Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture

During the 1970s, fetishism was a key concept for the political aesthetics of modernist-influenced anti-Hollywood cinema and psychoanalytically influenced feminist theory. As fetishism, like a portmanteau, answered a number of conceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporary agenda of debate, in writing, discussion, filmmaking. The agenda included: willing suspension of knowledge in favor of belief; a defense against a male misperception of the female body as castrated; the image of femininity as fragmented and reconstructed into a defensive surface of perfect sheen; an apotheosis of spectacle in consumer capitalism; the sheen of Hollywood cinema in which the erotic spectacle of femininity contributed to the invisibility of filmic processes; the erasure of the cinematic signifier, and its specificity, under its signified. In these polemics, the influence of Brecht met psychoanalysis and modernist semiotics. Furthermore, an aesthetic that intends to make visible the processes hidden in cultural production could, by analogy, or rather by homology, point toward labor power, also concealed by the sheen of the commodity product under capitalism. This was an agenda composed at the closing moments of the machine age. Contemporary critiques of realism have drawn attention to the way its aesthetics were formally, even fetishistically, imbricated within an apotheosis of vision which assumed that an image represented, or referred to, the object it depicted. For feminist aesthetics, concepts that made visible a gap between an image and the object it purported to represent and, thus, a mobility and instability of meaning have been a source of liberation. It was, of course, semiotics and psychoanalytic theory that played a central part in this conceptual liberation, not only opening up the gap in signification but also offering a theory that could decipher the language of displacements that separated a given signifier from its apparent signified. The image refers, but not necessarily to its iconic referent.