TWELVE

Fetish

Wilcox: Why can’t you people take things at their face value?

Robyn: Signs are never innocent. Semiotics teaches us that.

Wilcox: Semi-what?

Robyn: Semiotics. The study of signs.

Wilcox: It teaches us to have dirty minds, if you ask me.

—Lodge 1988:155

1. THE WORD “FETISH” AND ITS USES IN ANTHROPOLOGY

As everyone can ascertain from the OED, the English vocable fetish was directly adopted from the Portuguese substantive feitiço, “charm, sorcery.” (Cf. Spanish hechizo; both from the Latin facticius “factitious,” meaning “artificial, skillfully contrived.”) Originally, the term was applied to any of the objects used by the Guinea Coast natives and in neighboring regions as talismans, amulets, or other means of enchantment, “or regarded by them with superstitious dread.” Portuguese sailors allegedly minted the appellation in the fifteenth century when they observed the veneration that West Coast Africans had for such objects, which they wore on their person. The earliest English citation, as further reported in the OED, dates from a 1613 work by Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimage (VI.xv.651): “Hereon were set many strawen Rings called Patissos or Gods.”

Writers on anthropology, following Brosses (1760), began using fetish in the wider sense of an inanimate object being worshipped by “savages” on account of its supposed inherent magical powers, or as its animation by a spirit. More generally still, fetish referred to something irrationally reverenced.

In 1869, McLennan, who framed totemism as a theoretical topic, also invented the notorious formula: totemism is fetishism plus exogamy and matrilineal descent (but cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962:18). Van Wing then wrote (1938:131) an oft-cited amplification about the fetish, which is of particular interest here because of its relatively early employment, in this context, of the metaphor-metonym opposition:

Le “fétiche” nkisi est, chez les Kongo orientaux, un objet artificiel comportant des éléments métaphoriques empruntés aux trois règnes naturels: “herbes qui egratignent, blessent, guérissent; feuilles, écorces, racines qui guérissent ou tuent; bees et ongles, plumes, cornes, dents, queues et poils d’animaux divers, etc.” L’élément vital (metonymique) d’un nkisi “est une argile prise au fond d’une riviere ou d’un étang, séjour des esprits des morts;” cette opération fixe l’un de ces esprits dans le charme, lui conférant son pouvoir effervescent.

The nkisi, Van Wing noted, assures the protection of its proprietor, the two being magically linked, “uni à lui par un lien de maître à sujet.” He sums it all up in this couplet: “La gloire du nkisi, e’est d’avoir un maître en vie. / Le chef a son autorité, le féticheur a la sienne.”

However, Herskovits, writing about a decade later (1950:368), objected:

One word that has been applied to charms is fetish, and no term has proved more troublesome than this and its companion, fetichism. The derivation is from the Portuguese feitiço “something made,” and was used by the early Portuguese to denote the charms and images of African peoples. These terms are mentioned here because they are encountered so often in the literature, as when it is said that “fetichism is the religion of Africa.” When used at all, they should be employed in the sense of “charm” and “magic”; but tftey are far better omitted from any discussion of the means whereby man controls the supernatural.

That demurral notwithstanding, one fruitful way of classifying religions has been to ask in the case of each: where is the divine (the object of religious responses) primarily sought and located, and what sort of response is primarily made to it? According to this principle of division, religions may be partitioned into three major groups: sacramental, prophetic, and mystical. Details of this were spelled out by Alston (1967c), following a suggestion by William James; but Auguste Comte and Charles de Brosses specifically interpreted the fetish as a basis for their theories concerning the origin of religion.

The divine in the sacramental religion is said to be chiefly sought in things, which are thought of as capable of capturing natural forces—inanimate things, such as pieces of wood, relics of saints, statues, crosses; or food and drink, such as bread and wine or baptismal water; or living things, such as the totemic animal of the group, the sacred cow, the sacred tree; or processes, such as the movements of the sacred dance. In very primitive forms of sacramental religion, when the object itself, perhaps possessing animate existence in and of itself, is responded to as divine, that object has, in early anthropological practice, been designated a fetish. Such a fetish could be wrought to have positive effects—such as to heal or to cure sickness—and even used to induce erotic disposition, that is, to affect and alter “natural” social relations.

Clearly, it was the assignment of the latter capability that led to the eventual espousal of the term in clinical, thence in legal, discourse to describe the enhancement of sexual activity in the presence of a type of object which is, for others, not at all, or if so but weakly, endowed with a compulsively sexual (paraphiliac) connotation. Gebhard (1969:72) quite properly envisions “the whole matter of fetishism as a gradated phenomenon. At one end of the range is slight preference; next is strong preference; next is the point where the fethish item is a necessity to sexual activity; and at the terminal end of the range the fetish item substitutes for a living sexual partner.” Indeed, as will become clear, sorting by degree is the only procedure that makes sense when the matter is viewed from the semiotic standpoint.

The notion of “fetishism of the commodities” (cf. Erckenbrecht 1976) has become one of the cardinal concepts and slogans of the Marxist heritage as applied to the analysis of the relationship between people and products, or between use-value and exchange-value. Geras (1971:71) sees the origins of this concept in the more fundamental distinction between “essence” (that is, “real” social relations) and its “appearance” (the outer manifestation of such relations). He writes:

It is because there exists at the interior of capitalist society, a kind of internal rupture between the social relations which obtain and the manner in which they are experienced, that the scientist of the society is confronted with the necessity of constructing reality against appearances. Thus this necessity can no longer be regarded as an arbitrary importation into Marx’s own theoretical equipment or something he merely extracted from other pre-existing sciences. . . . [It is] seen to lead, by a short route, to the heart of the notion of fetishism.

In short, to invest a commodity with powers which are not present or inherent is to elevate it to the status of a fetish; it is in this way that money, or capital in general, comes to be “fetishized.” Jhally—whose concern is with fetishism in television and magazine advertising—(1987:29) reformulated this process in quasi-semiotic parlance when commenting that “fetishism consists of seeing the meaning of things as an inherent part of their physical existence when in fact that meaning is created by their integration into a system of meaning.” Earlier, Baudrillard (1981:92) made a similar point when he noted that it is the sanctification of the system as such, “the commodity as system,” that reinforces “the fetishist fascination.”

2. THE FETISH IN PSYCHOLOGY AND IN SEXOLOGY

The forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s book, Psychopathia sexualis (1886), contained the first systematic collection of data relating to “pathological” fetishism. This text, with its view of sex as perverted and disgusting, came to exert a great, baleful, and seemingly perpetual, influence. He wrote extensively of sex crimes and sexual variations or deviations, which he considered based on genetic defects.

So far as I have been able to trace, it was Krafft-Ebing who first referred to the notion of the fetish as a “perversion,” that is, something that requires shame and social sanctions to control it. According to his descriptions, a fetish is a nonhuman object—a part of the body or something contiguous to it, such as clothing—which serves as an impetus to sexual arousal and orgasm. The Teutonic doctor, in fact, considered all acts other than marital coitus for the purpose of procreation, and all surrogates for penile-vaginal intercourse—for example, voyeurism, exhibitionism, transvestitism, sadomasochism, and so forth—as “perversions” to be reprehended.

Krafft-Ebing’s “method” is illustrated by his report of a case (no. 101) of hair fetishism, which I cite from Kunzle (1982:53n14), who, after the French police doctor Paul Garnier’s monograph (1896:70), uses it to illustrate “the degree of moral vindictiveness” evinced by the authorities and approved of by Krafft-Ebing. According to this retold story, a seventeen-year-old boy was watching a show in the Tuileries gardens, while pressing up to a girl “whose hair he silently, amorously rolled between his fingers, so softly that she did not even notice. Suddenly two plainclothes policemen sprang upon him. One seized with his hand the boy’s erect penis through his trousers, and cried, ‘At last we got you . . . after all the time we’ve been watching you!’ ” The boy was then sentenced to three months in jail.

Freedman, Kaplan, and Sadock’s standard comprehensive textbook Psychiatry (1972) likewise defines the use of fetishes (in an explicitly sexual context) in metonymic terms: “The process of achieving sexual excitement and gratification by substituting an inanimate object such as a shoe, piece of underwear, or other article of clothing for a human love object.” This definition is substantially repeated under the rubric of (sic) “Other Sexual Deviations,” where only “a foot or a lock of hair” is added to the enumeration of common sexual fetishes. (A recent conspicuous instance of foot fetishism is displayed in Martin Scorsese’s short film Life Lessons; this is realized by his camera’s—or the painter’s—obsessive dwelling over Rosanna Arquette’s feet.) In point of fact, it is very common in psychiatric literature to find references to the attraction a patient may have for an inanimate object as inordinate or pathological.

An exchange (March 6, 1987) from “The Kinsey Report,” a syndicated newspaper column by my colleague June Reinisch, epitomizes the current scientific view of the subject:

Q.—I am a male in my mid-20s. Since age 9, I have been strongly attracted to women’s feet, shoes and stockings. I become sexually aroused thinking about foot odor and sometimes have erections in public places from fantasizing about this.

I feel extremely guilty and think most people would think I’m perverted. Do you think I’m sick? Do I need professional help? Why am I this way?

A.—I think that you should consult a psychotherapist who is experienced in working with sexual problems. He or she can help you determine exactly what role these desires play in your life, and then the two of you can decide what type of therapy (if any) is necessary for you to form long-lasting, close relationships.

Fetishism is a behavior in which sexual arousal depends on an inanimate object, a certain body part or the like—in short, on something other than the whole person. This area has not been fully examined scientifically. Very little is known about the causes of fetishistic behavior, except that it is thought to originate early during psychosocial development.

Scientists also don’t know how many people have sexual fetishes, but it is clear that this behavior is much more common in men than in women. A variety of body parts, items of clothing and odors have been mentioned in reports of individual fetishism.

Several points in this correspondence merit comment.

It is clear, first of all, that both parties in the exchange view the reported fetishistic comportment as constituting a sexual “problem,” possibly even a “perverted” form of behavior, or one at least likely to require psychotherapeutic intervention. This is so despite Reinisch’s concession that very little is known about the cause of the kind of behavior described or of its ontogeny.

Reinisch also echoes a common opinion among clinicians—that fetishism “is much more common in men than in women.” This presumption was held by Freud (1927; cf. Vigener 1989), as well as by Alfred C. Kinsey and his collaborators, who considered fetishism to be an “almost exclusively male phenomenon” (1953:679). Freud and his epigones even held that fetishism is the male perversion par excellence. As Schor (1985:303) puts it, in a nutshell, “female fetishism is, in the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, an oxymoron.”

For Schor’s subject, George Sand, the female fetish happens to be a wound; but wounds, Schor asserts (p. 304), “are not generally fetishized by men”—a questionable claim. Fetishistic attraction to cripples or, more broadly, to “discredited” individuals who bear stigmata in Goffman’s sense (1963), as also to one-legged females, and even crutch fetishism (cf. Schindler 1953), abound in the literature. For instance, Desmond Morris (1969:170) reports the following case: a young boy “was leaning out of a window when his first ejaculation occurred. As it happened, he saw a figure moving past in the road outside, walking on crutches. When he was married he could only make love to his wife if she wore crutches in bed.”

Reinisch implicitly subscribes to the view of the fetish as an essentially indexical sign—especially a synecdochic sign (“something other than the whole person”)—although, of course, her idiom is other than semiotic. Indeed, the fetish is, as here, commonly regarded as a fixation on the pars pro toto.

The most extensive recent study of the fetish in sexology is to be found in John Money’s Lovemaps (1986). He once more offers the conventional definition, as “an object or charm endowed with magical or supernatural power; an object or part of the body charged, for a particular person, with special sexuoerotic power” (ibid.:261). In his lemma on “fetishism,” however, there is a hint of a wider view (to which I shall return), when Money points out that there “is no technical term for the reciprocal paraphilic condition in which the fetish, for example, a uniform, must belong to the self” (ibid.:261).

Mainly, what we find in Money’s book is a routine catalogue of some objects that have been pinpointed by numerous clinicians as typical fetishes. Pornographers fabricate and sell objects—including pictorial and written displays—arranged according to similar categories, designed to cater to every conceivable fetishistic taste.

Money classifies tangible objects, or, technically, imagery (ibid.:65f.), in addition to those appealing to the eye, as either haptic or olfactory, available in immediate perception or in fantasy. The former pertain to feelings of pressure, rubbing, or touch, which may be generated internally (as by an enema or other inserted artifact) or externally (by the application of fabrics, fur, hair, and so forth). A tactual token may also be a live creature, wriggling and/or furry; thus, in one reported case, a woman habitually placed a dog in her crotch, “as an adjunct to masturbation and orgasm,” but she later substituted a small infant in the same position (ibid.:54).

Leather (for example, shoes, as in Figs. 12.1 and 12.2) and rubber or now plastic (for example, training pants) fetishes bridge the gap between touch and smell, as did James Joyce’s fetish for soiled knickers. (For other paraphernalia employed by well-known writers, see Colin Wilson’s book, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders, 1988.) Olfactory fetishes characteristically carry the smell of some portion of the human body, especially of those garments that cover sexual parts (namely, fecal or urinary odor, odor of sweat, menstrual odor, smell of lactation). These garments are sometimes also sucked or chewed.

Although Money doesn’t emphasize this, the use of fetishes by females seems considerably more prevalent than has been explicitly recognized in the literature thus far. Freud’s judgment was obviously dictated by his theoretical preoccupation with the castration complex, according to which fixation or regression to prior psychosexual stages of development underlies deviations, so that castration anxiety is the central component of fetishism.

Kinsey’s traditional supporting opinion may have been due to nothing more than a prejudicial sampling error. For instance, compulsive stealing of objects which are of no intrinsic value to the thief but which have obsessive semiotic significance—treated in sexology under the heading “kleptophilia”—seemingly does occur in women more often than in men, but the connection is not always explicitly recognized (cf., however, Zavitzianos 1971, relating female fetishism to exhibitionism and kleptomania).

Fig. 12.1. “Penaljo & Muscle.” Color advertisement for Penaljo Shoe Corp. by Michael Meyers & Associates, Inc. New York Times Magazine, August 31, 1987. By permission.

Fig. 12.2. Merchant’s logo and tag line on business card.

Moreover, reports such as the following are not uncommon: “A young girl experienced her first orgasm when clutching a piece of black velvet as she masturbated. As an adult, velvet became essential to her sexually. Her whole house was decorated with it and she only married in order to obtain more money to buy more velvet” (Desmond Morris 1969:169-170). Similarly, the fixation of Imelda Marcos on her 500 bras and 3,000 pairs of shoes appears to be a well-publicized recent case of something more than run-of-the-mill female fetishism.

Children of both sexes frequently cling to an object—à la Linus and his celebrated blanket. Such an object may be related by contiguity to a parent or to the infant’s early material surroundings. According to some psychiatrists (Freedman et al. 1972:637), this “is a security operation that should be distinguished from fetishism in which the normal sexual object is substituted by another.” It is further asserted in this source that fetishism of this latter type “is not known to occur in childhood.” However, this judgment may be due to psychiatrists’ clinging to the prejudice that a fetish, in order to be defined as such, must produce genital sexual satisfaction (usually deemed “deviant” as well) and that the use of objects to produce a fetishistic effect necessarily occurs relatively late in adolescence. Nevertheless, earlier transitory objects present in the child’s immediate environment may, eventually, be promoted to the status of a full fetish, so this again seems to be only a matter of degree (cf., for example, Sperling 1963; Roiphe 1973; and Bemporad et al. 1976).

In passing, a syndrome sometimes called “Pygmalionism,” which refers to a fetish in the shape of a female statue or life-sized rubber doll, should be mentioned here. From a semiotic viewpoint, an object such as this would constitute an index that is strongly tinged with iconicity. (To a lesser degree, perhaps the rarer cases of tattoo fetishism, as reported by Weimann 1962, involve iconic indexes, too.)

Still other fetishes—as, for instance, diamond engagement rings, gold wedding bands, and class rings or pins exchanged as tokens of going steady in teen age (Money 1986:63)—can be taken as indexes overlaid, in an erotic frame of reference, with a pervasive, culturally widely understood symbolic significance. Money itself, or, more broadly, property, is commonly reported to turn into capitalistic fetish objects (cf. Becker and Schorsch 1975; and Stratton 1987, passim, for literary implications).

3. THE FETISH IN SEMIOTICS

I turn now to a fuller consideration of the fetish as a semiotic problem.

It is clearly the case that, as can be gleaned even from the discussion thus far, a fetish is (1) a sign; namely, that it is (2) a predominantly indexical sign; that, moreover, it is (3) an indexical sign of the metonymic species, usually a pars pro toto synecdoche; and that (4) this indexical sign is, as a rule, intermingled with both iconic and symbolic elements in various proportions, depending on the context of its use.

With respect to (4), an important consequence of the semiotic model of the fetish is that it is not necessary for the represented object to be fully present to the organism before information about it can influence internal semiosis (“thought”) and induce what Peirce called (8.372) “gratific” action.

In another terminology, a fetish could be regarded as a model (aliquid), but such that this simulacrum is often more potent than the object (aliquo) that it stands for (stat pro). Its reference (renvoi) is, as it were, reminiscent in efficacy to that of a caricature to the subject that it represents. This accords with the view of Desmond Morris (1969:209f.) to the effect that the art of caricature is entirely concerned with the process of stimulus extremism. Features exaggerated in caricatures are, as a rule, supernormal equivalents of normal juvenile features, or of sexual parts, such as female breasts and buttocks.

As we have seen, the term “fetish” has hitherto been principally employed in the fields of anthropology and psychiatry (including especially psychoanalysis) and, in a narrower, more focused sense, yet quite extensively, in studies of erotic and sexual behavior in humans. The notion of “fetish” has to do, in all of these conceptions, with an obsessive maintenance of self-image.

To my knowledge, only Christian Metz has reflected thus far on the “fetish” in chiefly semiotic terms, but even he does so only in a strictly circumscribed technical environment, namely, in relation to photography. (His remarks hark back to Dubois 1983, which, in turn, is an elaboration and application of Peirce’s notions about indexicality.) Metz (1985) feels that because of two features—relatively small size and the possibility of a look that may linger—a photograph (as opposed to the cinematic lexis) “is better fit, or more likely, to work as a fetish,” that is to say, as something that signifies at once loss (Freudian “symbolic castration,” which is metaphoric) and protection against loss (which is metonymic). However, let me set aside here the matter of the photograph-as-fetish, which Metz then ingeniously relates to death (or the fear of death) and conservation (embodied as looking, glancing, gazing). Instead, I would prefer to briefly review and ponder the implications of the more relevant ethological problem variously dealt with under such headings as the “supernormal signal/stimulus” or the “superoptimal sign.” (On the relation of semiotics and ethology, see Sebeok 1979a, Ch. 2.)

The point I want to make about such signs is neatly captured by Oscar Wilde’s celebrated aphorism (from A Woman of No Importance, III), “Nothing succeeds like excess,” itself anticipated by Shakespeare’s lines, “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, / To throw perfume on the violet . . . / Is wasteful and ridiculous excess” (King John, IV.ii.11f.).

In short, a sign is deemed “supernormal” when it surpasses a “normal” sign in its effectiveness as a releaser (meaning, the discharge of appropriate behavior). According to Guthrie’s excellent account of the anatomy of social organs and behavior (1976:19), so-called supernormal signs “occur in the form of extra-large social organs, i.e. increasing signal strength by increasing signal amplitude.” Thus, in certain species of animals, antlers and horns are used as an estimation of rank, and therefore they either “grow to gigantic size among the older males, or develop specialized modifications, like filling in between the tines to form palms, thereby increasing the visual effect from a distance.”

In particular, anal and genital organs—or just those about which humankind harbors so many taboos—tend to become modified into semiotic organs for several reasons: in part, because mammals, having, in general, a well-developed smelling apparatus, tend to use feces and urine as a part of their signing behavior (“Who was where and when?”); and, in part, because of the sexual overtones of different mammalian ways of urination. Genitalia have frequently acquired heavy semiotic import and have become ritualized into a set of signs conveying oppositions such as maleness-femaleness, aggression-submission, and so forth, while having been elaborated, as well, into specialized social ornamentation that is residually related to their ancestral copulatory role.

The phenomenon of the supernormal stimulus object has been demonstrated many times in animal-behavior studies, especially in one exemplary piece of work by Tinbergen and Perdeck (1950). In brief, these two investigators (among other interesting achievements) found that they could devise a supernormal stimulus object consisting of an artificial model in which some sign aspects are exaggerated relative to the natural object. Such a supernormal stimulus was provided by a long red knitting needle with three white rings near the tip. In the event, this was more effective than a naturalistic head and bill of an adult gull in evoking a pecking response from herring gull chicks.

It should also be noted that, in experiments such as this one, the strength of the response to the stimulus situation varies from context to context, including that of the internal state of the responding animals. In the famous experiment designed to identify the stimulus characters important for the male three-spined stickleback, the maximal effectiveness of the red belly display depends on the stage of the respondent’s breeding cycle and whether or not he is in his territory.

Writing about domestic cats, the ethologist Leyhausen observed (1967) that “substitute objects” can become supernormal objects, as when a sated cat disports itself with a ball of paper in an intensive catching game, while perfectly “adequate” prey mice run around under its very nose. Indeed, fetishistic attachments are commonplace among vertebrates, in particular in mammals, as well as in many birds.

I would argue that a fetish is just such a supernormal sign, a “misplaced response” (Lorenz 1971:160), if you will, standing for, indeed amplifying by a process of ritualization, some natural object, upon which an individual has become preferentially imprinted in lieu of the object itself. (For a likely mechanism, see Leyhausen 1967.)

But this definition requires a considerable expansion of the concepts of fetish and of fetishism, encompassing erotic estheticism in general, as well as positive attachments which can only by interpretative extension, if at all, be considered to fall into the realm of the erotic (for example, saints’ relics, a rabbit’s-foot charm, and the like).

Such attachments normally occur between a child and its mother, and again when the child grows up and falls in love with another human being. Attachment to an exclusive love-object or sexual partner, eventuating in a relationship which animal behaviorists call pair-bonding, involves in fact a live fetish: the love-object is a pars pro toto, in the sense that, say, the female mate comes to stand for, say, all marriageable females. “The strongly sexual aesthetic responses to specific ‘beautiful features’ of the male and female body demand particular attention,” for these are elicited by characters “which are immediate indicators of hormonal sex functions” (Lorenz 1971:159f.; italics in original). Lorenz goes on to give many examples from art and from fashion of the production of such “superoptimal dummies,” pinpointing those characters which are exaggerated for this purpose; other instances are listed and discussed by Desmond Morris (1969).

In this perspective, what in the literature of the erotic and the sexological is called a fetishistic attachment may be viewed as a form of malimprinting. As Morris (1969:169) writes: “Most of us develop a primary pair-bond with a member of the opposite sex, rather than with fur gloves or leather boots . . . but the fetishist, firmly imprinted with his unusual sexual object, tends to remain silent on the subject of his strange attachment. . . . The fetishist. . . becomes isolated by his own, highly specialized form of sexual imprinting.”

________

This chapter was written at the invitation of Thais Morgan, of Arizona State University, for publication in a special issue on the semiotics of pornography which she edited for the American Journal of Semiotics (6:51-65). Versions have also been published in French, German, Italian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, and Spanish.