Even a cursory reading of cross-disciplinary texts on fetishism reveals that the idea of fetishism continues to be caught in its initial meaning.

Even a cursory reading of cross-disciplinary texts on fetishism reveals that the idea of fetishism continues to be caught in its initial meaning.

Namely, as de Brosses conceived from it, as being a pure condition of un-enlightenment distinguished by the “fetish worshipper’s delusion that is desire-driven natural things” (Pietz, 1996, p. 136). Marx’s famous idea of commodity fetishism is, too, over and over interpreted as a misconception concerning the beginning of value, for instance of collective forgetting, repression so when a matter of vulgar distortion that is ideological. In Tim Dant’s work, we find an illustration of these an interpretation:

Into the work of Marx and Freud the word “fetishism” can be used to spot misunderstanding around the globe by which properties are related to items that may just precisely be related to humans.

Making use of the term permits them for connecting these misunderstandings up to a pre-humanistic scheme in which spirits, often residing within material items, had been addressed as a substantial area of the ontological purchase around the globe. … To recognize a fetish would be to expose the insufficient philosophy of the whom revere it for they believe that it is effective at, by pointing towards the genuine, material, characteristics associated with the item and distinguishing its presumed capabilities as actually living elsewhere – within the “true” god; in individual labour; in arousal by an individual regarding the contrary intercourse …. An unreality to use the term ‘fetish’ in a realist mode is to engage in cultural critique; it is to identify someone else’s reality as an illusion. (Dant, 1996, p. 496)

Pietz likewise writes, interpreting Marx, that

… the individual truth of money is the fact that, as a method that has been a conclusion, it’s a socially built, culturally genuine power-object: it’s the instrumentalized energy of demand over tangible humans by means of control of their work task through investment choices. Capital is a kind of guideline, of social federal federal government. Its this truth that is political the chiasmic personification-reification framework of capitalist fetishism conceals. (Pietz, 1996, p. 147, focus mine)

But, everything we shall make an effort to show the following is that the dwelling of fetishism is maybe not because simple as a delusion that is simple concealment.

An illustration demonstrates the idea: the idea of fetishism as concealing, as an ideological cover-up that could be shattered into pieces by understanding of the true relations, is exactly the exact exact same concept that drives customer activists whom aim at de-fetishizing commodities through honest revelations, in other words. By exposing the genuine reputation for the commodity to revive a nonalienated connection between commodities and customers (Duncombe, 2012). For the customer activists, frequently self-proclaimed Marxists, as Duncombe documents, “the objective is always to expose the concealed, light the darkness, to really make the social ills, often hidden towards the center and top classes, noticeable” (Duncombe redtube zone, 2012, p. 361). Ergo, “the governmental issue is defined as usually the one of ignorance in addition to part associated with the activist would be to shine light regarding the darkness and expose the actual nature of things” (Duncombe, 2012, p. 362). The truth that the activists fail over and over at changing the specific behavior of customers who they repeatedly enlighten should already tell us that lack of knowledge isn’t the problem that is actual. Most likely, will there be actually anybody who will not realize that fashion that is fast manufactured in exploitative conditions of sweat stores? The idea that the activists skip the following is that whenever it comes down to ideology, not enough knowledge is usually perhaps perhaps not the issue (Pfaller, 2005, 2014); towards the contrary, individuals have a tendency to eat and luxuriate in items that are an outcome of exploitation etc., properly against their better knowledge (Kuldova, 2016a). More over, this “revolutionary knowledge” becomes it self easily commodified (think Adbusters) and offered to those customers who want to show their enlightenment and ethical superiority, therefore becoming yet another status expression, as Heath and Potter nicely documented in their guide in the commodification of counterculture, The Rebel Sell (Heath and Potter, 2005). Or as Mitchell argued, “the most apparent issue is that the critical publicity and demolition of this nefarious energy of pictures is both simple and ineffectual” (Mitchell, 1996, p. 74). Cluley and Dunne likewise re-discovered this psychoanalytic structure of “I’m sure very well, but still …” produced by Mannoni (2003) – even when they don’t relate to their seminal work – on the list of customers they studied, i.e. A structure of acting just as if one would not understand, or otherwise, against one’s better knowledge. They point away that:

… the typical customer currently understands just all too well that their day-to-day bread and clothes, in addition to their privileged luxuries, have been authorized just because of the presence of exploitative and unsafe working problems that harm the social and real environment. It really is commonly recognized, this means, that a thriving consumer tradition cannot but perpetuate ecological degradation and socio-political inequality – and yet – customer culture marches on, triumphant. (Cluley and Dunne, 2012, p. 252)

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