Laura Mulvey Fetishism

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Some Thoughts on Theories ofFetishism in the Context ofContemporary Culture

LAURA MULVEY

During the 1970s, fetishism was a key concept for the political aestheticsof modernist-influenced anti-Hollywood cinema and psychoanalytically influ-enced feminist theory. As fetishism, like a portmanteau, answered a number ofconceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporary agendaof debate, in writing, discussion, filmmaking. The agenda included: willingsuspension of knowledge in favor of belief; a defense against a male mis-perception of the female body as castrated; the image of femininity as frag-mented and reconstructed into a defensive surface of perfect sheen; an apoth-eosis of spectacle in consumer capitalism; the sheen of Hollywood cinema inwhich the erotic spectacle of femininity contributed to the invisibility of filmicprocesses; the erasure of the cinematic signifier, and its specificity, under itssignified. In these polemics, the influence of Brecht met psychoanalysis andmodernist semiotics. Furthermore, an aesthetic that intends to make visible theprocesses hidden in cultural production could, by analogy, or rather by homol-ogy, point toward labor power, also concealed by the sheen of the commodityproduct under capitalism. This was an agenda composed at the closing momentsof the machine age.Contemporary critiques of realism have drawn attention to the way itsaesthetics were formally, even fetishistically, imbricated within an apotheosis ofvision which assumed that an image represented, or referred to, the object itdepicted. For feminist aesthetics, concepts that made visible a gap between animage and the object it purported to represent and, thus, a mobility and insta-bility of meaning have been a source of liberation. It was, of course, semioticsand psychoanalytic theory that played a central part in this conceptual liberation,not only opening up the gap in signification but also offering a theory thatcould decipher the language of displacements that separated a given signifierfrom its apparent signified. The image refers, but not necessarily to its iconicreferent.

The influence of semiotic and psychoanalytic theory on feminism coin-cided, however, with the wider ramifications of postmodern aesthetics, its plea-OCTOBER65, Summer1993, pp. 3-20. ? 1993 Laura Mulvey.


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sure in instabilities of meaning and infinite deferral of reference. And just asthe aesthetics of realism had a specific formal relation to the economics of themachine age and industrial capitalism, so the aesthetics of postmodernism seemto reflect, in turn, new economic and financial structures. The problem ofreference is, now, not only a question of the image and aesthetics, but ofcapitalism itself. As industrial capitalism shows symptoms of decline, financecapitalism flourishes, and the advanced capitalist world shows signs of re-form-ing into economies that can create money out of money and produce surplusvalue outside the value produced by the labor power of the working class. Inthis sense, the success of finance capital over industrial capital in the advancedcapitalist economies, where currency speculation can be more profitable thanthe exploitation of labor power, raises the issue of reference in economic terms.Money, which is first and foremost a symbolic representation of value, is nowalso subsumed into processes of exchange that do not necessarily representeither commodities or their production.From this point of view, a Marxist approach to contemporary aestheticsmight well argue that the loss of referentiality in culture is, itself, the result ofshifts and changes in the economic structures that herald the advent of acapitalism based on an electronic machine age in which speed of communica-tions takes precedence over production. Marxism evolved within the historicalcontext of an industrial age that was dependent on working-class labor powerto generate value and a political imbalance of power to maintain the supremacyof capitalism. While Marxist theories of ideology aimed to unveil the politicaland economic realities that lay behind the imbalance, the impact of psycho-analysis and semiotics put the possibility of actually articulating the Real intoquestion. An economic, social, and political real could no more find articulationthan the Real of the Lacanian unconscious. All that could be analyzed wouldbe discourses and representations. But it is also crucially necessary to confrontthe cause that gives rise to certain discourses and representations, and to bearin mind that this theoretical and aesthetic shift might itself reflect changes anddevelopments within the material reality of capitalist technology and economics.The free-floating signifier may, itself, be a signifier of changes in the economicbase. Marxist principles that revealed the determining power of the economicover the social and the cultural are as relevant as ever, even as capitalism evolvesand convulses in ways that Marx himself could not have foreseen. History is,undoubtedly, constructed out of representations. The question is: How manyrepresentations may be related back, as symptoms, to the forces that generatedthem?It is in this context that fetishism, the carrier of such negative ideologicalconnotations once upon a time, might be reexamined. I want first to argue thatthe structures of disavowal might suggest a way in which the difficulty ofreference could be reformulated, without losing the crucial contribution thatpsychoanalytic and semiotic theory has made to contemporary thought. The

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SomeThoughtson Theoriesof Fetishism

point would not be to resurrect a totalizing real, but to consider history in termsof symptoms, pointing to sites that call for decipherment-even if it may betoo hard to crack the code. Secondly, I want to consider how semiotics andpsychoanalysis might be brought to bear on history, to attempt a theoreticalmeans of articulating the relation between representations and their skewedreferentiality. This essay is not by any means an answer to these problems, butrather a consideration of the concept of fetishism, in its different theoreticalmanifestations, as a structure that arises out of, as a consequence of, the diffi-culty of representing reality. Fetishism acknowledges the question of referencewithin its own symptomatic structure.The question of reference is raised acutely, as contemporary criticism hasconstantly pointed out, by the American cinema produced in the aftermath ofthe Hollywood studio system. And cinema itself now seems more and moreantiquated and marginalized by the evolution of very diverse entertainmenttechnologies. For me, this sense of belonging to a past epoch is accentuated bythe fact that the cinemas I have most loved, criticized, and learned from-theHollywood cinema of the studio system and the radical avant-gardist negationof its aesthetic-have both been transformed beyond recognition, and nearlyout of existence, by changes in the material conditions of film production. Theartisanal and the industrial were mutually interdependent in their mutual neg-ativity. Now, as the end of the twentieth century draws near, both seem almostquaint. For the cinema, in this age of video and television, occupies neither themesmerizing place it once held in popular culture and imagination nor thecentral place it once held in the economy of mass entertainment, and, in theage of the small screen, the concept of counter-cinema seems, consequently, tohave withered away.At the same time, the fascination exerted by the movies persists. As modesof consumption change, from movie theater to home video and television,intertextual references proliferate. Hollywood cinema is a constant source ofquotation and connotation in the more complex cultural climate of the electronicmedia, in its advertisements and its rock videos. Hollywood, of course, producedthe presidency of Ronald Reagan, who both implicitly and explicitly representedthe history of Hollywood as his own history and, thus, that of the United States.The past of Hollywood cinema is therefore present; propped up on its deathbed,it is sustained by the power the images of its heyday exert over subsequentgenerations. All this is well known and is being confronted as an issue bycontemporary critics. As Dana Polan has remarked:

Mass culture becomes a kind of postmodern culture, the stability ofsocial sense dissolved (without becoming any less ideological) into onevast spectacular show, a dissociation of cause and effect, a concentra-tion on the allure of means and a concomitant disinterest in mean-ingful ends. Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not

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the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness,as the ground for extensive experience.'Psychoanalytic theory allows a distinction between disavowal, the primaryprocesses of displacement as a mechanism of the unconscious, and the endlesssliding of the postmodern signifier. In all three cases, the relationship betweensignification and reference varies, but the concept of disavowal and the symptomof fetishism that is associated with it can contain the question of reference evenwhile displacing it. Thus, in order to distinguish between disavowal and repres-sion, Freud makes the following points:The ego often enough finds itself in the position of fending off somedemand from the external world which it feels distressing and ...this is effected by means of a disavowalof the perceptions which bringto knowledge this demand from reality. Disavowals of this kind occurvery often and not only with fetishists; and whenever we are in aposition to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incompleteattempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supple-mented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent at-titudes always arise and result in the situation of there being asplitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends on which of thetwo can seize hold of the greater [psychical] intensity.2In this sense, disavowal acknowledges its own origin in an unspeakable, and itsconsequent displacements thus both acknowledge and deny a relation of causeand effect.The psychic process of disavowal, although occurring "not only with fet-ishists," was first elaborated by Freud in his discussion of fetishism. Throughdisavowal, the fetish allows access to its own cause. It acknowledges its owntraumatic real and may be compared to a red flag, symptomatically signaling asite of psychic pain. Psychoanalytic film theory has argued that mass culturecan be interpreted symptomatically, and that it functions as a massive screen onwhich collective fantasy, anxiety, fear, and their effects can be projected. In thissense, it speaks to the blind spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifestsocially traumatic material through distortion, defense, and disguise. The aes-thetic of "rich sight" has lost touch with that delicate link between cause andeffect, so that its processes of displacement work more in the interests of formalexcitement and the ultimate denial of reference than as a defense against it. It

1. Dana Polan: "Stock Responses: The Spectacle of the Symbolic in SummerStock,"Discourse10(Fall/Winter 1987/88), p. 124.2. Sigmund Freud, "An Outline of Psychoanalysis," in The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud, vol. 23, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964),p. 202.

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is important to remember, however, that the current transcendence of the "richsight" aesthetic has developed out of the structures of disavowal at work in massculture. Disavowal maintains, after all, only a tenuous link between cause andeffect, while its investment in visual excess and displacements of signifiersproduces a very strong texture that can come to conceal this need to concealthe relation between cause and effect. That is, the aesthetic of disavowal caneasily provide a formal basis for a displacement that moves signification consid-erably further away from the problem of reference. And the blind spots thatgenerated the processes of disavowal get further lost on the way.Fetishism, broadly speaking, involves the attribution of self-sufficiency andautonomous powers to a manifestly "man" derived object. It is therefore de-pendent on the ability to disavow what is known and replace it with belief andthe suspension of disbelief. The fetish, however, is always haunted by thefragility of the mechanisms that sustain it. Fetishes are supremely culturallyspecific, so, as Eisenstein showed so clearly in the gods sequence of October,oneman's divine may be another man's lump of wood. Knowledge hovers implacablyin the wings of consciousness. In Octave Mannoni's famous phrase, the fetishist'sdisavowal is typically expressed "I know very well, but all the same . .." ChristianMetz invokes this phrase in his discussion of the suspension of disbelief in thecinema: "Any spectator will tell you 'he doesn't believe it,' but everything hap-pens as if there were nonetheless someone to be deceived, someone who reallywould 'believe in it.'. . In other words, asks Mannoni, since it is 'accepted' thatthe audience is incredulous, who is it who is credulous? . . . This credulousperson is, of course, another part of ourselves."3Unlike Metz, who sees the cinema's fetish object in its own technologicaltranscendence, feminist film theory has argued that the eroticization of thecinema is a major prop for its successfully fetishized credibility. And construc-tions of erotic femininity are also dependent on an economy of fetishism.Fetishism in the cinema also leads to Marx and to a consideration of theaesthetics of commodity fetishism. The popular cinema, itself a commodity, canform a bridge between the commodity as spectacle and the figure of woman asspectacle on the screen. This, in turn, leads on to the bridging function ofwoman as consumer, rather than producer, of commodities. This series of"bridges" suggests a topography, or spatial mapping, in which homologies,realized in image, then slide into formally similar structures. Connotations,resonances, significances can then flow, as it were, between things that do not,on the face of it, have anything in common. The formal structures of disavowalcreate a conduit, linking different points of social difficulty and investing in"sight" as a defense against them.

3. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysisand the Cinema (London: Macmillan,1982), p. 72.

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Feminist politics, when picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the crisisof the Left of the 1960s, played an important part in putting Freud on thepolitical agenda alongside Marx. Marx and Freud. For my political generation,feminist and post-1960s, the combination of names has an almost incantatoryring, and the desire to negotiate between the two sets of ideas has, like thesearch for the philosopher's stone, been at once inspiring and frustrating. Thematerials for alchemical experiment have been mainly images, representation,aesthetics, in which Freud has tended to have an edge over Marx. Now thesphere of the economic and the social, coded as the sphere of Marx, is forcingitself once again to the fore just as, paradoxically, the Marx-inspired regimes ofthe world have crumbled. This is due not only to the ever-encroaching economicand social crises generated by the right-wing regimes of the 1980s still in powerin the West. Collapsing communism received, perhaps, its coupdegracefrom animaginary of capitalism in which the imaginary of the commodity fetish plays alarge part. Psychoanalytic theory needs Marx, as echoes of the thirties, of thefascism and nationalism that drove Freud into exile, resound around Europe.At the same time, as world politics moves into reverse mode, remaining Marxistswill have to pay heed to the monstrous presence of the irrational in politics,which appears increasingly to be gaining strength over the progressive move-ment of history.Fetishism, present in the ideas of both Marx and Freud, has seemed to bethe first and the most potentially rewarding alchemical link between the two.The obvious link between their concepts of fetishism is that both attempt toexplain a refusal, or blockage,of the mind, or a phobic inability of the psycheto understand a symbolic system of value within the social and the psychicspheres. The differences between the two invocations of fetishism are, however,at least as significant as their similarities. The Marxist concept is derived froma problem of inscription: that is, the way in which the sign of value is, or ratherfails to be, marked onto an object, a commodity. It is in and around the difficultyof signifying value that commodity fetishism flourishes. The Freudian fetish is,on the other hand, constructed from an excessive, phantasmatic inscription:that is, the setting up of a sign, which is of value only to its worshippers, toconceal a lack, to function as a substitute for something perceived as missing.In one case, the sign of value fails to inscribe itself on an actual object; in theother, value is over-inscribed on the site of lack through a substitute object. Inconsidering the essential difference between the two theories, it may be inter-esting to consider the semiotic implications that both set up around the problemof inscription and the relation of inscription to a lost point of reference.The concept of the sliding signifier has been of enormous importance forcontemporary theory and aesthetics; even so, it is important to acknowledge

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that contemporary American popular culture can, and has, embraced this slid-ing to lose, to a second degree, a relation to its history and its collectivity. Toanalyze the fetishisms conceptualized by Marx and Freud is not to deny theplace of the signifier, but to return to the question of reference that both imply.The discussion that follows is an experiment. It is posited on the way inwhich, despite their differences, the two concepts of fetishism trace a series ofsemiotic problems. And these semiotic problems return to the Real, as conceivedby Lacan as the "unspeakable," the stuff of unconscious that surpasses expres-sion. The question is whether this "stuff" may also be present within the socialcollective and, if so, how it may be deciphered. The point is not to claim thatwhat is unspeakable may be spoken, but to decipher symptoms that might findexpression in popular culture. The cultural analyst may perhaps only drawattention to these sites and attempt to formulate means that might make themvisible while recognizing that they may not be accessible to the language ofconsciousness in ideal terms. This experiment does not aim to come up withany new formulation but rather to argue the case for the aesthetics of disavowalas opposed to those assumed by postmodernism. Charles S. Pierce's triad-theindex, the icon, and the symbol-is the starting point for a return to Marxwithin the context of contemporary semiotic theory.For Marx, the value of a commodity resides in the labor power of itsproducer. If this labor power could ever inscribe itself indexically on the com-modity it produces, if it could leave a tangible mark of the time and skill takenin production, there would be no problem. But the index, the sign based ondirect imprint, fails. Value has to be established by exchange. Marx shows howvalue can be marked by the equation of different commodities of equal value.One commodity acts as a mirror, reflecting and thus expressing the value ofthe other or, indeed, of as many others as it takes for the equivalence to balance.This stage is analogous to the Piercian icon. Slavoj Zizek has pointed out thatthis process is analogous to Lacan's mirror phase, in which the two sides of theexchange literally have to represent each other.4 While value may be inscribedthrough this reflective process, it depends on the literal presence of the goods,a barter that has to be repeated as often as exchange takes place. Complexeconomic systems, with wide-scale production, exchange, and circulation, de-veloped a means of expressing equivalence through a generalized sign system:money. The exchange of money takes place on the level of the symbolic, andthe expression of value acquires the abstract and flexible quality of language.Not only does money, as the sign of value, detach itself from the literalness ofobject exchange, but it also facilitates the final erasure of labor power as theprimary source of value. The referent, as it were, shifts away from the produc-tion process toward circulation and the market, where the commodity emerges

4. See Slavoj Ziiek, The SublimeObjectof Ideology(London: Verso, 1990).

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and circulates with an apparently autonomous value attached to it. In Marx'sterms, this appearance of self-generating value gives rise to commodity fetish-ism, the disavowal, that is, of locating the source of value in labor power. And,at the same time, a commodity's market success depends on the erasure of themarks of production-any trace of indexicality, the grime of the factory, themass-molding of the machine, and, most of all, the exploitation of the worker.It instead presents the market with a seductive sheen, competing to be desired.While money appears as a sophisticated, abstract, and symbolic means of ex-change, capitalism resurrects the commodity as image. As Marx says, in whatare probably the most frequently quoted sentences of Capital:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to themist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world theproductions of the human brain appear as independent beings en-dowed with life, and entering into relations both with one anotherand the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with theproducts of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attachesitself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced ascommodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the productionof commodities.5Here is a perfect paradigm of the disavowal of knowledge in favor ofbelief. An abstract system piggybacks itself onto a return to the image, disavow-

ing not only the origin of value but the processes of symbolization that havebrought it into being. Commodity fetishism triumphs as spectacle. As spectacle,the object becomes image and belief and is secured by an erotic, rather than areligious, aura. In her book The Dialecticsof Seeing, about Walter Benjamin'sArcades project, Susan Buck-Morss describes his perception of its primal stag-ing:

For Benjamin ... the key to the new urban phantasmagoria was notso much the commodity-in-the-market as the commodity-on-display,where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning,and purely representational value came to the fore. Everything de-sirable, from sex to social status, could be transformed into commod-ities as fetishes-on-display that held the crowd enthralled even whenpersonal possession was far beyond their reach.6Producers become consumers. And the invisibility of the workers' labor is

just as essential for the commodity's desirability as the visibility of the artisan'slabor is for a craft object. Any indexical trace of the producer or the production5. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 72.6. Susan Buck-Morss, TheDialecticsof Seeing:WalterBenjaminand the ArcadesProject(Cambridge:MIT Press, 1989), pp. 81-82.

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process is wiped out, in a strange reenactment of the failure of the workers'labor power to stamp itself on its products as value. Any ghostly presence oflabor that might haunt the commodity is canceled by the absolute pristinenewness and the never-touched-by-hand packaging that envelops it. And thegreat intellectual achievement of capitalism, the organization of an economicsystem as a symbolic system, can continue in its own interests. The commodityfetish masks something that is disturbing and secret for a particular form ofeconomic exploitation and combines the topographical with the semiotic. It re-presents the logic of symbolic exchange as an imaginary investment in object assuch. And that object then becomes endowed with a phantasmagorical othernessof hidden "something" behind its surface appearance. Surface and depth. It isthis dichotomy that psychoanalysis and semiotics have challenged with the con-cept of displacement. And it is here, in topographical imaginaries, that homo-logies between the otherwise incompatible Marxist and Freudian concepts mayemerge.There is nothing intrinsically fetishistic, as it were, about the commodityin Marx's theory. While establishing value may be a complex process in asophisticated system of circulation and exchange, and it may be difficult todecipher the place of labor power as the source of value, fetishism of thecommodity, in Marx's argument, has a political implication particular to capi-talism and those societies that come under its sway. Commodity fetishism alsobears witness to the persistent allure that images and things have for the humanimagination and the pleasure to be gained from belief in imaginary systems ofrepresentation. There is no need to claim a psychoanalytic explanation for thisphenomenon. The point of interest lies rather in the way that objects andimages, in their spectacular manifestations, figure in the process of disavowal,soaking up semiotic significance and setting up elisions of affect.Freud, in his short essay "Fetishism,"elaborated his concept from the malechild's misperception of the female body as lacking the male sexual organ andtherefore perceiving it as a source of castration anxiety. The psychic sequenceof events that follow are enacted through the processes of disavowal, substitu-tion, and marking. The fetish object acts as a "sign" in that it substitutes for thething thought to be missing. The substitute also functions as a mask, coveringover and disavowing the traumatic sight of nothing, and thus constructingphantasmatic space, a surface and what the surface might conceal. This intricateconfusion of the semiotic and the topographical, so important to the workingsof the unconscious, has yet another dimension. For Freud, the fetish object alsocommemorates. It represents a memorial, marking the point of lack (for whichit both masks and substitutes) and ensuring that the fetish structure, even in itsfixation on belief in the female penis, includes, through its very presence, aresidual knowledge of its origin. It is in this sense that the fetish fails to losetouch with its original traumatic real and continues to refer back to the momentin time to which it bears witness, to its own historical dimension.

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It is well known that the fetish very often attracts the gaze. In popularimagination, it glitters. It has to hold the fetishist's eyes fixed on the seductionof belief to guard against the encroachment of knowledge. This investment insurface appearance enhances the phantasmatic space of the fetish and sets upa structure in which object fixation can easily translate into image. The sexualfetish masks its origins in an excess of image. But while the symbolic system ofmoney value is essential to the appearance of the commodity fetish as spectacle,the Freudian fetish is constructed precisely to disavow the symbolic system atstake in sexual difference. And while the Freudian fetish includes a trace ofindexicality in its function as "memorial," the consumer of commodities is notknown to whisper, "I know very well, but all the same . . ." However, the eroticpower of the sexual fetish can, enabled, perhaps by the homologous topograph-ical structures of the two types of fetish-both split between spectacle anddisavowal-overflow onto and enhance the commodity. Film theory, particularlyfeminist film theory, has recently begun to examine these elisions and conden-sations.

The visibility or invisibility of the production process has had a crucialplace in film theory debates. In an extension of the Marxist model, it is logicalthat Hollywood, the Detroit of cinema, would evolve its characteristic stylearound the erasure of its own mechanics of production. The Hollywood film,as a commodity, also emerged into the marketplace as a self-generated objectof fascination, erasing, during the high days of genre, stars, and the studiosystem, even any easily identifiable directorial signature. And the spectacularattributes of the cinema fuse into a beautifully polished surface on the screen.It is not surprising that an interest in Brechtian foregrounding of the productionprocess or a Vertovian formalism heralded a politically based desire to demystifythe magical sheen of the screen. The aesthetics of the 1960s and '70s avant-garde were organized around the visible presence of an artisanal author andacknowledgment of cinema's mechanical processes. But cinema is a system ofproduction of meaning, above and beyond a mechanical process of imagegeneration, and one that has a unique ability to play with the suppression ofknowledge in favor of belief. The process of production gives birth to images,while the construction of the image gives birth to fascination. Feminist filmtheory has argued that cinema finds its most perfect fetishistic object, thoughnot its only one, in the image of woman.

While Freudian analyses of fetishism in cinema have a long history in filmtheory, one strand of the argument is particularly relevant here. The image ofwoman on the screen achieves a particular spectacular intensity partly as aresult, once again, of a homology of structure. Just as an elaborate and highlyartificial, dressed-up, made-up, appearance envelops the movie star in "surface,"

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so does her surface supply a glossy front for the cinema, holding the eye infascinated distraction away from its mechanics of production. This fragile car-apace shares the phantasmatic space of the fetish itself, masking the site of thewound, covering lack with beauty. In the horror genre, it can crack open toreveal its binary opposition when, for instance, a beautiful vampire disintegratesinto ancient slime. In film noir, the seductive powers of the heroine's beautymask her destructive and castrating powers. At the same time, this duality ofstructure facilitates displacements so that images and ideas that are only resid-ually connected-fascination with woman as surface and cinema as surface-can slide together, closing the gap between them like automatic doors. Thetopography of the phantasmatic space acts as a conduit for shifts in signification.It is this sexuality of surface, a sexuality that displaces a deep-seated anxietyabout the female body, that feminist film theorists have recently analyzed as abridge between the screen and the marketplace, where woman, the consumerpar excellence, also consumes commodities to construct her own sexual surfaceinto an armor of fetishistic defense against the taboos of the feminine uponwhich patriarchy depends.These kinds of links first came to my attention when I was working on thefilms ofJean-Luc Godard, particularly in the period of his work leading up to1968 and, most particularly, his film 2 or 3 ThingsI Know aboutHer. The heroineof this film is an average working-class housewife who takes to casual prostitutionin order to acquire the consumer goods associated with the needs of a latecapitalist life-style. Woman as consumer and consumed is not a new concept,and Godard, of course, uses prostitution as a metaphor quite widely in his work.But I was struck by the analogy that Godard seemed to suggest, simultaneously,as it were, misogynist and anticapitalist, between femininity and commodities asseduction and enigma, with both premised on an appearance fashioned asdesirable, and implying and concealing an elusive, unknowable essence. Godardcombines an ancient, romantic mystique of the feminine (the femme fatale, theSphinx, the Mona Lisa) with a Marxist, materialist interest in revealing thefunction of the commodity in modern life. This dualism also reflects Godard'spassionate and conflicted relationship to the cinema-as both a site of fascina-tion and the erotic and something to be exposed as mystification and delusion.For Godard the fascination of the cinema had been, above all, epitomized byHollywood cinema.There is an intrinsic interest in an overlap between the politics of sexuality,the politics of fetishized commodity consumption, and the politics of cinematicrepresentation. And there are obvious ways in which the female movie star setsup a possible point of conjuncture between the figure on the screen as fetishizedcommodity and her function as signifier in a complex, social discourse of sex-uality. One privileged image, such as that of Marilyn Monroe, who still todayrepresents an apex of the star system, may epitomize a construction of femaleglamour as a fantasy space. Its investment in surface is so intense that it seems

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to suggest that the surface conceals "something else." The question, then, iswhat this something else might be, and to what extent the surface sheen guardsagainst nameless anxieties associated with the female body outside its glamourmode, which are then repressed, leading to an even more intense reinvestmentin the fascination of surface. Marilyn's own form of cosmetic appearance isparticularly fascinating because it is so artificial, so masklike, that she managesto use her performance to, as it were, comment on, draw attention to, orforeground both its constructedness and its vulnerability and instability.When Andy Warhol did his Marilyn series, after her death in August 1962,he brought to bear on her image qualities that he had explored in his work onthe commodities he elevated into icons of the American way of life. The imageof the movie star, mass-produced and infinitely repeatable for consumption, isidentified by a given look, like a trademark, that masquerades as value. Warholilluminates two aspects, in particular, of the mythological quality of Marilyn'sface. First, he used its commodity aspect, reducing her features into a minimalcaricature that could be stamped onto a surface, and replacing the pseudo-natural cosmetics with highly stylized and nonlocal color, which played on thecosmetic of makeup and that of paint or print. In juxtaposition with his otherpaintings of commodities, Marilyn's image highlights the surface nature ofcommodity appearance itself, and the brightly glittering, blond surface is res-onant with "value"and with its enigma. But in, for instance, his MarilynDiptych,he hints at the second quality that her face evokes. The masquerade is fragileand vulnerable, and the surface starts to crack as the printing process slips andher features distort and decay. The other side of the feminine masqueradeseeps through into visibility. In this work, Warhol brings together the mark ofthe print, the signifier, the subject of modernist discovery and unveiling, withthe topography of feminine surface and its underside, which suggests deathand decay. This hint of something troubling and concealed rubs off, as it were,onto his commodity images. The trademarks of capitalism, like Campbell's soupor Coca-Cola, conceal the fact that these objects are produced in factories andby workers. The stamp of the printing process, again, sometimes slips in thismid-twentieth-century version of the still life, produced by a former child ofthe Pittsburgh working class.In the film industry the star always functioned as the main vehicle formarketing, providing the facade behind which the wheels of investment, pro-duction, circulation, and return could function invisibly. In his book HeavenlyBodies, Richard Dyer makes this point about stars:

Above all, they are part of the labor that produces film as a com-modity that can be sold for profit in the marketplace. Stars areinvolved in making themselves into commodities; they are both laborand the thing that labor produces. They do not produce themselvesalone. We can distinguish two logically separate stages. First, the

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person is a body, a psychology, a set of skills that have to be minedand worked up into a star image.... The people who do this laborinclude the star him/herself as well as make-up artistes, hairdressers,dress designers, dieticians, body-building coaches, acting, dancing,and other teachers, publicists, pin-up photographers, gossip column-ists, and so on. Part of this manufacture of the star image takes placein the films the star makes, with all the personnel involved in that,but one can think of the films as a second stage. The star image isthen a given, like machinery, an example of what Karl Marx calls"congealed labor," something that is used with further labor (script-ing, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce anothercommodity, a film.7

Dyer's description clearly relates to both male and female stars, but the processworks more acutely in the case of the female. And in the course of this processsome stars achieved an emblematic status that moved far beyond the fictionalcharacters impersonated on the screen.Two theories central to feminist analysis of the specificity of cinematicimages of women should be briefly introduced here. In "Visual Pleasure andNarrative Cinema," I argued that the spectator looking at the screen has avoyeuristic relation to the female, eroticized, image. This look, I claimed, istransmuted into that of the male protagonist looking at the eroticized womanwithin the fictional world of the narrative. I also argued that the very perfectionof this image was a defense against the castration anxiety that the body of thewoman may generate. Or rather, the fixation on surface, the gloss of appear-ance, created a binary space in which the problematic body was erased under aseductive surface. There is also the concept of the masquerade, which feministfilm theorists (in particular Mary Ann Doane) have adapted from Joan Riviere's1929 paper "Womanliness as Masquerade," in which she discusses the difficultyof femininity and its persistent construction in relation to male expectation.Riviere also focuses on the way in which competent women disguise themselvesunder an appearance of helplessness and coquettishness in order to undermineany male anxiety at rivalry:

Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, bothto hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals ex-pected if she was found to possess it-much as a thief will turn outhis pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not stolenthe goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness ordraw the line between genuine womanliness and the "masquerade."

7. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies:Film Stars and Society(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986),pp. 5-6.

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My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference;whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing.8Such an alignment between femininity and masquerade finds an apotheosisin the cinema, and particularly the Hollywood cinema, investing as it does inthe power wielded by eroticism in the marketplace. While the eroticized femaleimage may "front for" the cinema machine, a similar process of reinforcementexists between woman and commodity. Film theorists have traced the linksbetween Hollywood cinema and a conscious tie-in with marketing directed atthe female film spectator. These links shift the argument away from the fetish-ization of the female body on the screen within the erotic economy of patriarchy,

capitalist production, and cinematic convention, toward an erotic economy inwhich the fetishization of the female body becomes a vehicle for generalizingan appearance or masquerade off the screen and within the wider social interestsof patriarchy and capitalism. Here the cinema functions as a bridge betweenthe movie star as object of desire and the commodities associated with her, asobjects of desire, for the women watching the screen and looking in shopwindows. Charles Eckert, in his influential article "The Carole Lombard inMacy's Window," shows how specific commercial tie-ins transposed the fashionof the film stars into mass-produced clothes and cosmetics, priced within therange of every working girl.9 Doane, in the introduction to her book The DesiretoDesire, traces this relationship: "The woman's objectification, her susceptibilityto the processes of fetishization, display, profit, and loss, the production ofsurplus value, all situate her in a relation of resemblance to the commodityform."'0 And in relation to the cinema she states: "The economy of the text, itsregulation of spectatorial investments and drives, is linked to the economy oftie-ins, the logic of the female subject's relation to the commodity-her statusas consumer of goods and consumer of discourses.""Doane argues that the mass audience of cinema helped to place the laborerin the position of consumer, offering an image of a homogeneous populationpursuing the same goals-living well and accumulating goods. And the filmgenres directed at a specifically female audience sold a certain image of femi-ninity:

It is as though there were a condensation of the eroticism of theimage onto the figure of woman-the female star proffered to thefemale spectator for imitation .... The process underlines the tau-

8. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as Masquerade," in Formationsof Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin,James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 38.9. Charles Eckert, "The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window," in Fabrications: Costume and theFemaleBody,ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 100-21.10. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman'sFilm of the 1940s (London: MacmillanPress, 1987), p. 22.11. Ibid., p. 25.

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tological nature of the woman's role as consumer: she is the subjectof a transaction in which her own commodification is ultimately theobject.... The ideological effect of commodity logic on a large scaleis therefore the deflection of any dissatisfaction with one's life or anycritique of the social system onto an intensified concern with a bodywhich is in some way guaranteed to be at fault. The body becomesincreasingly the stake of late capitalism. Having the commodifiedobject-and the initial distance and distinction it presupposes-isdisplaced by appearing, producing a strange constriction of the gapbetween consumer and commodity.'2In the fifties, America became the democracy of glamour, completing a process,through the movies and through mass-produced clothes and cosmetics, thathad been launched in the 1930s and interrupted by the Second World War.America then exported this image through the Marshall Plan and the ColdWar; the glamour of Hollywood cinema encapsulated this relation betweencapitalism and the erotic and the society of commodity possession.For Freud, the body that is the source of fetishism is the mother's body,uncanny and archaic. For Marx, the source of fetishism is in the erasure of theworker's labor as value. Both become the unspeakable, and the unrepresentable,in commodity culture. Repression of the mother's body, repression of laborpower as a source of value. These two themes run, respectively, through theMarxist and the Freudian concepts of fetishism, concealing (in image) structuresof sexual difference and value that, although not themselves structurally linked,reinforce each other through topographies and displacements linking the eroticspectacle of the feminine to the eroticized spectacle of the commodity. Thereremain important differences between the two kinds of fetishism, one of whichI described at the beginning of this paper as a problem of inscription. I haveattempted to suggest that this problem is central to and articulated within theHollywood cinema of the studio system and has been made visible by recentfilm theory. By placing some of these analyses in juxtaposition to each other Iwanted to reiterate the well-known argument that the disavowal of productionprocesses is, in this context, complemented by the construction of an image thatfinds its ultimate realization in the eroticized feminine. There is a logic to theharnessing of the overinscribed signifier to the uninscribed. The sheer force of"rich sight," of the spectacle, creates a diversion away from inquiry or curiosity.The "aesthetics of fetishism," however, derive from the structure of dis-avowal in the Freudian model ("I know very well, but all the same . .."), whichcreates an oscillation between what is seen and what threatens to erupt intoknowledge. What is disavowed is felt to be dangerous to the psyche, either the

12. Ibid., pp. 30, 32.

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black void of castration anxiety or some other threat that sets up a split betweenknowledge and belief. In the same way, the threat to an autonomous self-sufficiency of image, that is, value located in the image itself and not its pro-duction processes, threatened the cohesion of Hollywood cinema. But dangerand risk are also exciting, on a formal as well as on a narrative level, andHollywood cinema has made use of a greater degree of oscillation in its systemof disavowal than has often been acknowledged. This trompe l'oeil effect iscentral for postmodern aesthetics, which came ultimately to use self-referen-tiality, intertextual reference, and direct address in the interests of a pleasurabledestabilizing of perception. To look back at the aesthetics of disavowal in Hol-lywood cinema is, still, an attempt to rearticulate those black holes of politicalrepression, class, and woman in the symbolic order. But it is also an attempt toreturn to a reconsideration of the relationship between cause and effect in thesocial imaginary at a time when the relation between representation and histor-ical events is becoming increasingly dislocated. Spectacle proliferates in contem-porary capitalist communication systems. At the same time, the reality of historyin the form of war, starvation, poverty, disease, and racism (as an ever escalatingsymptom of the persistence of the irrational in human thought) demands anal-ysis with an urgency that contemporary theory cannot ignore.

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Laura Mulvey Fetishism

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