Capitalism and Desire

CAPITALISM AND DESIRE C A P I T A L I S M AND DESIRE ! e Psychic Cost of Free Markets T o d d M c G o w a n COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS N E W Y O R K Columbia University Press Publishers Since New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McGowan, Todd, author. Title: Capitalism and desire: the psychic cost of free markets / Todd McGowan. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN | ISBN (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN (e- book) Subjects: LCSH: Capitalism— Psychological aspects. | Capitalism— Social aspects. | Psychoanalysis— Philosophy. Classifi cation: LCC HB .M | DDC ./— dc LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. + is book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c : Mary Ann Smith References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. For Bea Bookchin the only anticapitalist I’ve ever met Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: After Injustice and Repression [ ] + e Subject of Desire and the Subject of Capitalism [ ] + e Psychic Constitution of Private Space [ ] Shielding Our Eyes from the Gaze [ ] + e Persistence of Sacrifi ce After Its Obsolescence [ ] A God We Can Believe In [ ] A More Tolerable Infi nity [ ] + e Ends of Capitalism [ ] Exchanging Love for Romance [ ] Abundance and Scarcity [ ] + e Market’s Fetishistic Sublime Conclusion: Enjoy, Don’t Accumulate Notes Index vii Acknowledgments C h a p t e r s and contain work revised from earlier publications. + anks to Ashgate Publishing for permission to reprint “Driven Into the Public: + e Psychic Constitution of Space,” in Architecture Post Mortem: ! e Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death , eds. Charles David Bertolini, Simone Brott, and Donald Kunze (London: Ashgate, ), –. + anks also to Wayne State University Press for permission to reprint “+ e Capitalist Gaze,” Discourse: Journal for ! eoretical Studies in Media and Culture , no. : –, copyright © Wayne State University Press. More than anyone else, Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press was the engine for the publication of this book. She is an incredibly thoughtful and conscientious editor, and her eff orts to sustain the publication of theoretical works today are unequalled. I also appreciate the work that Christine Dunbar at Columbia Uni- versity Press did in order to help this book to appear. + anks to Dashiell and + eo Neroni for their constant insights into how capitalism insinuates itself into the structure of our desire. + e students at the University of Vermont played a decisive role in helping me to think through the psychic appeal of capitalism. Ryan Engley has been especially infl uential on my thinking, especially con- cerning the theoretical underpinnings of the banal. M y fi lm studies colleagues at the University of Vermont—Deb Ellis, Dave Jenemann, Hilary Neroni, Sarah Nilsen, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have created a stimulating environment in which to teach and write. ix + e + eory Reading Group—Joseph Acquisto, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, John Waldron, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have made the University of Vermont a place of respite from the demand for success. Quentin Martin has helped to direct my thinking about capitalism through his trenchant critiques of it and has always been available to provide equally trenchant critiques of various chapters. I appreciate Jean Wyatt’s careful readings of the fi rst chapters of the book. Without Jean’s help, they would be twice as long and half as legible. + anks to Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Anna Kornbluh, Donald Kunze, Juan Pablo Luccheli, Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Rob Rushing, Russell Sbriglia, Fabio Vighi, and Louis- Paul Willis, who have provided a theoretical milieu in which no one is content but everyone is satisfi ed. Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips have continually nudged me to think in directions that I hadn’t foreseen, while at the same time giving me credit for the new turn. + anks also to Slavoj Žižek for his obscenely generous help in fi nding the appropriate place for this book to come out. I would like to also thank Richard Boothby, whom I encountered while in the middle of this project. After that encounter, which I experienced as a miracle, everything was diff erent for me because there was someone else, cut from precisely the same cloth, who could interrupt my dogmatic slumbers. Mari Ruti provided the most thorough and thoughtful reading that anyone has ever given me. + e book took a great leap forward thanks to her contribution. Sheila Kunkle has supported this project in innumerable ways. It would be unthinkable without her existence in the world, and she remains my fundamental co-conspirator. I owe the greatest debt to the three people who guide my thinking: Walter Davis, Paul Eisenstein, and Hilary Neroni. + ey are in the capitalist world but not of it. x Acknowledgments CAPITALISM AND DESIRE Introduction After Injustice and Repression PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM Can we psychoanalyze capitalism? Freud himself would probably have had his doubts. Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents , he questions whether or not one can psychoanalyze an entire society and concludes that one cannot. + e problem is not a practical one. Even though one cannot submit an entire society or an economic system to a series of psychoanalytic sessions, every social order and every economic system speaks through articulations that betray its psychic resonances, and we can analyze these articulations from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory. For Freud, the barrier to psychoanalyzing a society is a theoretical one. + e psychoanalyst can’t condemn an entire society as neurotic, for instance, because this diagnosis depends on a standard of normalcy with which to contrast the neurosis. But the irony of this conclusion coming in a book that psychoanalyzes social order as such must have escaped Freud. He is able to perform this act because no social order is complete and perfectly self-identical. Rather than being self-contained and thus impervious to critical analysis, every society opens up a space outside itself from which one can analyze it and make a judgment on it. + e same holds for capitalism as a socioeconomic structure. + e space for the psychoanalysis of capitalism exists within the incompletion of the capitalist system. If we accept the verdict that we cannot psychoanalyze capitalism as a socioeconomic system, then we implicitly accede to the arguments of the apologists for capitalism. Defenders of the system claim that capitalism is a function of human nature—that there is a perfect overlap between capitalism and human nature—and thus that there exists no space from which one might criticize it. From this perspective, any foun- dational critique is inherently fanciful and utopian. But much more than other socioeconomic systems, capitalism necessarily relies on its incompleteness and on its opening to the outside in order to function. One can psychoanalyze capitalism though the very gaps the system itself produces and through its reliance on what exceeds it. It is the case, however, that the practice of psychoanalysis has not always been equal to this task. Many critics of capitalism associate psychoanalysis with capitalism. It functions, according to this critique, as one of capitalism’s ideological handmaidens. It has the eff ect of shoring up potential dissidents and transforming rebellious subjects into more quiescent ones. + is ten- dentious understanding of psychoanalysis is not wholly unjustifi ed. In its practice (especially in regions of the world most fervently commit- ted to capitalism, like the United States), psychoanalysis has certainly played a role in enhancing the docility of its patients rather than un- leashing their revolutionary passion. But the verdict on psychoanalytic practice is decidedly mixed. Psychoanalytic theory has played a key role in the critique of the capitalist system, though it has never played the decisive role. Most of the attempts to understand how capitalism works have fo- cused on its economic structure or on the social eff ects that it produces. While important, these approaches necessarily miss the primary source of capitalism’s staying power. + e resilience of capitalism as an economic or social form derives from its relationship to the psyche and to how subjects relate to their own satisfaction. + is is why psychoanalysis is requisite for making sense of capitalism’s appeal. Psychoanalysis probes the satisfaction of subjects and tries to understand why this satisfaction takes the forms that it does. It does not transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but analyzes why certain structures provide satisfaction despite appearances. In this sense, it represents a new way of approach- ing capitalism and of understanding its staying power. To psychoanalyze a system is inherently to criticize it. But previous eff orts at marshaling psychoanalysis for the critique of capitalism have Introduction: After Injustice and Repression consistently placed psychoanalysis in a secondary position. Critique has been primary, and critics have deployed psychoanalysis to serve the critique. In the chapters that follow, I will do the reverse: the psychoanalysis of capitalism will remain the motor for the analysis, and if a critique of capitalism emerges from this psychoanalysis, it will never be- come the driving force of the analysis. Of course, no one is a neutral analyst of capitalism. But it is my contention that immersing oneself within its structure and within its psychic appeal must function as the prelude to any eff ective critique or defense of the system.

Load more