Fetishes

I am fascinated with the concept of the fetish. According to Dictionary.com, the word has, in its simplest forms, three definitions; a fetish is either (a) “an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency; or (b) any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion: to make a fetish of high grades; or (c) any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation.”

What fascinates me is that the fetish is a nexus point, an intersection of desire, separation, and obsessive compulsive attention.  A fetish is often a small part of a larger whole and that part is invested with a disproportionate significance of something else.  This “something else” then becomes the object of either a distorted desire or an unhealthy fixation.

Those who make a fetish out of money, for example, often confuse monetary value with an overall self-image of “worth” or successful living. Acquisition of the money-object, in effect, becomes a horribly unhealthy pursuit of one small part of a whole (the entire economic realm) and this desired “part” comes to signify something else altogether: selfhood.  I am rich therefore I am “worth” something.  The fetishist thus devolves into an abject subject caught within a grotesque cycle of desire and anxiety. Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho is perhaps one of the more well known sad fetishists.

But I digress.  The question that prompts this little meditation on grotesque desire is this: to what extent has the North American academy become abject?  To what extent does it fetishize either research or teaching or service?  These three traditional pillars of academic labour seem to have drifted apart over the past few decades and now, in some quarters, only one of the three becomes the object of desire. In an odd mimicry the academy has become a marketplace of individualistic acquisition where members of the Collegium are positioned EITHER to overvalue research (or more specifically research income); OR good teaching is deemed good teaching only if it receives an award; OR service is fixated upon to the exclusion of the other two pillars. 

I exaggerate, of course.  But my point, I think, is solid.  The North American academy has strayed from its original path of educating responsible citizens and in some cases the academy has been transformed into an acquisitive economy of pathetic desires. Only one part of the job has become invested with a disproportionate meaning which is then overvalued or fixated upon. This is not a good thing.

At Trent, at this time, we have the opportunity in the academic planning process to reconstruct ourselves, to “do better by our students” as a wise young philosopher said to me today. We have the chance to sidestep the sick allure of the fetish and regain our balance. We have the chance to remind ourselves and the rest of the academy that we remain “Canada’s outstanding small university” where we still value excellent teaching, solid research, and academic citizenry.