VLVL2(10) Ditzah's Disguise

[Dave Monroe]

>From William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I,"  
Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5-17 ...

"'Fetish' has always been a word of sinister pedigree.
 Discursively  promiscuous and theoretically
suggestive ..." (p. 5)

"... the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a
novel object not proper to any discrete society,
originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast
of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.  Of course, origins are never absolute. 
While I argue that the fetish originated within a
novel social formation during this period through the
development of the pidgin word Fetisso, this word in
turn has a linguistic and accompanying conceptual
lineage that may be traced.  Fetisso derives from the
Portuguese word feticio, which in the late Middle Ages
meant 'magical practice' or 'witchcraft' performed,
often innocently, by the simple, ignoarant classes. 
Feticio in turn derives from the Latin adjective
facticius, which originally meant 'manufactured.'"
(ibid.)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0106&msg=56489&sort=date

And for futher recommended reading, see ...

http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/exams/examfetbib.htm

And from Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song:
Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century
French Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995),
Chapter 5, "Baudelaire and the Painted Woman," pp.
118-42 ...

... the shift to modernity and modernism.  The new
phantasmal projection of woman as artifice, as
simulacrum, appears in french letters through the
writing of Baudelaire ... (119)

The preferred rendition of the woman as statue, of
artifice as the desirable woman's most important
fashion accessory, is adumbrated already in
Baudelaire's praise of makeup in Le Peintre de la vie
moderne.  In these essays, he intervenes in the
tradition dating to antiquity that censures women's
use of "paint," affirming instead the value of
artificiality and linking it specifically with ideas
of
modernity.  While the painted woman has long been a
metaphor for the seductions of representation, I will
argue that the artificial woman enacts a
metafiguration of the technologies of the mechanical
reproduction (to borrow Benjamin's phrase) of human
presence that transformed the culture of the late
nineteenth century: the brilliance of electricity, the
instantaneity of telegraphy, the capture of the warmth
of the human voice in the phonograph, the advent of 
cinema. (119)

My argument is parallel in this regard, once again,
with certain points of [Friedrich] Kittler's
discussion of teh transition from romanticism, his
shift from the "discourse network" 1800 to that of
1900.  Kittler argues that in 1800, the woman was
idnetified with nature, in 1900, no longer: "If the
phantasm of woman arose in the distribution of form
and
matter, spirit and nature, writing and reading,
production and consumption, to the two sexes, a new
discourse network canceled the polarity." [Kittler,
Discouse Networks 1800/1900, p. 348] (119)

The inhuman woman carries forward the ancient topos of
teh automaton so prevalent in German literature of teh
period at the same time she expresses one aspect of
the dominant image of the fatal woman as [Mario] Praz
has described it [in his The Romantic Agony], and the
icy, expressionless symbolist woman [Frank] Kermode
isolates in his discussion of the dance figure in
romantic imagery [in his Romantic Image].  (120)

... the kind of nineteenth-century fantasy of the
femme fatale that Praz shows to be pervasive in
romantic writing and that Bram Dijkstra [in his Idols
of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in
Fin-de-Siecle Culture] finds typical in the visual
representations of women in the late nineteenth
century: a vision of the woman as seductive, perverse,
and infinitely dangerous. (121)

Baudelaire finally discloses to his reader the source
of the woman's charm: its secret lies in the magical
luxury of her adornments.  All the touches that
enhance and ornament her beauty are part of her, and
one must make no effort to think of her as separate
from them ... (122)

Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves
to show off her beauty, is part of herself.... No
doubt Woman is sometimes a light, a glance, an
invitation to happiness, sometimes just a word ... in
the metal and the mineral which twist and turn around
her arms and neck, adding to the fire of her  glance
... ([Baudelaire,] Painter, 30) (122)

In this piece, Baudelaire attacks the association of
beauty and virtue with nature in order to relocate
them in the realm of art and artifice. (127)

Rather, Baudelaire excoriates nature as the source of
crude constraint and evil (he himself preferred evil
in a more refined form).  (127)

Speaking of fashion leads Baudelaire metonymically to
the subject of women and makeup, the heart of "Eloge
du maquillage."  If virtue is "surnaturel," then it
becomes the woman's duty to make herself up, not to
imitate natural beauty or to "heigheten" her good
features, but to make them appear as artificial as
possible.... For Baudelaire, then, the woman is at her
best by making herself appear "supernatural" ... (128)

And see as well here ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0205&msg=67061&sort=date

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> Fetishism and Decadence: Salome's Severed Heads
> Charles Bernheimer
> 
> Etymologically, the fetish is a decadent object.
> The word comes from the Portuguese
> feitigo, "artificial, skillfully contrived," which
> in turn derives from the Latin facticius, "made by
> art." The sense of human fabrication as opposed to
> biological origin, of cultural signs replacing
> natural substance, is at the basis of other words
> in the Romance languages deriving from the same
> Latin root: Spanish afeitor, "to make up, adorn,
> embellish," and afeite, "dress, ornament,
> cosmetics"; French feint, "feigned, simulated."
> Furthermore, the French word moquilloge, "makeup,"
> is semantically connected to "fetish" through the
> Germanic root maken, "to make." As a verb,
> maquiller, like the words deriving from focticius,
> suggests not just painting one's face but also to
> fake, disguise, mask.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/