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George Eliot and the fetish of realism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville
De Brosses's work had repercussions well beyond ethnology. A young Karl Marx read a German translation of Du culte des dieux fetiches in 1842-1843 and later incorporated it into his economic theory.10 And the French psychologist Alfred Binet adapted de Brosses's religious fetishism to sexual pathology in 1887, after which it was taken up by Krafft-Ebing and then Freud.11 But, within ethnology, de Brosses's theory of primitive fetishism dominated nineteenth-century thinking about the earliest stages of human development, largely due to its adoption by Comte, and it is through Comte that George Eliot's usage derives.12 As the historian Hodgen has noted, de Brosses's "doctrine was not only widely disseminated but became, in the thirties of the nineteenth century the slender 'factual' foundation of Auguste Comte's primary, fetishistic, or theological stage in the development of society" (491).
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Comte divides social development into three progressive stages: the "theological," the "metaphysical" (which included the Europe of his own day), and ultimately the "positive," or utopian, stage yet to come. Fetishism marks the earliest point in this sequence. He explains that humans, in their encounters with inexplicable events, "conceive of the production of unknown effects according to the passions and affections of the corresponding being regarded as alive; and this is the philosophical principle of fetichism" (3: 9). In the state of "gross fetichism," humans imagine all objects, whether living or not, "to be animated by passion and will" (3: 8). Through this unaware act of projection, the early human is enabled "passively to yield to his propensity to transfer to outward objects the sense of existence which served him for an explanation of his own phenomena, and therefore for an absolute explanation of all out of himself" (3: 10). The external world thus was composed entirely of fetishes, and this explanatory principle allowed early humans to make sense of their chaotic experiences. This fetish-worship differs fundamentally from "the adoration of images" (3: 9). As in de Brosses, the fetish is a non-symbolic object because its supernatural quality is "inseparable from the object in which it resides" (3: 26). So fetishes are distinct from the polytheistic gods, which appear in the second phase of the theological stage. These gods are abstractions that do not reside in concrete objects, and thus are represented by idols that are not themselves gods. As society develops, Comte argues, this primary fetishism never entirely disappears. Like Charles Darwin's concept of "rudiments" or Edward Tylor's "survivals," Comte's primitive fetishism operates in later stages as a residual; all ages have "very marked traces ... of the original fetichism, however it may be involved in metaphysical forms in subtle understandings" (3: 10).13 It remains in evidence even in nineteenth-century life: when someone looks at a malfunctioning watch, he or she imagines it to be a capricious being, while knowing rationally that it has no life of its own.
