Monday, November 10, 2008

Questions

Fetishism
How is the assignation of value in commodity culture potentially analogous to the object choice of the fetish?

Three Essays

I. Freud posits a definition of the normal beginning with an exploration of the abnormal: “The importance of these abnormalities lies in the unexpected fact that they facilitate our understanding of normal development” (7). What groups does this classification of “normal” exclude and what effect does this have on the applicability of Freud’s ideas?

II. “Whoever can solve this riddle [of infantile amnesia] would, I think, have explained hysterical amnesia as well” (41). Here, Freud posits an understanding of the abnormal as rooted in the normal, reversing the binary established in the first essay. How does this and other binaries (for example male/female, dirty/clean) function, and how are they variously destabilized and strengthened?

III. The section of the third essay entitled “The Finding of an Object” (88) suggests that human sexuality requires external physical supplement in order to achieve sexual satisfaction. How can this object, endowed with both personal and cultural significance, function like a commodity?


--Nicole

2 comments:

ThingTheory said...

In response to the first question, on fetishism, it seems to me that both the assignation of value in commodity culture and the object choice of the fetish are tied to some kind of nostalgia. The fetish object is chosen, as Freud says, as something to stand in for the penis a little boy once believed his mother to have, and does not want to forego once he learns that this assumption is false. In other words, he fetishizes an object as a kind of ideal, as a version of or stand in for something he wants to believe in but that has never actually existed. Nostalgia in commodity culture works in basically the same way. Objects imbued with nostalgia are the embodiment of a wish for some ideal that has never actually existed, but that the owner nevertheless wants to believe in.

If both, then, are a kind of nostalgia, it is interesting to consider where nostalgia comes from, what it is rooted in. In the case of the fetish object it is rooted in sexual development (or at least Freud's conception of it). What other sources can it come from? Is it necessarily related to some trauma in which we discover that something we once believed in is untrue? Does nostalgia come from certain beliefs or ideals of childhood that we want to hold on to and can only hold on to through transferral to an obect?

--Marguerite

Ryan Hartigan said...

I took a slightly different track in responding to you, by thinking about Freudian fetishization/ ‘standing in for’ / disavowal, and Marxist commodity fetishization. I suppose my immediate thought was that I’m not sure about whether an object can move from the Freudian fetish to the Marxist commodity because the two approaches converge, but to my mind, are undertaking different critical labors. To take Elaine’s maxim, what would Slavoj Zizek say? I certainly don’t have his panache or erudition, but I do have his book. In The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, 254–55, he says of commodity fetishism that ‘[T]he fetishist illusion resides in our real social life, not in our perception of it—a bourgeois subject knows very well that there is nothing magic about money, that money is just an object which stands for a set of social relations, but he nevertheless acts in real life as if he believed that money is a magical thing.’

Zizek’s fusion rewrites Marxist fetishism as Freudian disavowal, but in doing so, simply overrides the differing logics in play here. Although both commodity fetishism and disavowal are operations upon the function of knowledge, they seem to play out in quite different ways. Where disavowal functions, the acknowledgement of the reality is necessary in order to move beyond it – or perhaps, it’s submerged, but it has to be recognized in order for this to occur. But doesn’t the experience of commodity fetishism, as Marx constructs it, involve mystery? Doesn’t it revolve around placing the subject ‘into a primary condition of unknowing’? (Mulhern ‘Critical Considerations on
the Fetishism of Commodities’483). Additionally, disavowal is an argument about the universal; isn’t commodity fetishism a feature of, produced by, capitalism? I’m thinking of the way in which Marx places fetishism as a condition following the production of commodities.


--Ryan