pp. 102-4: The central paradox (and perhaps the most succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as a fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is, of the social mode of production. In a step further in this discussion of Marx, one is thus tempted to propose a schema of three successive figures of fetishism, which form a kind of Hegelian 'negation of negation'; first, traditional interpersonal fetishism (Master's charisma); then standard commodity fetishism ('relations between things instead of relations between people', that is, the displacement of the fetish on to an object); finally, in our postmodern age, what we witness as the gradual dissipation of the very materiality of the fetish. With the prospect of electronic money, money loses its material presence and turns into a purely virtual entity (accessible by means of a bank card or even an immaterial computer code); this dematerialization, however, only strengthens its hold; money (the intricate network of financial transactions) thus turns into an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, spectral frame which dominates our lives. One can now see in what precise sense production itself can serve as a fetish: the postmodern transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which effectively runs the show....This shift towards electronic money also affects the opposition between capital and money. Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit. In one case, we have the excess of materiality (social relations appearing as the property of a pseudo-concrete material object); in the other, the excess of invisible spectrality (social relations dominated by the invisible spectre of Capital). Today, with the advent of electronic money, the two dimensions seem to collapse: money itself increasingly acquires the features of an invisible spectral Thing discernible only through its effects.
Again, the paradox is that with this spectralization of the fetish, with the progressive disintegration of its positive materiality, its presence becomes even more oppressive and all-pervasive, as if there is no way the subject can escape its hold...why? Crucial for the fetish-object is that it emerges at the intersection of the two lacks: the subject's own lack as well as the lack of his big Other. Therein lies Lacan's fundamental paradox: within the symbolic order (the order of differential relations based on a radical lack), the positivity of an object occurs not when the lack is filled but, on the contrary, when two lacks overlap. The fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the Other's inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks ('mother's phallus'). At its most fundamental, the fetish is a screen concealing the liminal experience of the Other's impotence--the experience best epitomized by the vertiginous awareness that 'the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves', or (as in Kafka's novels) that the all-pervasive gaze of the Law is a mere semblance staged in order to fascinate the subject's gaze.
Within the domain of psychoanalytic treatment, this ambiguity of the object which involves the reference to the two lacks becomes visible in the guise of the opposition between the fetish and the phobic object: in both cases we are fascinated, our attention is transfixed, by an object which functions as the stand-in for castration; the difference is that in the case of the fetish, the disavowal of castration succeeds; while in the case of the phobic object, this disavowal fails, and the object directly announces the dimension of castration. Gaze, for example, can function as the fetish-object par excellence (nothing fascinates me more than the Other's gaze, which is fascinated in so far as it perceives that which is 'in me more than myself', the secret treasure at the kernel of my being), but it can also easily shift into the harbinger of the horror of castration (the gaze of the Medusa's head). The phobic object is thus a kind of reflection-into-self of the fetish: in it, the fetish as the substitute for the lacking (maternal) phallus, turns into the harbinger of this very lack....The point not to be missed is that we are dealing with one and the same object: the difference is purely topological. Phobia articulates the fear of castration, while in fetishist perversion (symbolic) castration is that which the subject is after, his object of desire. That is to say: even with the fetishist disavowal of castration, things are more ambiguous than they may seem. Contrary to the doxa, the fetish (or the perverse ritual which stages the fetishist scene) is not primarily an attempt to disavow castration and stick to the (belief in the) maternal phallus; beneath the semblance of this disavowal, it is easy to discern traces of the desperate attempt, on the part of the perverse subject, to stage the symbolic castration--to achieve separation from the mother, and thus obtain some space in which one can breathe freely. For that reason, when the fetishist staging of castration disintegrates, the Other is no longer experienced by the subject as castrated; its domination over the subject is complete....
The theoretical lesson of this is that one should invert the commonplace according to which fetishism involves the fixation on some particular content, so that the dissolution of the fetish enables the subject to accomplish the step towards the domain of symbolic universality, within which he is free to move from one object to another, sustaining towards each of them a mediated dialectical relationship. In contrast to this cliché, one should fully accept the paradoxical fact that the dimension of universality is always sustained by the fixation on some particular point.
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