Andrew's Wiki
Desirable Body

Cultural Fetishism

• The state has control of the “biggest” phallic symbol around
• Neil Mc Kendrick?
  • by 1800 world’s first consumer society has emerged as commercial attitudes are increasingly accepted
  • but not yet a mass market
• Hamish Fraser
  • after 1850 mass market
  • by this time, most people see improvement of standard of living
  • more surplus: “more and better food,” clothing, and furnishings, and more opportunities for leisure expenditure
• Some people say that some kind of human instinct is “unleashed” by mass market (Mc Kendrick?), while others focus on the market, with its economy of desire, being constructed via advertising and sales techniques (Fraser)
  • Stratton: it’s bourgeois ideology to say that individuals are by nature acquisitive
• Rosalind Williams
  • over the last half of the 19th century products are standardized
  • ex: lots of choices for bread in 1860s, but by 1900, only wheat bread
  • and during that time period, the gap between the clothes of lower class and upper class huge…but it diminishes, and everyone wears colorful, shorter skirts and simpler silhouettes
• Shopping 1850: small shops, no huge plate-glass windows / displays, no prices on the objects, you bargained, and if you’re in the shop then you will clearly buy something
  • Rachel Bowlby, in France, le nouveau commerce: with plate glass windows, window shopping, prices clearly marked; department store brings lots of commodities under one roof; now it’s a leisure activity like going to a museum or a show

Bodies

• Male body fetishized
• Female body spectacularized
• Cultural fetishism, which adds to male desire for sex, is what helps to spur growth of consumerism: male desire that is culturally produced
  • men’s experience of capitalism was created through “supplementation of male sexual desire”
  • new desiring structure of 19th century: male desire for phallicized female body: the pubescent female (incl daughters)
• Freud’s theories are culturally and historically specific
  • Freud: as baby your sexual desire is nonspecific, polymorphous, and must be focused via cultural intervention
• Social historians have found that there was an increase in heterosexual genital intercourse between 17th and 18th centuries, and then a huge increase during 19th century – which historically correlates to rise of industrial production, and the creation of the “privatised nuclear family”
• Cultural fetishism refers to Lacan’s “Desire”
  • need = Real
  • demand = imaginary
  • desire = symbolic
    • where the adult is driven by a permanent sense of lack
    • This third kind is cultural fetishism, he says
• Giddens on the state: “centralized organs of government” with “legitimate territorial control” and “distinct dominant or elite class” qtd 10; what makes it European and modern is the precision with which the boundaries of the state are drawn
• Hobsbawm, 1870-1914: the state “mass-produces” traditions (made by them of course) that will refer to “mythic” and “immemorial” past
• Again, Cultural Fetishism
  • heightened male desire for female body
  • it’s a cultural effect that takes place in places of modern statehood (see Giddens above), and its generally in all men
  • provoked by castration anxiety of a sort: loss of the phallus: but in this case it’s anxiety about the loss of power because of the power of the state
    • says that Freud said that castration anxiety is at the basis of all fetishism (it is the individual male’s reaction to finding out that women have been castrated…fear): penis is the “material correlative” of the cultural phallus (power, control) so that penis proves power
  • Cultural fetishism, with the “supplementary” male desire it creates (b/c phallicised female body is the phallus that you don’t have but want to have), drives commodity consumption
    • this is radically diff from the women consumers stuff we’ve been getting
• Relation to Marx’s commodity fetishism
  • “an object within an origin” 16
  • commodities become the phallus men don’t have but want to have
  • he believes that cultural fetishism is one major source of commodity fetishism b/c of the extra male desire…. but my problem is he doesn’t understand how the state came about b/c of capitalism and not the other way around, which is what I am thinking of… esp b/c he talks about Freud yet Freud is as he admits a product of late 19th c, not the beginnings of nation state…
  • and he goes exactly where you think he’s gonna go: female shopping too is the desire for the phallus in the shape of the commodity

Argument

• So, changing nature of male desire b/c of the changing nature of power—that is the formation of the nation-state—which creates in men the feeling of lack (the symbolic order of Lacan, which he historicizes in this way), which helps to drive commodity fetishism (even in women’s shopping b/c of phallus envy) b/c men want the power back.