On Fetishism

There was a post on Jodi Dean's I Cite blog recently about the relation of religion and sexual fetishism. Here is the comment that I posted to I Cite blog:

Hello Ms. Dean,

This is my first comment on your blog thus I will try to minimize the subsequent trivialities. All right, unlike a fantasy that enables love to pass through the real to field the imaginary, an object of fetishism operates as “the return of the repressed”, the substitute material filling the cavity which originates from the act of denial of the symbolic castration. Therefore, the pervert subject of fetishism could cross the boundary of the symbolic only by use of the object of fetishism as the authorization certificate, i.e. the transit visa for the passage from the symbolic to the real. Let me give a considerably free flowing illustration by employing our Marxist concept of “the fetishism of commodities”:

Although we have been castrated from the means of production and from our own labor power, etc. in the symbolic order, due to still being an individual who is obliged to satisfy our needs to survive in society, to obtain a ground to ensure the real conditions of our existence, we need a substitute that enables us to disavow the repressed trauma of symbolic castration. I need something that makes me to fallaciously perceive that there is nothing derogatory in the capitalist production. There “the fetishism of commodities” comes into the picture. For instance, in the feudal production God itself functions as the object of fetishism.

As regards to the Catholicism that you mention as the only fetishized religion that you come up with, for my part, I don’t see an exceptionally distinctive characteristic in the Catholic practice of Christianity that reinforces nunsploitation and nun fetishism. I think any particular outfit, especially uniforms, (the uniform of the women of God in the naughty nun case) that relates the human body with Lacanian big Other has the potential to serve as an object of fetishism that substitute the missing symbolic phallus and make the sexual intercourse possible while the complication of the denial of symbolic castration is still in the view.

The Dhamma Brothers

There was a review by Louis Proyect in his The Unrepentant Marxist blog about the documentary “The Dhamma Brothers” which depicts the experience of some prisoners with Buddhist meditation techniques in a high security prison. I decided to copy my comments in Louis's blog and the exchange of my thoughts with Peter Byrne and Greg McDonald. I will keep on duplicating here if the discussion proceeds:

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Louis,

Your post is thought provoking as usual. At first I thought that a high security prison that restricts all forms of physical freedom is an ideal place for Buddhism to sprout since it only tolerates the freedom of mind. Then I realized that there is a flaw in this logic given that Buddhism is not a path to liberation at all. Like other forms of religion, Buddhism is a form of “desire” for freedom, which operates for not materializing its goal, but to reproduce and regulate its form as a desire. Therefore, a prison is a perfect place for Buddhism not by reason of that it promises the liberation of mind where the freedom of body is completely prevented, rather, a prison renders the desire for spiritual development possible. If we consider the reason of Jack Kerouac’s fiasco to traverse his ego with meditation, we can straightforwardly conclude that because of his American practicality he didn’t comprehend the exact mechanism of meditation: It has nothing to do with weakening the ego. Rather, it validates the excess of ego by regarding it as an inner process of the isolated mind and the measurement of truth as if the true nature of life is only accessible by overcoming the ego. As a result, rather than undermining it, mediation ossifies the ego by obsessively circling around it.

The same thing goes for the soothing effect of religion (a protest against real suffering) too. God is the object cause of the desire for a soul in a soulless world. God is the object that regulates the human desire for attaining harmony with external reality. As I said above, the function of religious desire is not to materialize its goal but to circle around it. I think this is where the answer of the question of does religion and Marxism compatible could be properly answered: Marxism strives to change the external reality, not to circle around it.

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Peter Byrne:

“Rather than undermining it, meditation ossifies the ego by obsessively circling around it.” Exactly. But to remain in the vein of “American practicality”, why did meditation serve the Dhamma Brothers any better than the Black Muslim program, bible thumping or even the discipline of push-ups and weight lifting? Their problem was to keep their personality together in inhuman conditions. I.R.A. prisoners in Longkesh pored over Marxist classics.When they finally got out, their comrades told them they were old hat. But that’s another story."

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Greg McDonald:

I’m glad to see Mehmet weighing in on the subject of meditation. I understand the critique on the basis of unfulfilled desire, (is that Lacanian)? but I submit that argumentation without a real basis for understanding the subject at hand lends just as much to obfuscation as did Kerouac’s original misunderstanding of the same topic. Your argument is apriori and based on western critique of “religion”. You have no experience of meditation, so that makes it difficult for you to actually understand what is involved here. If you really want an informed opinion from a psychoanalytic perspective, I suggest checking out some psychoanalysts who are indeed experienced meditators within this tradition, such as the work of Paul Fleischman M.D. To quote:

“Meditators must “have the seed”. Like the life of any seed, the seed of meditation eludes the microscope of words: is it basic good faith; or a sense of determination; or enough miseries and losses to have to keep going; or an unfathomable curiosity about their own true nature; or an intuition of values that transcend immediate life; or a yearning for peace; or a recognition of the limitations of mundane routines? It was said by the Buddha that at the heart of the path lies ahimsa, non-harmfulness. Is it an inkling of the infinite curative value that this most treasured and elusive cumulative virtue provides, that constitutes the seed? In any case, a life of meditation ia a path for those who hear the call, seek it out, and sit down to observe. Some may not seek it, some may not value it, some may not tolerate it, some may have other valuable paths to take.

“
The French psychoanalyst, Jaques Lacan, wrote, “Psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the ‘thou art that,’ in which is revealed to him the cipher of his moral destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.” Vipassana meditation is based on one thing; “This is suffering; this is the way out of suffering.” It is the path where the real journey begins. It is a healing by observation of and participation in the laws of nature. Even the stars are born and die, but beyond the transiency of the world there is an eternal that each of us can travel towards.

The potential therapeutic actions of Vipassana include increased self-knowledge, deepened human trust and participation, integration with and acceptance of one’s past, deepened activation of one’s will, an increased sense of responsibility for one’s own fate; greater concentration, deepened ethical commitments, firm yet flexible life structures and disciplines, fluid access to deeper streams of feeling and imagery, expanded historical and contemporary community; prepared confrontation with core realities such as time, change, death, loss, pain leading to an eventual dimunition of dread, anxiety, and delusion; fuller body-mind integration, decreased narcissism, and a fuller panorama of character strengths such as generosity, compassion, and human love. Each student starts at a different place and progresses individually; there is no magic and no guarantee.”

excerpt from “Karma and Chaos”

....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Peter,

Since I don’t have adequate information about the Black Muslim Brotherhood, I can’t explain its particular failure in the prison system of the US. But as I grew up in a society that the influence of Islamic beliefs is palpable in every pore of daily life, I can clarify why Islam is incompatible with the environment of prison. To begin with, we should modify Marx’s famous statement regarding religion for Islam: Islam is the BDSM fantasy of the oppressed creature. The daily activity of a believer is entirely dictated by celestial law while this artificial world is a preparation ground for the real afterlife. The Islamic disavowal of the existence of any external reality as such could be traced in Qur’an which is infested with the statements about dualist opposition linking the imaginary and the real world. Such as, “the life of this world is nothing but an enjoyment of self-delusion. (3:185)” or “and nothing is the life of this world but a play and a passing delight (6:32)”, etc. As a result, Islam functions like the Ego of the believer that suppresses one’s needs, wishes and desires as long as they are conflicting with delusive external reality. Here, one might probably ask: Then, how could you give explanation about the aggressive posture of Islamic fundamentalism towards western imperialism? If we completely abstract the fact that it has been molded by the immediate interests of its opponents to some extent, there is a significant paradox here: Muslim subject does not conflict with his own imaginary external world or with a world imagined by the Muslim subject. To be more precise, the controversy is between Muslim subject and the world imagined by the other and therefore which is exempt of Islamic suppression. I think for that reason Islam and environment of a prison is a downright mishmash because both of their purpose of existence is to control the freedom of human body.

.....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Hello Greg,

As I told you before in a private correspondence, my recent interest on psychoanalysis was incited when a neurologist diagnosed that I was displaying some symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder. After that, I have decided to figure out the source of my anxiety rather than taking the pills that he prescribed since it is a minor disease. Lust like reading Marx has led me to question my illusions of social relations, mechanism of market and capital, their interaction with working class, false idealist conception of history, etc. psychoanalysis has gave me a ground to deal with my the illusions about myself and my subjectivity. Actually it is exactly what Jack Kerouac’s character in “On the Road” naively expects from Buddhist practices. On the contrary, the genuine path to deal with ego is to get the picture of how it is structured as an illusion about our subjectivity. There are two subtle encounters of Alice respectively with the Caterpillar and the Pigeon:

`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'

`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'

And,

Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see you're trying to invent something!'

`I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

In fact, the Pigeon is right. My subjectivity is something that I invented along my adventure in the symbolic order. And my ego is a product of my fantasy about this order, which directly resists the restrictions of the internal reality of socio-symbolic order.

Here I fancied whether the famous quote from Sun Tzu, "Know thy self, know thy enemy" might be applicable to the game of poker. In my opinion, this would be a perfect advice for how to lose everything immediately in poker and in the battleground as well. We must undertake a necessary adjustment: Know thy table-image, know the table-image thy enemy. We should assign this statement to meditation too: Do not strive to know yourself in vein; there is no such a thing other than in the field of imagination.

There is a particular chapter in The German Ideology in which Marx accuses Young Hegelians for assigning self-determining existence to consciousness and thus ascribing the social relations and limitations of humankind as products of consciousness. However, the accurate pathway to understand the function of human consciousness is to decipher its relation with material reality of humankind.

As an obligatory confession, I have difficulties to understand Lacan. First of all, unlike Freud’s relatively direct and vivid narrative style, Lacan leaves readers in a jam of unintelligible expressions time and again. Secondly, I am deprived of the full access to his works as they are not available online thanks to copyright laws. I have no idea if they were translated in Turkish since making an effort to read Lacan in Turkish would be a waste of time anyway. I don’t even understand the Turkish translations of Marx, I have deserted this absurdity when I found myself in situations that I was continuously checking the English version to make sense of what our Turkish translator intended to say.

In spite of my semi-ignorance, there is an entertaining dimension in grappling with the ideas of Lacan. For instance, couple of days ago, in the farewell letter to a former intimate friend of mine (now she declines to respond my usual sterile and sensible letters), in a little bit sarcastic fashion, I declared that masturbation is the only authentic sexual activity since it is the only unmediated contact with our fantasies that renders the physical sexual intercourse possible. Then I concluded that, the genuine manifestation of sexual desire is not to make love with the person that we desire. Contrary, it is the act of masturbation while fantasizing the person with whom we made love just now.

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Peter Byrne:

Mehmet, I appreciate your philosophical precision. My point was more prosaic. People in the unnatural situation of prison have to fight against being crushed as acting subjects. Any discipline they commit to personally can help them. I admire the Black Muslims for their effort to bring a community in disarray out of self-destructiveness. But they are as far from Islamic social, religious and psychological realities as other Americans. Your explanation of the Islamic doctrinal denial of a real world is telling and lucid. To the less theologically inclined, however, it has a downside. It makes the Muslim world seem arid. In fact it can be a very pleasant place and demonstrate more humanity than ours.

.....

Mehmet Çagatay:

Peter, I am sure that if I were a dweller in that prison I would be the first person who registers the meditation course. Specifically I am not disagreeing with there is a tranquilizing effect of spiritual readjustments that provides a flexibility to endure the antagonism of reality, like I never question whether god exists or not. The proper materialist question here is why does god exist or why religion renders the social scandal of the external reality bearable. You are right that in some ways a Muslim community occasionally displays superior qualities of humanity. In consequence of my last poetry attempts published in an Islamist magazine whose editor was an honest admirer of my poetry thus ignored their content (Ironically, I was free to make downright insult to God), I spent some time with their poetry clan. I observed a continuous solidarity, a candid bosom of modesty, a never-ending salvo of goodwill that provokes me to act like Maldoror, etc. But like sci-fi movies, there was something strange, a movement of an eyebrow, a transition in the tone of voice, a sudden change of the color of skin that reveals there is something lame about this pretentious normality. One day a known Turkish-Islamist-Poet told me his darkest fantasy: “I always imagine myself observing the world behind a rifle scope”.

It's not Chicken

A thread on Marxmail reminded me Freud’s definition of myths as "distorted vestiges of the wishful fantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity". Like Marx criticizes the German idealist for not grasping the "connection of German philosophy with German reality", Freud criticizes previous approaches to dream interpretation for not recognizing dream as a psychic activity and not comprehending its relation with material physical life.

A hilarious thing occurred today when I suddenly entered the next room where my brother and his friend were watching TV. At the moment of my entrance, glancing at me with an expression of uneasiness my brother said: "Let's switch the channel, he could make comment!" Presumably they were watching a political debate ridden with myths of Turkish nationalism about the recent incursion to Northern Iraq. And I felt myself like commercials disturbing the enjoyment to participate the ideological sleep:

"Sleep is a condition in which I wish to have nothing to do with the external world, and have withdrawn my interest from it. I put myself to sleep by withdrawing myself from the external world and by holding off its stimuli. I also go to sleep when I am fatigued by the external world. Thus, by going to sleep, I say to the external world, "Leave me in peace, for I wish to sleep." Conversely, the child says, "I won't go to bed yet, I am not tired, I want to have some more fun." The biological intention of sleep thus seems to be recuperation; its psychological character, the suspension of interest in the external world. Our relation to the world into which we came so unwillingly, seems to include the fact that we cannot endure it without interruption." (Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis)

I was the objective external stimuli that incites the dream, "the guardian of sleep". Then I quickly left the room.

Lately, I assumed that I am going mad since I've begun to detect a continuous ideological message in the regular language of mainstream Turkish media. It is extremely annoying to the extent that it is unbearable for me to watch TV or read newspapers except sports news. I was undergoing an ideological abuse looking for an excuse to state that "The sun is not yellow it's chicken". But I realized that my madness is not because I do perceive a thing that doesn't exist. I am accurately detecting the occurrences of the coarse ideological massages. But I am not capable to internalize it, or recognize it as a routine expression of everyday language, or receive the message in its original form, or entrench the massage in my perception without turning it inside out. When I run across the ideological message, I typically point out the sun and cry out: "Here! It is yellow and it is not chicken". Therefore I am mad.

We can combine Freud’ two definitions: Myths are the disguised fulfillments of the social wishes that serve individual to preserve his or her sanity by participating in social insanity. I can't conserve my sanity as long as I am not capable to participate:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

What if I've come here accidentally?

.....

Comrade Renegade Eye wrote:

“If the masses wake up, you'll have a different outlook.

At least when you go into a dream state, you do it armed with probably more insight than you desire.”

.....

Hello Ren,

I don’t think masses are in a state of continuous ideological sleep. The paradoxical absurdity in Alice’s situation is she is unaware of the actuality that she is dreaming. But other characters of the Wonderland are conscious that they are the ingredients of a dream. Actually, Cheshire Cat says Alice: “If you are not mad, why are you dreaming about me?

Marx elucidates his thoughts on mythology at the end of the first chapter of Grundrisse:

“From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?”

There is a significant similarity in both Freud’s and Marx’s approaches to Mythology. They both regard it as wishful fantasies that rise above the infantile stage of development of societies.

We are aspiring after a world, a higher stage in the development of society, in which humankind are able to endure the external life without interruption.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t manage to sleep nowadays (literally). It is not for that I’ve overcome the alienation from external life, but the stimuli of external life are so powerful that it doesn’t allow me to sleep. This the perfect condition of a revolution.

Images of Women

While I was thinking on the question of women, suddenly a strange idea came to my mind. I decided to match some images of contemporary women with Baudrillard's last three phases of the image:

1) "It masks and perverts a basic reality" (a poster designed by Turkish Army to celebrate International Women's Day):

While I was in preparation class for high school, we were studying English for 25 hours a week. I was eleven and it was the most fascinating experience that I had ever had. As my imagination was pulsated with fantasies prepossessed by Jules Verne, Gulliver, Ivanhoe, etc I remember that I was spending some of my time by burying my head into a worn-out atlas and daydreaming about the exotic people that speak with mysterious words. There came an English lady teaching us a new, unthinkable words with stories. We were reading Longman Target English books and every word that we learned was associated with an anecdote about Adams family. “Lilly is a gossip, Molly is a gossip too” was a legendary maxim of that fictional and imaginary revolution etched in my mind. Unfortunately, we had spent the subsequent six years by studying the freakin’ English grammar. Of course we read some samples from English literature but everything about the English language turned into perfunctory wanderings of the arrested development of this revolution. Then I had lost all my interest and passed the examinations by cheating in all the possible techniques that you can imagine. As the English courses were not innovative enough to stimulate my imagination, I invested my creativity for the novelty in the art of cheating.

The image above is the poster designed by Turkish Army to celebrate International Women's Day. At the left side there is a quote form Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the chief of Kemalist revolution: “Our women ought to be much more enlightened, much more productive, much more knowledgeable then men”. This poster is signifying the utopic juggle of semi-capitalist Turkish Army (Turkish Army possesses one of the biggest holding companies in Turkey, OYAK, mostly associated with French capital) as a counter demonstration against the recent disgraceful quarrel on headscarf. There is a herd of five petit-bourgeois women here, representing a military officer, a doctor, a lawyer and presumably a bank manager and a girl who seems like an accountant. As you may noticed, there is no place for underpaid working-class women, unpaid farm women, typically headscarfed scrubwomen, usually uneducated baby sitter women who look after the kids of those petit-bourgeois women, girls that subjected by honor-killings, women yoked with prostitution who ruin the “blessed” marriages of those women in the image, illiterate Kurdish women and girls deprived of access even to the rubbish Turkish wisdom awashed with nationalist agitation, and numerous class of women despised and oppressed that I forgot to enumerate. The deplorable conditions of the Turkish women who were not represented in the image are the symptom of Turkish bourgeois.

After the War of Independence, and ensuring some formal political rights for women by the goodwill of Kemalist Enlightenment, subsequently Kemalist revolution recalled its authentic roots composed of merchandise capitalists, local landlords, insignificant number of industrial capitalists and mandatory assistance of foreign capital. This is where the development of condition of Turkish women has been arrested. The question of Turkish women has been reduced to a robotic discursive illusion abstracted from the factual disgrace towards working-class women. It is now functioning as competiton of novelity in the kitschart of cheating. As Baudrillard said, the image above “is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice”. Meanwhile, in fact, I am seduced by the image of sterile petit-bourgeois women. It made me itching to write a novel like Marquis de Sade.

2) "It masks the absence of a basic reality":

When I defined the image of veiled Iranian women as “It masks the absence of a basic reality.” there are two mysterious (at least for me) Lacanian ideas in my mind: The curtain is the idol of absence. and the reality is the lack of intersubjectivity. Therefore, I don’t consider veil and the Sharia dress codes as tools to make women invisible or hide them from the public gaze. For instance, the reality of capitalist exploitation is the lack of intersubjectivity between capitalist and labourer that manifests itself as the twofold meaning of surplus value. And the reality of the oppression of Muslim women is the lack of consensus on the classification of women’s role in the society, originates from the ideological exertion to subjugate the secular world to the spirituality of Islam. But, after 1500 years, this perverted “REALITY” has no factual foundation in secular-material world. Thus, instead of being an instrument of the concealment of a basic reality, the Shaira dress code functions as a mask to conceal the absence of the reality. Because, there is no scientific and convincing evidence to justify the antiquated gaze that perceives woman “as the source of ‘corruption’ and ‘chaos’.” Then, the only choice for Muslim rulers is to exhibit the veiled women body as the idol of deception and seduction which does not fit the reality.


3) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum:

Council of Ex-Muslims

I wrote the letter below to salute Ms. Namazie's “Council of Ex-Muslims:

Dear Maryam,

To begin, I would like to congratulate you on your courageous endeavor to establish an organization that will hopefully fill the absence of virtual fraternity of Islam with secular solidarity. If the “Council of Ex-Muslims” will give hope someone, it is primarily as a result of the organizational power that overcomes the limitations of individual struggles.

In his "Philosophy of History” Hegel properly defines the distinctive feature of Islam: “The worship of the One is the only final aim of Mahometanism, and subjectivity has this worship for the sole occupation of its activity, combined with the design to subjugate secular existence to the One.” This is where the stubborn resistance of Islam outbreaks as a misleading symptom in the body of bourgeois modernism: The spiritual vapor that claims dominance on behalf of its supreme universality in the material world now finds itself squashed in the universal engine that melts all that is solid in the air. Unfortunately, this engine is not capable to vaporize the absolute vapor. What renders Islam and its universal spirituality political, as related with the power struggle for decision making on this-worldly affairs is exactly this incompetence of liberal world order. Just like the protagonist of Terry Gilliam’s magnificent movie “Brazil”, who suddenly finds himself as an enemy of the state on the course of his quest to find the girl of his dreams in the depths of bureaucracy, Islam has detected its imaginary political expression in the midst of liberal capitalism where the politics is relentlessly being vaporized.

This is the reason why I previously proposed Atheism within the shortcomings of neo-liberal order as a genuine solution to retard the rise of the fundamentalist enthusiasm among working-class Muslims. Demands for a more strict practice of secularism is like my bizarre habit that I carry out when I have to get up early and have little time to sleep: I always set up my environment and sleeping position as uncomfortable as possible to discourage the enjoyment of sleeping. But as the verification of Lacanian interpretation of the act of awakening, I always end up inventing the most horrifying nightmares to repress the disturbance of the external effects and enable myself to sleep for a little more.

Therefore, rigorously secularist projects are doomed to seduce the fundamentalism in the consciousness of working class Muslims. Secularism is the archenemy of the religion that hunts for the total domination of its spirituality (which knows no social bond other than the worship to God) over material world. I find it very remarkable how intellectuals often miss the connotation of the Islamic concept of “jihad”: It is not simply warfare against infidels but at the same time the struggle to expand the spiritual battlefield on which believers and infidels will exchange blows till the Judgment Day. Even the concept of sin is not exempt from the will of God: “If Allah so willed, He could make you all one people: But He leaves straying whom He pleases, and He guides whom He pleases” (16:93). Its symptomatic intolerance is more vindictive towards everything that ridicules its spiritual universality: especially towards bourgeois modernism which has compelled man “to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

I think secularism is a "passage to the act” for the fundamentalism of Islam. It resolves the anxiety among working class Muslims and provokes courage for act of militant Islamism. For instance, prohibition of religious symbols from public sphere invites Muslims to attach themselves with closed circuit of fundamentalist communities.

On the other hand, in an incredibly ironical fashion Atheism is almost complementary with Islam: Atheism as an inverted spirituality due to its intact form that is still mediated with the absence of God is the perfect adversary of Islam. (No regrets! I frequently rant and rave about my indomitable Atheism as a reflective political stance). Spiritual battlefield is only maintainable with the existence of identically devout foes eager to clash their ideas. Maybe, in this vein, we might persuade some of the Muslims of working class oppressed both by Muslim leaders and bourgeois modernism:

“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,

A working class hero is something to be”

I think genuine remedy of religious fanaticism and the ground for an authentic and unmediated solidarity is socialism: the real political emancipation which has the capacity to dispel the battleground of abstract ideas… I hope you would not take offense to my well-intentioned criticism. My criticism also comprises my affirmation. I always have doubts about agreements without contradictions.