Cultures of Fetishism (29 page)

Analogous to my discussion of the foreground-background dynamics of films, in psychoanalysis, our aim is not to eliminate the central or manifest, symptom, conflict, fantasy, or dream, but rather to comprehend how this conspicuously foregrounded narrative is systematically related to the discordant or latent elements that have been cast into the shadows, margins, and background.

It is one thing to be aware of the screening function of a dominating man- ifest text and to analyze it in order to approach the latent marginal texts. It is something else to eliminate the manifest. The purpose of animating the shad- ows and background of a manifest clinical narrative is not to discover “the real and true meaning” in the background but to arrive at an articulation between manifest and latent, the center and its margins, the foreground and the background. We protect the patient’s psychic reality by creating an atmosphere that gives free rein and expression to the interplay between manifest and latent. On the other hand, we analysts sometimes revel in the tantalizing ambiguities of psychic reality in order to avoid acknowledging the ordinary and comparatively dull material realities that comprise the patient’s everyday life.

Money is one of those supposedly ordinary and dull material realities. As in every analysis—indeed, as in every life—the consideration of money and

other financial concerns that tend to get represented as objective, material realities are always bound up with the dynamics of the patient’s inner psychic reality. How a patient earns or does not earn money, how she saves it, squanders it, hoards it, spends it, what she spends it on, is always symptomatic of con- flicts within the patient. When money issues come up, analysts may enter into a collaboration with the patient’s defensive strategies. However, when an apparent and seemingly evident material reality such as debt, credit card debt, compulsive shopping, or the injustices of financial distributions is subjected to analytic scrutiny, the patient is helped to acknowledge the various ways that she enlists material realities as defensive strategies that serve to protect her psychic reality—the psychic reality she does not want to acknowledge, examine, or change.

In his 2003 paper, “Full Pockets, Empty Lives,” Paul Wachtel, a clinical psychologist trained as a psychoanalyst, presents a case vignette of Stanley as an introduction to his ideas about the psychological perils of living in culture where consumerism and commodity fetishism are the reigning values.

Briefly, Stanley, an immensely successful corporate executive, could not enjoy his financial success in a sustained way. He had grown up in a home where his mother habitually denigrated and disparaged his father. His success therefore was a forbidden triumph. “Stanley alternated between taking pleas- ure in success, relishing images of himself as a dashing man about town and seeing himself as a dull, mediocre, pathetic man.”
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The simple dichotomy that had dominated Stanley’s understanding of his childhood years—disparaged father and cherished son—eventually gave way to a more complex configuration. The guilt of the Oedipal winner was only one part of his struggle. At another level he, too, was disparaged by his mother, but disparaged in a very particular way. Stanley suffered from a particular fantasy that he had internalized from his mother, a fantasy of himself as slothful, need- ing to be pushed and prodded, having as his natural state one of inactivity that he had constantly to counter.
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Since he saw himself as naturally inert, he imagined that he had to be always vigilant or he would end up doing nothing at all. Yet he were to experience himself as self-motivated, as a person who did not need to crack the whip to “keep himself from being mired in sloth,” this self experience would be a betrayal of his mother, “whose opposition to his imagined inertia was experienced as essential to his psychic equilibrium.”
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Wachtel employs the dynamics of Stanley’s conflicts to illuminate a cultural phenomenon that he believes to be especially characteristic of the United States and other similar societies. If Stanley had been born into a different kind of society, he might still have had an inner world with a dis- paraging mother and a disparaged father. But, Wachtel stresses: “it would have been a
different
world. That difference itself should tell us that the inner world is not quite as ‘inner’ as some of our theoretical language seems to imply, not as hermetically sealed off from the influence of large social forces or the circumstances and experiences of daily life.”
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Wachtel believes, and I agree with him, that the psychoanalytic habit of distinguishing between “deep” inner sources and the “surface” influences of the external environment implicitly downgrades the role of social forces on the structuring of a person’s inner life. His words reminded me of Leon Edel’s comment on the tendency of psychoanalysts to enjoy “their underwa- ter snorkeling to such an extent that they never once looked up to see the great glittering exposed mass of the iceberg.”
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In fact what goes on above the water-line has a profound impact on what lies below the surface. Wachtel insists, “Living in a consumer culture that converts our needs into commodities . . . shapes the very core of our being.”
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Finally, Wachtel criticizes the narrowness of the psychoanalytic focus on the inner life of patients. “Constructing a moat that seals off the inner world from the world of everyday life and society, defeats the central aim of psychoanalysis—of restoring intimacy and authentic selfhood to our patients.”
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Wachtel’s discussions of the profound relationships between a patient’s inner world and the social world “outside” confirm my idea of psychoanaly- sis as a process of “shifting surfaces,” and of an inside and outside that oper- ate in tandem to produce an experience of self. Foreground and background are eternally in a state of mobility with dynamic tensions beween them. A “sort of” Mobius strip model of the human mind. We analysts make a serious mistake if we think of background as synonomous with the real, true inner life, and foreground as a merely defensive measure based on external realities. In fact, we seem to pride ourselves on our ability to keep focusing on the “deep” psychic realities of our patients and not be distracted by the “surface” material realities that the patient sometimes brings into the foreground of her analysis. We think of the patient’s preoccupation with the manifest daily realities of her life as a mask for the life of Desire—with its absences, ellipses, uncertainties, ambiguities. And, yes, this is often what is going on during an analytic session. Surely, though, the ideal of analytic neutrality is not to glorify the life that lies beneath the surface, but to ameliorate the patient’s sufferings and enable her to participate more fully in daily life and in society. Though these old-fashioned prosaic notions may offend our holy aesthetic of analytic neutrality, we and our patients are better off when we can name and identify the social forces that have given shape and direction to their inner lives. In fact, neutrality means to keep our attention evenly divided between the inner world and the outer world.

If the material reality of the patient’s existence, the culture that surrounds him and contours the minutes, days, hours, and years of his everyday existence, is a culture that breeds a sense of personal alienation, which in its turn nurtures a desperate longing for consumer goods that might fill the emptiness of his life, what, if anything, can the analyst do to enable the patient to resist and prevail? To assert these social dilemmas and intrude them into the patient’s analysis would amount to a betrayal of the free association process. However, we should be aware of and take into account the ways in which these material realities have contributed and continue to contribute to shaping “the core of the patient’s being.”

Perhaps, though, we analysts are too impacted by the cultures of fetishism that infiltrate our daily lives to even notice, much less understand how they impact on the psychic life of our patients. Perhaps, most of the time, we inure ourselves to the pernicious psychological fallout of consumerism and com- modity fetishism by walking about with our “eyes wide shut.”

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E
i g h t

T
he
F
etishism of
C
ommodities

T
he ghostly presence of Karl Marx has been haunting these pages. So, as we now enter into the mystifying territory that he identified as “commodity fetishism,” it seems fitting that I should once again summon up his words. “All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force.”
1
This statement served as a background for several of my previous discussions of the fetishism strategy. Now I will be bringing Marx’s words into the foreground, linking them with his meditation on “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” the title of the fourth section of Chapter One of his magnum opus,
Capital
.
2

Though commodity fetishism represents only one small corner of Marx’s voluminous writings, it is the cornerstone of his theories on the social relations that are embedded in the production of commodities. Briefly, com- modity fetishism arises out of the twisted relationship between the worker whose labor produces the commodity and the capitalist who feeds on that labor to maximize his profit from the sale of the commodity The “Secret” of commodity fetishism is the
surplus labor
produced by the worker the crucial factor that enables the capitalist to make the biggest profit possible from the goods he produces. Surplus labor and the commodity fetishism it represents are still around as major characteristics of the twenty-first-century global economy. It is also represented in the commodification of human beings, as exemplified by Reality TV.

The first principle of the fetishism strategy is given consummate expression in Marx’s concept of
surplus labor
. In the first chapter, when I listed the five principles of the fetishism strategy, I mentioned that Marx’s concept of surplus labor is
nearly
identical with the first principle of the fetishism strategy— “
a mental strategy or defense that enables a human being to transform some- thing or someone with its own enigmatic energy and immaterial essence into something or someone that is material and tangibly real
.” When the surplus labor of a worker is transformed into the profits of the capitalist, the worker

is transmographied into a commodity—a nonliving thing like a shoe or a diamond or a table, a material thing that can be exchanged for other material things, a thing that can be manipulated and controlled.

As Otto Fenichel, a psychoanalyst who was also a Marxist, explained in “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” “Our system of production [Capitalism] is an economy of commodities which does not produce in order to satisfy the needs of the producer directly but in order to create products for sale, bene- fiting the producer only indirectly and in such an economic system a certain commodity
labor
, has the characteristic of producing greater value than its own market price.”
3

This value that is greater than its own market price is surplus labor or surplus labor value.

Surplus labor is a guiding theme of this chapter. As I mentioned, it embodies the first principle of the fetishism strategy. Of course, the principles of the fetishism strategy cannot be separated into neat and orderly categories. They are not distinct entities. They are shades and reflections of one another. They overlap and usually operate in tandem. So, as we bring out the various expressions of surplus labor value, other principles of the fetishism strategy will come into focus, now and then, here and there.

The fetishism strategy is also represented in some personality traits of Marx himself. For example, Marx’s endless ruminations, gathering of data, and writing and re-writing endless drafts of his theories are symptomatic of archive fever. And, yet, because these “symptoms” also had the effect of leaving his theory open, uncertain, and flowing with energy, they paradoxi- cally oppose and challenge the fetishism strategy. We shall be encountering Marx’s intellectual grandiosity, his preoccupations with financial manipula- tion and theories of money, his voracious need to know everything about everything, his compulsion to counterpose a dissolution for every solution. And each of these personal “idiosyncrasies” could be regarded as a way of smothering the vitalities of the subjects he was exploring, but also as a way of keeping them alive and vibrant by allowing them to emerge and materialize in their own time, according to their own uncertain and unpredictable destinies. Marx was a genius, whose far-reaching mind grappled with the major philosophical ideas of his time, and then went beyond them to arrive at a form of philosophical inquiry that was powerful enough to challenge the economic and political forces that kept most of the workers of the world enslaved. These forces, previously hidden away in the folds of apparent political and economic normalities, were devious, disguising themselves in forms that constantly shifted, presenting themselves as more powerful than the human rationalities and passions that might be enlisted to oppose them. Marx was often overwhelmed by the elusive and ever-changing appearance of the demonic forces he was observing. But despite the enormous anxiety such ambiguity must have evoked, Marx stood fast and did not yield to the temp- tation of premature certainty. Marx stared long and hard at these bats that sometimes looked like birds and sometimes looked like mice, refusing to pin them down to a permanent, easily identifiable form.
4
In this sense, he was