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George Eliot and the fetish of realism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville
Because fetishism is the product of a relationship between Europeans and Africans within the contact zone, the fetish cannot be understood adequately as a positive thing in itself.14 Instead, it needs to be conceptualized as an expression of the relationship in which it comes into being. In schematic form, that relationship exists between three points. From the earliest travel narratives, the representation of fetishism has involved a triangular relationship between: a) a material object of some kind, b) a local who attributes supernatural qualities to the object, and c) an outsider who contradicts the local to reassert the simple materiality of the object. In schematic terms, the three positions can be labeled as follows: the fetish, which can be either a thing or an idea; the fetishist who "worships" the fetish; and the subject. This last position is occupied by a critical spectator who interprets the fetishist's relationship to the fetish as a form of false evaluation. Fetishism entails a commentary on an attribution of false or erroneous cultural value.
However, there is a dialectical complication that follows from this apparently simple triangular scheme. In asserting the falsity of the fetishist's values, the subject simultaneously asserts the truth or accuracy of his or her own values. In this relationship, the claim that an object is a fetish, and thus overvalued as possessing qualities it lacks, also implies that non-subjective value does exist elsewhere, in other objects. By establishing the grounds of truth within his or her own cultural values, the subject thus becomes vulnerable to the claim of fetishism by another outsider. And so the critic of the first level comes to occupy the position of the fetishist in an alternate fetishistic triangle. Dialectically, the subject becomes the fetishist in the act of evaluating the fetish as such. And, in this manner, the critique of fetishism produces the secondary fetishization of the critic's values. Representations of fetishism, as Slavoj Zizek has argued, always occur within a dialogue that entails competing claims of fetishism, in which the critic and fetishist become structurally interchangeable (Plague 97).15 Thus, the discourse of fetishism is never about the fetish as such, but rather is about the sequence of relationships that produce the notion of fetishism. While this kind of discourse tells us little about the cultural values of the local fetishist, it can indicate a great deal about the subject's cultural values.16
George Eliot, like many English intellectuals in the 1840s and 1850s, was enthusiastic about the new ideas in Comte's Cours de philosophie positive." The diffusion of those ideas in England began in earnest in 1843, when John Stuart Mill published his A System of Logic, which uses many of Comte's ideas.18 After this date "intellectual Englishmen no longer had any excuse for not knowing the philosophy of Auguste Comte, for Mill makes absolutely clear his debt to the French thinker" (Kitchel 41). A young friend of Mill's, Lewes first made his mark as a popularizer of Comte's ideas in his Biographical History of Philosophy (1845-1846).19 Written as an accessible primer to philosophy in "Knights's Weekly Volume Series," its one-shilling installments reached an audience well beyond the intellectual circle that knew Mill's Logic. Lewes continued his work on Positivism, and, in 1853, just months after he and Evans became lovers, he finished his explanation of Cours, published later that year as Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences.
