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.For thepowerful, fetish is clearly used "by a regime of domination in seeking to legitimize violentpractices." 32 Thus, power is the ultimate fetish, and the play around it is a "zombification" of boththe leaders and the led.With a skillful use of theory derived centrally from Bakhtin, but also fromFoucault, Certeau, and Bataille, Mbembe locates the fetishization of power in the language of thebody, turning "the postcolonial autocrat into an object of representation that feeds on applause,flattery and lies." 33 The people are cowed, but they also "engage in baroque practices which arefundamentally ambiguous, mobile, and 'revisable,' even in instances where there are clear, written,and precise rules." 34 Mbembe's sense of the banality of power is that this masquerade leadsnowhere except to the "violent quest for-139- file:///C|/Archivos%20de%20programa/eMule/Incoming/Stanley%20Fis.Jameson%20(Ed)%201998%20The%20Cultures%20Of%20Globalization.htmlgrandeur and prestige" that "makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence." 35In his reply to his critics, Mbembe takes up the issue of shared knowledges, and how "dominantand dominated share in the same episteme." 36 The common stock of narratives andcounternarratives may derive from the colonial library, but they are made active by "practices of'disorder' and indiscipline, desertion, disguise, duplication and 'improvisation.'" The large numberof "documents" of culture (written materials, visual imagery, music, oral speech) are mute and are"made to speak" by us in terms of "a direct link between lived temporality and the narrative act."37How we make them speak depends on how we see "power and servitude" operating "asexpressive practices." 38 But in what ways the narrative might "transform the general process ofdecomposition" in Africa, as Mudimbe questions in his critique, 39 is not addressed.In her response to Mbembe, Judith Butler notes that the term fetish is the most problematic of all."It may be that the state as fetish, derived from the Latin facera, is always a fake, a substitute, andthat it will be the logic of the fetish, when it poses as origin, to undermine its own originatingclaims.It was, I think, the psychologist Maud Mannoni who claimed that the structure offetishism was to claim, 'I know, but still& ': I know all the reasons not to desire what I desire, but Idesire it nonetheless, or I know that what I desire is repellant, but I desire it nonetheless." 40Useful as this is, it is a classic colonialist and neocolonialist reading of the term, skirting aroundMbembe's own use.What if, as Mark Wigley has suggested, an alternative reading of fetish is notthat of fake, but of a double meaning, "slipping constantly between exemplifying thesubordination of the surface and exemplifying its dominance"? 41 In which case, the "desire" thatthe fetish arouses is not for something else but for the slippage space between itself and its double.The issue is worth exploring because the colonial library, which invented the term, is now sendingit back, through African ventriloquists, to explain what is going on in Africa.Marx, Freud,Durkheim, Mauss, and many others have taken the fetish as a substitute for reality, a token ofsomething else.It easily slides into Baudrillard's simulacrum, the idea of a part of the body beingtaken for the whole, the inanimate object being taken for the living.And so on.Fetish thereforebecomes a metaphor, like many others, to account for another reality.But fetish, though named assuch by the Portuguese, is not-140- file:///C|/Archivos%20de%20programa/eMule/Incoming/Stanley%20Fis.Jameson%20(Ed)%201998%20The%20Cultures%20Of%20Globalization.htmla metaphor.It is the space within which the individual and nature are united: it is the space (acarving, a painting, a shrine) where the stories of hopes and despairs can coexist.In his"Reprendre," Mudimbe, while talking of contemporary African art, hits the metaphorical nailfirmly on its fetishistic head:"[The] popular artists& want to transmit a clear message: they claim the virtue ofsociological and historical truth; and they try to name and unveil even theunnamable and the taboo.Here technical flaws become marks of originality.Theartist appears as the 'undisciplinable' hero, challenging social institutions, includingart practices, particularly academic ones.Yet this 'deviant,' who sometimes lacksboth a tradition and its modern currents, incarnates clearly the locus of theirconfrontation.In popular art, the politics of mimesis insert in the 'maternal' territoryof the tradition a practice that questions both art and history in the name of thesubject.This is work that aims to bring together art, the past, and the community'sdreams for a better future." 42The problem with the European use of fetish is that it is seen to represent another reality, whichwas a "source," an origin.Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke thought they had found a"source," and Richard Leakey and his family have established an anthropological industry inKenya based on the "origins" of mankind.They are the classic colonial fetishists, and Gorillas inthe Mist, Born Free, and Out of Africa are their contemporary mementos.The gun is not a fetish,real as it may seem to be, but a metaphor for someone who has nothing else to do but blastsomeone else's head off.The American black who comes to view the Slave Castles at Cape Coastis looking for a visible metaphor to dull his or her own pain.The view of pan-Africa as a politicalthing is surely that which was invented by blacks of the diaspora to create a homogeneousPromised Land.43 The important fetish is the traveling music of the Rasta Rudie, who turnsGhana or Jamaica or Nigeria into the space of transcontinental hope.44 In this, the commonstorytelling becomes part of the music and the music part of the personal image.If this sense of fetish is valuable, then it operates in precisely the same way as Mami Wata, orAppiah's Many Mansions, or Otabil's biblical text, or Ochieng's newspapers, or, indeed,Mudimbe's library.By living in the slippage between the dominance and the subordination of thesurface, a mutation is being created with new languages and new possibilities.It is important thatMbembe has opened up the territory and provided a new strategy for mapping the cultures, but itmust be read closely with the other cartographies-141- file:///C|/Archivos%20de%20programa/eMule/Incoming/Stanley%20Fis.Jameson%20(Ed)%201998%20The%20Cultures%20Of%20Globalization
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