pp. 97-98: In the false alternative between 'naive historicist realism' and 'discursive idealism', both sides accuse each other of 'fetishism': for historicist realists, discursive idealism fetishizes the 'prison-house of language', while for discursivists, every notion of pre-discursive reality is to be denounced as a 'fetish'. What makes this polemic of theoretical interest is the fact that these mutually exclusive uses of the term 'fetishism' point towards a certain split which cuts through the very heart of the notion of fetishism.
Marx opens his discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital with the statement: 'a commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another': this standard notion of fetishism relies on a clear common-sense distinction between what the object is 'in itself', in its external material reality, and the externally imposed fetishist aura, the 'spiritual' dimension, which adheres to it (for example, in 'primitive' fetishist religion, a tree which is 'in itself' merely a tree acquires an additional spectral dimension as the seat of the Spirit of the Forest--or, in commodity fetishism, an object which satisfies some human want also becomes the bearer of Value, the material embodiment of social relations). In German Idealism, however, (and in the radical versions of Hegelian Marxism, like Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness), 'objectivity' as such, as the firm, stable, immediate, determinate Being opposed to the fluidity of subjective mediation, is conceived (and denounced) as a 'fetish', as something 'reified', as the domain whose appearance of stable Being conceals its subjective mediation. From this perspective, the very notion of the object's external material being, directly identical to itself ('the way things really are'), is the ultimate fetish beneath which the critical-transcendental analysis should recognize its subjective mediation/production. The fetish is thus at one and the same time the false appearance of In-itself, and the imposition on this In-itself of some spiritual dimension foreign to it.
It may seem that this split simply indicates the opposition between materialism (which maintains the In-itself of reality, independent of subjective mediation) and idealism (which conceives of every material reality as something posited/mediated by the subject); on closer inspection, however, these two opposed poles reveal a profound hidden solidarity, a shared matrix or framework. For the Marxist historical materialist, the very ideal agency which allegedly 'posits' or mediates every material reality (the 'transcendental subject') is already a fetish of its own, an entity which 'abbreviates' and thus conceals, the complex process of sociohistorical praxis. For a deconstructionist 'semiotic materialist', the notion of 'external reality' is--no less than the notion of the 'transcendental subject'--a 'reified' point of reference which conceals the textual process which generates it. And this game can go on almost indefinitely: in a Marxist response to deconstructionism, the very notion of 'arche-writing' or Text is again dismissed as a fetish which conceals the process of historical material practice....
The theoretical problem behind these impasses is: how are we to conceive of some 'immediacy' which would not act as a 'reified' fetishistic screen, obfuscating the process which generates it? Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process. At this point, however, it is crucial to bear in mind the distinction between reality and the Real: the Real as 'impossible' is precisely the excess of 'immediacy' which cannot be 'reified' in a fetish, the unfathomable X which, although nowhere present, curves/distorts any space of symbolic representation and condemns it to ultimate failure. If we are to discern the contours of this Real, we cannot avoid the meanderings of the notion of fetishism.
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