Irony and fetishism as strategies for how to avoid change
There is a story in which a young minister is sitting in her house one day when she hears a banging on the door. When she opens the door she discovers one of the church members standing before her. It is obvious that he is exhausted from running to her house and is barely holding back some tears.
“What’s wrong” asks the minister, seeing that this man is obviously in distress
“Please can you help”, replied the man, “A kind and considerate family in the area are in great trouble. The husband recently lost his job and the wife cannot work due to health problems. They have three young children to look after and on top of all that the man’s mother lives with them as she is unwell and needs constant care. They have no money at the moment and if they don’t pay the rent by tomorrow morning the landlord is going to kick them all onto the street, even though its winter”.
“That’s terrible”, said the minister, “Of course we will help. Anyway how do you know them”?
“I’m the landlord” replied the man
In this story we see an instantiation of irony. Irony as a political stance can be described as a way in which we intellectually disavow our social activity. For instance, often individuals host 70’s or 80’s parties in which people dress up in the fashion of the time and dance to the most extreme and laughable music of the era. Here people are able to laugh at the music and the outfits while dancing to the music and wearing the clothes. Thus they are able to ridicule the very activity that they are fully engaged in, dancing and singing along to music while intellectually distancing themselves from it.
This draws out the weakness of irony (the ubiquitous stance of the cultured elite) as a political and religious response. For it is this very stance that allows one to disavow the very activity that one engages in. Deriving ones jouissance (excessive pleasure) from an action while simultaneously critiquing it.
In the above story the landlord intellectually cares for the family and wants to help even though his actual activity as the one who is going to kick them out of the house contradicts this.
However, the story does not just expose irony it also helps to introduce us to the idea of fetish. A fetish is an object or activity that one holds onto in order to be able to avoid a confrontation with the reality of ones situation or action. For instance, we can imagine a situation in which a person dies suddenly and yet their lover takes the news with a stoic calm. While missing her deeply he has his lovers dog as a constant reminder of her presence. However, when the dog dies, the man breaks down, unable to cope. Here the dog acted as a fetish, as a lie that helped the man avoid the unbearable truth that his beloved was gone. Something he already knew and yet had not confronted.
In the same way we can say that the act of going round to the ministers house acted as a type of fetish, the action was a type of security blanket that allowed the man to continue to engage in his rather ruthless demands. The fetish does not give us false information, it simply helps us avoid confronting what we already know.
The question, or course, is to what extent do we engage in irony and fetishism as a way of ensuring that we do not really change our life and challenge the system we live in.
For instance, most of us will be concerned about ecological issues. We may even talk a lot about it with our friends in some big coffee chain and think about it as we drive about in our big car on the way to the shops to buy goods we do not need. Thus disavowing the very activity that we are engaged in and that we get our jouissance from (the ironic stance). On top of this we may even attend faith gatherings that explore the issues and go on some protests against the practices of big business while not reconfiguring our social existence (the fetishistic stance).
These ways of changing things without changing anything (rearranging chairs on the Titanic) stem from a distinction between the inner and the outer. The inner (our ideas and ‘desires’) are thought of as who I really am, while what I do is viewed as a false self that I merely act out. I will explore this in more depth some other time.
Tags: fetishism, irony, Peter Rollins
September 19th, 2008 at 3:10 am
[...] PeterRollins.net placed an interesting blog post on Irony and fetishism as strategies for how to avoid changeHere’s a brief overview [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 3:35 am
[...] well crafted piece of writing from the excellent Pete Rollins this morning explores the concepts of irony and fetishism as strategies to avoid change – to avoid confronting the real issues of our [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 3:35 am
[...] Irony and fetishism as strategies for how to avoid change September 19th, 2008 There is a story in which a young minister is sitting in her house one day when she hears a banging on the door. When she opens the door she discovers one of the church members standing before her. It is obvious that he is exhausted from running to her house and is barely holding back some tears. “What’s wrong” asks the minister, seeing that this man is obviously in distress “Please can you help”, replied the man Se källan [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 7:53 am
[...] Peter Rollins: Irony and fetishism as strategies for how to avoid change. [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
[...] Zimmerman shared a link today that I’ll pass on to you. It’s an interesting post about our strategies for not making needed changes; but I’ll [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I’m interested in how some of these ideas might connect some of your work with that of the new monastic movement.
I’m also reminded of Bonhoeffer’s call to “prayer and action” – perhaps a way of connecting the inner and the outer.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[...] Rollins’ post on Irony and Fetishism as means of avoiding change is well worth a read, though I can’t help feeling that I am indulging in both by blogging it [...]
September 20th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
[...] on irony and fetish, hitting on a topic that bothers me a lot, but idealism we often have little to show [...]
September 20th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
What you term fetish, I call white elephant – Where the satirist has a field day is when “religious” leaders preaching contradicts their practices because there they use the justification for their fetishes ‘in the name of God.’ For instance, I am aware of a New York City religious based grassroots group dedicated to promoting “environmental justice” (using the book of Genesis as a desire to return to a state of shalom) in some poor urban areas (this despite the fact that the residents who live in said areas note that there are other higher priority issues facing them in their quest for a peaceful neighborhood.) For all their talk of equality, they’re adopting yet another colonial model of missions. The head of this organization just wrote a book (an unintentional act of satire) and is promoting this book by trying to land as many cross country gigs as possible thus taking up a massive carbon footprint via airplane travel. (How many times a year does one “need” to go from NYC to LA for instance? Why not say live in NYC for four months, LA for four months, etc. or find more holistic ways to reduce one’s carbon footprint such as carpooling, driving cross country in veggie bus, etc.?) A number of us have started to wonder what’s grassroots and environmentally sound about this strategy.
Then you have dudes preach about “female equality” but they assume the role of the landlord in that when they organize conferences and the like, they continue along a Westernized academic model where almost all of the major speakers are white men. Then they wonder why their gatherings remain 90%+ white postevangelical males. I would celebrate the day that those with the mic stand up and do a Clevon Little Blazing Saddles impersonation when he rode into town (we get enough of the campfire scene).
The one fetish no one wants to confess is classism – I’ve had friends take some serious heat for trying to involve “non college educated” people into some gatherings – having heard some of these folks speak, I can testify that what they have to say is often far more relevant than what I’ve heard from most academic discussions.
September 21st, 2008 at 10:29 am
Oh – another fetish (the one I and other published writers suffer from) is the fact that no matter how we try to frame it, we’re still the ones front and center with our name on a product. The Q for me is for those of us who feel called to get a message out do so despite the irony that we’re asking people to buy our books. I use Phyllis Tickle as my role model here but still admit I have much work to do in this department.
Another issue I struggle with is the pressures put on by this capitalistic structure where one does need to show up for events that continue placing one person as the sole authority when in fact, many people helped to give birth to that which has my name on it. Fortunately as a woman, I am not faced with the adulation/hero worship that I find greets male authors here in the US. I pray for how you’ll deal with that piece of the puzzle because I find this to be an odd fetish that prevents true equality from happening. For example, your hosts in Minnesota and NYC/Philly have a known history of worshipping you (as indicated by some of their blog postings and comments I’ve heard in NYC) while excluding women and you’re speaking in Connecticut along with a dude who went so far as to accuse a female journalist (unfairly I might add) of libel and slander (a charge that is similar to using the “c—” word). How does one confront said behavior when one in fact is being hosted (hence paid for) by those who are continuing the fetish? Irony abounds. In fact, your tour seems to be targeted towards this white male postevangelical PhD demographic as does the tour in January. How do we break this mold and move towards models like Greenbelt that are far more inclusive?
September 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
when my grandad died (i was 7 years old and he lived with us), i did not cry. my guinea pig died 6 months later and i cried for a week. some of us clearly learn very early on strategies for coping that can only ever take us so far… that is to say, fetishes prolong the arrival of facing the facts. similarly, when my mum died, i was terrified about losing her final mobile phone message to me… i hung on to it until my phone broke and i lost it anyway.
i’ve always found cheese nights at clubs ironic. music that is uncool being danced to by the cool. surely they all need to chill out and admit they love it!
as broken humans trying to get by we do adopt all kinds of mechanisms and strategies for coping… i know i do, mostly by instinct. i guess a part of what wisdom is, is about being prepared to get to know yourself well enough to see the tricks you adopt and work with fear and trembling to becoming more honest and ultimately more vulnerable.
stimulating post.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
This is interesting, but do you think that there is an ironic element involved in simply being human – in the sense that there is a kind of distance between “being” and “having” one’s physical body?
One can easily talk about one’s body as if it were a thing, laugh about it, make decisions about it, until one is experiencing more extreme sensations like pleasure, hunger, or pain – then it’s like you are a body, and the distance is more difficult – but still possible – to maintain (e.g. in rigorous exercise or fasting). And perhaps something similar is true of the difference between the inner and the outer self. The public roles one plays are not simply one’s “true self”, but equally, there is no true self without them.
Can we ever get rid of these kinds of distinction completely?
September 24th, 2008 at 4:43 am
I imagine a lot of intimate relationships are engaging in fetishism…where we bind ourselves (excuse the pun) to the other, in order to avoid some reality in ourselves…and often the reality in ourselves that we are avoiding is a difficult feeling that we spend our lives desperately trying to avoid. So, is it just a human disposition to engage in fetishism? Can we actually get beyond that? Can we free ourselves from being hooked on transferrance and projection?? Probably not
June 29th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
[...] above parable is courtesy of Peter Rollins and is taken directly from his blog post on Irony and Fetishism. What I most appreciate about Pete’s parables is his way of transforming the way we think [...]