Cultures of Fetishism (5 page)

Finally, having exhausted the anthropological and commodity fetishisms of the pronk paintings, Foster suggests that these Dutch still lifes are also fetishisms in the Freudian sense. They are structures that express both sides of an ambivalence. For example, the “Reaganomics”
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that Foster cites (and even more so, I would imagine, the Bushomics of the early twenty-first century), represented the ambivalent structures of fundamentalism and greed, moral restraint, and economic expenditure. With skilled craft control- ling and regulating the destructive excess depicted in the paintings, the pronk still life, at the same time, could assuage anxieties about affluence, expendi- ture, and economic speculation.
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Like the Freudian fetish, which both assuages castration anxiety by posing as a substitute penis, and yet also remains as a memorial to castration, in the pronk still life, “a ghost of a lack hangs over its very abundance.”
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Moreover, “the luminous shine on these still lifes is more faultily fetishistic: it recalls our lack even as it distracts us from it.”
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In the next chapter, on Freud’s “Fetishism,” as in all the succeeding chapters, although they depict very different cultures of fetishism and an immense variety of fetishistic arts and artifacts, we will be observing myriad reflections of Foster’s meditation on the fetishisms of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting.

Unfortunately, Foster’s rich appreciation of the fetishism strategy is not typical of most efforts to grapple with the notion that fetishism is a form of

cultural discourse. Since the
strategy
(or discourse) of fetishism has eluded many of the investigators who tackled the subject, the basic notion underlying these attempts has been to propose the several ways in which the
perversion
of fetishism could be enlisted to disrupt and challenge cultural norms.

In contrast, I am arguing that the fetishism strategy aims to keep human beings enslaved to cultural norms. Fetishism, as a strategy or item of cultural discourse, is a servant of authoritarianism. The fetishism strategy works to insure that the law is upheld. A central principle of the fetishism strategy is to guarantee that creative energies and vitalities are stifled, perhaps even murdered if necessary.

Since another crucial aspect of the fetishism strategy is masquerade, it is almost impossible to discern in any specific instance, or at any given moment, whether eroticism is regulating and taming violent and destructive urges or whether the death drive is insinuating its presence by painting itself in erotic colors. And this
uncertainty
haunts the pages of
Cultures of Fetishism
. As we go along we shall also learn to tolerate and appreciate the value of uncer- tainty. Certainty collaborates with the principles of the fetishism strategy. A toleration for uncertainty is the ally of the essential human spirit that opposes and undermines the fetishism strategy.

The fetishism strategy can, and often does, insinuate itself as a deadly, destructive force that opposes human dialogue, the heartbeat of human exis- tence. Each time a child comes into the world, there is a new opportunity to re-establish and preserve the human dialogue.Yet, it would seem that we live in a world dominated by cultures that would interfere with that dialogue. It is ironic that the vital importance of an infant’s need for human dialogue should be subverted at the very moment in human history when the com- plaints of human detachment and alienation are loudest.

As we plunge unthinkingly into the very emptiness we fear, something in us continues to resist. For the time being the human dialogue has not been silenced. Even the increasing robotization of human beings illustrated by Reality TV, or the increasing interference with the parent-child dialogue by mechanical devices that, all too often, substitute for human interchanges and human contact, can be combatted and defeated. This battle begins with the ability to detect the fetishism strategy in all its deceptive guises. So, let us begin.

T
w o

U
nr aveling
F
reud on
F
etishism

I
begin our explorations of the fetishism strategy with Freud’s six-page paper “Fetishism.” While this book is definitely not about Freud, and does not give much attention to
his
theory of fetishism, I discovered after many readings of his befuddling paper on sexual fetishism, that it has been infil- trated by the fetishism strategy. Therefore, “Fetishism” turns out to be a demonstration of the differences between fetishism, the perversion, and the fetishism strategy that is the central subject of this book.

As I began the process of detecting the fetishism strategy in Freud’s paper, I simultaneously began to take in some facts about Freud’s state of mind, dur- ing the two weeks in the summer of 1927 when he was writing “Fetishism.” The state of mind of a person who is suffering can be as much a culture of fetishism as a characteristic of the social order, or a cultural endeavor such as biographical writing, making films, or training psychoanalysts.

Over the years, I have read and re-read “Fetishism,” a paper whose for- mulations about male and female differences have always troubled me. This time around, though, I was guided by my understanding of the fetishism strategy. I therefore could detect how the fetishism strategy had influenced the tone and quality of these formulations. One principle of the fetishism strategy stood out with a striking intensity. As I will be demonstrating, what was meant to be a contribution to a theory of the erotic life, gradually, but surely, degenerates into a destructive aggression toward the female body. “Fetishism” is an example of the death drive tinting itself in erotic color. Recall the fifth principle of the fetishism strategy where this tint of erotic color can make deadly practices invisible to the naked eye. The erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin.

The centerpiece of “Fetishism,” situated at its dead center, is Freud’s basic theory that fetishism is based on an aversion to the female genitals. The “absence” of a penis signifies that these genitals must be “castrated.” The fetish, whatever form it takes, represents a substitute penis. However, the sub- stitute penis cannot erase the “horror” of the sight of the castrated female

genitals. The sight of the female genitals remains as a “
stigma indelible
.”
1
The fetish represents “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it,”
2
yet, “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.”
3
Thus a fetish reassures but also recalls the horror of castration.

Finally, in the last paragraph of the third page, as if to hammer in the point, Freud proclaims, “Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.”
4

The fourth and fifth pages are taken up with the exploration of some typ- ical fetishes and one man’s unique fetish of an athletic supporter. The entire last page is given over to men’s destructive impulses directed toward the bodies of women. Apparently these fetishists can only appease their castration fears, when they are actively engaged in mutilating parts of a woman’s body, or parts of her clothing, which might be snipped off and kept on hand for future sexual activities, or, at the very least, as with footbinding, obsessed with worshipping a body part that has already been mutilated. And, the coup de grace, Freud’s final statement about the anatomical difference between the male and female sexes, will turn out to be as horrifying as the “memorial to the horror of castration.” At the bottom of page six, Freud drives home what he has been saying with a memorable concluding sentence, a memo- rial, as it were, to the castrations he has been recounting: “In conclusion we may say that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris.”
5

The characters Freud evokes to illustrate his theory of fetishism are a prototypical little boy who presumably, somehow or other, catches a sight of his mother’s “castrated” genitals; two young men, analytic patients of Freud whose fathers died when the young men were children; and four more adult males—a man whose fetish was the shine on a woman’s nose, the gentleman whose fetish was an athletic support belt, and another prototype, a
coupeur des nattes
, a braid-cutter, and finally, a variant of braid cutting that afflicted an entire society—men who endorsed the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revered it as a fetish.

In the background, given full attention in the first paragraph, are a whole host of anonymous males, most of whom were at one time or another in analysis with Freud. Though each of these analytic patients recognized the abnormality of his fetish, he did not suffer from using it, or see it as a symp- tom worth analyzing. In fact the patients were quite satisfied with it, sometimes even praising “the way in which it eases their erotic life.”
6

The fears of the female body, and the mutilations that men sometimes inflict on women’s bodies to counteract these fears, are not figments of Freud’s imagination. Many men do fear the female body and they do some- times participate in the mutilation of women’s bodies in order to alleviate this fear. However, the manner in which Freud puts his argument together, and his unrelenting attack on the so-called castrated female genitals, reveal some of his own destructive aggression toward the female body.

This time, as I re-read “Fetishim,” once again my insights into the fetishism strategy have given me a better sense of what was troubling Freud’s heart, body, and soul at the time he wrote it. Indeed, now I must wonder at my earlier shrinking away from some facts that I could have registered more consciously much earlier. What I must have been aware of long ago, what I must have known but did not want to know and therefore disavowed, was all the information about the emotional and physical “castrations” that had befallen Freud prior to his writing “Fetishism.”

Four years before his sudden impulse to write “Fetishism,” Freud had been struck down by the gods twice, one bolt right after the other; in fact, almost simultaneously. The first blow, in April of 1923, would be bringing him the first of thirty-four operations on his cancerous jaw, the placement of a prosthesis in his mouth that made it almost impossible to speak or hear, and sixteen years of nearly unbearable physical pain. The second blow, the death of his grandson, killed his enjoyment of life and was experienced by Freud as far more unbearable than his cancer.

In June of 1923, as his four-year-old grandson, Heinz, lay in a coma, Freud had already begun to speak of him in the past tense: “He was indeed an enchanting fellow,” and “I have hardly ever loved another human being, certainly not a child, so much as him.”
7
Heinz was frail and skinny, nothing but bones and hair and eyes.
8
There was no hope of survival, and yet he would occasionally open his eyes and act and talk just like his old, charming, enchanting, clever self, making it hard to believe that he was really dying. Freud said, “I find this loss very hard to bear. I don’t think I have ever experienced such grief.”
9

Three years later, in a letter of condolence to Ludwig Binswanger, a colleague who had recently lost his eight-year-old son to tubercular meningitis, Freud does not immediately tell him about the death of his grandson from the same illness. Instead he begins by recounting his reaction to the death of his twenty-seven-year old daughter, Sophie. “That was 1920, when we were crushed and miserable, after years of war, against which we had steeled our- selves against hearing that we had lost a son or even three sons. Thus, we had been resigned to fate in advance.”
10
Freud was trying to explain to Binswager (and to himself, I imagine) that Sophie’s death had not affected him so pro- foundly as the death of her child, his little grandson, Heinz, or as Freud called him, Heinerle.

It was not Freud’s resignation to fate, however, that had made the death of Sophie bearable. In telling Binswanger about Heinz, Freud said, “To me this child had taken the place of all my children and other grandchildren.”
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The presence of Heinz had consoled Freud and helped him to recover from the death of his favorite daughter, Sophie. As so often happens when a parent dies, a part of her or him lives on in the child who is left behind. The clever, enchant- ing Heinz embodied those precious aspects of his mother that Freud could not bear to lose. If Heinz were still alive, Sophie was not altogether dead.

The full emotional impact of Sophie’s death did not register with Freud until Heinz dragged what remained of his mother into the grave with him.

In August of 1923, three months after Heinz’s death, Freud was aware he might never recover from this loss. To his colleague Max Eitingon, he wrote, “I am obsessesed by impotent longing for the dear child.”
12
He confessed to his cherished friend Oscar Rie, “He meant the future to me and thus has taken the future away with him.”
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