The fetish is the being-there of a desire, an expectation, an imminence, a power and its presentiment, a force interred in the form and exhumed by it. Whether one considers it in the context of magic, of psychoanalysis, or the jubilant and almost incantatory use of the word in Marx, the fetish possesses a double secret: the one that critical analysis shows to be the paltry monetary secret, and the other that which remains in the intensity of a presence, which precisely as presence retains its secret, and its presence is in this keeping of the secret. –Jean-Luc NancyFootnote1
This symposium marking the compilation and publication of Pietz’s original articles on the fetish, published in the 1980s, in a single volume speaks to the raw intimacy, vibrancy, and power that persists in this unconventional, seminal work nearly forty years on from its origins. Inevitably, the six provocative contributions offered here themselves resonate with the ambiguous power under scrutiny and gesture towards the very ‘intensity of a presence’ that Nancy designates as a ‘secret’ contained within the fetish. How could it be otherwise? We have before us a book that appears to, at least partially, materially mimic the very object of its content, unifying works published separately (or not at all) into a singularity that is imbued with an escalating power by this singularisation and returned to us. Further, we have the intensity of multiple presences that are discernible and yet retain their secrets – the fetish itself, a concept which retains the power to ‘resonate just a bit’ within us no matter how forensically and objectively presented, and the author himself who inhabits every page with an intense perspicuity and yet evades even the most speculative attempts by the reader to give some answer to the question of ‘who’ he is. Revising Nancy just a bit, this is the double secret that has rendered Pietz’s writings on the fetish more notorious than known and that inevitably transgresses upon our consideration of the now-singular volume in the present.
The question of ‘presence’ thus simultaneously structures, animates, and haunts the six contributions that constitute this symposium – this is a unifying, overarching strength that binds the otherwise quite different approaches and assessments one finds here. Each contribution in its own way offers a clear, critical discussion of Pietz’s work while, consciously or not, leaving its secrets largely intact. Only Masuzawa’s touching personal reflection ‘On Pietz Doing History’ edges into a direct consideration of presence and how we might think about it in relation to this work. ‘[I]t was a time when it was still possible to lose touch,’ she writes, expressing a regret and a desire that might be hard to grasp or contemplate in the present and in the systematic way that Pietz’s writing demands.
The question of ‘presence’ emerges as a central point in the other contributions as well. For some, this point indirectly serves to frame critical discussions of what are characterised as Pietz’s own omissions and blind spots. In this vein, Matory highlights the quite straightforward fact that the fetish concept was/is driven by the European subject projecting disavowed and repressed elements of the self onto African merchants and into African religions, noting that Pietz himself is hardly immune from at times engaging in such acts of projection and disavowal in his own materialist approach. Similarly, Spieler posits that accounts that emphasise the existence of a zone of cross-cultural incommensurability over questions of value and the status of objects between European and African traders distorts the situation on the ground at the time, as Europeans could not have practically understood African merchants as ‘gawking simpletons’ and developed the thriving, complex face-to-face commerce that is historically established as having existed at the time. For Spieler, what the fetish literature (including Pietz’s writing) obscures is the fact that Europeans and Africans were meaningfully present to one another, a fact kept secret by the evolving fetish discourse that one-sidedly emphasises a gulf in meaning and that Pietz somewhat credulously (in Spieler’s telling) takes as his primary source.
Other contributors see more possibility in Pietz’s approach for taking up questions of the fetish, both past and present. Regarding the past, Lafont provocatively suggests how the fetish concept served to determine a monotheistic ‘European specificity’ in reference to art and religion, asserting that Pietz’s work potentially allows us to better understand how a modern, profane definition of art comes into being in the wake of a ‘rupture of the faith’ precipitated by the fetish, where neither God nor the sacred remained present in Christian images and sacral objects. In reference to the here and now, Bialecki engages with The Problem of the Fetish by deploying its approach in a summary analysis of the present-day phenomenon of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the seeming contradiction of having a strongly sensuous experience of the materiality of objects that are, strictly speaking, nonexistent as material substance. For Bialecki, Pietz’s theorisation of the fetish provides us with a way of understanding how it is possible for something like an NFT to function as ‘the particular, sensuous face of a distributed, abstract system,’ providing a model for simultaneously noting the power and the limits of an ever-widening field of experience that would appear to be ‘fetishistic’ and yet lacks the presence of any solidly material objects of desire at all.
Bialecki’s focused use of Pietz to gain some traction on the present anticipates Kliger’s expansive outline of what she terms ‘a third reading’ of encounters that are incommensurable and words that are untranslatable, with Pietz’s close analysis of the term ‘fetish’ and the historical contexts that gave rise to its operability as a term serving as inspiration. Noting that the untranslatability or incommensurability of a term is typically understood as a blockage and tends to frame the encounter in binary terms, Kliger argues that Pietz demonstrates that these can be multivocal sites of creative opportunity and invention. Using an incident recounted by British missionary John Henry Holmes as an example, Kliger makes a compelling intellectual case for paying close attention to when actors proclaim with some exasperation ‘I tried to account for it.’ In Holmes’s case, it was accounting for a strange cry that seems to eminate from a nearby tree – his Papuan ‘house-boy’ indicates that it is the imunu of the tree, a concept that is never explained further but is represented as dangerous and something to avoid. Holmes never determines the source of the cry, but he tries (unsuccessfully, it seems) to account for sound and the concept both. In Kliger’s telling, Pietz shows us how to, in turn, account for such an experience and the incommensurability that would mark it out as an encounter that requires accounting for at all. In short, Kliger is highlighting precisely how Pietz allows us to think alongside not only the fetish as such but any event, word, or phenomenon that cannot be translated, that does not reveal who or what is present, and that generates a strong, sensuous experience despite those blockages and aporias.
The intensity of the presence retains its secret. Each contributor in their own way senses this quality in The Problem of the Fetish and, via the presence of their contributions in this symposium, simultaneously elucidates and extends Pietz’s thinking while (mostly) keeping its secrets. Such engagements attest to the brilliance of this unusual work and themselves serve as useful encounters for a new generation of readers.
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Note from Stefanos Geroulanos: As we completed compiling this forum, Francesco Pellizzi passed away in August 2023. Pellizzi edited Pietz’s essays for the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics in the 80s and 90s, and Pietz had confided to him the full manuscript of that book, with a view to publication – the publication on which the contributions here are commenting.
Over forty years, Francesco served as an extraordinary editor for so many authors in RES, working with a careful eye to style as much as a questioning one for arguments. In RES he created and sustained that rare intellectual space that blends remarkable rigour and creativity. He did not only open a door to a true intellectual home; he served as an informal mentor to so many authors, as he did for Pietz, as he did for me, and he did so with extraordinary generosity, seriousness, and in the best kind of intellectual friendship imaginable. Francesco was a prince among men. We mourn his passing with deep sadness: sadness over the powerful and generous spirit that has now left us, sadness also for those who will not, or no longer, benefit from thinking with him.
Notes
1 Nancy Jean-Luc, ‘The Two Secrets of the Fetish’, trans. Thomas C. Pratt, Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 6.