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RE: [microsound] fetishization pt. 2
"The artist does not belong to truth because the work is itself what
escapes the movement of the true. For always, whatever our perspective
upon it, it revokes the true, eludes signification, designates the region
where nothing subsists, where what takes place has nevertheless not taken
place, where what begins over has never begun."
Thus for Blanchot, art encounters Being in a place where truth lacks.
Derrida attempts to reinscribe Heidegger's truth-value of the work of art
towards a value of non-truth, or more precisely, in accordance with an
economy which is not governed by truth. As one of the voices in Derrida's
polylogue remarks, the shoes give - there is, _es gibt_ , painting. The
work of art is a gift, prior to the subjectivity of the artist, and prior
to the circular economy. Derrida's intention is to open up art to a
limitless outside, to reveal paintings excess to metaphysics, in a way
similar to Blanchot who writes: "the work of art is linked to a risk; it is
the affirmation of an extreme experience." The value of painting lies in
its value as exile, it belongs to a "foreign" economy, not an economy of
truth, restitution, proper place, home, homeland, soil, _earth_ and
_world_, but an economy of the Unheimlich (uncanny). Heidegger, seeking to
attach art to truth by way of the classical metaphor of unveiling, must by
necessity accept the value of the fetish into the discourse of aesthetics.
Fetishism
Heidegger speculates on the value of uselessness, with the possibility of
the loss of meaning, in order to extract a surplus value and re-invest it
back into the economy of truth and re-attachment, in terms of what Derrida
describes as a restitution. This restitution proceeds according to the
movement of the _Aufhebung_, by which Heiddegger's argument seems to
sublate itself by its own bootstraps. To up the ante, Derrida hedges his
argument on a non-dialectical strategy involving the question of fetishism
developed along the lines of the hypothesis that the shoes in Van Gogh's
painting might not form a pair. If both Heidegger and Schapiro all too
quickly come to the assumption that the shoes form a pair, this move may,
according to Derrida, be one of reassurance, that guarantees a subjective
presence in and about the painting. On one side, Heidegger attributes the
ownership of the shoes to a hypothetical peasant woman, belonging to the
land, the _earth_ and the _world._ On the other, Schapiro argues that the
shoes are in fact Van Gogh's own town shoes (within a series of personal
objects). Derrida seeks to go beyond this quarrel, between the "two
professors," over restitution, over the true subject-owner. He seeks to
displace the relation of the work of art to its subject-truth, with a
supplementary reading, which begins with the supposition that the shoes are
detached from the subject (wearer, owner or even author signatory, and
detached-untied in themselves. The shoes out of service, not forming a
pair cannot be restituted to the subject, or put to use, that is, at least
not a "normal use". The shoes can only be submitted to a use which, for
some, might "run the risk of perversion." Derrida argues that Heidegger
seems to be only interested in the usefulness of the shoes, that is in the
hypothetical peasant woman wearing, walking and working in the shoes, in
other words, in no other "use" of the shoes but their "normal" use.(TP,
332-333) Derrida here seems to echo Bataille's challenge. He challenges
Heidegger (and Schapiro) to consider the shoes in Van Gogh's painting, not
as a pair, bound to normal use, but as two single shoes: in order to not
"exclude the question of a certain uselessness or "so-called perverse
usage."(TP, 333)
The Hypothesis of the un-pairedness of the two shoes, its destabilizing,
limping movement, is in many ways analogous to Derrida's argument of the
girdle (on Freud's 1927 essay "Fetishism") in _Glas_, where he makes a
distinction between strict fetishism as such, and what he refers to as
_general fetishism._ Rather than adhering to a strict observance of the
rule, Derrida focuses his attention on the margin of the Freudian text; the
appendix, the footnote; the point where Freud "broaches" the well known
theory , and instead turns to some "very subtle cases." Here Freud relates
the case of a man whose fetish consists of athletic support belt or girdle
which can also be worn as a swimming costume.
"This piece of clothing covered up the genitals entirely and concealed
the distinction
between them. Analysis showed that it signified that women were
castrated and that they were not
castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that men were castrated,
for all these possibilities could equally well be concealed under the belt
- the earliest rudiment of which in his
childhood had been the fig-leaf on a statue."
In this case the choice of the girdle as the fetish object was, according
to Freud, determined by a "divided attitude," on the part of the subject,
consisting of both the disavowal and the affirmation of castration. For
Derrida, this divided attitude constitutes an undecidability where
fetishism oscillates between two contraries: _at once_ disavowal and
affirmation.
This economy of the undecidable opens up onto the general economy of
non-dialectical economic speculation; or, in other words, a feint which
plays a game with dialectics. "The feint consists in pretending to lose,
to castrate oneself, to kill oneself in order to cut (_couper_) death off.
But the feint does not cut it off. One loses on both sides, in both
registers, in knowing how to play all sides (_sur les deux tableaux_)...
On this condition does the economy become general." "The structure of the
feint describes, as always, an extra turn."
Traditional notions of fetishism, including Freudian and Marxian models,
always regard the fetish as a substitute which for the thing itself(God,
nature, castration, use value, etc.); truth understood in the Classical
sense as _aletheia_ (truth as unveiling) the stripping away of fetishized
conceptions so as to reveal an underlying reality. The traditional notion
of the fetish, which always finds itself opposed to the thing itself, and
which could have no conceptual substance without the thing itself, Derrida
calls "strict fetishism." The restricted economy of strict fetishism
always has as its general equivalent (its central function), some
transcendental signified at which all the figures of multiplication and
substitution come to an end: absolute knowledge for Hegel; Oedipus for
Freud. In short, phallogocentrism. Strict fetishism remains circumscribed
within an economy of truth (the symbolic order, full speech, presence,
intersubjective dialectic, etc.). General fetishism or the general economy
of fetishism, on the other hand, resists a decidable, Oedipal
interpretation, and exceeds the oppositions true/non-true,
substitute/non-substitute, in an oscillating movement which is not simply
opposed to the thing itself, as its negation: "a certain undecidability of
the fetish lets us oscillate between a dialectics (of the undecidable and
the dialectical) or an undecidability (between the dialectical and the
undecidable)." (_Glas,_ 207) This oscillation resists reinterpretation of
the fetish as negativity, and the subsequent sublation into the speculative
economy.
It is again, in order to displace the philosophical-psychoanalytic
concept of fetishism, that Derrida invokes the possibility of the two shoes
rather than the "homosexual" or "heterosexual" pair. This bi-sexuality of
the shoes is further complicated by the significance given, by Freud, to
the shoe in the interpretation of dream symbols (_Introductory lectures,_
"Symbolism in Dreams," Lecture 10. Shoes and slippers, along with pits,
hollows, caves, boxes, and other objects which enclose a space, for Freud
symbolically represent female genital organs. On the other hand, in
cases of fetishism, the shoe almost always stands in for the penis, though
a particular penis, the mothers (absent) penis. But where Freud hangs the
symbolic significance of the dream symbol on a relationship of resemblance
(long pointed upraised objects = penis, hollowed out concave objects =
vagina), the deciding factor in the choice of the shoe as a fetish object
is always in relation to its orientation as regards to the mothers genitals
from the position of the young boy shifting his gaze upwards from ground
(from the shoe or the foot) to the point where he at last perceives that
shocking realization. The rules which provide for the sexual classification
of objects in cases of fetishism are not governed by resemblance but by
position, or in other words, the choice of the fetish is determined by a
process of metonymy rather than metaphor..
The shoe, however, like the glove, combines both types of objects, both
sexes at once, being firm and convex (and often pointed) on the outer
surface, and concave and hollow on the inner surface. Thus for Derrida,
interpretation involves a supplementary reading, a surplus of associations
must be put into play. Such a reading cannot rely on "ready-to-wear"
symbolic equivalences or "off-the-peg universals."(TP 268) Thus the
fetishization of the work of art cannot be questioned according to the
coded forms of sexual fetishism or commodity fetishism.
Then how does one go about supplementary reading? Derrida offers one
example: consider the shoe as playing the role of a detached big toe.
Opening Heidegger's text up to the early works of Bataille ("The Big Toe,"
"Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh," "Van Gogh
as Prometheus"), Derrida suggests a direction towards the reinscription of
the use value of the shoes, and the use-value of art, onto the general
economy of fetishism.
Bataille regards foot fetishism as a "phenomenon of base seduction," a
basic attraction removed from Oedipal designations and aesthetic
considerations, the "perfect indelible taste that, in most cases, leads one
to prefer elegant and correct forms." A predilection for ugly deformed feet
is what motivates Bataille's fetishist. The ancient Chinese custom of
binding the female foot, cited by Freud as form of fetishism, belongs to
this sexual/aesthetic configuration. For Freud this practice involves the
aforementioned divided attitude, consisting of both affection and hostility
in the subject's treatment of the fetish. Bataille inscribes this practice
within an economy governed by the relations of high and low. The foot
being the part of the body closest to the ground, to mud and dirt, has thus
been attributed a "burlesque" value. High heels thus have the function of
distracting attention from the low and flat character of the foot. This
stems, according to Bataille, from a secret horror of the foot.
"Besides, this uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this
is especially striking among the Chinese, who, after having atrophied the
feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance."
This type of fetishism is characterized by an extreme negation of use
value, where the erotic value of the the woman's foot is measured in direct
proportion to her inability to walk. High heeled shoes play the same role
in Western culture. Bataille's notion of fetishism is characterised by a
mixture of reverence and horror which links it to the practice of
sacrificial mutilation: Van Gogh's ear, the automutilated finger of Gaston
F., a series of detachable body parts and part objects, loved and revered
like a fetish.
Bataille's poetics enlarge the concept of fetishism, and provide a
concept of fetishism for which there is no truth for which the fetish would
be a substitute. Such a displacement of the fetish is so great, so
excessive, that the truth is forgotten. There is no longer anything behind
the veil. However, this is not to say that the fetish becomes the
non-substitutable thing itself. Rather the fetish becomes infinitely
substitutable in an economy beyond (and before) ownership, property,
propriety and the proper. In the general economy, art's explosive loss of
meaning is accompanied by a surplus of eroticism, according to the rules of
general fetishism. Duchamp's readymades stand as monuments which mark the
death of aesthetics, and point to a new eroticism. The work of art, like
Van Gogh's severed ear (for Bataille, nothing less than a sun ), is a
detachable fetish, which might be wrapped up in newspaper, and sent as a
gift.... to a prostitute.
Ian Andrews
Metro Screen
Sydney
Email: i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.metroscreen.com.au
Metro Screen
Sydney Film Centre
Paddington Town Hall
P.O. Box 299
Paddington NSW 2021
Ph : 612 9361 5318
Fax: 612 9361 5320