I think it safe to assume that some of us with access to keyboards, internets, television, telephones and teenagers have come to know what Foot Fetishists and Furries are. Of the two, I suspect the following understanding of Furries better elucidates the subject at hand: "An interest that can lead to participating in the furry fandom, a subculture where individuals express themselves through artistic creations like "fursonas" (personal animal characters) and elaborate costumes called fursuits. The fandom is also known for its conventions, online communities, and focus on artistic expression, acceptance, and community." So with Furries it's not just a macabre Halloween, with tricks and treats, it's a whole life style, not exclusively centered on inappropriate or weird commingling of the furred and the un-furred. Commodity Fetishism predates the telephone, as early as 1840 Marx was waxing on the fetish of metal money which everyone loved and needed, paper money just didn't count. In the late 1860's he had a detailed understanding, of how, in our minds a product lost touch with the material world, what the product, let's call it a tooth brush, was, where it came from, the labor involved in making it, who owned the labor involved in making it and on it went for approximately 400,000 words. This social relationship had magically become a relationship with a toothbrush, not a social relationship between two people, but a relationship between a person and a thing. And Lo in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell for the first time ever telephoned his assistant and rather seductively said "Mr Watson, come here. I want you," a new world of fetishism was born. It was a form of progress that used electric signals traveling along wires, and which soon enough would be overtaken by electric signals traveling through electromagnetic waves. This was the beginning of a condition a Frenchman called Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International and cigarette smoker who died at the age of 62 in 1994, chose to call, Spectacle Commodity Fetishism. (Le fétichisme de la marchandise spectacle.) You could turn a love of stuff, into a love of Spectacle, defined as a social relationship mediated by images. We don't interact directly with each other, we interact with images of what what we are persuaded is what our lives should look like It's not the person, he could be a dim-witted jackass, it's what the person looks like and the image he presents. It's not the toothbrush, it's what the toothbrush looks like, how its presented in images, that may include handsome men driving motorcycles and hot chicks brushing their pearly white teeth. It's not the staged sea battle with multiple casualties in somewhere like Portland Oregon, it's what the staged sea battle does for the image of the Emperor.
No comments:
Post a Comment