News reports, citing information provided by the FBI, indicated that the Unabomber had a fascination with wood: he tended to choose his victims according to what Gregory L. Ulmer calls a "puncept." For instance, Gilbert Murray, killed by a bomb on April 24, 1995, was President of the California Forestry Association. Murray was a lobbyist for the timber industry. The previous victim, Thomas Mosser, an advertising executive for Burson-Marsteller, was killed December 10, 1994, at his North Caldwell, New Jersey home; he lived on Aspen drive. Earlier victims included Percy Wood, then head of United Airlines­who lived in Lake Forest. Reports indicated that the Unabomber often used phony return addresses on his mail bombs which included places named Ravenswood and Forest Glen Road. Evidently, the four letters he (presumably) mailed out the weekend of April 21­23, 1995­one to the New York Times, one to a previous victim at Yale University, and to two others whose names the FBI refused to disclose­were mailed from Oakland, California. Moreover, the package bombs also contained twigs or pieces of wood, and in at least one the firing mechanism had a triggering device made of wood.

In other words, the method behind the madness was the puncept and perhaps some occult fetish logic. However, one should be circumspect about connecting the fetishism of the psychotic with the fetishism of the primitive. Is the Unabomber a true fetishist or only a pseudo-fetishist?

Perhaps it might be useful to contrast the Unabomber's supposed wood fetish with that of The Log Lady of Twin Peaks who certainly is a wood, if not a log, fetishist. She carries, cradled like a child, her log with her wherever she goes. She qualifies as one of Lynch's many fetishizing freaks, but her fetishism would seem to be incommunicable. It certainly remains uncommunicated during the (brief) course of the television series.

In contrast, the meaning of the Unabomber's supposed wood fetish is discernible in what he's written; it is not an accidental aspect of his private history, like The Log Lady's, and therefore indecipherable to the rest of us. Rather, he has indicated exactly what he is: a radical environmentalist or eco-terrorist, a Nature worshipper, a technophobe, a latter-day Luddite. His message is clear, and in the terms of that message there really is something unsavory and hypocritical about a lumber industry lobbyist who lives on a street named "Aspen Drive," though perhaps his sin isn't great enough to justify blowing him to bits. More generally, wood is symbolic of nature, the antithesis of human artifice and industry. There may be a genuinely fetishistic element in all of this, as there most certainly is with The Log Lady (though the log cannot in fact be "merely" symbolic of nature), but it seems to me that the Unabomber inhabits the realm of social semiotics (albeit in a paranoiac [=LINK TO (POSTMODERN) PARANOIA] and violent way) much more than the solipsistic realm of a fetishist such as The Log Lady, the world of a solitary gnosis. In the case of the Unabomber, the question is, Is it signal or fetish? In the Unabomber's case, the motive is (politically) radical but nonetheless communicable.

The inability to communicate the meaning of the fetish would seem to be essential for a true fetishist. At this point I should indicate that my understanding of the fetish differs from that put forth by Freud. The later Freud seemed to conclude that the fetishist was not a solipsist. He argues, in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, in his discussion of the fetishist, that "the detachment of the ego from the reality of the external world has never succeeded completely" (60; see also 61). My position is that Freud did not show, finally, that the fetishist is not a solipsist; he simply defined the fetish as "a compromise formed with the help of displacement" (Outline 60) of cathexis from the instinctual object to some signifying object, an effect that tells us nothing about whether this signifier as such is understood by one, ten, a hundred, or one hundred million people. For instance, the example of the foot-fetishist in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis provides no help given the narrative's glaring lacunae, as he simply recounts the (illusory?) scene of origin of the fetish, though this explanation tells us nothing of the meaning of the fetish (348­349). (He concedes, in "Fetishism" (1927), that it is not always possible "to ascertain the determination of every fetish" (201) though the impossibility of this is unrelated to the critical issue of the meaning of the fetish.)

On the other hand, pseudo-fetishism is a social semiotic (that is, pseudo- fetishes are embedded in semiosis as languages within metalanguages), while true fetishisms must be solipsisms. The point is that one can't understand the meaning of a fetish unless one has received the same conditioning as the fetishist, while the powerful affective imprinting that attends the birth of the fetish object induces a premature induction (for the fetishist), only making our task in understanding it in any way all the more difficult.

Of course, it is still possible to theorize about a fetish even when it lacks semiotic import for us, in the same way we are able to theorize about natural (i.e., non- intentional) objects and events: by observing regular associations of the fetishizing activity with other things. But this is perhaps too extreme a view; to the extent that the mind of each human being possesses wide experience of life and a theory of other human minds, we probably have at least inklings of the fetishist's meaning even in very odd cases (though to conclude the nature of The Log Lady's fetishism would seem to be a very daunting problem indeed).

How is it that some potential signifiers enter into communication and others do not, instead remaining unavowably private? An interesting case to consider is that of autism, for autists themselves appear to have no theory about other minds (to them other human beings may only be very unpredictable and scary physical objects), while their fetishisms can seem very mysterious and impenetrable to non-autistics. In this sense, the fetish object seems to inhabit an eerie twilight realm between the human and the nonhuman. The autist lives in a world of private signification and private fetishes because he seems to lack some cognitive module which the rest of humanity possesses. (Here we have to suspend Wittgenstein's strictures about private languages if we want to pursue a model). Of what does this lack consist? The inability to theorize about other minds? An incapacity to generalize effectively in situations of ostensional learning? Whatever the problem, autistic language is extremely impoverished. (If Freud ever discussed the issue of autism, I am not aware of it.)

Nonetheless, autists tend to become very involved with obsessional objects and compulsive, ritualistic behavior patterns associated with them (see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). When one sees similar behaviors occurring in normal persons one certainly says that they have meaning­in fact, that they are among the most meaningful patterns of all. The counting of rosary beads, the shimmying prayer of the orthodox Rabbi before the Wall of the Second Temple, the repeated bow toward Mecca of the faithful Muslim­all of these rituals bear the marks of autism. This is not surprising, since they also serve the autistic purpose of imposing order and stability upon an otherwise chaotic and painfully incalculable world. Of course, they autist can't say what's bothering him; we have to infer it. In this sense the sign­the fetish!­exists before language does.

What is the fetish? An enduring material object, X, that acts as a signifier of some other object, process or relationship, Y. Fetish is thus to be distinguished from ritual as object is from event, the spatial axis of a related pair whose temporal axis is ritual: the Sacrament of Holy Communion is the ritual, the transubstantiating wine and wafer the fetish. In semiotic abstraction, this is roughly the relationship between paradigm and syntagm. The signified entity, Y, is, in turn, instinctually highly cathected for sexual, religious or economic reasons, or even because of some atypical neurological condition. (Thus the autist fetishizes and ritualizes his behavior in order to restore some stable order to a disturbed and chaotic perceptual field). In the fetish complex the signifier­the fetish object­in turn becomes cathected, acquiring the affective import of the instinctual object. How does the fetish object become cathected? In other words, the question is how it is possible that a signifying object (even one possessing substantial materiality) can provide some part of the satisfaction of the instinctual object. This paradox certainly confounded Freud and would seem to be the primary reason for his interest in fetishism, especially in those cases where the fetish is unrelated to the instinctual object by metonymy (a cowrie shell seems more mysterious than the female foot). Signs may be consumed but they are not nutritious.

Fetishism demands that the signifier act as promissory note: it must instantiate some expectation or promise of the eventual return of the instinctual object. The coin is the promise of the actual good­which is why currency inflation ignites such visceral fear­while the rosary, the altar, and the communion wafer constitute the promise of Christ's return and the believer's salvation. This is the realm of doxa, belief. The fetish is founded upon belief, not knowledge (episteme). This is precisely the import of Professor Ulmer's remark when he says, in his Ebola virus scare illustration, "I know very well (knowledge), but nonetheless (I believe something else). The knowledge is medical (Ebola, DNA), the belief is magic or conspiracy."

I may be slightly at odds with Ulmer, however, with respect to "fetish" and "fetish logic." Ulmer follows Lacan in that the fetishistic signifier substitutes for the absent object of desire; following Freud, this lost object was is the castrated penis (Teletheory 124­125). Leaving aside the identity of the signified object, the point is that for Lacan it was universal, that is, even more inclusive than anything signified by what I have called the "pseudo-fetish." From my point of view, fetish logic is a type of inference that has become compromised by a utility or evaluation; what it amounts to is a premature induction. The power of desire drives the misidentification.

At issue is the power of the intention­the power to control reality­even if the power is magical and the reality internal. This insight is perhaps what drove Freud to conclude that the fetish is "a sort of permanent memorial to itself" (200), like a blank headstone on an unmarked grave: it marks the existence of a loss, but of whom or what we do not know. From another perspective, however, an informational-theoretical perspective, a semiotics of the fetish perhaps becomes possible. In particular, C. H. Bennett's notion of logical depth (from the Chaitin-Kolmogorov theory) offers some startling insights into the global properties of meaning.

For example, it helps explicate the title of Derrida's Cinders, which plays against the absent dichotomous term "diamonds." In turn this suggests a whole system of binary oppositions: time/eternity ("ashes to ashes" versus "diamonds are forever"), margin/center (earth's crust versus core as site of origin), soft/hard (phallocentrism), common/scarce, with the second term in each case being privileged over the first.

In fact the physical scarcity and incompressibility of diamonds find explicit analogues in the description of the atomic structure of diamond from the point of view of algorithmic information theory: Diamonds are as hard as they are because the description of their atomic structure is maximally compressed, while highly compressed descriptions are, of logical necessity, extremely rare in the Chaitin- Kolmogorov hierarchy. (If we define the usefulness of a scientific theory in terms of its powers of data compression and prediction, then an important mathematical result, related to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, shows that the ratio of the number of all possible useful theories to the number of all possible strings of data is vanishingly small. What this means is that worthwhile scientific theories are rarer and harder to find than small needles in large haystacks. See Martin Davis, "What is a Computation?," in Mathematics Today, and Chapter 4 of Rudy Rucker's Mindtools). Living organisms are also carbon based, though they resemble neither diamonds nor coal ash. Incidentally, Derrida's title, Cinders, looks back mournfully to the Shoah, the Holocaust, the absence of life.

One important insight of an informational-theoretical perspective is that each marginal increment of inductive knowledge requires more and more effort to obtain, but once obtained has power in proportion to this expended effort. Highly compressed descriptions, like diamonds, are rare and valuable. Concepts are compressed descriptions; some of them (e. g., E=MC2) are very rare and valuable indeed. It might be easy to conclude from this that the cinders­the non-conceptual bits of knowledge­ are so much worthless junk. In fact, most of our thinking is devoted to incompressible personal memories (Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, 94­97, "Ol-Factory") to our own very particular cinder-strewn paths through history, and not to any powerful, universal engine of inference whose returns must, inevitably, diminish with any increase in its volume of output. This is one aspect of Derrida's message, and it is strangely congruent with Bennett and Chaitin and Kolmogorov have to say as well. In this respect, Gregory Ulmer's Fetish Project (http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/) faces the same problem as the scientist: How to find a maximally compressed expression (visual/verbal) for an individual fetish that is itself of a very complex nature.

I am forced to acknowledge that my understanding of other people must inevitably be incomplete; there is no book that, in the space of a few hundred pages, can provide the perfect simulacrum of the many years of a person's life. The impossibility of perfect understanding, however, does not negate the possibility of partial understanding. But there's a much bigger issue at work here. It is not the enigma that lies between a fetishist and the "reader" of the fetish, but the greater enigma that lies between the fetishist and the Unnamable. That is certainly the message of the Gnostic vision: We're all strangers here, leaving cinder-strewn paths behind us, those memorials to our own incompressible, unavowable memories.

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