Every
criticism ultimately exposes itself as
an aesthetic attraction. And these
morsels are greedily absorbed by modern,
liberal society, and so any criticism
that was able to hide until then
immediately dissolves into supple
popularities.
Time to think
once more about
the fetish. For example:
Jean Baudrillard begins to treat fetishism as a sign of social value; the fetish object is seen as a symbol of the owner's social status. Here, the fetish is no longer an unreal object to which properties are attributed that it does not have in reality, but it is a means of conveying social values through material culture. For Baudrillard, the fetish is the site of a fusion or confusion of subject and object...
A
fetish (derived from the French fétiche,
which comes from the Portuguese feitiço,
and this in turn from Latin facticius,
'artificial' and facere, 'to make') is
an object believed to have supernatural
powers, or in particular, a human-made
object that has power over others.
Essentially, fetishism is the
attribution of inherent value, or
powers, to an object.
Initially,
the Portuguese developed the concept of
the fetish to refer to the objects used
in religious practices by West African
natives.
The theory of fetishism
was articulated at the end of the
eighteenth century by G. W. F. Hegel in
Lectures on the Philosophy of History.
According to Hegel, Africans were
incapable of abstract thought, their
ideas and actions were governed by
impulse, and therefore a fetish object
could be anything that then was
arbitrarily imbued with imaginary
powers...
Oh yes, having power!
Karl Marx already wrote in Capital about
the fetish character of the commodity
and its mystery: "At first glance, a
commodity seems to be a trivial thing.
But if you look more closely, you can
recognise its metaphysical subtleties
and theological quirks in the commodity.
We too have become commodity.
Later Guy Debord has found in the
concept of the spectacle the point at
which one can leverage contemporary
society.
The fetishism of commodities is a deterministic myth, designed to conserve the existing order by convincing the people in it that they can do no other. By picturing themselves as unfree, men make themselves unfree: their prophecy of powerlessness is self-fulfilling.
How can this paralysing picture be shattered, this confusion dispelled?