religious fetish – GV Loewen

Identity Fetishism

Identity Fetishism (the objectification of echoism)

In over-identifying with the generalized other, the echoist sacrifices at first self-interest, as does the traditional altruist, but also thence the very self, if the pursuit of the other’s needs and desires overcomes the one who so pursues. The echoist is commonly seen as the figure who expresses personality traits opposite to that of the narcissist, though it is not correct to assume that this latter always acts in their own best interest. The narcissist is, after all, blinded by his own blind loyalty not to the self as he actually is, but to an idealized selfhood into which he has placed a fallible reality. The echoist, on her part, denies that the self either has needs at all, or, more usually, places these needs below those claimed by the other, giving them a lesser value. The danger for psychology as a discourse when using these Greek ethical constructions is that, aside from their original caveat against extremities – the golden mean or moderation in all things was a Greek mantra – that the best kind of personality holds within it a balance of self and other, which is a mere technical manner of stating that a neo-Christian selfhood is the newer ideal. Not the Christian in the original, and more radical sense, for the neighbor figure is after all the ultimate altruist. He is, as I have stated elsewhere, simply the libertine of compassion.

Not so the ‘balanced’ self, which identifies with the generalized other as if this abstract and very much collective presence is expressed in now this individual before me, now that. Such a middle road, the fairway between La Scylla of the echoist and the Charybdis of the narcissist, and thus the fair way to adjudicate between one’s own needs and those of the other or others, always as well denies the selfhood as it is. It is a personalized way of doing the same to the world as it is. For in gifting oneself to the other, we do generally gain our own desires, be they having to do with public acclaim, a sense of personal vindication, a veneer of the virtuous, or being a model citizen, in no order and perhaps also in toto. Augustine is himself cautious about self-sacrifice, not due to Jesus becoming the Christ through so enacting it, but rather because for lesser beings, it would be a challenge to sort out one’s intents. Are we truly selfless in our actions? Did we actually put the other before ourselves? Do we rather seek to become an echo of the savior; to ‘borrow status’, to use a sociological turn of phrase.

The narcissist seeks all such things, and in spades. In this, he is by far the easier to identify, and perhaps somewhat perversely, to identity with as well. He is unsure of his own person and thus desires to build around it a persona, the bastion against self-doubt constructed of that same anxious architecture. A persona is, however, still a more authentic expression of the lack of selfhood than is the fullest leap into the generalized other. A persona, though a mask, yet must be carried by its wearer. Not so otherness, of course, for it is irruptive, if rare, and especially in modernity. Not so the Other, capital ‘O’, which is alien and we would suggest, generally incomprehensible even if fully present to our senses bemused. But the case is different when it comes to echoism. This otherness, generalized in G.H. Mead’s sense that one has by a certain age internalized social norms and is able to exemplify them in one’s day to day or quotidian conduct – something which the over-identification with specific guises of the generalized other ironically allows one as a person, and even as a citizen, to forego – is not taken on as one does a costume of oneself, as in narcissism, but is rather slipped bodily into as if one were able to simply up and transfer one’s being into a ready-made vessel. Anyone who has adopted for themselves a form of identity politics has indulged in this fantasy.

This is why one might suggest that there has been an objectification of echoism. The classic echoist, whom one might recognize casually as a ‘doormat’ or even a masochist, gears herself into the needs of singular others, usually serially and repetitively. It is these persons who are at most risk for domestic abuse, for example. The echoist internalizes the sense that she is of little value, or that her only value is in being a servant of another, aggrandizing his needs if he has no merit, or, if authentic value is present, then aiding his genuine quest. Either way, the echoist denies the self. It is a pressing weakness of the genius that he demands an echo; first from a person, then a community, and thence from the world itself. When Mahler consulted Freud in the Netherlands in 1910, the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams had recently appeared and its author was by then as world-famous as was the celebrity composer and conductor. Aside from uttering the expected ‘what a meeting of giants, wish I could have been there’, we can more seriously remind ourselves that no archaeologies of selfhood, no high-flying hermeneutics, no ambitious analyses were involved. No, Freud simply told Mahler that he was being a prick, hmm. For Mahler’s marriage had been shipwrecked by his demand that Alma, once the hottest young woman in Vienna and an aspiring composer in her own right, should utterly sacrifice her own needs and desires to his superior gifts. And as challenging as it would be to compete with a Mahler, this was manifestly not what Alma was trying in any case to do. Freud told Mahler to instead aid his estranged wife’s quest, and ‘who better to do it’, for Pete’s sakes. More deeply and consistently, to take his mate’s needs as seriously as he took his own. Note to self, and dear reader.

Alma was neither echoist nor narcissist. But then again, neither was her husband. So, what comes out of this historical vignette is both an illustration of the problem of identifying just exactly where our selfhood lies, especially in relation to others, and also, by extension, where might we find the place or the space wherein our best self resides? For many today, these questions are too challenging to confront in any authentic manner. Hence the mass objectification of echoism as a parallax to the much more individuated construction of a persona. Statements such as ‘I am a person of color, a trans-person, a proud boy, a Christian “first”, a liberal, a conservative, a survivor of the residential schools, a Holocaust survivor, an abuse victim, a revolutionary, a woman, a man’ and a myriad of others, if held to be front and center in even casual conversation and in one’s political opinions, if taken to be the defining characteristic of one’s selfhood, are all decoys, meant to help one avoid the anguish of being a self, and short-circuiting the essential relation between anxiety and personhood. With all the patent irony of modernism, it is psychotherapy itself which plays upon these projections. And even if we place our faith in the analytic process – which involves a gradual unmasking of persona in order to confront the authentic self in all of its patently fragile mortality – we must, in the end, also abandon the wider conception of faith as well.

But what of the second term in our title? Speaking of faith, the fetish item, ethnographically, contained the Mana of some otherwise amorphous and animistic force. It might be the famed Churinga stones of the Australians, it might be the disembodied artifacts pinned into the shaman’s mesa in Mexico, or yet the ‘figurines of the Virgin Mary’, to borrow from King Crimson. Marx lights upon this conception and realizes that in capital, it is the commodity which now is seen as ‘Mannic’, excuse the obvious pun. Part of the object’s ‘surplus’, indirectly linked to the broader economic conception of surplus value, lies in its ability to transfer the consumer’s desire by objectifying it. The ‘finest’ marques, such as Ferrari, have mastered not the marketing of self-indulgence, but rather the ability to place the person in intimate association with the thing, as if the driver of a legendary auto is direct kindred with the shaman and their traditional fetish. Certainly, when I drove an expensive Jaguar just for fun, I felt a kind of augmented power, as if the prosthetic was mimicking an extramundane quality, something that the shaman’s tried and true trickery also mimicked. I also felt that the big cat was a mere extension of myself, and not just of my body, but rather of my very being.

And this is what the idolaters of identity also seek. In their absence of selfhood, they desire to deny their very existence as human beings first, as historical beings, as beings endowed, by evolution or otherwise, with both reason and imagination, and as cleaving to a very much mutable ‘human nature’ which is not, and has never been, one thing, let alone the one thing they have, like a long line of crucified simulacra, hung themselves upon.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Poiesis and Untruth

Poiesis and Untruth

Lying is a privilege of the poets because they have not yet reached the level on which truth and error are discernable. (Santayana, 1954:338 [1906]).

Speaking into being that which heretofore did not exist is a narrowing of the Greek term, for ‘poiesis’ originally refers to anything that is ‘made’, or even to the act of ‘making’ itself. That it has come to be associated more specifically with language alone, and yet even poetic language, is a function not of any etymological ellipsis, but rather of industrial production, which makes effortlessly and seemingly without being. At the same time, it creates a kind of violence, both against the process of making but also against the idea of creation. Creation, in the modern day, might then be more aptly referred to simply as production, even reproduction. Benjamin’s famous essay about the status and nature of the work of art in our own age, that of ‘mechanical reproduction’, is still a lynchpin of understanding our common lot vis-à-vis art. What then can be an aesthetics of industry, a poetics of production, a lexicon of l’art pour l’art?

This sudden violence, betraying its potential for evil within its very subito, taking us unawares and blindsiding us with its thief in the night, is yet only possible if we ourselves are unrefined, produced rather than created and especially, self-created: “Only the weak are obliged to be violent; the strong, having all means at command, need not resort to the worst. Refined art is not wanting in power if the public is refined also.” (ibid:324). Santayana cautions that in this industrial and technical age, escape through any form of art disorients us in our intent; we would become distracted, even entangled, rather than approaching art as one would a respected lover. Here, desire is present, but not lust. The will to Mitsein overtakes anything ulterior. The ‘companionate marriage’ is a social poiesis in this sense, but so is the genuine mentoring relationship, which is, at its best, what parenting also is or becomes. And in each and all of these variants, art is attached to both reason and rationality through the effort that must be made to create it, to bring it into being as a manifestation of poiesis. Perhaps it is too pat to simply declare the mechanism to be a lie and the creative force which has ever and always a poetic nature to be equally within the truth of things. For the object of reproduction, in its minions and in its millions, speaks its own kind of truth after all.

The issue is rather that we tend to take this truth for both objectivity and rationality, as if the object of production, in a word, the commodity, is the epitome of human reason. In so doing, we have divorced the artistic process which is poiesis from the ‘bringing into being’ of something not extant beforehand. One response has of course been to deny such objects any relation to being, preserving this existential term for either animate and sentient objects such as animal life or more grandly, only for human beings themselves. But this too is both premature and a kind of untruth. However mundane and mass produced, the commodity is nevertheless a product of the human imagination, and to the nth degree, at least in its numbers, efficiencies, and technicalities. A second response has been that the very intent of producing the object, though a creative act, sullies in a final and fatal manner the creation itself, thus through its purpose it loses its connection to being. This too cannot be entirely dismissed but I feel that along with the first response, such a criticism is over-ripe and hurried. Objects are after all placed in use, and persons, once concluding the commodity contractuality that is the vulgar goal of all capital, often use such objects in creative ways not predicted by their manufacturers. In this, the consumer is herself a being who only exists momentarily, and thenceforth becomes rather a creator or an imaginer.

Thus it is too easy to engage in a critique of an entire series of events and eventualities by hanging it up on a singular point, whether it was at this moment that the particular series began or ended, changed its timbre or upshifted itself, perhaps even in a dialectical movement. The commodity as fetish does of course extend the half-life of such critiques, but even here, the fullest intent of how this or that produced item is to be venerated by us is, as often as not, not followed through upon. And the rationale that is issued from the producer which might run something like ‘all we want is for you to buy it, you can use it however you want.’, comes across as more of a rationalization. A most picaresque example of such a thing came during the first Iraq conflict when France was critical of the American invasion and working class Americans bought expensive French champagne only to break the bottles in ditches. One could imagine a tradition-minded vintner objecting but not a contemporary capitalist.

Poiesis is not abandoned in the commodity fetish. This may appear reactionary, for how then could one explicate the problem of the contrived power of the fetish itself? Perhaps we should return to Marx’s sources. The religious fetish had no power of is own, but rather was first a receptacle for Mana, then a vehicle for it. That it had to be propitiated in a primitive sense – the fetish is not after all an icon, temple, or other space of oblation and genuflection – which involved more ululation than anything else, tells us that it as an object was quite useless. In short, the fetish item was ever a source only of potential energetics. This being so, how could one compare a mass produced object meant to be sold at a profit and used in a specific manner, to a unique object whose use was absolutely undefined until the moment it is, ‘poietically’, spoken into being?

Let us pause just here, and double back to Santayana’s plaintive call to poetic conscience. Instead of merely nodding in a Platonic cum Nietzschean manner to the idea that art is beyond truth and lie just as love is beyond good and evil, and that there is some sort of ‘madness’ in both, the madness that speaks of the death of God amongst other mad, and angry, things, we can docket these facticities for a moment and suggest that the artist, since he has no reasoned conception of truth, can dally with untruth in the very being of creation; that is, through poiesis does what could not be true come into being in the world. For industrial production, for mechanical reproduction, for technical process, this means reiterating the truth through an ongoing lie; the idea that the commodity contains no being and is born of no art: “The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed at the conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own incompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he proclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.” (ibid:363).

Just so, the most finely crafted objects of capital, the great auto marques, the vintage wines, haute couture, even memorable and time-tested popular songs, are still and always still commodities. Does this epithet make them less creative, less a part of being, less close to poiesis? The untruth of poiesis is that it can create only the once, and for its next trick must differ its creation and defer its creativity. Mechanical reproduction is a merely more efficient means of disciplining the reason of and for copying. One might write the same manuscript, prior to the Incunabular phase of early printing, once a month say, for a year. Then there are a dozen hand-made copies of what is essentially the same object, the same work. Yes, the writer or illustrator might make intentional alterations for the sake of uniqueness, increasing, as per the going rate the idea that it is not merely a copy but each its own work of art, but what if these alterations are only mistakes uncalculated and unintentional? Amphorae were mass manufactured, even vessels of trade and war, in antiquity. And how many clay pots would it take for the post-war critic to admit that the productive-commodity relation existed side by side, nay, as a very part of the point of creation and construction, recreation and reconstruction, at the very moment of poiesis?

It is no simple task to place the mute and dormant fetish into the vibrant and vivid commodity. That they both contain expectations of themselves and of their use can be understood as one point of contact. That they both elicit anticipations in their would-be users, whether ancient or modern, both consumers of the ‘to be created’, the ‘to be enacted’, is another. But the vague desires with which our ancestors approached the fetish were, unlike those later in the temple or in front of the oracle, as unlike anything the modern consumer brings to the commodity as could be imagined. Perhaps Marx got hung up on the apparent likeness between them, feeling that the both the fetish object and the commodity in themselves did nothing. This too is a piece of poietic untruth, for a table, to use his own example, has in itself and standing alone outside of any aura, a precise set of functions that can be enacted or interacted with, without any sense of veneration. Indeed, it is the sheer lack of fetishism in the commodity relation that marks consumption as an often vapid venture. That brand logos take on the mantle, though not the mantra, of Mana – each month there is a competition amongst them to gauge the most valuable branding – in capital presents something more akin to the original fetish. But even here, the logo is not the thing itself. The prancing horse is not the auto, the one is a mere sign for the other and not its signature. No such disconnect, no such distance, was to be found in ancient societies. And the fact that it is only amongst the elite brands do we find any hint of fetish strongly suggests that it is poiesis itself which is being hyper-valued and not any specific creation thereof.

And this in turn points to the error of disassociating on the one hand, poiesis from mechanism, and on the other, untruth from rationality. The first relationship remains, though in impersonal form for much of the production process. Even so, one cannot have a commodity without a creator bringing something into being that was not extant beforehand. The second relation is more complex: certainly, rational organizations seek to level truth and lie through anonymous dynamics and reducing persons to roles alone. At the same time, the movement from right and wrong to correct and incorrect is not quite enough to convince us that there are still proper ways to go about one’s business, that there are still rules, laws, and consequences for transgression. ‘Truth and lie in a non-moral sense’, by no coincidence the title of the most important short essay of the 19^th century, does not by itself propitiate a world which is beyond morality, only a way of being that sees beyond the moral gloss that veils and manipulates what is and what is not, as well as calling into question any absolute definition of either. It cannot be used as a means by which to critique the supposed disenchantment the ‘pure’ commodity relation has brought into that self-same world.

In sum, poiesis lives on. Its scope has been magnified, its precision codified, its powers purified, and at both ends of the living spectrum of existence. Its untruth of inexistence, its ability to utilize becoming as a way of speaking into being and then naming this odd miracle ‘creation’ rather than ‘production’, is a piece of sophistry which is unworthy of even the lies of the poets themselves.

G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five books in aesthetics, ethics, education, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.