own ambiguous vitalities.” Moreover, the second principle is operating in tandem with principle 5. “
The death drive tints itself in erotic color. The impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin
.”

This is often the case with fashions that have an obvious erotic surface. The perennial stiletto shoe, which these days boasts the newly fashionable “toe cleavage,” is responsible for the deformation and mutilation of women’s feet. While some doctors complain about the irreparable damage done to women’s feet by stilettos, other doctors, one cannot assess how many, amass a huge fortune by slicing off those parts of a woman’s foot that would inter- fere with her being able to fit into these crippling shoes.

In the 2004 publication
Stiletto
, a handsomely produced, glossy, glittery extravaganza of alluring legs poised on many variations of stilettos, the author tries to be even-handed in her evaluations of the shoes that adorn the pages of her book.
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But, obviously she has fallen under the spell of the stilet- tos and would not dream of criticizing them. She dismisses the idea that these steely heels might act as shackles that hobble women’s body movements. At one point, she equates the recent furor over stilettos with the uproar that greeted the bobbed hair of the 1920s. As with today’s stilettos, the major objections in “the roaring twenties” to women’s bobbed hair came from the male medical profession. The doctors were fond of advising women that an excessive cutting of their hair would sap their energies. More horrifying was the medical warning that the shorn hair was likely to grow back on a woman’s chin. But none of these warnings succeeded in stopping the fashionistas of those days from bobbing their hair.

As accurate as the author’s analogies are in some respects, her comparison of today’s stiletto with yesterday’s hair bobbing is not convincing. Medical warnings about the stilted gait created by stilettos and the crippling of the foot that results from prolonged wearing of them, are based less on the fan- tasies of conservative male doctors than on some plainly visible facts. The feet that emerge from prolonged and constant wearing of stilettos
are
crippled. The compensatory tilted posture that is invoked as an effort to maintain bal- ance, generates all manner of aches and pains in the knees and thighs, pelvis and abdomen, and in muscles and joints throughout the body, and may even- tually create internal bodily ailments as well. Yet, even knowing all this and experiencing, more or less acutely, the bodily distresses the doctors caution about, many women, young and old, find the appeal of these shoes irre- sistible. They must have them. They worship them.

Much of the appeal and attraction of the stiletto heel probably has to do with the long-legged illusion it creates. In this regard, the physical appearance

of the stiletto-heeled leg bears an uncanny resemblance to descriptions of the bound feet of ancient Chinese women:

When the foot is forced to arch like a bow, it gives the illusion of being part of the leg. Thus, with the help of high heeled [lotus] shoes, what remains of the original foot becomes the extension of the erect leg. It is quite similar to the effect created by high-heeled shoes. Those stilt-like shoes and boots with heels as high as five to seven inches raise the body dramatically, creating the illusion of lengthened and thinned legs as well as shortened feet. More important, the raised heel alters the sudden break of the line of the leg, making the body appear taller and straighter, away from the dirt, from gravity.
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And it must be said that women are the ones who pass these traditions of foot-binding and stiletto fashions on to their female children. Men may be the foot fetishists who fall in love with these shoes and the leggy legs they adorn. However, it is the women who have an irresistible urge to spend a week’s salary on the purchase of shoes that bind their feet into distorted shapes.

Are footbinding and the worshipping of foot-crippling shoes the out- comes of being born into a culture of fetishism?

Since
Cultures of Fetishism
could be misconstrued as an exploration of the pathology of social communities, I want to insist that a transfer of terminol- ogy from individual psychology to social psychology is not appropriate and is, in fact, misleading. A society cannot have a psychological disorder. A society can, however, encourage and sponsor actions and activities that keep the cit- izens of that social order enslaved to falsehoods and deceptions. Societies do evolve and they construct cultural strategies that serve to perpetuate them- selves. It is characteristic of organized societies that they try to discourage any vitalities and energies that might disrupt or challenge the authority that upholds the social order as it is.

The cultures of fetishism I am addressing in this book are much like the prepared culture in a petri dish that incubates, nourishes, and breeds bacte- ria, and other living organisms, encouraging them to flourish and proliferate. The only difference—and this difference is crucial,—is that the cultures of fetishism discussed in this book incubate and breed materials that are poten- tially deadly.

The fetishism strategy aims to silence rebellion and perpetuate conformity. And while there have been other attempts by social critics, philosophers, and psychologists to address the idea of fetishism as a strategic form of cultural discourse, the fundamental premise of most of these writings was to focus attention on the sexual perversion, fetishism. There have been notable excep- tions, however, that manage to get away from the sex manual definitions of fetishism.

An enlightening example of this more salient approach is Hal Foster’s essay on Dutch still life paintings during the middle of the seventeenth- century. Foster captures exactly the spirit of the cultures of fetishism I will be addressing. Foster discusses the “pronk”
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(
pronken
means to show off)

paintings that depict lavish displays of objects like long clay pipes, gold chalices, fine porcelain platters, and extravagant food like oysters and crystal goblets filled with dark wine; all coated in a luxurious glaze of shellac that captures and “lubricates” the viewer’s gaze: “Often in Dutch still life, the inert seems animate, the familiar becomes estranged, and the insignificant seems humanly, even preternaturally significant . . . animate and inanimate states are confused, things are consumed by representations, once homey images return as
unheimlich
(uncanny), a whiff or whisper of death hangs over the scene.”
20

The fetishistic quality of these pronk paintings are even expressed in their official nomenclature, “still life” (
still leven
), “nature morte.”
21
But, as Foster reminds us, not every still life is fetishistic, or nearly as fetishistic as the pronk paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch.

During the seventeenth-century, the Dutch Protestant social order opposed the idea that any material object could have a spiritual value. They rejected what they called the
Fetissos
of the Africans and the crosses and icons of Catholicism as “ridiculous ceremonies.”
22
However, “As religious fetishism was suppressed, a commercial fetishism, a fetishism of the commodity was released; the Dutch denounced one overvaluation of objects, only to produce another of their own.”
23
Furthermore in this displaced fetishism of the pronk still lifes, the glazed objects appear caught between two worlds: “not alive, not dead, not useful, not useless, as if lost between the tangibility of the common thing and the visibility of the distanced commodity. And the pictorial effect is often one of deathly suspension or, of eerie animation with the objects at once chilled
and
charged by the speculative gaze fixed upon them.”
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