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05/26/2004 Archived Entry: "fetish"
Been reading through William Pietz's work on the fetish, a series of articles which appeared years ago in Res. The history of the fetish can teach us a bit about composition studies and its relationship(s) to its own object(s) of study, writing.
One main issue is the question of mis-recognition. Europeans encountering African ritual for the first time mis-recognized African usage of currency, objects, material goods, and worship. They also greatly misunderstood discourse (and thus, rhetoric) motivated by object placement and usage.
Thus, the mistake of labeling such activities "fetish."
One specific moment of interest to me was the European feeling that trade for trinkets revealed an African obsession with trash and junk.
"While it was precisely such 'false' estimation of the value of things that provided the desired huge profit rates of early European traders, it also evoked a contempt for a people who valued 'trifles' and 'trash'" ("The Problem of the Fetish" 41)
I'm not really trying to evoke analogy here, but I see a parallel to how composition has determined the nature of writing(s), particularly in the digital. The question of what is trash or unimportant revolves around how practioners interpret those new domains encountered in the digital (the digital has been compared as well to a colonial enterprise). Anything outside of the expected and familiar (like the Portuguese valuing gold over other material goods because of an accepted currency value in circulation in Europe) is worthless. The unfamiliar signifies a displaced object of value, a fetish.
Robert Farris Thompson demonstrated in Flash of the Spirit how in Yoruban culture, the fetish (represented in the usage of objects for communicative purpose) revolved around the notion of itutu, whose contemporary meaning is cool.
See the connection(i.e. to my object of study)? No surprise, then, to find cool a dominant web term (the cool list, for instance) whose larger rhetorical value gets scorned in composition as displaced attention, too much focus on the trivial and trinket. In other words, too much focus on the fetish.
All of this also connects to an article I’m working on about the throw back jersey as rhetoric. The jersey, too, functions as fetish; its rhetorical output generates nostalgia as rhetorical gesture. But more on that connection later….
