In this initial chapter, I intend to explore the role of the souvenir and nostalgia as it is related to fetishism. My focus will be directed toward the manifestation of various narratives or relationships that are attached to souvenir objects, which may be described as fetishistic. To begin this examination, I will initially define the various meanings of fetishism by calling upon two of the best-known interpretations - Marx's commodity fetishism and Freudian notions of the sexual or psychological fetish.
By analysing these examples, I will be able to underpin this section of the paper in terms of materialist and psychoanalytic epistemologies, both of which are crucial to this topic. The term fetishism, as it is generally understood, has three distinctly separate contexts. Gammon and Makinen describe these as - 'commodity fetishism', 'anthropological fetishism' and 'pathological' or 'sexual fetishism.'[6]
The first of these types depend on a financial exchange to sate the desire of the subject, who fetishises after particular commodity objects. The other two forms have significance attached by the personal or community context of the object. In brief, the homily paid to fetish objects in a traditional sense, is largely religious, and can also expanded to include the rituals which manifest in individual spiritual beliefs, particularly in a contemporary Western consciousness. For instance, the new age found its roots in a fascination for 'exotic' cultures in the late nineteenth century. Many followers of philosophical movements including Theosophy and Jungian psychology appropriated Hindu and Buddhist icons and beliefs. These ideologies reflected a yearning for desiring higher 'truth' and 'authentic' communication with the universe, through paying homage to various deities or, by purchasing artifacts whilst taking pilgrimages to sacred sites.
Not surprisingly, the development of tourism started to escalate around the same time that trade corridors were opened to places such as Japan, India and Nepal, all of which were defined as the 'East'. The Western public was starting to locate these objects as exotic and they operated as signposts of that culture. Meaghan Morris, cites MacCannell in her well known essay At Henry Parkes Hotel [7], by making this statement in regards to the 'markers' or signposts of tourism:
"Both tourist and theorist can be caught up in a metaphysical quest. Each is motivated by desire "to make present to himself a conceptual schema which would give him immediate access to a certain authenticity (the 'real nature' of his object of study)."[8]
This notion of authenticity forms part of the subjective relationship between the object and the encounter. The Shroud of Turin has long been heralded as a relic of Christianity - signifying the trace or connection to Jesus Christ The imprint of his body on the cloth acted as the evidence of Jesus Christ's existence as a living person. The authenticity of this 'historical evidence' was called into question some years ago and x-rays of the shroud have dated it to around 1350 AD. The carbon-dating results from three different internationally known laboratories agreed with the date: 1355 by microscopy and 1325 by C-14 dating[9] . Ironically, many people still associate the shroud with Christ, and there are many web sites that proclaim that the shroud is authentic, regardless of the scientific evidence. This tendency to pay homage to an object also encompass the rituals that accompany local community landmarks, for instance war memorials, in the quest to memorialise the past.
Whilst all three of these above-mentioned categories of the fetish define an obsession for an inanimate object, only the first is dependent on monetary transactions. However, for the object this is only a transitive state - a waiting period. Its status as a potential fetish object in the context of the other types is displayed after the purchase. In some ways, this type of commodity preempts its state as future treasure in much the same way as contrived commericialised forms of nostalgia, because in essence they operate in the same way as these objects by anticipating their future as collectible forms of culture.
In the field of anthropology, the term fetishism refers to a mode of defining and identifying the concept of beliefs systems dependant on the devotion to objects. It is applied to beliefs and religious practices where supernatural attributes are centered on material, inanimate objects, which are described as fetishes. These objects are usually figurative and modeled from a range of media including; stone, wood, clay, glass or any other "material in imitation of a deified animal or other object." [10]
In psychology, "the term applies to sexual urges and fantasies that persistently involve the use of non living objects by themselves or, at times, the use of such objects with a sexual partner. Common fetishes include feet, shoes, and articles of intimate female apparel."[11] In Freud's original interpretation of the fetish, we see it as a substitute for the penis: "the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and does not want to give up. The fetish achieves a token of triumph over the threat of castration and serves as a protection against it." [12]
According to Freud, after having the opportunity of studying a number of men with a fascination to particular objects that, "in every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the same."[13] He noted that these conditions were often related to childhood events and that "the choice of the fetish object seems determined by the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one." [14] Arguing that "in very subtle instances both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself."[15] Concluding "that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man's penis, just as the normal prototype of interior organ is a woman's real small penis, the clitoris." [16]
Earlier he contended that women did not have fetishes because of this association with the fear of castration. Freud never studied any women patients with fetishes, although he did later mention this possibility in a 1909 lecture. There are a number of later discussions that challenge Freud's assertion by specifically focusing on examples of female fetishes. The most common forms of female fetishism apparently do relate to shopping and food - Ann Friedberg, Meagan Morris, Elizabeth Grosz and Lorraine Gammon and Merja Makinen are all very useful for further reading in this particular area.
Gammon and Makinen closely examine Freud's 1909 paper titled 'On the genesis of fetishism', presented at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where Freud went as far as to state that all women are clothes fetishists. "It is a question again of the repression of the same drive, this time however in the passive form of allowing oneself to be seen, which is repressed by the clothes, and of account of which clothes are raised to a fetish." [17]
Also in this paper, Freud also relates fetishism to the scopic drive - the repression of the desire to look. The tourist averts their gaze from the unsightly realities of their site of consumption, only focusing on the attractions of the site. For instance, in the example of the Disney theme park, all waste is removed, all tours highly orchestrated, with the gaze being directed to only see the wonders of Disney. When tourists yearn for a distant place, they desire to extend their gaze to see only what existed previously, as what Baudrillard would call 'simulacra'. These familiar signposts validate their experience and make it authentic in their eyes.
By 1927 Freud, in an article auspiciously titled 'Fetishism,' moves away from the process of documenting the clinical practice, undertaken by the examination of patients, to offering a psychoanalytic reading - stating categorically that the fetish stands in for the lost phallus of the mother. The fetishist needs the fetish object to carry out the sexual act to protect from the horror of female castration and perceptions of lack. Gammon and Makinen obverse from Freud's 1937 lecture 'An outline of Psycho-Analysis', that he clearly identifies that the "choice of fetish is either metaphorical -a symbolic representation of the phallus, or metonymic and contiguous to the revelations of female genitals."[18] According to Freud, the last moment before the trauma signifies and characterises the object's meaning and the subsequent desire towards such an object. From that point on, that moment is frozen, represented by an inanimate object that defines a pathway to the past and memory.
Faith in memory retrieval is a well-known feature of Freudian psychology. He believed that "impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further development."[19] Although the fetish object itself may have no relevance to the processing of time -its source, connecting point or trace is in the past. Just as nostalgia explicitly relies on the linearity of time to forge its connection to the owner, so do the origins of the sexual fetish. What these objects both inherently represent is the subject's partiality, which is conveyed through a personal syntax of signs that are represented by the souvenir/fetish object.
On the other hand, Karl Marx's treatise on the commodity fetish is dependent on the interaction arising from certain sets of social relations pertaining to commodity exchange and trade. His is a scenario driven by the obsession and need for the consumer fetishist to attend to their obsession or desire via a financial transaction. In this particular discourse on the object, there is present a phenomenon that characterises the consuming nature of capitalism. Although, ultimately in the end, the importance of the souvenir is relative to the meaning inherited from the owner. The creation of an object through the labour of a person, which is then exchanged or sold in a market economy, is seen as a contributing factor in the notion of the commodity fetish. Marx argues that:
"Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values." [20]
This assertion by Marx is essentially grounded and connected with his theory of alienation, which contends that what arises through the process of commodity exchange is a removal from the process of production. In other words, the labour involved in the manufacturing of such commodities is ours as workers, but we do not directly benefit from our production. He believed that:
"The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence."[21]
By making this statement he defines the difference between consuming for need and consuming for desire. He also states that:
"Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself."[22]
In other words, the relationship between a person and these commodity objects is related to the objects' purpose, or use value. For instance, a potato would rarely be part of a personal chronicle of the past - the nature of its form does not give much room for nostalgic inscription as it is recognised generally as a food source. However, it is possible for a psychologically driven fetishistic attachment to be made, if appropriate to the fetishist. It is this social context of commodity fetishism that characterises it from other forms of consumption involving the necessity to sustain life. The commodity fetishist purchases goods because they are drawn to, or fascinated by the object, they consume for desire, not for need. John Rees[23] states that Marx and later commentators such as Georg Lukacs, also acknowledge the contingent relationship between commodity fetishism and alienation. Marx believed that:
"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour."[24]
Marx also noted that:
"This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses."[25]
Also, he contends that "the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself."[26]
Again, what appears here is a relationship between the role of spectatorship and fetishism, one that exists by separating the subject from the object of desire. Marx contended that the objectification that arises from such commodity exchanges is evident because of the alienation that exists in the process of creating such commodities as a worker. Rees cites Lukacs' response to Marx in regard to the commodity fetish that:
"There is both an objective and subjective side to this phenomena. Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movement on the market). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power.....Subjectively.....a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article."[27]
The word 'fetish' can be traced to the Portuguese 'feitico', a name given to popular talismans in the Middle Ages, which were often heretical and/or illegal. Subsequently the word in popular usage developed to mean bewitched, fated and charmed. The word 'feitico' originally "came from the Latin 'facticium', which meant 'artifical', before it came to mean 'witchcraft.'"[28] This term also signifies practices that involve the theft or procurement of another's belongings for the purpose of making magic. Voodoo and other forms of folk magic may be applied in this instance. Obviously, these objects are not dependent on any type of commodity exchange nor do they have any economic value as such. They are predominately trophies procured from the person who becomes the subject of fixation by the collector, possessor or fetishist. For example, a sinister version of this type of collecting pertains to the common practice of serial murderers to collect souvenirs from their victims.
At this point, I would like to expand on the symbolic differences between commercial and non-commercial fetish, nostalgia and souvenir objects. The object purchased is only a commodity until the point of exchange, whereupon it then emerges as a possession. A noncommercial souvenir can arise from many different types of encounters - the offering of a gift, the finding of a significant object (treasure), and items which symbolise loved ones, are but a few examples. Also, theft is another, more covert means of securing a trophy of either category (as every object tells a story), and is usually identified as related to either arcane religious practices such as voodoo and witchcraft, or psycho/sexual obsessions, traumas and illness.
A braid of hair in the film Golden Braid, featuring Chris Hayward will serve as an example of the combined elements of fetishism and nostalgia in a personal souvenir. This obscure 1990 drama focuses on Hayward's character Bernard, a quiet, reserved clock maker who sleeps with a plait of blonde hair, keeping it locked in the chimes cabinet of a grandfather clock during the day. His ever-growing obsession with the object leads him gradually to a total denial of the present, forgoing his lover in favour of the mysterious braid. Bernard's connection with the braid is mostly illusive to the viewer, the narrative being composed visually of snatches of the past and scenes of Bernard crying, his obsession growing out of control. This particular example demonstrates not only the difference between the commercially available souvenir and personal talisman, but also outlines the distinctive difference between psychological or sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism.
This film presents the type of fetishism that is much more aligned with Freud's model of the proxy for the castrated mother's penis¾an attachment to an object representative of past traumatic or significant experience. In the case of the manufactured souvenir however, it is unlikely that the fetishistic relationship is sexual. The issue of commodity fetishism is intrinsic to the character of souvenir products. However, the braid of hair and the souvenir which originated as a commodity do have similarities - they are mediating objects which have powerful meanings on the level of the individual¾regardless of the circumstances in which it was procured. By this, I mean that the object mediates or communicates a relationship between people and places, which is significant to the owner. Both have the ever increasing weight of nostalgia bearing down on their role as belonging to the 'history' of the individual as time moves on. But where does this need come from, is it an inherited desire to collect objects of sentimental value? Perhaps, but it is unlikely that this is an innate or genetically coded behaviour. More possibly it is a process which has arisen from our social conditioning, and the effects of the modern world.
My grandmother is a great hoarder and has amongst her most precious possessions, items from her childhood in Yorkshire¾a wooden toy and a report card from her school. When Mary knew she was moving to Australia, she could only take the bare minimum on the boat, and was forced to decide what would accompany her to her new home across the ocean. As each of these items survives the yearly excavation, recategorisation and de-accessioning of her personal belongings (the annual spring clean), their value and status increases, becoming more precious as time magnifies and distances experience from the object. The capacity of these objects ability to exist in a collection further act as signifiers of identity, experience and the past, all of which function as a chronological measuring of time. Also, these objects often rely on a context to the remainder of the collection, hence the similarity between the art/museum collection and personal memorabilia. Phillips and Steiner comment in the regard to the contextualisation or categorisation of art objects that:
"The solution to defining the authenticity of an object circulating in the networks of world art exchange lies not in the properties of the object itself, but in the very process of collection which inscribes, at the moment of acquisition, the characteristics and qualities that are associated in both individual and collective memories."[29]
The moment of purchase and the means to which it becomes available in itself has the potential to be fetishistic and colonising, a process that emanates from a desire to own. This scenario operates as a means to claim legitimacy to a perceived encounter with another culture or nation, in terms of the tourism industry or, to have access to a ideological, community, or personally driven movement. For a tourist, this purchase potentially involves a certain level of colonisation-a taming of the cultural other via the process of financial exchange, whether or not they are conscious of this process. It is akin to the practices of commodity fetishism that are evident in the everyday existence of the 'modern' world of shopping malls and museum exhibits. From that magical transitive moment the fetish/souvenir object is transformed - claimed into the realm of the personal. Its fetishistic appeal leads its future owner to the cash register to claim their trophy prize. At that moment, the objects state of transcendence is at an epoch, as it its context shifts from non-specific and mass produced, to occupying the intimate space which is the terrain of the personal.
The self in relation to these social constructs then appears in the process of generating the subsequent stories of attachment to the souvenir. Its partiality as an object renders it as a proxy for that experience, by representing that part or aspect of the self. As identity is ever shifting and evolving as we move through time, the priority of certain objects will wax and wane in accordance with the ongoing construction of self. Though their significance usually increases with age in response to the significance of the event (remember young Mary leaving her homeland). Because the objects relation or point of contact or significance with the owner is in the past, their relationship is controlled and imaginary because the retrieval of such memories amplifies the removal and distance from present experience. This concept is in keeping with Freudian notions of the fetish as the objects ensuing purpose is, as a stand in or partial aspect of the self, as a means of preserving or repressing memory.
Susan Stewart pursues the role of the body in relation to its perceived surroundings, by outlining the difficulty in simultaneously imagining self as place, object and agent. She utilises the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his discussion of the carnival grotesque as an example of the unification of these three elements of self. Stewart also establishes the role of performance as a catalyst in this scenario, as a signifier of the present, particularly focusing on how it operates as a temporal zone that includes all three aspects of self. This is an impossible prospect for a fetish or souvenir to occupy beyond the moment of transcendence and contact, primarily because this is the moment of transformation for the tourist/possessor, after that the object is rendered nostalgic. Beyond this moment, time is captured or mediated by way of the object, as the moment is gone. The argument that time is invisible follows Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque - a theory of social relations and performance situated in the temporal space of the phenomenological world. Nostalgia and fetishism are both reliant on a past event to define its existence: in the case of nostalgia that transcribed moment is signified by feelings of longing, in the fetish we see manifested in the object feelings of desire.
In terms of a temporal positioning of the subject, Bakhtin is dealing with the present, hence the experiential context of subjectivity in his writings on the carnival and the grotesque. The process of nostalgia is perpetually deferred, as is the future dream world of utopia. What is beginning to present itself through this study is the multitude of psychological spaces which nostalgia impacts upon - home, tour, work, religion, not to mention the great museum repositories of Western arts and sciences. Whilst all of these sites are physically tangible, they are also overloaded with symbolic meanings which are manifested through the psyche, via the system or language of referents which characterises or defines the object.
The realm of the grotesque as described by Bakhtin, is one of the immediacy of lived experience, the here and now, addressing the phenomenological world rather than the musty corridors of the past. Stewart is very clear in differentiating this state of the grotesque from the distancing and objectification of the freak show, by stating that the freak show operates as an inversion of the ideal. The process of time operates in a mode that forever distances the self and lived experience from the scale of measurement that perceives the body somewhere between the ideal and the freakish. The subsequent objectification of the body also renders it as a potential commodity - incapable of experiencing life or death as it exists in a state of transcendence, forever represented by the symbols, objects and images which identify the self. Or, as I assert through the course of this paper, that contemporary Western identity is dependent, controlled and constructed by such qualitative and quantitative assessments.
The cult of the individual is a phenomenon that became widely popularised during the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time when romanticism for the past (the exotic and primitive) and the landscape appeared as traces to humanity's ties with nature and the spirit (the self). Darwinian theories of evolution, pseudo sciences such as Phrenology all focused on gathering knowledge and histories related to the development of civilisation and humanity. At this time the academy grew and branched off into the divergent disciplines that later constituted the arts and sciences.
As the transference from experience to memory takes place, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world becomes abstracted. As such, the association with the object/event ultimately belongs to the mythological domain of nostalgia. By having its moment translated into a fetish object; the object replaces (in material form) the memory of the body. As much as the souvenir and its nostalgia is removed from the bodily experience of now, it acts as a proxy for the body, a stand in, presented as an extension of the subject, connecting them to the past. Because the object (souvenir) exists outside of the self, its materiality alone can never disclose its meanings and narrative. It relies completely on its partiality and social relation to the owner to actually be of any significance or meaning.
These objects hold no use value in this state even if 'useful' (think of tea towels used as wall hangings) only sentimental value is apparent due to its position as the trace of past experience. Through the process of time, the souvenir moves from origin to trace, going from event to memory to desire, desire committing the event to memory, where it becomes idealised and nostalgic. The object can only be animated via the narrative of the possessor, and upon such revelations in the course of storytelling the object is further projected to the realm of the nostalgic, as it (the object) alone cannot reveal its stories. This distance created is seen as a loss as it recalls the past, but it is also represents a surplus - of signification. It is in this state that we see fetishism come to play. This in turn demonstrates how environment shapes the construction of identity in a Marxian context rather than identity being constrained to the parameters of genetic coding and inherited traits. Katherine Platt, author of the essay Places of experience and the experience of place[30] comments that:
"Bachelard emphasises two important points. One is that we create and recreate ourselves out of our experiences. A second is that the boundary between the outside and inside is vital and active: it expands and contracts. It is permeable and plastic."[31]
In terms of its meaning, the nature of an object is shaped by those experiences, as the present can impact on how we in turn perceive the past. In other words, the desire for the ideal is also the desire for closure and stasis, the present cannot be contained like the past. This is a process where, as Bachelard comments, we do not remain static as we are constantly reinventing ourselves to suit the occasion or the necessity. Stewart also sees this scenario as the process whereby an object substituting the body in part or wholly is representative of the partial double. This is because the object can never revive the experience, it can only evoke or rekindle the memory of an event or experience. Paul Riceour also links the construction of historical narratives to the processes of fiction and states:
"We have tried to give meaning to the idea of the reality of the past by our analyses of the reinscription of the trace, then by the dialectic of reeffectuation, of the gap and the analogical assimilation. A similar task is indicated on the side of fiction which would give a plausible meaning to the idea of cross-reference between history and fiction."[32]
These processes of assimilation act as a form of translation, to make the syntax understandable. What I also think Riceour is dealing with here is the rationality of Western systems of categorisation which ultimately code and locate objects and relationships as belonging to discrete branches of knowledge, which all claim legitimacy to a past. Once these branches are held to scrutiny, as in the case of the souvenir in this essay, we are exposed to a plethora of ideas and theories which seek to situate it within a specific object relation. For instance such categories as memorabilia, art, ethnography, kitsch, have to a certain extent a mind set or psychology related to nostalgia and fetishism. This in turn brings into question the position or role of the status of these objects, as examples of transcultural contact and cultural representation. There have been many examples of the discovery of mass produced 'artifacts' held in numerous collections under the auspices of traditional ethnography and fine art. These types of categorisations or systems of naming are mostly exempt from the rationale of a personal collection, where the value of an object is always seen as authentic and therefore not exposed to any external process of scrutiny.