Notion Of Fetishism Research Articles

El reflejo de “lo típico”. La construcción de productos turísticos en Chaco (Argentina)

Using the notion of fetishism, we analyse the construction of Chaco touristic products, delving into the social relations that are made invisible appearing in the physical shape of objects with value. We continue research initiated in 2012 and 2019 (referring to processes of commodification of Chaco indigenous handicrafts and culture in tourist‑cultural projects). We use the ethnographic method, covering ethnographic interview and reviews of official documents and websites. The construction of the products in question, by tour operators, state agents and non‑governmental organizations, involves an administration of perceptions that articulate reality and fiction. The fiction of “the typical” as something that is there to be shown is linked to products presented as the same after through operations of selection, naming, hierarchisation, demonstration, translation and certification. These operations, however, remain unfocused, thus promoting the sense of “the typical” as something that is there.

DOMINATION, SERVITUDE AND COMMODITY FETISHISM IN HAROLD PINTER’S THE HOMECOMING

The struggle for domination clearly persists in The Homecoming as it does in almost all of Pinter’s works. Because of the vague atmosphere, enigmatic characters, and dark, tragicomic dialogue and action, a single decisive meaning for the play cannot be identified. Many character analyses have been carried out on the play, frequently focusing on Ruth and her decision at the end. Moreover, critics have sought to read the play in the light of psychoanalysis, centering on the characters’ past and complexes. By adding a sociopolitical dimension to purely realistic or symbolic readings, this article attempts to analyze the relationships of domination and servitude between characters at the micro-level of the family structure through Marx’s notions of fetishism in relations between individuals, and commodity fetishism as expounded by Slavoj Žižek. With the help of Žižek’s ideas on ideology, a new layer of sociopolitical signification to the relationships held between characters is added, particularly that between Ruth and the men, which is seen as a parallel to the macro-level fetishized relationships in pre-capitalist societies and commodity fetishism in a capitalist one.

#Foodporn: Fetishized sharing of food and its images

Once translated into images, food acquires a broader meaning. Food is no longer merely something to eat, but to show, share and look at. The increasing amount of images and pictures of dishes on our social networks, associated with hashtags such as #foodporn, expresses this renewed social, communicative and provocative function of food. However, the exhibition of these images is quite ambivalent when it comes to establishing determined patterns of visual and social relationships with and between users. The aim of this article is to analyze and attempt to provide mediation to this ambivalence. The pornographic exposition of food images no longer presupposes a transitive form of consumption by the user, but becomes pure and self-reflexing spectacle. The images are obscene (Baudrillard [1981] 1994) and characterized by an excess of transparency on their object which abolishes any form of seduction (Baudrillard [1979] 1990). Barthes ([1980] 1981) defines this kind of image as unary. Pornographic images are an emblematic example. In terms of their self-evident objectivity, these pictures lack any punctum, any piercing sign of a relationship with or openness to the observer (see Eco 1962; 1979). Nevertheless, behind their apparent transparency, the images are always products of specific perspective cuts, and still able to convey mystery, meaning and involvement. The unary image of food is a further fragment in a series of multiple perspectives on the same object. Such potentiality is actualized in our (social) media culture in which sharing and continuous remediation of images and pictures of food constitute a complex storytelling of the object. This, in turn, fosters further participation by the users. The ambivalence between the indifference of the pornographic image and the involvement in the serialization of the detail is synthetized by the notion of fetishism (Baudrillard [1972] 2019). The social (and) media scenery seems to exemplify and radicalize a sort of commodity fetishism, in which social relationships between users are shaped and mediated by (social) media relationships between images of food.

La lógica de la apariencia en Marx. Sobre la interpretación de Clara Ramas San Miguel del fetichismo y la mistificación capitalistas

Las nociones de fetichismo y misticismo constituyen los conceptos fundamentales con los que Marx analiza las formas de la apariencia propias de las sociedades capitalistas. Estos conceptos tienen un valor arquitectónico en la estructura interna del proyecto de Marx de una crítica de la economía política. Este trabajo pretende exponer y discutir las aportaciones interpretativas abiertas por el libro de Clara Ramas San Miguel: Fetiche y Mistificación capitalistas. La crítica de la economía política de Marx publicado en 2018 en la editorial Siglo XXI.

Thinking Outside the Body: New Materialism and the Challenge of the Fetish

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

Der „schreckliche erste Abschnitt“

This paper reconstructs Louis Althusser’s criticism of the first section of Capital and the notion of fetishism. It argues that Marx’s theory of value is not properly conceivable on the basis of Althusser’s theory of science. Therefore, his rejection of value form analysis and the concept of economic mystification is a logical consequence of his epistemological positions.

Fetichismos da carne: consumismo midiático no capitalismo contemporâneo

<p>Este artigo procura apresentar os resultados de uma pesquisa realizada junto a estudantes de uma instituição superior de ensino localizada no interior do estado de Santa Catarina em que buscou-se observar através de entrevistas abertas e semiestruturadas como esse estudantes são afetadas pelo consumismo midiático, sobretudo a partir da noção de fetichismo inscrita dentro do pensamento do intelectual alemão Walter Benjamin. A partir da elaboração de sete categorias que envolviam a opinião dos entrevistados sobre as propagandas assistidas por eles, os seus produtos de consumo, a sua relação com a Internet, a representação da juventude nas grandes produções midiáticas, o seu conhecimento acerca do consumo sustentável e a opinião acerca das propagandas de cervejas e de bancos percebe-se que o fetichismo é importante produtor de modos de subjetivação orquestrados em modos de governamentalidades responsáveis por fazer do consumo a única forma de existência possível na nossa sociedade. </p>

The fetish of global competition

A number of scholars have criticised the methodological nationalism of the mainstream study of capitalist diversity for ignoring a global convergence trend triggered by global competition. This contribution agrees with this criticism but insists on the need to take the diversities into account in order to understand the dependence of capital on the geographical concreteness of living labour and its social context. At the same time, the paper outlines an analytical framework that sheds light on the process that makes this dependency invisible, hidden behind the convergence trend. This framework further develops Karl Marx’s and Evgeny Pashukanis’s notion of fetishism by drawing on accounts of state theory and economic sociology with a view to outlining the complex interplay of economic and extra-economic processes enabling this disguising. It assigns this process relative autonomy, and thus highlights another type of dependence of capital in its drive towards the realisation of surplus value.

EDITORIAL: Trials of celebrity

THIS ISSUE of Pacific Journalism Review engages with the theme of the dynamics of fame in a small country. In contrast to the dominant focus in the newly emergent field of Celebrity Studies on celebrity as a global phenomenon, the emphasis in this issue is on the interface between the global and the local; on questions of how the distinctiveness of national and local values fares when caught up in or of willingly imitating the circulation of global fame and influence. Accounts of celebrity often focus on the notion of fetishism—the complex process through which specific idols become objects of veneration on whose admirable or even infamous qualities are presented as emanating from the inner recesses of a luminous personality. The importance of this aspect of celebrity and celebrity worship is not to be denied. But there is another feature of celebrity and stardom that complements and energises the engagement of fans, the interest of the general public and the ambitions of the press and media to create and sustain a market for copy. Celebrities and stars are also totems that create a sense of unity, an imagined community. Individuals express and explore a sense of collective identity, define rituals of belonging, separate themselves from others and manage the relationship between society and nature—in the case of celebrities, the nature in question, is most often, human nature (Rojek, 2012, pp. 130-131). In the case of small countries, like New Zealand, the internal impact of Hollywood stars and celebrities on American popular culture is intensified by the fact that the celebrity system is a totemic import. Patterns and processes for rewarding talent and ascribing fame that have reached the acme of intensity in Global Hollywood, interface with locally situated systems of beliefs and values. This might be seen as a process of colonisation—and to an extent it is.

Baudrillard's Radicalization of Fetishism

Baudrillard's theories developed dramatically over his intellectual career of forty years, and throughout these years he contributed considerably to the thematic of cultural fetishism. Consistent with his conception of the consumer society, he developed the notion of sign-fetishism, and object-fetishism. These are both steps in the radicalization of Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, drawing on freud's idea of fetishism as a perverse structure. The article notes that Baudrillard provided inventories of fetishism at regular intervals in his writings, and that these remained curiously unchanging. He contrasts the structure of fetishism with that of symbolic exchange, a cultural formation which resolves fetishism. His analysis of 9/11 is shown to be a complex combination of elements of the theory of fetishism (without being named as such) with that of symbolic exchange. Although Baudrillard developed the notion of fetishism to great critical effect, he did not theorize it or apply it systematically.

Property, Community, and the Problem of Distributive Justice

While it is often taken for granted that the concepts of property and of distributive justice are capable of working together to generate norms which can enhance positive social and political relations, in particular the value of community, this Article argues otherwise. Relying on critical tools deriving from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s notion of fetishism, the author claims that the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice fetishizes the institution of property, and claims to distribute participation in society amongst its members as if this amounted to a distribution of so many objects. Taken in this way, the concept of distributive justice has no respectable content. What social justice requires is a means to ensure that people are not socially excluded, which requires each individual’s participation in the social and cultural enterprise. This sort of participation can no more be distributed than can life itself, and the realization of this point undermines the cogency of most discussions of distributive justice.

Nouns and verbs; or, Holloway's understanding of revolution

Change the World Without Taking Power has already been widely debated, especially as regards the political connotations of the book. For that reason, it is difficult for the reviewer to fuel the political debate with fresh considerations; but a short comment on the theoretical ground of the argument may hold interest, nevertheless. If the core of the book is the notion of fetishism, its starting-point is the scream against the horrors of capitalism: a two-dimensional scream that comprises rage and hope, and which is rooted in the experience of the evil of capital, and the projection beyond it of an alternative otherness. Thus, Holloway stresses once and again that the starting-point is an active refusal: a scream that implies a doing that points to the negation of what exists; doing not just as work, but as the whole movement of practical negativity. Then, the base of his theoretical reflection would be the 'scream-doing' and its movement against limits, against containment, against closure: in short, subjectivity. Although Holloway qualifies this starting-point as a concrete scream-doing against the misery of capitalist society, I would argue that this is just the rhetorical point of departure of his argument. Holloway does not offer any characterisation of the kind of negative practice involved in this scream-doing, except for a short list of empirical examples composed of some predictable collective struggles and individual acts. On the contrary, the actual starting-point of the argument is the most abstract and universal notion of human doing imaginable, but not the negative practice that arises from our active scream of opposition to capitalism. Holloway's real premise is the amorphous social flow of doing, in which 'past doing (of ourselves and others) becomes the means of doing in the present' and 'our doings are so intertwined that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins' (p. 22). (1) Furthermore, the material constitution of the 'we' who scream is the outcome of 'the conscious and unconscious, planned and unplanned, braiding of our lives through time' (p. 22)--not the result of the movement of negative practice. After posing this theoretical premise Holloway shows, by analysis, that embedded in the social flow of doing lies a power-to-do, 'a uniting, a bringing together of my doing with the doing of others' (p. 24). Power-to will be the implicit material substratum that becomes power-over when both doing and its social flow are broken by the separation and private appropriation of the done. It is the critique of this separation--of done from doing, of existence from constitution, of conception from realisation, of subject from object--that leads the argument to its 'turning point': the vulnerability of power-over; in other words, the dependence of the powerful on the powerless, of the done on the doer. However, in order to grasp the source of this vulnerability it is crucial to understand, first, that the antagonistic mode of existence of the broken doing is the movement of the antagonistic relations between contents and the forms of existence of these contents. Power-to; doing; done, are the contents dominated and denied by their social forms--power-over; labour; capital. In short, the whole secret resides on quite a simple point: that no matter how much the done dominates and denies the doing, the done depends absolutely on the doing for its existence. Everything else is an illusion, albeit a very real one. By this analytical path we arrive at the notion of fetishism which is, according to Holloway, the way in which the rupture of doing was conceived of by Marx. Then, the last theoretical step of the argument will be to infuse movement into the notion of fetishism, by transforming the hard approach into a form-process approach: fetishisation. In my view, there are some fatal flaws in this argument. …

Hopeful voyage; uncertain point of arrival?

Change the World Without Taking Power is an extraordinary book. It's a ship that weighs anchor in search of the contemporary meaning of the revolution; that clearly perceives the reefs confronting its adventure and, notwithstanding its uncertain end, advances convinced of its arrival in port. Our critique can only be, then, an internal one--in both the standard sense of the word, and in the more intimate sense that, in these pages, we'll be travelling together. John Holloway is right in supposing that the starting point of a revolutionary critique is negativity: the rejection of our daily experience of the relations of exploitation and domination inherent in capitalist society. This starting point restores us, damaged subjects, into the core of this revolutionary critique and, at the same time, demands of us a negative dialectic--in Adorno's sense--as a dialectic of the revolution. And this starting point also restores the notion of fetishism--in the footsteps of the young Lukacs--as the key notion of the Marxist critique of capitalist society. A great deal of the best pages in Holloway's book reflects on these notions of fetishism and negativity as, for example, he outlines the contention between the traditions of Marxism as critique and Marxism as positive science; or the difference between hard fetishism and fetishisation-as-process, revealing its revolutionary thinking. This is a good point of departure. But there is no point of departure, no matter its theoretical firmness, that can guarantee us in advance that we will reach a good political port. I think that Holloway's hopeful voyage, notwithstanding his capacity to navigate, has lost its direction and could take us to an unexpected point of arrival; that is to say, to postmodern politics, i.e. versions of liberal politics, instead of to revolutionary politics. The first reef that Holloway confronts on his trip is that of class reductionism. Holloway seeks to resolve the important political problem of class antagonism by avoiding reducing the diverse social subjects into one--i.e. the working class--and, at the same time, by diluting them into a multiplicity of the so-called social movements. His manoeuvre consists, then, of redirecting those subjects and struggles into a common, binary antagonism, between power-to and power-over, which fractures the social flow of doing in capitalism. This manoeuvre is virtuous for many reasons. One of them refers to praxis--unsuccessfully. Whereas his argument seeks to specify the nature of the antagonism between power-to and power-over, it cannot distinguish it from the antagonism between labour and capital, nor derive from this antagonism the multiplicity of social subjects and struggles. How to derive patriarchy, for example, from an antagonism between power-over and power-to, which cannot be discerned from the antagonism between capital and labour? Do the capitalist market and the state exercise their power through the identification of the working class as a class, or through the atomisation of this class identity into an aggregate of citizens and sellers of their labour power? The manoeuvre leads, then, to an undifferentiated aggregate of social subjects and struggles, with non-identity as a criterion for aggregation. Holloway associates these subjects and struggles with workers and class struggle in a broader sense, certainly, but his own suppression of any criterion justifying this association, malgre lui-meme, spreads fertilizer on the populism of postmodern politics. …

Je sais bien, mais quand même…: Fetishism, Envy, and the Queer Pleasures of Beau travail

In the course of filming Beau travail/Good Work (1999), Claire Denis met with a hostile reaction from the inhabitants of Djibouti who objected to the film's investment in homoeroticism. In more affirmative terms than those used by these initial respondents, this article performs a queer reading of Beau travail. Yet to set up this film as an uncritical celebration of homoeroticism is problematic, since the most sustained, albeit closeted, appearance of homoerotic desire is intimately entwined with envy. Spectatorial pleasure may well emerge in response to the exquisite, seductive beauty of this film. But the questionable relation between the aesthetic and the ethical dimensions confirmed in the translation of the film's title into English which links the beautiful to the good asks us to address what is at stake in such visual gratification. The film does, however, question its belief in its own logic, associating envy with a cinematic notion of fetishism to which it might usually be opposed. Considering relations between narrative and image to suggest that we are not (only) getting enjoyment from someone else's pain here, this article opens up existing film theory to the queer specificity of Beau travail.