Re: 'fetish'

From: db (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Feb 17 2006 - 16:28:06 PST


Thank you for broadening the definition of fetish to include some of
its lesser known or recognized antecedents. Important stuff.

db

On Feb 9, 2006, at 11:30 PM, David Tetzlaff wrote:

> This is a word many folks only associate with freudianism and sexual
> obsession. However, that is not, at base, what the word means: it's
> general defn. is neither particularly creepy or pejorative. It is 'an
> object believed to have magical properties.' In Marx's theory of the
> commodity this notion of magic is akin to 'something somone pays
> too much
> attention to at the expense of attention to other things.' Apparently
> several current video-games use the term for objects players may
> acquire
> that have unusual powers: e.g. a pistol that always shoots the
> player's
> enemy between the eyes.
>
> The etymology of the term -- which has 'charm' or 'totem' as the
> closest
> synonym at its derivation -- goes back to the Latin for
> 'artificial' and
> 'to make.' So all art might be said, merely descriptively, to be a
> fetish...
>
> I brought it up in something akin to the marxist sense, meaning to
> 'fetishize' is to isolate something from the big picture, to fail
> to see
> the forest for the trees, as it were. Hardly a compliment, but
> nothing, I
> think to get too disturbed about...
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.