Fetishization - The Making Of Fetishes
Mar. 7th, 2012 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxI just popped into a couple of bookstores in town, and browsed the items on display. Just killing time. No particular wants or needs burning away inside me.
I have that kind of a mood on me today.
I noticed something that I'd only really observed, never codified or put into words. The items on display can't really count as books, as such. More like fetishes.
Some definitions of the word "fetish" -
- "An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices."
"An object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence."
"An object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion."
You won't believe the difficulty I had, just now, in getting the library computer to generate definitions of this word. They control Safe Search on Google, which means nothing they don't want you to know gets heard. Awful, censorious, Nanny State nonsense.
In a way, making a fetish out of safety and "Teh Kidz."
I looked at the cookery books. Remainder stores and Waterstones alike have an overabundance of them. In fact, Waterstones has so many that, in addition to occupying a whole three shelves right in the centre of the shop floor, they have had to put in an overflow shelf to accommodate a surplus of them, each book carrying a happy, smiling celebrity face or bearing a celebrity name.
Reading a Jamie Oliver book won't somwhoe magically make your bad, lousy, tasteless cooking over into a banqueting masterpiece. I can only imagine that people buy these useless books so that, somehow, a book carrying the smiling face of a celebrity chef will magically do the job and transform you, or simply the trash you microwave, into something as juicy and tasty as the crap they serve on the television.
The television. Pixels glowing on a screen. Cookbooks. Just words and pictures books. The pictures and dancing pixels, the words, won't feed you. Even if you tear open the pages and eat them, it's just paper.
The pictures won't transsubstantiate into magic food when it hits your belly. Nigella Lawson won't magically walk into your kitchen and transform you into a master chef. But people want to believe it.
This is why people collect art, and will kill or steal for originals, and why they go apeshit when something turns out to be a skilful forgery. It isn't the money, even though an obscene amount of it does change hands. It's the possession of the Thing that counts.
Or perhaps it is the Thing, the fetish, imbued by the mind of the owner with mystical properties, that is doing the possessing.
In the end, who's the property? Why do we call something a "belonging?" People belong to groups. People identify with a group. We belong to our associations. Perhaps this is a more abstract form of possession, too.
But who owns us, if we are caught up in our need to have things? Is it we who own a thing, or is it the thing that, in the end, owns us?
I have that kind of a mood on me today.
I noticed something that I'd only really observed, never codified or put into words. The items on display can't really count as books, as such. More like fetishes.
Some definitions of the word "fetish" -
- "An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices."
"An object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence."
"An object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion."
You won't believe the difficulty I had, just now, in getting the library computer to generate definitions of this word. They control Safe Search on Google, which means nothing they don't want you to know gets heard. Awful, censorious, Nanny State nonsense.
In a way, making a fetish out of safety and "Teh Kidz."
I looked at the cookery books. Remainder stores and Waterstones alike have an overabundance of them. In fact, Waterstones has so many that, in addition to occupying a whole three shelves right in the centre of the shop floor, they have had to put in an overflow shelf to accommodate a surplus of them, each book carrying a happy, smiling celebrity face or bearing a celebrity name.
Reading a Jamie Oliver book won't somwhoe magically make your bad, lousy, tasteless cooking over into a banqueting masterpiece. I can only imagine that people buy these useless books so that, somehow, a book carrying the smiling face of a celebrity chef will magically do the job and transform you, or simply the trash you microwave, into something as juicy and tasty as the crap they serve on the television.
The television. Pixels glowing on a screen. Cookbooks. Just words and pictures books. The pictures and dancing pixels, the words, won't feed you. Even if you tear open the pages and eat them, it's just paper.
The pictures won't transsubstantiate into magic food when it hits your belly. Nigella Lawson won't magically walk into your kitchen and transform you into a master chef. But people want to believe it.
This is why people collect art, and will kill or steal for originals, and why they go apeshit when something turns out to be a skilful forgery. It isn't the money, even though an obscene amount of it does change hands. It's the possession of the Thing that counts.
Or perhaps it is the Thing, the fetish, imbued by the mind of the owner with mystical properties, that is doing the possessing.
In the end, who's the property? Why do we call something a "belonging?" People belong to groups. People identify with a group. We belong to our associations. Perhaps this is a more abstract form of possession, too.
But who owns us, if we are caught up in our need to have things? Is it we who own a thing, or is it the thing that, in the end, owns us?
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-08 06:26 am (UTC)As far as Nigella Lawson, people aren't looking at her to come into their kitchens to make them better chefs. In the case of men, they're staring at her huge tits and wanting them (because let's face it, why would anyone want to eat dove breasts when they can have the ginormous turkey breasts?), and in the case of women, they're hoping she'll walk into their kitchens to wave a magic cooking spoon that will grant them larger tits so that men and women will find them more worthy of love and attention. I'm not entirely sure that I see her in a serious light as a chef. I'm not sure that anyone else sees her as one either. I think the only thing that would make her even more desired is if she had red hair because as we all know, redheads are fierier and sexier, blondes are cuter and have more fun, black-haired women are more exotic and we boring brunettes might as well kill ourselves because no one has ever claimed that brunettes have any sort of trait that makes us sexy.
A Serious Chef
Date: 2012-03-08 11:29 am (UTC)Her father, Nigel Lawson, was one of the more famous Chancellors of the Exchequer (holder of the nation's purse strings and organiser of Budgets) in Thatcher's day. During his time as Chancellor, however, all those expense lunches of pate de foie gras and oysters and champers gave him a figure like Mister Creosote.
Then he quit, and went of a diet, and now he looks positively anorexic.
Meanwhile, his daughter Nigella married Charles Saatchi, one of Thatcher's early spin doctor advisors, and he landed her a job in the BBC.
So when they asked her what she can do, she replied that she could cook, and probably she jiggled them, and ... bingo. Job's a good un.
It really is who you know ...
Re: A Serious Chef
Date: 2012-03-08 06:09 pm (UTC)