Notes on: Discourse Fetish
by Kari Rosenfeld
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No one seems to remember what Jo Freeman says in her essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, because the title alone, for anyone who’s been involved in non-hierarchical organizing, resonates enough to be considered proverbial. The essay responds to the efforts of early feminist “Consciousness Raising” groups to not repeat structural oppression through structuring their organizing. They denounced hierarchy and representation altogether, which Freeman saw as resulting in unaccountable leadership, as existing structurally oppressive dynamics permeated the groups’ attempts to challenge them.
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The section I facilitated at Field of Study was spent with texts defining and problematizing the distinctions between art, theory, and politics, focusing on J.M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art. Praxis and truth become the fundamental questions within these categories. The importance of those terms highlights how, without relying on both action and an idea of truth, politics, theory, and art flail; they gesture only internally.
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“An academic culture in the United States still dominated by the privilege of the monograph only rarely affords occasions for critics to converse with each other in print. That may reflect conversation’s low place in the hierarchy of literary genres. Structurally determined by interruption, shifts in perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up of control, conversation complicates the prestige of autonomy and the fiction of authorial sovereignty by introducing the unpredictability of moving in relation to another.” Sex or the Unbearable, Berlant and Edelman.
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Bernstein also makes a case for non-truth-only-cognition. Truth as non-monotonic and cognition beyond truth requires the constant friction of bodies in exchange.
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There is a zealous liberal fantasy: discourse as a monomodal and immaterial act of sharing views. In the fantasy, the friction of the other is buffed down and wrapped in latex; it is here where we find the Discourse Fetish. The Discourse Fetish is such because it holds discourse as fantastically immaterial. The Discourse Fetish-izer fantasizes that the monomodal and immaterial act of sharing views holds supernatural properties, and indulges their fetishistic desires only when the act can be safely contained. The festish act happens in gallery offices and tiny houses at film festivals; during discreet phone calls; it happens when government officials and heads of state ask protestors to listen. The fetishizer claims to desire equality through “understanding” but relies on the fantasy of an already established condition of equality and thus believes that the fetish will protect the fetishizer from material politics. The fetish act gestures internally. The socks go back on after.
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For some the fetish leaves neurosis and becomes psychosis: the fantasy is believed as reality, language equated to material, and the fetish act mistaken for a politics.
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So often, our efforts toward non-hierarchical educational projects, while necessary to challenge forms, reject history and relinquish a praxis beyond flailing. So often, art, while necessary in expanding (political) praxis beyond what is already prescribed, takes on political language similar to the Discourse Fetishizer, and gestures a position into the void.