Cultures of Fetishism Read Online Free PDF

as Foster reminds us, not every still life is fetishistic, or nearly as fetishistic as the pronk paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch.
    During the seventeenth-century, the Dutch Protestant social order opposed the idea that any material object could have a spiritual value. They rejected what they called the Fetissos of the Africans and the crosses and icons of Catholicism as “ridiculous ceremonies.” 22 However, “As religious fetishism was suppressed, a commercial fetishism, a fetishism of the commodity was released; the Dutch denounced one overvaluation of objects, only to produce another of their own.” 23 Furthermore in this displaced fetishism of the pronk still lifes, the glazed objects appear caught between two worlds: “not alive, not dead, not useful, not useless, as if lost between the tangibility of the common thing and the visibility of the distanced commodity. And the pictorial effect is often one of deathly suspension or, of eerie animation with the objects at once chilled and charged by the speculative gaze fixed upon them.” 24
    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” 25 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. 26
    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.” 27 Moreover, “the luminous shine on these still lifes is more faultily fetishistic: it recalls our lack even as it distracts us from it.” 28
    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