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: The MIT Press
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 Some Thoughts on Theories of
Fetishism in the Context of
Contemporary Culture

LAURA MULVEY

During the 1970s, fetishism was a key concept for the political aesthetics
of modernist-influenced anti-Hollywood cinema and psychoanalytically influ-
enced feminist theory. As fetishism, like a portmanteau, answered a number of
conceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporary agenda
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 femininity as frag-
mented and reconstructed into a defensive surface of perfect sheen; an apoth-
eosis of spectacle in consumer capitalism; the sheen of Hollywood cinema in
which the erotic spectacle of femininity contributed to the invisibility of filmic
processes; the erasure of the cinematic signifier, and its specificity, under its
signified. In these polemics, the influence of Brecht met psychoanalysis and
modernist semiotics. Furthermore, an aesthetic that intends to make visible the
processes hidden in cultural production could, by analogy, or rather by homol-
ogy, point toward labor power, also concealed by the sheen of the commodity
product under capitalism. This was an agenda composed at the closing moments
of the machine age.
Contemporary critiques of realism have drawn attention to the way its
aesthetics were formally, even fetishistically, imbricated within an apotheosis of
vision which assumed that an image represented, or referred to, the object it
depicted. For feminist aesthetics, concepts that made visible a gap between an
image and the object it purported to represent and, thus, a mobility and insta-
bility of meaning have been a source of liberation. It was, of course, semiotics
and psychoanalytic theory that played a central part in this conceptual liberation,
not only opening up the gap in signification but also offering a theory that
could decipher the language of displacements that separated a given signifier
from its apparent signified. The image refers, but not necessarily to its iconic
referent.
The influence of semiotic and psychoanalytic theory on feminism coin-
cided, however, with the wider ramifications of postmodern aesthetics, its plea-

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

4 OCTOBER

sure in instabilities of meaning and infinite deferral of reference. And just as

the aesthetics of realism had a specific formal relation to the economics of the
machine age and industrial capitalism, so the aesthetics of postmodernism seem
to reflect, in turn, new economic and financial structures. The problem of
reference is, now, not only a question of the image and aesthetics, but of
capitalism itself. As industrial capitalism shows symptoms of decline, finance
capitalism flourishes, and the advanced capitalist world shows signs of 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 working class. In
this sense, the success of finance capital over industrial capital in the advanced
capitalist economies, where currency speculation can be more profitable than
the exploitation of labor power, raises the issue of reference in economic terms.
Money, which is first and foremost a symbolic representation of value, is now
also subsumed into processes of exchange that do not necessarily represent
either commodities or their production.
From this point of view, a Marxist approach to contemporary aesthetics
might well argue that the loss of referentiality in culture is, itself, the result of
shifts and changes in the economic structures that herald the advent of a
capitalism based on an electronic machine age in which speed of communica-
tions takes precedence over production. Marxism evolved within the historical
context of an industrial age that was dependent on working-class labor power
to generate value and a political imbalance of power to maintain the supremacy
of capitalism. While Marxist theories of ideology aimed to unveil the political
and economic realities that lay behind the imbalance, the impact of psycho-
analysis and semiotics put the possibility of actually articulating the Real into
question. An economic, social, and political real could no more find articulation
than the Real of the Lacanian unconscious. All that could be analyzed would
be discourses and representations. But it is also crucially necessary to confront
the cause that gives rise to certain discourses and representations, and to bear
in mind that this theoretical and aesthetic shift might itself reflect changes and
developments within the material reality of capitalist technology and economics.
The free-floating signifier may, itself, be a signifier of changes in the economic
base. Marxist principles that revealed the determining power of the economic
over the social and the cultural are as relevant as ever, even as capitalism evolves
and convulses in ways that Marx himself could not have foreseen. History is,
undoubtedly, constructed out of representations. The question is: How many
representations may be related back, as symptoms, to the forces that generated
them?
It is in this context that fetishism, the carrier of such negative ideological
connotations once upon a time, might be reexamined. I want first to argue that
the structures of disavowal might suggest a way in which the difficulty of
reference could be reformulated, without losing the crucial contribution that
psychoanalytic and semiotic theory has made to contemporary thought. The
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 5

point would not be to resurrect a totalizing real, but to consider history in 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 semiotics and
psychoanalysis might be brought to bear on history, to attempt a theoretical
means of articulating the relation between representations and their skewed
referentiality. This essay is not by any means an answer to these problems, but
rather a consideration of the concept of fetishism, in its different theoretical
manifestations, as a structure that arises out of, as a consequence of, the diffi-
culty of representing reality. Fetishism acknowledges the question of reference
within its own symptomatic structure.
The question of reference is raised acutely, as contemporary criticism has
constantly pointed out, by the American cinema produced in the aftermath of
the Hollywood studio system. And cinema itself now seems more and more
antiquated and marginalized by the evolution of very diverse entertainment
technologies. For me, this sense of belonging to 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 system and the radical avant-gardist negation
of its aesthetic-have both been transformed beyond recognition, and nearly
out of existence, by changes in the material conditions of film production. The
artisanal and the industrial were mutually interdependent in their mutual neg-
ativity. Now, as the end of the twentieth century draws near, both seem almost
quaint. For the cinema, in this age of video and television, occupies neither the
mesmerizing place 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-cinema seems, consequently, to
have withered away.
At the same time, the fascination exerted by the movies persists. As modes
of consumption change, from movie theater to home video and television,
intertextual references proliferate. Hollywood cinema is a constant source of
quotation and connotation in the more complex cultural climate of the electronic
media, in its advertisements and its rock videos. Hollywood, of course, produced
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who both implicitly and explicitly represented
the history of Hollywood as his own history and, thus, that of the United States.
The past of Hollywood cinema is therefore present; propped up on its deathbed,
it is sustained by the power the images of its heyday exert over subsequent
generations. All this is well known and is being confronted as an issue by
contemporary critics. As Dana Polan has remarked:
Mass culture becomes a kind of postmodern culture, the stability of
social sense dissolved (without becoming any less ideological) into one
vast spectacular show, a dissociation of cause and effect, a concentra-
tion on the allure of means and a concomitant disinterest in mean-
ingful ends. Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not
6 OCTOBER

the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness,

as the ground for extensive experience.'

Psychoanalytic theory allows a distinction between disavowal, the primary

processes of displacement as a mechanism of the unconscious, and the endless
sliding of the postmodern signifier. In all three cases, the relationship between
signification and reference varies, but the concept of disavowal and the symptom
of fetishism that is associated with it can contain the question of reference even
while displacing it. Thus, in order to distinguish between disavowal and repres-
sion, Freud makes the following points:
The ego often enough finds itself in the position of fending off some
demand from the external world which it feels distressing and ...
this is effected by means of a disavowalof the perceptions which bring
to knowledge this demand from reality. Disavowals of this kind occur
very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever we are in a
position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete
attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supple-
mented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent at-
titudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a
splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends on which of the
two can seize hold of the greater [psychical] intensity.2

In this sense, disavowal acknowledges its own origin in an unspeakable, and its
consequent displacements thus both acknowledge and deny a relation of cause
and effect.
The psychic process of disavowal, although occurring "not only with fet-
ishists," was first elaborated by Freud in his discussion of fetishism. Through
disavowal, the fetish allows access to its own cause. It acknowledges its own
traumatic real and may be compared to a red flag, symptomatically signaling a
site of psychic pain. Psychoanalytic film theory has argued that mass culture
can be interpreted symptomatically, and that it functions as a massive screen on
which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear, and their effects can be projected. In this
sense, it speaks to the blind spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest
socially traumatic material through distortion, defense, and disguise. The aes-
thetic of "rich sight" has lost touch with that delicate link between cause and
effect, so that its processes of displacement work more in the interests of formal
excitement and the ultimate denial of reference than as a defense against it. It

1. Dana Polan: "Stock Responses: The Spectacle of the Symbolic in SummerStock,"Discourse 10

(Fall/Winter 1987/88), p. 124.
2. Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis," in The Standard Edition of the Complete
PsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964),
p. 202.
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 7

is important to remember, however, that the current transcendence of the "rich

sight" aesthetic has developed out of the structures of disavowal at work in mass
culture. Disavowal maintains, after all, only a tenuous link between cause and
effect, while its investment in visual excess and displacements of signifiers
produces a very strong texture that can come to conceal this need to conceal
the relation between cause and effect. That is, the aesthetic of disavowal can
easily provide a formal basis for a displacement that moves signification consid-
erably further away from the problem of reference. And the blind spots that
generated the processes of disavowal get further lost on the way.
Fetishism, broadly speaking, involves the attribution of self-sufficiency and
autonomous powers to a manifestly "man" derived object. It is therefore de-
pendent on the ability to disavow what is known and replace it with belief and
the suspension of disbelief. The fetish, however, is always haunted by the
fragility of the mechanisms that sustain it. Fetishes are supremely culturally
specific, so, as Eisenstein showed so clearly in the gods sequence of October,one
man's divine may be another man's lump of wood. Knowledge hovers implacably
in the wings of consciousness. In Octave Mannoni's famous phrase, the fetishist's
disavowal is typically expressed "I know very well, but all the same . .." Christian
Metz invokes this phrase in his discussion of the suspension of disbelief in the
cinema: "Any spectator will tell you 'he doesn't believe it,' but everything hap-
pens as if there were nonetheless someone 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 fetish object in its own technological
transcendence, feminist film theory has argued that the eroticization of the
cinema is a major prop for its successfully fetishized credibility. And construc-
tions of erotic femininity are also dependent on an economy of fetishism.
Fetishism in the cinema also leads to Marx and to a consideration of the
aesthetics of commodity fetishism. The popular cinema, itself a commodity, can
form a bridge between the commodity as spectacle and the figure of woman as
spectacle on the screen. This, in turn, leads on to the bridging function of
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 formally similar structures. Connotations,
resonances, significances can then flow, as it were, between things that do not,
on the face of it, have anything in common. The formal structures of disavowal
create a conduit, linking different points of social difficulty and investing in
"sight" as a defense against them.

3. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysisand the Cinema (London: Macmillan,
1982), p. 72.
8 OCTOBER

Feminist politics, when picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the crisis
of the Left of the 1960s, played an important part in putting Freud on the
political agenda alongside Marx. Marx and Freud. For my political generation,
feminist and post-1960s, the combination of names has an almost incantatory
ring, and the desire to negotiate between the two sets of ideas has, like the
search for the philosopher's stone, been at once inspiring and frustrating. The
materials for alchemical experiment have been mainly images, representation,
aesthetics, in which Freud has tended to have an edge over Marx. Now the
sphere of the economic and the social, coded as the sphere of Marx, is forcing
itself once again to the fore just as, paradoxically, the Marx-inspired regimes of
the world have crumbled. This is due not only to the ever-encroaching economic
and social crises generated by the right-wing regimes of the 1980s still in power
in the West. Collapsing communism received, perhaps, its coup de grace from an
imaginary of capitalism in which the imaginary of the commodity fetish plays a
large part. Psychoanalytic theory needs Marx, as echoes of the thirties, of the
fascism and nationalism that drove Freud into exile, resound around Europe.
At the same time, as world politics moves into reverse mode, remaining Marxists
will have to pay heed to the monstrous presence of the irrational in politics,
which appears increasingly to be gaining strength over the progressive move-
ment of history.
Fetishism, present in the ideas of both Marx and Freud, has seemed to be
the first and the most potentially rewarding alchemical link between the two.
The obvious link between their concepts of fetishism is that both attempt to
explain a refusal, or blockage,of the mind, or a phobic inability of the psyche
to understand a symbolic system of value within the social and the psychic
spheres. The differences between the two invocations of fetishism are, however,
at least as significant as their similarities. The Marxist concept is derived from
a problem of inscription: that is, the way in which the sign of value is, or rather
fails to be, marked onto an object, a commodity. It is in and around the difficulty
of signifying value that commodity fetishism flourishes. The Freudian fetish is,
on the other hand, constructed from an excessive, phantasmatic inscription:
that is, the setting up of a sign, which is of value only to its worshippers, to
conceal a lack, to function as a substitute for something perceived as missing.
In one case, the sign of value fails to inscribe itself on an actual object; in the
other, value is over-inscribed on the site of lack through a substitute object. In
considering the essential difference between the two theories, it may be inter-
esting to consider the semiotic implications that both set up around the problem
of inscription and the relation of inscription to a lost point of reference.
The concept of the sliding signifier has been of enormous importance for
contemporary theory and aesthetics; even so, it is important to acknowledge
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 9

that contemporary American popular culture can, and has, embraced this slid-
ing to lose, to a second degree, a relation to its history and its collectivity. To
analyze the fetishisms conceptualized by Marx and Freud is not to deny the
place of the signifier, but to return to the question of reference that both imply.
The discussion that follows is an experiment. It is posited on the way in
which, despite their differences, the two concepts of fetishism trace a series of
semiotic problems. And these semiotic problems return to the Real, as conceived
by Lacan as the "unspeakable," the stuff of unconscious that surpasses expres-
sion. The question is whether this "stuff" may also be present within the social
collective and, if so, how it may be deciphered. The point is not to claim that
what is unspeakable may be spoken, but to decipher symptoms that might find
expression in popular culture. The cultural analyst may perhaps only draw
attention to these sites and attempt to formulate means that might make them
visible while recognizing that they may not be accessible to the language of
consciousness in ideal terms. This experiment does not aim to come up with
any new formulation but rather to argue the case for the aesthetics of disavowal
as opposed to those assumed by postmodernism. Charles S. Pierce's triad-the
index, the icon, and the symbol-is the starting point for a return to Marx
within the context of contemporary semiotic theory.
For Marx, the value of a commodity resides in the labor power of its
producer. If this labor power could ever inscribe itself indexically on the com-
modity it produces, if it could leave a tangible mark of the time and skill taken
in production, there would be no problem. But the index, the sign based on
direct imprint, fails. Value has to be established by exchange. Marx shows how
value can be marked by the equation of different commodities of equal value.
One commodity acts as a mirror, reflecting and thus expressing the value of
the other or, indeed, of as many others as it takes for the equivalence to balance.
This stage is analogous to the Piercian icon. Slavoj Zizek has pointed out that
this process is analogous to Lacan's mirror phase, in which the two sides of the
exchange literally have to represent each other.4 While value may be inscribed
through this reflective process, it depends on the literal presence 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 expressing equivalence through a generalized sign system:
money. The exchange of money takes place on the level of the symbolic, and
the expression of value acquires the abstract and flexible quality of language.
Not only does money, as the sign of value, detach itself from the literalness of
object exchange, but it also facilitates the final erasure of labor power as the
primary source of value. The referent, as it were, shifts away from the produc-
tion process toward circulation and the market, where the commodity emerges

4. See Slavoj Ziiek, The SublimeObjectof Ideology(London: Verso, 1990).

10 OCTOBER

and circulates with an apparently autonomous value attached to it. In Marx's

terms, this appearance of self-generating value gives rise to commodity fetish-
ism, the disavowal, that is, of locating the source of value in labor power. And,
at the same time, a commodity's market success depends on the erasure of the
marks of production-any trace of indexicality, the grime of the factory, the
mass-molding of the machine, and, most of all, the exploitation of the worker.
It instead presents the market with a seductive sheen, competing to be desired.
While money appears as a sophisticated, abstract, and symbolic means of ex-
change, capitalism resurrects the commodity as image. As Marx says, in what
are probably the most frequently quoted sentences of Capital:
In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the
mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the
productions of the human brain appear as independent beings en-
dowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another
and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches
itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as
commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production
of commodities.5

Here is a perfect paradigm of the disavowal of knowledge in favor of

belief. An abstract system piggybacks itself onto a return to the image, disavow-
ing not only the origin of value but the processes of symbolization that have
brought it into being. Commodity fetishism triumphs as spectacle. As spectacle,
the object becomes image and belief and is secured by an erotic, rather than a
religious, aura. In her book The Dialectics of Seeing, about Walter Benjamin's
Arcades project, Susan Buck-Morss describes his perception of its primal stag-
ing:
For Benjamin ... the key to the new urban phantasmagoria was not
so much the commodity-in-the-market as the commodity-on-display,
where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning,
and purely representational value came to the fore. Everything de-
sirable, from sex to social status, could be transformed into commod-
ities as fetishes-on-display that held the crowd enthralled even when
personal possession was far beyond their reach.6
Producers become consumers. And the invisibility of the workers' labor is
just as essential for the commodity's desirability as the visibility of the artisan's
labor is for a craft object. Any indexical trace of the producer or the production

5. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 72.
6. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialecticsof Seeing: WalterBenjaminand theArcadesProject(Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1989), pp. 81-82.
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 11

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

labor power to stamp itself on its products as value. Any ghostly presence of
labor that might haunt the commodity is canceled by the absolute pristine
newness and the never-touched-by-hand packaging that envelops it. And the
great intellectual achievement of capitalism, the organization of an economic
system as a symbolic system, can continue in its own interests. The commodity
fetish masks something that is disturbing and secret for a particular form of
economic exploitation and combines the topographical with the semiotic. It re-
presents the logic of symbolic exchange as an imaginary investment in object as
such. And that object then becomes endowed with a phantasmagorical otherness
of hidden "something" behind its surface appearance. Surface and depth. It is
this dichotomy that psychoanalysis and semiotics have challenged with the con-
cept of displacement. And it is here, in topographical imaginaries, that homo-
logies between the otherwise incompatible Marxist and Freudian concepts may
emerge.
There is nothing intrinsically fetishistic, as it were, about the commodity
in Marx's theory. While establishing value may be a complex process in a
sophisticated system of circulation and exchange, and it may be difficult to
decipher the place of labor power as the source of value, fetishism of the
commodity, in Marx's argument, has a political implication particular to capi-
talism and those societies that come under its sway. Commodity fetishism also
bears witness to the persistent allure that images and things have for the human
imagination and the pleasure to be gained from belief in imaginary systems of
representation. There is no need to claim a psychoanalytic explanation for this
phenomenon. The point of interest lies rather in the way that objects and
images, in their spectacular manifestations, figure in the process of disavowal,
soaking up semiotic significance and setting up elisions of affect.
Freud, in his short essay "Fetishism," elaborated his concept from the male
child's misperception of the female body as lacking the male sexual organ and
therefore perceiving it as a source of castration anxiety. The psychic sequence
of events that follow are enacted through the processes of disavowal, substitu-
tion, and marking. The fetish object acts as a "sign" in that it substitutes for the
thing thought to be missing. The substitute also functions as a mask, covering
over and disavowing the traumatic sight of nothing, and thus constructing
phantasmatic space, a surface and what the surface might conceal. This intricate
confusion of the semiotic and the topographical, so important to the workings
of the unconscious, has yet another dimension. For Freud, the fetish object also
commemorates. It represents a memorial, marking the point of lack (for which
it both masks and substitutes) and ensuring that the fetish structure, even in its
fixation on belief in the female penis, includes, through its very presence, a
residual knowledge of its origin. It is in this sense that the fetish fails to lose
touch with its original traumatic real and continues to refer back to the moment
in time to which it bears witness, to its own historical dimension.
12 OCTOBER

It is well known that the fetish very often attracts the gaze. In popular
imagination, it glitters. It has to hold the fetishist's eyes fixed on the seduction
of belief to guard against the encroachment of knowledge. This investment in
surface appearance enhances the phantasmatic space of the fetish and sets up
a structure in which object fixation can easily translate into image. The sexual
fetish masks its origins in an excess of image. But while the symbolic system of
money value is essential to the appearance of the commodity fetish as spectacle,
the Freudian fetish is constructed precisely to disavow the symbolic system at
stake in sexual difference. And while the Freudian fetish includes a trace of
indexicality in its function as "memorial," the consumer of commodities is not
known to whisper, "I know very well, but all the same . . ." However, the erotic
power of the sexual fetish can, enabled, perhaps by the homologous topograph-
ical structures of the two types of fetish-both split between spectacle and
disavowal-overflow onto and enhance the commodity. Film theory, particularly
feminist film theory, has recently begun to examine these elisions and conden-
sations.
The visibility or invisibility of the production process has had a crucial
place in film theory debates. In an extension of the Marxist model, it is logical
that Hollywood, the Detroit of cinema, would evolve its characteristic style
around the erasure of its own mechanics of production. The Hollywood film,
as a commodity, also emerged into the marketplace as a self-generated object
of fascination, erasing, during the high days of genre, stars, and the studio
system, even any easily identifiable directorial signature. And the spectacular
attributes of the cinema fuse into a beautifully polished surface on the screen.
It is not surprising that an interest in Brechtian foregrounding of the production
process or a Vertovian formalism heralded a politically based desire to demystify
the magical sheen of the screen. The aesthetics of the 1960s and '70s avant-
garde were organized around the visible presence of an artisanal author and
acknowledgment of cinema's mechanical processes. But cinema is a system of
production of meaning, above and beyond a mechanical process of image
generation, and one that has a unique ability to play with the suppression of
knowledge in favor of belief. The process of production gives birth to images,
while the construction of the image gives birth to fascination. Feminist film
theory has argued that cinema finds its most perfect fetishistic object, though
not its only one, in the image of woman.

While Freudian analyses of fetishism in cinema have a long history in film

theory, one strand of the argument is particularly relevant here. The image of
woman on the screen achieves a particular spectacular intensity partly as a
result, once again, of a homology of structure. Just as an elaborate and highly
artificial, dressed-up, made-up, appearance envelops the movie star in "surface,"
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 13

so does her surface supply a glossy front for the cinema, holding the eye in
fascinated distraction away from its mechanics of production. This fragile car-
apace shares the phantasmatic space of the fetish itself, masking the site of the
wound, covering lack with beauty. In the horror genre, it can crack open to
reveal its binary opposition when, for instance, a beautiful vampire disintegrates
into ancient slime. In film noir, the seductive powers of the heroine's beauty
mask her destructive and castrating powers. At the same time, this duality of
structure facilitates displacements so that images and ideas that are only resid-
ually connected-fascination with woman as surface and cinema as surface-
can slide together, closing the gap between them like automatic doors. The
topography of the phantasmatic space acts as a conduit for shifts in signification.
It is this sexuality of surface, a sexuality that displaces a deep-seated anxiety
about the female body, that feminist film theorists have recently analyzed as a
bridge between the screen and the marketplace, where woman, the consumer
par excellence, also consumes commodities to construct her own sexual surface
into an armor of fetishistic defense against the taboos of the feminine upon
which patriarchy depends.
These kinds of links first came to my attention when I was working on the
films ofJean-Luc Godard, particularly in the period of his work leading up to
1968 and, most particularly, his film 2 or 3 Things I Know aboutHer. The heroine
of this film is an average working-class housewife who takes to casual prostitution
in order to acquire the consumer goods associated with the needs of a late
capitalist life-style. Woman as consumer and consumed is not a new concept,
and Godard, of course, uses prostitution as a metaphor quite widely in his work.
But I was struck by the analogy that Godard seemed to suggest, simultaneously,
as it were, misogynist and anticapitalist, between femininity and commodities as
seduction and enigma, with both premised on an appearance fashioned as
desirable, and implying and concealing an elusive, unknowable essence. Godard
combines an ancient, romantic mystique of the feminine (the femmefatale, the
Sphinx, the Mona Lisa) with a Marxist, materialist interest in revealing the
function of the commodity in modern life. This dualism also reflects Godard's
passionate and conflicted relationship to the cinema-as both a site of fascina-
tion and the erotic and something to be exposed as mystification and delusion.
For Godard the fascination of the cinema had been, above all, epitomized by
Hollywood cinema.
There is an intrinsic interest in an overlap between the politics of sexuality,
the politics of fetishized commodity consumption, and the politics of cinematic
representation. And there are obvious ways in which the female movie star sets
up a possible point of conjuncture between the figure on the screen as fetishized
commodity and her function as signifier in a complex, social discourse of sex-
uality. One privileged image, such as that of Marilyn Monroe, who still today
represents an apex of the star system, may epitomize a construction of female
glamour as a fantasy space. Its investment in surface is so intense that it seems
14 OCTOBER

to suggest that the surface conceals "something else." The question, then, is
what this something else might be, and to what extent the surface sheen guards
against nameless anxieties associated with the female body outside its glamour
mode, which are then repressed, leading to an even more intense reinvestment
in the fascination of surface. Marilyn's own form of cosmetic appearance is
particularly fascinating because it is so artificial, so masklike, that she manages
to use her performance to, as it were, comment on, draw attention to, or
foreground both its constructedness and its vulnerability and instability.
When Andy Warhol did his Marilyn series, after her death in August 1962,
he brought to bear on her image qualities that he had explored in his work on
the commodities he elevated into icons of the American way of life. The image
of the movie star, mass-produced and infinitely repeatable for consumption, is
identified by a given look, like a trademark, that masquerades as value. Warhol
illuminates two aspects, in particular, of the mythological quality of Marilyn's
face. First, he used its commodity aspect, reducing her features into a minimal
caricature that could be stamped onto a surface, and replacing the pseudo-
natural cosmetics with highly stylized and nonlocal color, which played on the
cosmetic of makeup and that of paint or print. In juxtaposition with his other
paintings of commodities, Marilyn's image highlights the surface nature of
commodity appearance itself, and the brightly glittering, blond surface is res-
onant with "value" and with its enigma. But in, for instance, his Marilyn Diptych,
he hints at the second quality that her face evokes. The masquerade is fragile
and vulnerable, and the surface starts to crack as the printing process slips and
her features distort and decay. The other side of the feminine masquerade
seeps through into visibility. In this work, Warhol brings together the mark of
the print, the signifier, the subject of modernist discovery and unveiling, with
the topography of feminine surface and its underside, which suggests death
and decay. This hint of something troubling and concealed rubs off, as it were,
onto his commodity images. The trademarks of capitalism, like Campbell's soup
or Coca-Cola, conceal the fact that these objects are produced in factories and
by workers. The stamp of the printing process, again, sometimes slips in this
mid-twentieth-century version of the still life, produced by a former child of
the Pittsburgh working class.
In the film industry the star always functioned as the main vehicle for
marketing, providing the facade behind which the wheels of investment, pro-
duction, circulation, and return could function invisibly. In his book Heavenly
Bodies, Richard Dyer makes this point about stars:
Above all, they are part of the labor that produces film as a com-
modity that can be sold for profit in the marketplace. Stars are
involved in making themselves into commodities; they are both labor
and the thing that labor produces. They do not produce themselves
alone. We can distinguish two logically separate stages. First, the
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16 OCTOBER

person is a body, a psychology, a set of skills that have to be mined

and worked up into a star image.... The people who do this labor
include the star him/herself as well as make-up artistes, hairdressers,
dress designers, dieticians, body-building coaches, acting, dancing,
and other teachers, publicists, pin-up photographers, gossip column-
ists, and so on. Part of this manufacture of the star image takes place
in the films the star makes, with all the personnel involved in that,
but one can think of the films as a second stage. The star image is
then a given, like machinery, an example of what Karl Marx calls
"congealed labor," something that is used with further labor (script-
ing, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another
commodity, a film.7

Dyer's description clearly relates to both male and female stars, but the process
works more acutely in the case of the female. And in the course of this process
some stars achieved an emblematic status that moved far beyond the fictional
characters impersonated on the screen.
Two theories central to feminist analysis of the specificity of cinematic
images of women should be briefly introduced here. In "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," I argued that the spectator looking at the screen has a
voyeuristic relation to the female, eroticized, image. This look, I claimed, is
transmuted into that of the male protagonist looking at the eroticized woman
within the fictional world of the narrative. I also argued that the very perfection
of this image was a defense against the castration anxiety that the body of the
woman may generate. Or rather, the fixation on surface, the gloss of appear-
ance, created a binary space in which the problematic body was erased under a
seductive surface. There is also the concept of the masquerade, which feminist
film theorists (in particular Mary Ann Doane) have adapted from Joan Riviere's
1929 paper "Womanliness as Masquerade," in which she discusses the difficulty
of femininity and its persistent construction in relation to male expectation.
Riviere also focuses on the way in which competent women disguise themselves
under an appearance of helplessness and coquettishness in order to undermine
any male anxiety at rivalry:
Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both
to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals ex-
pected if she was found to possess it-much as a thief will 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 womanliness or
draw the line between genuine womanliness and the "masquerade."

7. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986),
pp. 5-6.
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 17

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

whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.8

Such an alignment between femininity and masquerade finds an apotheosis

in the cinema, and particularly the Hollywood cinema, investing as it does in
the power wielded by eroticism in the marketplace. While the eroticized female
image may "front for" the cinema machine, a similar process of reinforcement
exists between woman and commodity. Film theorists have traced the links
between Hollywood cinema and a conscious tie-in with marketing directed at
the female film spectator. These links shift the argument away from the fetish-
ization of the female body on the screen within the erotic economy of patriarchy,
capitalist production, and cinematic convention, toward an erotic economy in
which the fetishization of the female body becomes a vehicle for generalizing
an appearance or masquerade off the screen and within the wider social interests
of patriarchy and capitalism. Here the cinema functions as a bridge between
the movie star as object of desire and the commodities associated with her, as
objects of desire, for the women watching the screen and looking in shop
windows. Charles Eckert, in his influential article "The Carole Lombard in
Macy's Window," shows how specific commercial tie-ins transposed the fashion
of the film stars into mass-produced clothes and cosmetics, priced within the
range of every working girl.9 Doane, in the introduction to her book The Desire
to Desire, traces this relationship: "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."'0 And in relation to the cinema she states: "The economy of the text, its
regulation of spectatorial investments and drives, is linked to the economy of
tie-ins, the logic of the female subject's relation to the commodity-her status
as consumer of goods and consumer of discourses.""
Doane argues that the mass audience of cinema helped to place the laborer
in the position of consumer, offering an image of a homogeneous population
pursuing the same goals-living well and accumulating goods. And the film
genres directed at a specifically female audience sold a certain image of femi-
ninity:
It is as though there were a condensation of the eroticism of the
image onto the figure of woman-the female star proffered to the
female spectator for imitation .... The process underlines the tau-

8. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as Masquerade," in Formations of 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
Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 100-21.
10. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman'sFilm of the 1940s (London: Macmillan
Press, 1987), p. 22.
11. Ibid., p. 25.
Marilyn Monroepublicityphoto.

CaroleLombardpublicityphoto.
Some Thoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism 19

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

of a transaction in which her own commodification is ultimately the
object.... The ideological effect of commodity logic on a large scale
is therefore the deflection of any dissatisfaction with one's life or any
critique of the social system onto an intensified concern with a body
which is in some way guaranteed to be at fault. The body becomes
increasingly the stake of late capitalism. Having the commodified
object-and the initial distance and distinction it presupposes-is
displaced by appearing, producing a strange constriction of the gap
between consumer and commodity.'2

In the fifties, America became the democracy of glamour, completing a process,

through the movies and through mass-produced clothes and cosmetics, that
had been launched in the 1930s and interrupted by 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
capitalism and the erotic and the society of commodity possession.
For Freud, the body that is the source of fetishism is the mother's body,
uncanny and archaic. For Marx, the source of fetishism is in the erasure of the
worker's labor as value. Both become the unspeakable, and the unrepresentable,
in commodity culture. Repression of the mother's body, repression of labor
power as a source of value. These two themes run, respectively, through the
Marxist and the Freudian concepts of fetishism, concealing (in image) structures
of sexual difference and value that, although not themselves structurally linked,
reinforce each other through topographies and displacements linking the erotic
spectacle of the feminine to the eroticized spectacle of the commodity. There
remain important differences between the two kinds of fetishism, one of which
I described at the beginning of this paper as a problem of inscription. I have
attempted to suggest that this problem is central to and articulated within the
Hollywood cinema of the studio system and has been made visible by recent
film theory. By placing some of these analyses in juxtaposition to each other I
wanted to reiterate the well-known argument that the disavowal of production
processes is, in this context, complemented by the construction of an image that
finds its ultimate realization in the eroticized feminine. There is a logic to the
harnessing of the overinscribed signifier to the uninscribed. The sheer force of
"rich sight," of the spectacle, creates a diversion away from inquiry or curiosity.
The "aesthetics of fetishism," however, derive from the structure of dis-
avowal in the Freudian model ("I know very well, but all the same . .."), which
creates an oscillation between what is seen and what threatens to erupt into
knowledge. What is disavowed is felt to be dangerous to the psyche, either the

12. Ibid., pp. 30, 32.

20 OCTOBER

black void of castration anxiety or some other threat that sets up a split between
knowledge and belief. In the same way, the threat to an autonomous self-
sufficiency of image, that is, value located in the image itself and not its pro-
duction processes, threatened the cohesion of Hollywood cinema. But danger
and risk are also exciting, on a formal as well as on a narrative level, and
Hollywood cinema has made use of a greater degree of oscillation in its system
of disavowal than has often been acknowledged. This trompe l'oeil effect is
central for postmodern aesthetics, which came ultimately to use self-referen-
tiality, intertextual reference, and direct address in the interests of a pleasurable
destabilizing of perception. To look back at the aesthetics of disavowal in Hol-
lywood cinema is, still, an attempt to rearticulate those black holes of political
repression, class, and woman in the symbolic order. But it is also an attempt to
return to a reconsideration of the relationship between cause and effect in the
social imaginary at a time when the relation between representation and histor-
ical events is becoming increasingly dislocated. Spectacle proliferates in contem-
porary capitalist communication systems. At the same time, the reality of history
in the form of war, starvation, poverty, disease, and racism (as an ever escalating
symptom of the persistence of the irrational in human thought) demands anal-
ysis with an urgency that contemporary theory cannot ignore.