Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture

Author(s): Laura Mulvey

Source: October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20
Published by: MIT Press
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 Some Thoughts on Theories of
Fetishismin the Context of
ContemporaryCulture

LAURA MULVEY

During the 1970s, fetishismwas a key concept for the politicalaesthetics

of modernist-influencedanti-Hollywoodcinema and psychoanalytically influ-
enced feministtheory.As fetishism,like a portmanteau,answered a number of
conceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporaryagenda
of debate, in writing,discussion, filmmaking.The agenda included: willing
suspension of knowledge in favor of belief; a defense against a male mis-
perception of the female body as castrated; the image of femininityas frag-
mented and reconstructedinto a defensivesurfaceof perfectsheen; an apoth-
eosis of spectacle in consumer capitalism; the sheen of Hollywood cinema in
which the erotic spectacle of femininity contributedto the invisibilityof filmic
processes; the erasure of the cinematic and
signifier, its under
specificity, its
signified. In these polemics, the influence of Brecht met psychoanalysis and
modernistsemiotics.Furthermore,an aestheticthatintendsto make visiblethe
processes hidden in culturalproductioncould, by analogy,or ratherby homol-
ogy, point toward labor power, also concealed by the sheen of the commodity
product under capitalism.This was an agenda composed at theclosingmoments
of the machine age.
Contemporary critiques of realism have drawn attentionto the way its
aestheticswere formally,even fetishistically,imbricatedwithinan apotheosis of
vision which assumed that an image represented,or referredto, the object it
depicted. For feministaesthetics,concepts that made visiblea gap between an
image and the object it purported to representand, thus, a mobilityand insta-
bilityof meaning have been a source of liberation.It was, of course, semiotics
and psychoanalytictheorythatplayed a centralpartin thisconceptualliberation,
not only opening up the gap in significationbut also offeringa theory that
could decipher the language of displacementsthat separated a given signifier
from its apparent signified.The image refers,but not necessarilyto its iconic
referent.
The influenceof semiotic and psychoanalytictheoryon feminismcoin-
cided, however,withthe wider ramificationsof postmodernaesthetics,its plea-

OCTOBER 65, Summer1993, pp. 3-20. ? 1993 Laura Mulvey.

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4 OCTOBER

sure in instabilitiesof meaning and infinitedeferralof reference.And just as

the aestheticsof realismhad a specificformalrelationto the economicsof the
machine age and industrialcapitalism,so the aestheticsof postmodernismseem
to reflect,in turn, new economic and financialstructures.The problem of
reference is, now, not only a question of the image and aesthetics,but of
capitalism itself.As industrialcapitalismshows symptomsof decline, finance
capitalismflourishes,and the advanced capitalistworld shows signsof re-form-
ing into economies that can create money out of money and produce surplus
value outside the value produced by the labor power of the workingclass. In
thissense, the success of financecapital over industrialcapital in the advanced
capitalisteconomies, where currencyspeculationcan be more profitablethan
the exploitationof labor power,raises the issue of referencein economic terms.
Money, which is firstand foremosta symbolicrepresentationof value, is now
also subsumed into processes of exchange that do not necessarilyrepresent
eithercommoditiesor theirproduction.
From this point of view,a Marxistapproach to contemporaryaesthetics
mightwell argue that the loss of referentiality in cultureis, itself,the resultof
shiftsand changes in the economic structuresthat herald the advent of a
capitalismbased on an electronicmachine age in which speed of communica-
tions takes precedence over production.Marxismevolved withinthe historical
contextof an industrialage thatwas dependent on working-classlabor power
to generatevalue and a politicalimbalanceof power to maintainthe supremacy
of capitalism.While Marxisttheoriesof ideology aimed to unveil the political
and economic realitiesthat lay behind the imbalance, the impact of psycho-
analysis and semioticsput the possibilityof actuallyarticulatingthe Real into
question. An economic,social, and politicalreal could no more findarticulation
than the Real of the Lacanian unconscious.All that could be analyzed would
be discourses and representations.But it is also cruciallynecessaryto confront
the cause that gives rise to certaindiscoursesand representations,and to bear
in mind thatthistheoreticaland aestheticshiftmightitselfreflectchanges and
developmentswithinthe materialrealityof capitalisttechnologyand economics.
The free-floating signifiermay,itself,be a signifierof changes in the economic
base. Marxist principlesthat revealed the determiningpower of the economic
over the social and the culturalare as relevantas ever,even as capitalismevolves
and convulses in ways that Marx himselfcould not have foreseen. Historyis,
undoubtedly,constructedout of representations.The question is: How many
representationsmay be related back, as symptoms,to the forcesthatgenerated
them?
It is in thiscontextthat fetishism,the carrierof such negativeideological
connotationsonce upon a time,mightbe reexamined.I wantfirstto argue that
the structuresof disavowal might suggest a way in which the difficultyof
referencecould be reformulated,withoutlosing the crucial contributionthat
psychoanalyticand semiotictheoryhas made to contemporarythought.The

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SomeThoughtson TheoriesofFetishism 5

point would not be to resurrecta totalizingreal, but to consider historyin terms

of symptoms,pointing to sites that call for decipherment-even if it may be
too hard to crack the code. Secondly, I want to consider how semioticsand
psychoanalysismight be brought to bear on history,to attempta theoretical
means of articulatingthe relation between representationsand their skewed
referentiality. This essay is not by any means an answer to these problems,but
rather a considerationof the concept of fetishism,in its differenttheoretical
manifestations,as a structurethat arises out of, as a consequence of, the diffi-
cultyof representingreality.Fetishismacknowledgesthe question of reference
withinits own symptomaticstructure.
The question of referenceis raised acutely,as contemporarycriticismhas
constantlypointed out, by the American cinema produced in the aftermathof
the Hollywood studio system.And cinema itselfnow seems more and more
antiquated and marginalized by the evolution of very diverse entertainment
technologies.For me, thissense of belongingto a past epoch is accentuated by
the fact that the cinemas I have most loved, criticized,and learned from-the
Hollywood cinema of the studio systemand the radical avant-gardistnegation
of its aesthetic-have both been transformedbeyond recognition,and nearly
out of existence,by changes in the materialconditionsof filmproduction.The
artisanaland the industrialwere mutuallyinterdependentin theirmutual neg-
ativity.Now, as the end of the twentiethcenturydraws near, both seem almost
quaint. For the cinema, in thisage of video and television,occupies neitherthe
mesmerizingplace it once held in popular culture and imagination nor the
central place it once held in the economy of mass entertainment,and, in the
age of the small screen, the concept of counter-cinemaseems, consequently,to
have witheredaway.
At the same time,the fascinationexertedby the moviespersists.As modes
of consumption change, from movie theater to home video and television,
intertextualreferencesproliferate.Hollywood cinema is a constant source of
quotationand connotationin the more complex culturalclimateof the electronic
media, in itsadvertisementsand itsrockvideos. Hollywood,of course, produced
the presidencyof Ronald Reagan, who both implicitly and explicitlyrepresented
the historyof Hollywood as his own historyand, thus,thatof the United States.
The past of Hollywoodcinema is thereforepresent;propped up on itsdeathbed,
it is sustained by the power the images of its heyday exert over subsequent
generations. All this is well known and is being confrontedas an issue by
contemporarycritics.As Dana Polan has remarked:
Mass culture becomes a kind of postmodernculture,the stabilityof
social sense dissolved(withoutbecomingany less ideological) intoone
vast spectacularshow,a dissociationof cause and effect,a concentra-
tion on the allure of means and a concomitantdisinterestin mean-
ingfulends. Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not

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6 OCTOBER

the sightof particularfetishizedobjects,but sightitselfas richness,

as the ground for extensiveexperience.'

Psychoanalytictheoryallows a distinctionbetweendisavowal,the primary

processes of displacementas a mechanismof the unconscious,and the endless
slidingof the postmodernsignifier.In all threecases, the relationshipbetween
signification and referencevaries,buttheconceptof disavowaland thesymptom
of fetishismthatis associatedwithit can containthe question of referenceeven
whiledisplacingit. Thus, in order to distinguishbetweendisavowaland repres-
sion, Freud makes the followingpoints:
The ego oftenenough findsitselfin the positionof fendingoffsome
demand from the externalworld which it feels distressingand ...
thisis effectedby means of a disavowalof the perceptionswhichbring
to knowledgethisdemand fromreality.Disavowalsof thiskind occur
very often and not only with fetishists;and wheneverwe are in a
positionto studythemtheyturnout to be half-measures,incomplete
attemptsat detachmentfromreality.The disavowalis alwayssupple-
mented by an acknowledgement;two contraryand independentat-
titudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a
splittingof the ego. Once more the issue depends on which of the
two can seize hold of the greater[psychical]intensity.2

In thissense, disavowalacknowledgesits own originin an unspeakable,and its

consequent displacementsthus both acknowledgeand deny a relationof cause
and effect.
The psychicprocess of disavowal,althoughoccurring"not only withfet-
ishists,"was firstelaborated by Freud in his discussionof fetishism.Through
disavowal, the fetishallows access to its own cause. It acknowledgesits own
traumaticreal and may be compared to a red flag,symptomatically signalinga
site of psychicpain. Psychoanalyticfilmtheoryhas argued that mass culture
can be interpretedsymptomatically, and thatit functionsas a massivescreen on
whichcollectivefantasy,anxiety,fear,and theireffectscan be projected.In this
sense,itspeaks to theblindspotsof a cultureand findsformsthatmake manifest
sociallytraumaticmaterialthroughdistortion,defense,and disguise. The aes-
theticof "rich sight" has lost touch withthat delicate link between cause and
effect,so thatitsprocessesof displacementworkmore in the interestsof formal
excitementand the ultimatedenial of referencethan as a defense against it. It

1. Dana Polan: "Stock Responses: The Spectacle of the Symbolicin SummerStock,"Discourse10

(Fall/Winter1987/88),p. 124.
2. Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis,"in The StandardEditionof the Complete
WorksofSigmundFreud,vol. 23, trans.James Strachey(London: Hogarth Press, 1964),
Psychological
p. 202.

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 on TheoriesofFetishism
SomeThoughts 7

is importantto remember,however,thatthe currenttranscendenceof the "rich

sight"aesthetichas developed out of the structuresof disavowalat workin mass
culture. Disavowal maintains,afterall, only a tenuous link between cause and
effect,while its investmentin visual excess and displacements of signifiers
produces a very strongtexturethat can come to conceal this need to conceal
the relation between cause and effect.That is, the aestheticof disavowal can
easily provide a formalbasis fora displacementthatmoves signification consid-
erably further away from the problem of reference. And the blind spots that
generated the processes of disavowal get furtherlost on the way.
Fetishism,broadlyspeaking,involvesthe attributionof self-sufficiency and
autonomous powers to a manifestly"man" derived object. It is thereforede-
pendent on the abilityto disavow what is known and replace it withbelief and
the suspension of disbelief. The fetish,however, is always haunted by the
fragilityof the mechanisms that sustain it. Fetishes are supremely culturally
specific,so, as Eisensteinshowed so clearlyin the gods sequence of October, one
man's divinemaybe anotherman's lump of wood. Knowledgehoversimplacably
in the wingsof consciousness.In Octave Mannoni'sfamousphrase,the fetishist's
disavowalis typicallyexpressed "I knowverywell,but all the same ..." Christian
Metz invokes this phrase in his discussionof the suspension of disbeliefin the
cinema: "Any spectatorwill tell you 'he doesn't believe it,' but everythinghap-
pens as if there were nonethelesssomeone to be deceived, someone who really
would 'believe in it.'... In other words,asks Mannoni, since it is 'accepted' that
the audience is incredulous, who is it who is credulous? . . . This credulous
person is, of course, another part of ourselves."3
Unlike Metz, who sees the cinema's fetishobject in its own technological
transcendence, feministfilm theoryhas argued that the eroticizationof the
cinema is a major prop for its successfullyfetishizedcredibility.And construc-
tions of erotic femininityare also dependent on an economy of fetishism.
Fetishism in the cinema also leads to Marx and to a consideration of the
aestheticsof commodityfetishism.The popular cinema,itselfa commodity,can
forma bridge between the commodityas spectacle and the figureof woman as
spectacle on the screen. This, in turn, leads on to the bridging functionof
woman as consumer, rather than producer, of commodities. This series of
"bridges" suggests a topography,or spatial mapping, in which homologies,
realized in image, then slide into formallysimilar structures.Connotations,
resonances, significancescan then flow,as it were, between thingsthatdo not,
on the face of it,have anythingin common. The formalstructuresof disavowal
create a conduit, linking differentpoints of social difficultyand investingin
"sight"as a defense against them.

3. Christian Metz, The ImaginarySignifier:Psychoanalysis

and theCinema (London: Macmillan,
1982), p. 72.

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8 OCTOBER

Feministpolitics,whenpickingup thepiecesin theaftermath of thecrisis

of the Leftof the 1960s,playedan important in
part puttingFreud on the
politicalagendaalongsideMarx.Marxand Freud.For mypoliticalgeneration,
feminist and post-1960s, thecombination of nameshas an almostincantatory
ring,and the desireto negotiatebetweenthe twosetsof ideas has, like the
searchforthephilosopher's stone,beenat once inspiring and frustrating.The
materialsforalchemicalexperiment havebeen mainlyimages,representation,
aesthetics,in whichFreud has tendedto have an edge over Marx. Now the
sphereof theeconomicand thesocial,coded as thesphereof Marx,is forcing
itselfonce againto theforejust as, paradoxically, theMarx-inspired regimesof
theworldhavecrumbled. Thisisdue notonlytotheever-encroaching economic
and socialcrisesgeneratedbytheright-wing regimesofthe1980sstillin power
in theWest.Collapsingcommunism received,perhaps,itscoupdegracefroman
imaginary of capitalism in whichtheimaginary ofthecommodity fetishplaysa
largepart.Psychoanalytic theoryneedsMarx,as echoesof the thirties, of the
fascismand nationalism thatdroveFreudintoexile,resoundaroundEurope.
Atthesametime,as worldpoliticsmovesintoreversemode,remaining Marxists
willhave to pay heed to the monstrous presenceof the irrational in politics,
whichappearsincreasingly to be gainingstrength overthe progressive move-
mentof history.
Fetishism,presentin theideasofbothMarxand Freud,has seemedto be
the firstand the mostpotentially rewarding alchemicallinkbetweenthetwo.
The obviouslinkbetweentheirconceptsof fetishism is thatbothattemptto
explain a refusal,or blockage, of the mind, or a phobicinability of the psyche
to understanda symbolicsystemof value withinthe socialand the psychic
spheres.The differences betweenthetwoinvocations offetishism are,however,
at leastas significantas theirsimilarities.The Marxistconceptis derivedfrom
a problemof inscription: thatis,thewayin whichthesignofvalueis,or rather
failstobe,markedontoan object,a commodity. It isinand aroundthedifficulty
of signifying valuethatcommodity fetishismflourishes. The Freudianfetishis,
on the otherhand, constructed froman excessive,phantasmatic inscription:
thatis, the settingup of a sign,whichis of value onlyto itsworshippers, to
conceala lack,to function as a substituteforsomething as
perceived missing.
In one case, the signof valuefailsto inscribeitselfon an actualobject;in the
other,valueis over-inscribed on thesiteof lackthrougha substitute object.In
considering theessentialdifference betweenthetwotheories, it maybe inter-
estingtoconsiderthesemiotic implicationsthatbothsetup aroundtheproblem
of inscriptionand the relationof inscriptionto a lost point of reference.
The concept of the slidingsignifierhas been of enormous importancefor
contemporarytheoryand aesthetics;even so, it is importantto acknowledge

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SomeThoughts
on TheoriesofFetishism 9

that contemporaryAmerican popular culturecan, and has, embraced thisslid-

ing to lose, to a second degree, a relation to its historyand its collectivity.
To
analyze the fetishisms conceptualized by Marx and Freud is not to deny the
place of the signifier,but to returnto the question of referencethatboth imply.
The discussion that followsis an experiment.It is posited on the way in
which,despite theirdifferences,the two concepts of fetishismtrace a series of
semioticproblems.And these semioticproblemsreturnto the Real, as conceived
by Lacan as the "unspeakable," the stuffof unconscious that surpasses expres-
sion. The question is whetherthis"stuff"may also be presentwithinthe social
collectiveand, if so, how it may be deciphered. The point is not to claim that
what is unspeakable may be spoken, but to decipher symptomsthat mightfind
expression in popular culture. The cultural analyst may perhaps only draw
attentionto these sites and attemptto formulatemeans that mightmake them
visible while recognizing that they may not be accessible to the language of
consciousness in ideal terms.This experimentdoes not aim to come up with
any new formulationbut ratherto argue the case forthe aestheticsof disavowal
as opposed to those assumed by postmodernism.Charles S. Pierce's triad-the
index, the icon, and the symbol-is the startingpoint for a return to Marx
withinthe contextof contemporarysemiotictheory.
For Marx, the value of a commodityresides in the labor power of its
producer. If thislabor power could ever inscribeitselfindexicallyon the com-
modityit produces, if it could leave a tangiblemark of the time and skilltaken
in production, there would be no problem. But the index, the sign based on
directimprint,fails.Value has to be establishedby exchange. Marx shows how
value can be marked by the equation of differentcommoditiesof equal value.
One commodityacts as a mirror,reflectingand thus expressing the value of
the otheror, indeed, of as manyothersas it takesforthe equivalence to balance.
This stage is analogous to the Piercian icon. Slavoj Zi2ek has pointed out that
this process is analogous to Lacan's mirrorphase, in whichthe two sides of the
exchange literallyhave to representeach other.4While value may be inscribed
throughthis reflectiveprocess,it depends on the literalpresence of the goods,
a barter that has to be repeated as often as exchange takes place. Complex
economic systems,with wide-scale production,exchange, and circulation,de-
veloped a means of expressingequivalence througha generalized sign system:
money. The exchange of money takes place on the level of the symbolic,and
the expression of value acquires the abstractand flexiblequality of language.
Not only does money,as the sign of value, detach itselffromthe literalnessof
object exchange, but it also facilitatesthe finalerasure of labor power as the
primarysource of value. The referent,as it were, shiftsaway fromthe produc-
tion process toward circulationand the market,where the commodityemerges

4. See Slavoj Zifek,The SublimeObjectofIdeology(London: Verso, 1990).

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10 OCTOBER

and circulateswith an apparentlyautonomous value attached to it. In Marx's

terms,this appearance of self-generating value gives rise to commodityfetish-
ism, the disavowal,thatis, of locatingthe source of value in labor power. And,
at the same time,a commodity'smarketsuccess depends on the erasure of the
marks of production-any trace of indexicality,the grime of the factory,the
mass-moldingof the machine,and, mostof all, the exploitationof the worker.
It instead presentsthe marketwitha seductivesheen, competingto be desired.
While money appears as a sophisticated,abstract,and symbolicmeans of ex-
change, capitalismresurrectsthe commodityas image. As Marx says, in what
are probablythe most frequentlyquoted sentencesof Capital:
In order,therefore,to findan analogy,we musthave recourseto the
mist-envelopedregions of the religious world. In that world the
productionsof the human brain appear as independent beings en-
dowed with life,and enteringinto relationsboth withone another
and the human race. So it is in the world of commoditieswith the
products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishismwhich attaches
itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as
commodities,and whichis thereforeinseparablefromthe production
of commodities.5

Here is a perfectparadigm of the disavowal of knowledge in favor of

belief.An abstractsystempiggybacksitselfonto a returnto the image,disavow-
ing not only the origin of value but the processes of symbolizationthat have
broughtit into being. Commodityfetishismtriumphsas spectacle.As spectacle,
the object becomes image and beliefand is secured by an erotic,ratherthan a
religious, aura. In her book The Dialecticsof Seeing,about Walter Benjamin's
Arcades project,Susan Buck-Morssdescribeshis perceptionof its primal stag-
ing:
For Benjamin ... the keyto the new urban phantasmagoriawas not
so much the commodity-in-the-market as the commodity-on-display,
where exchange value no less than use value lost practicalmeaning,
and purely representationalvalue came to the fore. Everythingde-
sirable,fromsex to social status,could be transformedintocommod-
itiesas fetishes-on-displaythatheld the crowd enthralledeven when
personal possession was far beyond theirreach.6
Producersbecome consumers.And the invisibility of the workers'labor is
just as essential for the as
commodity'sdesirability the of the artisan's
visibility
labor is fora craftobject.Anyindexicaltraceof the produceror the production

5. Karl Marx, Capital,vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages PublishingHouse, 1961), p. 72.

6. Susan Buck-Morss,TheDialecticsofSeeing:WalterBenjaminand theArcadesProject(Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1989), pp. 81-82.

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 on TheoriesofFetishism
SomeThoughts 11

process is wiped out, in a strange reenactmentof the failure of the workers'

labor power to stamp itselfon its products as value. Any ghostlypresence of
labor that might haunt the commodityis canceled by the absolute pristine
newness and the never-touched-by-hand packaging that envelops it. And the
great intellectualachievement of capitalism,the organization of an economic
as
system a symbolicsystem,can continue in its own interests.The commodity
fetishmasks somethingthat is disturbingand secret for a particularform of
economic exploitationand combines the topographicalwiththe semiotic.It re-
presentsthe logic of symbolicexchange as an imaginaryinvestmentin object as
such. And thatobject thenbecomes endowed witha phantasmagoricalotherness
of hidden "something"behind its surfaceappearance. Surface and depth. It is
thisdichotomythat psychoanalysisand semioticshave challenged withthe con-
cept of displacement.And it is here, in topographicalimaginaries,that homo-
logies between the otherwiseincompatibleMarxistand Freudian concepts may
emerge.
There is nothingintrinsicallyfetishistic, as it were, about the commodity
in Marx's theory. While establishingvalue may be a complex process in a
sophisticated systemof circulationand exchange, and it may be difficultto
decipher the place of labor power as the source of value, fetishismof the
commodity,in Marx's argument,has a politicalimplicationparticularto capi-
talism and those societiesthat come under its sway.Commodityfetishismalso
bears witnessto the persistentallure thatimages and thingshave forthe human
imaginationand the pleasure to be gained frombeliefin imaginarysystemsof
representation.There is no need to claim a psychoanalyticexplanation for this
phenomenon. The point of interestlies rather in the way that objects and
images, in their spectacular manifestations,figurein the process of disavowal,
soaking up semioticsignificanceand settingup elisions of affect.
Freud, in his shortessay "Fetishism,"elaborated his concept fromthe male
child's misperceptionof the female body as lackingthe male sexual organ and
thereforeperceivingit as a source of castrationanxiety.The psychicsequence
of events that followare enacted throughthe processes of disavowal, substitu-
tion,and marking.The fetishobject acts as a "sign" in thatit substitutesfor the
thingthoughtto be missing.The substitutealso functionsas a mask, covering
over and disavowing the traumaticsight of nothing, and thus constructing
phantasmaticspace, a surfaceand whatthe surfacemightconceal. This intricate
confusion of the semioticand the topographical,so importantto the workings
of the unconscious,has yetanotherdimension.For Freud, the fetishobject also
commemorates.It representsa memorial,markingthe point of lack (for which
it both masks and substitutes)and ensuringthatthe fetishstructure,even in its
fixationon belief in the female penis, includes, through its very presence, a
residual knowledge of its origin. It is in this sense that the fetishfails to lose
touch withitsoriginaltraumaticreal and continuesto referback to the moment
in time to which it bears witness,to its own historicaldimension.

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12 OCTOBER

It is well known that the fetishveryoften attractsthe gaze. In popular

imagination,it glitters.It has to hold the fetishist's eyes fixedon the seduction
of belief to guard against the encroachmentof knowledge.This investmentin
surface appearance enhances the phantasmaticspace of the fetishand sets up
a structurein which object fixationcan easily translateinto image. The sexual
fetishmasks its originsin an excess of image. But while the symbolicsystemof
moneyvalue is essentialto the appearance of the commodityfetishas spectacle,
the Freudian fetishis constructedpreciselyto disavow the symbolicsystemat
stake in sexual difference.And while the Freudian fetishincludes a trace of
indexicalityin its functionas "memorial,"the consumerof commoditiesis not
knownto whisper,"I know verywell,but all the same . . ." However,the erotic
power of the sexual fetishcan, enabled, perhaps bythe homologoustopograph-
ical structuresof the two types of fetish-both split between spectacle and
disavowal-overflow onto and enhance thecommodity.Filmtheory,particularly
feministfilmtheory,has recentlybegun to examine these elisionsand conden-
sations.
The visibilityor invisibility of the production process has had a crucial
place in filmtheory debates. In an extensionof the Marxistmodel, it is logical
that Hollywood, the Detroit of cinema, would evolve its characteristicstyle
around the erasure of its own mechanics of production.The Hollywood film,
as a commodity, also emerged into the marketplaceas a self-generatedobject
of fascination,erasing, during the high days of genre, stars,and the studio
system,even any easily identifiable directorialsignature.And the spectacular
attributesof the cinema fuse into a beautifullypolished surfaceon the screen.
It is not surprising that an interestin Brechtianforegroundingof the production
processor a Vertovianformalism heralded a politicallybased desire to demystify
the magical sheen of the screen. The aestheticsof the 1960s and '70s avant-
garde were organized around the visiblepresence of an artisanalauthor and
acknowledgmentof cinema's mechanical processes. But cinema is a systemof
production of meaning, above and beyond a mechanical process of image
generation,and one that has a unique abilityto play withthe suppression of
knowledge in favorof belief.The process of productiongives birthto images,
while the constructionof the image gives birth to fascination.Feministfilm
theoryhas argued that cinema findsits most perfectfetishistic object, though
not its only one, in the image of woman.

While Freudian analysesof fetishismin cinema have a long historyin film

theory,one strandof the argumentis particularlyrelevanthere. The image of
woman on the screen achieves a particularspectacular intensitypartlyas a
result,once again, of a homologyof structure.Justas an elaborate and highly
dressed-up,made-up,appearance envelopsthemoviestarin "surface,"
artificial,

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SomeThoughts
on TheoriesofFetishism 13

so does her surface supply a glossy frontfor the cinema, holding the eye in
fascinateddistractionaway fromits mechanicsof production.This fragilecar-
apace shares the phantasmaticspace of the fetishitself,maskingthe site of the
wound, covering lack with beauty. In the horror genre, it can crack open to
reveal itsbinaryoppositionwhen,forinstance,a beautifulvampiredisintegrates
into ancient slime. In filmnoir, the seductive powers of the heroine's beauty
mask her destructiveand castratingpowers. At the same time, this duality of
structurefacilitatesdisplacementsso that images and ideas that are only resid-
ually connected-fascination withwoman as surface and cinema as surface-
can slide together,closing the gap between them like automatic doors. The
topographyof the phantasmaticspace acts as a conduitforshiftsin signification.
It is this sexualityof surface,a sexualitythat displaces a deep-seated anxiety
about the female body, that feministfilmtheoristshave recentlyanalyzed as a
bridge between the screen and the marketplace,where woman, the consumer
par excellence,also consumes commoditiesto constructher own sexual surface
into an armor of fetishisticdefense against the taboos of the feminineupon
which patriarchydepends.
These kinds of linksfirstcame to myattentionwhen I was workingon the
filmsof Jean-Luc Godard, particularlyin the period of his work leading up to
1968 and, most particularly, his film2 or3 ThingsI KnowaboutHer. The heroine
of thisfilmis an average working-class housewifewho takesto casual prostitution
in order to acquire the consumer goods associated with the needs of a late
capitalistlife-style.Woman as consumer and consumed is not a new concept,
and Godard, of course, uses prostitutionas a metaphorquite widelyin his work.
But I was struckby the analogy thatGodard seemed to suggest,simultaneously,
as it were, misogynistand anticapitalist,betweenfemininity and commoditiesas
seduction and enigma, with both premised on an appearance fashioned as
desirable,and implyingand concealingan elusive,unknowableessence. Godard
combines an ancient, romanticmystiqueof the feminine(thefemme fatale,the
Sphinx, the Mona Lisa) with a Marxist,materialistinterestin revealing the
functionof the commodityin modern life. This dualism also reflectsGodard's
passionate and conflictedrelationshipto the cinema-as both a site of fascina-
tion and the eroticand somethingto be exposed as mystification and delusion.
For Godard the fascinationof the cinema had been, above all, epitomized by
Hollywood cinema.
There is an intrinsicinterestin an overlap betweenthe politicsof sexuality,
the politicsof fetishizedcommodityconsumption,and the politicsof cinematic
representation.And thereare obvious waysin whichthe female movie star sets
up a possible pointof conjuncturebetweenthe figureon the screenas fetishized
commodityand her functionas signifierin a complex, social discourse of sex-
uality.One privilegedimage, such as that of MarilynMonroe, who stilltoday
representsan apex of the star system,may epitomize a constructionof female
glamour as a fantasyspace. Its investmentin surfaceis so intensethat it seems

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14 OCTOBER

to suggest that the surface conceals "somethingelse." The question, then, is

what thissomethingelse mightbe, and to whatextentthe surfacesheen guards
against nameless anxietiesassociated withthe femalebody outside its glamour
mode, whichare then repressed,leading to an even more intensereinvestment
in the fascinationof surface. Marilyn'sown form of cosmetic appearance is
particularlyfascinatingbecause it is so artificial,so masklike,thatshe manages
to use her performanceto, as it were, comment on, draw attentionto, or
foregroundboth its constructednessand itsvulnerability and instability.
When AndyWarholdid his Marilynseries,afterher death in August 1962,
he broughtto bear on her image qualitiesthathe had explored in his workon
the commoditieshe elevated into icons of the Americanway of life.The image
of the movie star,mass-producedand infinitely repeatable for consumption,is
identifiedby a given look, like a trademark,thatmasquerades as value. Warhol
illuminatestwo aspects, in particular,of the mythologicalqualityof Marilyn's
face. First,he used its commodityaspect,reducingher featuresinto a minimal
caricature that could be stamped onto a surface,and replacing the pseudo-
natural cosmeticswithhighlystylizedand nonlocal color,whichplayed on the
cosmeticof makeup and thatof paint or print.In juxtapositionwithhis other
paintings of commodities,Marilyn'simage highlightsthe surface nature of
commodityappearance itself,and the brightlyglittering, blond surface is res-
onant with"value" and withitsenigma. But in, forinstance,his MarilynDiptych,
he hintsat the second qualitythat her face evokes. The masquerade is fragile
and vulnerable,and the surfacestartsto crackas the printingprocessslips and
her features distortand decay. The other side of the femininemasquerade
seeps throughinto visibility. In thiswork,Warhol bringstogetherthe markof
the print,the signifier, subjectof modernistdiscoveryand unveiling,with
the
the topographyof femininesurface and its underside, which suggestsdeath
and decay. This hintof somethingtroublingand concealed rubs off,as it were,
onto his commodityimages. The trademarksof capitalism,like Campbell's soup
or Coca-Cola, conceal the factthatthese objectsare produced in factoriesand
by workers.The stamp of the printingprocess,again, sometimesslips in this
mid-twentieth-century version of the stilllife,produced by a formerchild of
the Pittsburghworkingclass.
In the filmindustrythe star always functionedas the main vehicle for
marketing,providingthe facade behind whichthe wheels of investment,pro-
duction, circulation,and returncould functioninvisibly.In his book Heavenly
Bodies,Richard Dyer makes thispoint about stars:
Above all, they are part of the labor that produces filmas a com-
modity that can be sold for profitin the marketplace. Stars are
involvedin makingthemselvesintocommodities;theyare both labor
and the thingthatlabor produces. They do not produce themselves
alone. We can distinguishtwo logicallyseparate stages. First, the

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AndyWarhol.Five Coke
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16 OCTOBER

person is a body, a psychology,a set of skillsthathave to be mined

and worked up into a star image .... The people who do thislabor
include the starhim/herself as well as make-upartistes,hairdressers,
dress designers, dieticians,body-buildingcoaches, acting, dancing,
and other teachers,publicists,pin-up photographers,gossip column-
ists,and so on. Part of thismanufactureof the starimage takes place
in the filmsthe star makes, withall the personnel involvedin that,
but one can thinkof the filmsas a second stage. The star image is
then a given, like machinery,an example of what Karl Marx calls
"congealed labor," somethingthatis used withfurtherlabor (script-
ing,acting,directing,managing,filming,editing)to produce another
commodity,a film.7

Dyer's descriptionclearlyrelatesto both male and femalestars,but the process

worksmore acutelyin the case of the female.And in the course of thisprocess
some stars achieved an emblematicstatusthat moved far beyond the fictional
charactersimpersonatedon the screen.
Two theories central to feministanalysis of the specificityof cinematic
images of women should be brieflyintroducedhere. In "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," I argued that the spectatorlooking at the screen has a
voyeuristicrelation to the female, eroticized,image. This look, I claimed, is
transmutedinto that of the male protagonistlooking at the eroticizedwoman
withinthe fictionalworldof the narrative.I also argued thatthe veryperfection
of this image was a defense against the castrationanxietythatthe body of the
woman may generate. Or rather,the fixationon surface,the gloss of appear-
ance, created a binaryspace in whichthe problematicbody was erased under a
seductivesurface.There is also the concept of the masquerade, whichfeminist
filmtheorists(in particularMaryAnn Doane) have adapted fromJoan Riviere's
1929 paper "Womanlinessas Masquerade," in whichshe discussesthe difficulty
of femininityand its persistentconstructionin relation to male expectation.
Rivierealso focuseson the way in whichcompetentwomen disguise themselves
under an appearance of helplessnessand coquettishnessin order to undermine
any male anxietyat rivalry:
Womanlinessthereforecould be assumed and worn as a mask,both
to hide the possession of masculinityand to avert the reprisalsex-
pected if she was found to possess it-much as a thiefwill turn out
his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not stolen
the goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanlinessor
draw the line between genuine womanlinessand the "masquerade."

7. Richard Dyer, HeavenlyBodies:Film Starsand Society(New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1986),

pp. 5-6.

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SomeThoughtson TheoriesofFetishism 17

My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference;

whetherradical or superficial,theyare the same thing.8

Such an alignmentbetweenfemininity and masquerade findsan apotheosis

in the cinema, and particularlythe Hollywood cinema, investingas it does in
the power wielded by eroticismin the marketplace.While the eroticizedfemale
image may "frontfor" the cinema machine,a similarprocess of reinforcement
exists between woman and commodity.Film theoristshave traced the links
between Hollywood cinema and a conscious tie-inwith marketingdirected at
the female filmspectator.These linksshiftthe argumentaway fromthe fetish-
izationof the femalebody on the screenwithinthe eroticeconomyof patriarchy,
capitalistproduction,and cinematicconvention,toward an erotic economy in
which the fetishizationof the female body becomes a vehicle for generalizing
an appearance or masquerade offthe screenand withinthe widersocial interests
of patriarchyand capitalism. Here the cinema functionsas a bridge between
the movie star as object of desire and the commoditiesassociated with her, as
objects of desire, for the women watching the screen and looking in shop
windows. Charles Eckert, in his influentialarticle "The Carole Lombard in
Macy's Window,"shows how specificcommercialtie-instransposed the fashion
of the filmstars into mass-produced clothes and cosmetics,priced withinthe
range of everyworkinggirl.9Doane, in the introductionto her book TheDesire
toDesire,tracesthisrelationship:"The woman's objectification, her susceptibility
to the processes of fetishization,display, profit,and loss, the production of
surplus value, all situate her in a relation of resemblance to the commodity
form."'1And in relationto the cinema she states:"The economy of the text,its
regulation of spectatorialinvestmentsand drives,is linked to the economy of
tie-ins,the logic of the female subject'srelation to the commodity-her status
as consumer of goods and consumer of discourses.""
Doane argues thatthe mass audience of cinema helped to place the laborer
in the position of consumer,offeringan image of a homogeneous population
pursuing the same goals-living well and accumulatinggoods. And the film
genres directed at a specificallyfemale audience sold a certain image of femi-
ninity:
It is as though there were a condensation of the eroticismof the
image onto the figureof woman-the female star profferedto the
female spectatorfor imitation.. . . The process underlines the tau-

8. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as Masquerade," in Formationsof Fantasy,ed. Victor Burgin,

James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 38.
9. Charles Eckert, "The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window," in Fabrications:Costumeand the
FemaleBody,ed. Jane Gaines and CharlotteHerzog (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 100-21.
10. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman'sFilm of the1940s (London: Macmillan
Press, 1987), p. 22.
11. Ibid., p. 25.

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 MarilynMonroepublicity
photo.

CaroleLombardpublicity
photo.

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SomeThoughtson TheoriesofFetishism 19

tological nature of the woman's role as consumer: she is the subject

of a transactionin which her own commodificationis ultimatelythe
object. ... The ideological effectof commoditylogic on a large scale
is thereforethe deflectionof any dissatisfactionwithone's lifeor any
critique of the social systemonto an intensifiedconcern witha body
which is in some way guaranteed to be at fault. The body becomes
increasinglythe stake of late capitalism. Having the commodified
object-and the initial distance and distinctionit presupposes-is
displaced by appearing,producing a strange constrictionof the gap
between consumer and commodity.'2

In the fifties,America became the democracyof glamour,completinga process,

through the movies and through mass-produced clothes and cosmetics,that
had been launched in the 1930s and interruptedby the Second World War.
America then exported this image through the Marshall Plan and the Cold
War; the glamour of Hollywood cinema encapsulated this relation between
capitalismand the erotic and the societyof commoditypossession.
For Freud, the body that is the source of fetishismis the mother'sbody,
uncanny and archaic. For Marx, the source of fetishismis in the erasure of the
worker'slabor as value. Both become the unspeakable,and the unrepresentable,
in commodityculture. Repression of the mother's body, repression of labor
power as a source of value. These two themes run, respectively,through the
Marxistand the Freudian conceptsof fetishism, concealing(in image) structures
of sexual differenceand value that,althoughnot themselvesstructurally linked,
reinforceeach other throughtopographiesand displacementslinkingthe erotic
spectacle of the feminineto the eroticizedspectacle of the commodity.There
remain importantdifferencesbetweenthe two kinds of fetishism,one of which
I described at the beginningof this paper as a problem of inscription.I have
attemptedto suggest that this problem is central to and articulatedwithinthe
Hollywood cinema of the studio systemand has been made visible by recent
filmtheory.By placing some of these analyses in juxtaposition to each other I
wanted to reiteratethe well-knownargumentthat the disavowal of production
processes is, in thiscontext,complementedby the constructionof an image that
findsits ultimaterealizationin the eroticizedfeminine.There is a logic to the
harnessingof the overinscribedsignifierto the uninscribed.The sheer forceof
"rich sight,"of the spectacle,creates a diversionaway frominquiryor curiosity.
The "aestheticsof fetishism,"however,derive from the structureof dis-
avowal in the Freudian model ("I know verywell,but all the same ..."), which
creates an oscillation between what is seen and what threatensto erupt into
knowledge. What is disavowed is feltto be dangerous to the psyche,eitherthe

12. Ibid., pp. 30, 32.

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20 OCTOBER

black void of castrationanxietyor some otherthreatthatsetsup a splitbetween

knowledge and belief. In the same way, the threat to an autonomous self-
sufficiencyof image, that is, value located in the image itselfand not its pro-
duction processes,threatenedthe cohesion of Hollywood cinema. But danger
and risk are also exciting,on a formal as well as on a narrativelevel, and
Hollywood cinema has made use of a greaterdegree of oscillationin its system
of disavowal than has often been acknowledged. This trompe l'oeil effectis
central for postmodern aesthetics,which came ultimatelyto use self-referen-
tiality,intertextualreference,and directaddress in the interestsof a pleasurable
destabilizingof perception.To look back at the aestheticsof disavowal in Hol-
lywood cinema is, still,an attemptto rearticulatethose black holes of political
repression,class, and woman in the symbolicorder. But it is also an attemptto
returnto a reconsiderationof the relationshipbetweencause and effectin the
social imaginaryat a timewhen the relationbetweenrepresentationand histor-
ical eventsis becomingincreasinglydislocated.Spectacle proliferatesin contem-
porarycapitalistcommunicationsystems.At the same time,the realityof history
in the formof war,starvation,poverty,disease, and racism(as an ever escalating
symptomof the persistenceof the irrationalin human thought)demands anal-
ysiswithan urgencythatcontemporarytheorycannot ignore.

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