An Astonished Facticity
ethnography on visual fetishisms

Massimo Canevacci Ribeiro

 

This book results from an empirical research on the actual mutant fetishism embodied into bodyscape and location throughout specific micro attractors. My statement is that the proliferations of new forms of visual fetishisms characterize more and more the contemporary communicational metropolis. Instead of from society, now those visual fetishisms spread out from culture, consumption and communication. The micrological ethnographic excursus approaches multi-language paragraphs as in the one on bodyscape (visus : skin : feitico : eros : bambole : sandmann) and in the one on location (from an Italian architect as Libera to a Dutch  one as Spuybroek and to industrial music).

 

Visual fetishism is the key-concept through which I approach some features of the traditional meaning of fetish; a meaning connected to those colonial, Marxist and Freudian visions. Then, I look at “it” as radically transformed along the flux of contemporary communication,  in order to apply “it” to Art, Advertising, Design, Music, Architecture, Fashion, Performance, Web etc. From this perspective, my research focuses on the relationship inside eyes and sex-eros-porno: the eroptica (an eros and glance mix), the Rainer M. Rilke’s illusive puppe (Schein-fruchte), the Hans Bellmer’s perverse dolls as well as the Simon Yotsuya’s astonished ones.

           

The title, Staunende Factizitat, is related to an Adorno’s basic concept through which he criticizes the method of his friend Walter Benjamin. On the contrary, the same Benjamin inverses Adorno’s critics claiming the facticities  (i.e. the fragmented and mobile constellation of objects-things-commodities) as the centre of his immanent critics, observed and melted through his astonished glance. Benjamin assumes his method beyond any mediation of synthetic dialectics: his interpretation is at the same time the destruction of reification. So, my Astonished Facticity is a relaboration of such an anticipative discussion. It is an adaptation towards fragmented and floating multiplicities related to “fetishised” bodies, skins, faces, shadows, masks, dolls (bio-doll), mummies, automatons within the connected communicational metropolis interzone and contemporary visual fetishisms.

 

At the same time,  the book tries to liberate characteristics of a new fetishism that may develop different perspectives: a practice beyond dualism (organic-inorganic) and beyond universalism (religion and politics); towards new metamorphosis in which a “thing” has its/her/his own subjectivity and where it is not condemned to only be useful; a practice for an immanent vision of the “sacred”, connected to a progressive mimesis; and finally towards a fetishism of the avatar that experiences the Subject (multi-vidual) potential multiplicity. In conclusion, the aim of my book is to focus, interpret and melt the new visual fetishisms, using the polyphonic and hybrid intertextual composition of different styles of writings, soundscape, icons and images. The method is the montage.