The Existential Drama of Capital

Christian Haines (bio)
Dartmouth College

A review of McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016.

In Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Todd McGowan offers a perverse starting point for the critique of capitalism: not the injustices and inequalities produced by capital accumulation, nor the repressiveness endured by the subjects of capitalism, but rather the joy of capitalism – “why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure” (18). Capitalist subjects, McGowan argues, take pleasure in capitalism, even as it deprives them of their freedom. In a certain respect, this claim recapitulates longstanding theories regarding the relationship between capitalism and pleasure, for instance, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of mass culture as an institution for generating empty pleasures, that is, pleasures that stimulate only insofar as they also rob subjects of reason and autonomy. McGowan takes this line of thought a step further, however, by insisting on the distinction between pleasure and satisfaction. “The problem,” he writes,

is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies. The capitalist regime produces subjects who cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and thus to the promise, constantly made explicit in capitalist society, of a way to escape this dissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of the commodity. (11)

Satisfaction is not always pleasurable, indeed, it can be painful, because for McGowan it has less to do with immediate gratification, or the relative ease of the Freudian pleasure principle, and more to do with freedom, with a commitment to fractured foundations of the subject, to what Jacques Lacan terms jouissance. Satisfaction revolves around loss and failure, rather than contentment and success. It is the stuff of symptoms, not psychic equilibrium. For McGowan, this disjunction between pleasure and satisfaction, promise and freedom, equilibrium and fracture, constitutes the motor of critique.

The gamble of Capitalism and Desire is to found the critique of capitalism not on futurity and pleasure but on trauma and loss. Critics of capitalism more often than not stake their positions on the promise of a better future, a future in which the barriers to pleasure have been removed. One need only think of Herbert Marcuse’s call for desublimation, Fredric Jameson’s investment in utopianism, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s faith in the liberatory potential of the multitudes. McGowan wants to do away with this investment in futurity in favor of an acknowledgement of the inextricability between freedom and loss. The point, he makes clear, is not to pivot from pleasure to loss, as if the only solution to the problems presented by capitalism were a plunge into asceticism or an embrace of melancholy. The problem with capitalism is that it conceals the sacrifices that capitalist subjects make to it through the pleasures of consumption. The task, then, is one of interpretation, of seeing how the capitalist system structures desire in a way that necessarily overlooks the dimension of lack and loss in the reproduction of capitalism. Following in the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis, interpretation is more than a change of perspective. It is also a change in the coordinates of desire, a restructuring of subjectivity so that the patient (in this case, the capitalist subject) can enjoy loss differently. The title of the book’s conclusion is suggestive in this respect: “Enjoy, Don’t Accumulate.”

The greatest accomplishment of McGowan’s book is to so sharply pose the question of what enjoyment untethered from capitalism might look like and to do so without relying on the tired claim that the pleasures of capitalism are not really pleasurable. One could speak of this accomplishment in terms of immanence, noting that for McGowan, the end of capitalism is not after capitalism but in its midst. One of the ways in which he frames this immanence is as an abandonment of final causality. Theorists cannot, and should not, predict or prescribe the future after capitalism, but

they can forge an approach to the world that reveals the unsustainability of the capitalist system and thereby make the alternative readily apparent. This is what transpires when we abandon the final cause that underwrites capitalist productivity [that is, the capitalist ideology of progress] and insist on the means for its own sake and not for what it will produce. … The means is a future that is already present within capitalism, and the task of the theorist – or even the task of the revolutionary – consists not in creating a new system but in identifying the implicit presence of this new system within the existing one. (174-175)

McGowan does not reject futurity as such but rather the issuance of promissory notes on the future. Put differently, he embraces futurity only insofar as it inheres in the present as the immanent potentiality for rupture. Crucially, McGowan poses this imperative towards immanence as political, rather than ethical, which is to say that he does not suggest that futurity is inherently good, that the end of capitalism secures virtue and pleasure. There is no utopian space of enjoyment, unadulterated by loss, on the other side of capitalist accumulation. McGowan’s approach is both stringently theoretical, in its insistence on formulating the abstract structures of capitalism, and remarkably pragmatic, in its recognition of the messiness of social and psychic life.

At the same time, I have reservations about the efficacy of two central methodological decisions in McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: first, the choice to model capitalist subjectivity primarily, indeed, almost exclusively, on the basis of commodity consumption; and, second, the identification of interpretation with radical political action, such that the capacity to subvert or overthrow capitalism depends on a relatively rarefied form of intellectuality. There are moments in the book when interpretation risks becoming a quest for authentic experience, so that the question of labor conditions and the problem of political organization seem almost epiphenomenal in respect to the existential drama of the subject. McGowan is so focused on what Marx calls the theological niceties of the commodity form that he forgets to descend into the hidden abode of production. McGowan does an excellent job of building on the philosophical or speculative element in Marxism, the gear in the critical machinery most associated with German Idealism (with Hegel, if not Kant), but the scientific element (the critique of political economy) and the political element (socialist and communist movements) more often than not seem like afterthoughts.

I have little interest in faulting Capitalism and Desire for sins of omission, given that there is much to admire in the book. However, the relative dearth of engagement with politics and political economy speaks to a specific relationship to Marxist theory and criticism. In its current formation, Marxist critical theory seems to consist of three relatively distinct fragments: a speculative fragment in which capitalism constitutes a transcendental structure of subjectivity; a political fragment at the heart of which is the question of what kind of historical subject will abolish capitalism (the party? the commune? the riot?); and an economic fragment that asks how the rhythm of capital accumulation – the cycle of crisis – might prepare the way for another mode of production or social system. These are points of emphasis, rather than mutually exclusive objects of thought. Much of what is interesting in Marxist scholarship has to do with the way it mediates between these emphases, the way it not only translates from one to the other but also marks the tensions, the contradictions, between them. McGowan’s analyses of the psychic life of capitalism do not lack for mediation, but McGowan tends to flatten the differences between these registers, applying the distinction between pleasure and satisfaction as a universal, explanatory formula. The messiness of social life operates at the level of the example or the anecdote, but it never quite manages to scale up to the level of the concept. The clarity of McGowan’s speculative propositions comes at the cost of bracketing the complexities of organizational practice (activism, social movements, etc.) and at the cost of leaving the history of capitalism a blur. As McGowan himself admits, his Marxism is more Hegelian than Marx’s, which, in this case, amounts to a valorization of the concept over the messiness of everyday life.

The Libidinal Deduction of Capitalism

The undeniable strength of Capitalism and Desire is the way in which it parses the theological niceties of commodity consumption. McGowan takes seriously the ritualistic element of capitalism, the way in which capitalist reproduction depends on a process of transubstantiation whereby loss and poverty become the ever-renewed promise of a better future. McGowan joins Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, and Giorgio Agamben, among others, in thinking capitalism as an economy of sacrifice, that is, as a mode of production for which the sacrifice of time, energy, and life is not merely a necessary condition but the very form of its reproduction. The capitalist version of sacrifice is a secularization of sacrifice, which is to say that it disseminates the ritual element of sacrifice so that it no longer occupies a special place in society (the sacred) but is rather coextensive with sociality as such. McGowan writes:

The migration of sacrifice from the realm of specified rituals to the everyday world of producing and consuming commodities has the effect of obscuring the act of sacrifice. Overt sacrifice troubles the equilibrium of the modern subject, but it becomes completely acceptable in the hidden form that capitalism proffers. In capitalism, subjects can enjoy sacrifice while believing that they aren’t. We can enjoy sacrifice in and through its very invisibility when it becomes secular. (92)

It would be too reductive to paraphrase McGowan as saying that capitalism is built on sacrifice. His point is more general: sacrifice is capitalism; sacrifice is the essence not only of production – one thinks of the workers at Foxconn factories, assembling products for Apple, when they are not attempting suicide – but also of circulation and consumption. In respect to circulation, one could consider all of the so-called negative externalities of the capitalist economy, not least of all climate change, which accrue in the transportation of commodities from one point of the globe to another. Is not the sacrifice of the planet the ultimate testament to the quasi-divine power of capitalism, which flirts with the apocalypse as if it were no more than a one-night stand? However, it is the sacrificial dynamics of consumption that truly draws McGowan’s attention, the way in which the consumption of the commodity betrays a promise of transcendence not unlike the Christian Eucharist. McGowan argues that the pleasure in commodity consumption exists not despite the element of sacrifice but because of it; we enjoy the loss, the suffering that accompanies our acquisitions. This pleasure in sacrifice speaks to our longing for satisfaction, for an encounter that would shake us out of our equilibrium. It transforms this negativity into a lure through which the normal and normative reproduction of society takes on the air of the forbidden. Capitalism capitalizes on the gravitational pull of negativity that is foundational to human subjectivity.

It is tempting to think the pleasure involved in sacrifice in terms of a subject-object dialectic, according to which it derives from the sense of mastery involved in consuming the suffering of another. From this perspective, one could speak of the global North and global South as economies of sacrifice: the production of geographically-distributed wealth implies the production of masters and servants, the former comfortable in their fortresses of luxury goods, the latter exposed to the violence of degraded working conditions.¹ This frame is a scaled-up version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, including the latter’s analysis of the substitution of pleasure for agency, or the dependence of the master’s enjoyment on the slave’s labor. It is an analysis implicit in the Latin American critique of development discourse, in what Cedric Robinson names the Black radical tradition, and in a number of Marxist and postcolonial theoretical practices.² McGowan does not neglect this differential distribution of pleasure, but he does shift the emphasis of critique away from geographic inequalities and towards libidinal dynamics by arguing that sacrifice belongs to the subject as much as the object, that the economy of sacrifice has as much to do with surrender as mastery, that, in short, the ritual of sacrifice inheres in the act of consumption. McGowan’s bluntest formulation of this claim is as follows:

Capitalism thrives not because we are self-interested beings looking to get ahead in any way that we can but because we are looking for new ways to sacrifice ourselves. This propensity for sacrifice stems from a recognition that no satisfaction is possible without loss. Sacrifice does not exist just at the margins of capitalist society. It is omnipresent within capitalism and provides the key to its enduring popularity as an economic system.(94)

The idea of the self-sabotaging subject is a refrain in Capitalism and Desire, because, in its Lacanian framework, self-sabotage is constitutive of the subject. There is no subject without a sacrifice that breaks the continuity between pleasure and satisfaction, that interrupts the animal instinct in the name of the signifier, jouissance, or the (death) drive. If the subject exceeds the pleasure principle, it is only because sacrifice introduces negativity into the force field of positivity. The premise, here, is transhistorical. Sacrifice is constitutive of sociality as such. Capitalism changes the configuration of the ritual, but it is the basic facticity of sacrifice that makes capitalism possible, not vice versa. Sacrifice is the ritualization of the loss that is fundamental to human existence. The “enduring popularity” of capitalism is thus an effect of the way it channels loss through sacrifice, constituting a perpetual alibi for a pleasure that is difficult for capitalist subjects to admit.

The transhistorical role of loss in Capitalism and Desire gives the book a great deal of its critical power, but it also tends to reduce social and political practice to an existential drama. On the one hand, the mobilization of a dialectic between the transhistorical and the historical pledges the book to the speculative element in Marxism, enabling McGowan not only to pierce the veil of commodity fetishism but also to answer the question, “Why capitalism?” McGowan follows in the footsteps of Slavoj Žižek, among others, in dropping the language of false consciousness in favor of a logic of disavowal. It is not that capitalist subjects do not know the sacrifices entailed by the capitalist mode of production – after so many campaigns to raise awareness of the terrible working conditions in sweatshops, how can we not know? – but rather that they do not know that they know:

The consumer’s enjoyment of the worker’s sacrifice – the enjoyment of the value given to the commodity by the worker’s sacrifice of time – occurs through an act of fetishistic disavowal. For psychoanalysis, the fetish enables the subject to disavow the necessity of loss. It is a failure of knowing that implies another level of knowledge. In other words, fetishists don’t know that they know and work to ensure that they will never know this.(97)

The epistemic discrepancy of fetishism confuses necessity with contingency. It does not naturalize capitalism, instead it assumes the sheer contingency of capitalism, offering the comfort that capitalism is merely a product of historical efforts, that the losses associated with it could easily be reversed, if only we chose to do so. In asserting the priority of loss, its role as fundament of human existence, McGowan does not dehistoricize capitalism, but he does acknowledge its cosmic scope, the manner in which it has brought the stars down to earth. The question “Why capitalism?” loses its sophomoric qualities, because the question no longer assumes a teleological framework – capitalism as destiny/destination of human life. Instead, it serves as the beginning of an inquiry that leads to the stubborn fact, as well as the sticky strangeness, of human desire. This is what one might call the libidinal deduction of capitalism, an analysis that dispenses with the poststructuralist suspicion regarding causality and metaphysics, without jettisoning critical reflexivity.

On the other hand, there is an elision of social and political complexity that is arguably constitutive of this libidinal deduction of capitalism. McGowan’s critique depends on a reduction of phenomenal existence to an exemplification of commodity consumption. The paradigm of capitalism becomes “driving the car off the lot,” that is, the experience of “anticipated satisfaction” (“The joy of shopping lies in the interaction with a seemingly infinite number of promises of future satisfaction”), followed by inevitable disappointment, as sublime promise turns into “an ordinary object that falls far short of our expectations” (226). There is a certain truth to this perspective – after all, the capitalist drive to expand beyond its own limits can certainly be formulated as a desire to consume the world. However, this view leaves little room for a consideration of the ways that capitalist conditions include emergent social formations, the way that, for instance, the social cooperation organized by capitalism can change its valences, becoming the starting point for socialism or communism. Nor does it leave much room for considering the ways capitalism restructures itself in response to crisis, that is, for considering the specific ways in which capitalist institutions transform themselves in order to clamp down on resistance or revolution. It is not so much that these concerns disappear but rather that they become almost incidental or simplistic compared to the vicissitudes of desire. I am reminded of Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger in “The Idea of Natural-History,” namely, his argument that in Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, historicity emerges at the expense of history and the pursuit of authentic historical experience, requiring the debasement of natural history.

McGowan wants to recuperate an authentic experience of satisfaction from the empty promises of capitalism. He does not confuse this authentic experience with utopia, nor does he conceive of it as a resolution of contradiction. If anything, authenticity implies trauma, disruption, the shudder of jouissance. McGowan captures it best in his discussion of love:

One can never have the love of the other because one loves what the other doesn’t itself have. Even when the other desires us, something in the other remains outside our control. To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as lovable entity. … Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence.(184)

Love articulates negativity as an event.³ It introduces a break in the promissory trade of capitalism, a rupture in the circulation of the ever-deferred sublime. It is the moment of the Hegelian Aufhebung, provided that one does not imagine the sublation of capitalist social life as the achievement of equilibrium. Love is never easy. It pulls one outside of oneself, delivers one over to that which in another is irreducible to enjoyment. It demands surrender, shatters the ego. Love transforms sacrifice into the condition of possibility of a life, but this life does not imply health or well-being. Instead, it assumes the loss at the heart of the human. Love teaches us to live with loss, not to seek cheap substitutes for it.

The Point Is to Interpret It

Capitalism and Desire is, in many respects, an existentialism. It takes as its premise a negative anthropology, or an image of human nature in which loss, rather than some positive attribute, is the defining feature. It poses radical freedom as the fundamental project of human existence. Although McGowan never quite puts it this way, psychoanalysis becomes a means of reintroducing meaning into human life, even if that meaning involves assuming negativity as the essential condition of raising oneself above animal existence. In focusing on this drama of the subject, McGowan pushes back against the vitalist turn in much recent theory and criticism. He calls into question the reparative impulse that responds to injustice by searching after the conditions for a happy life, for life without injury. McGowan goes a long way towards making the case that life without loss is not only impossible but also undesirable. At least for human subjects, there is no satisfaction without loss, only the endless pursuit of pleasures in a metonymic drift without meaning. Moreover, this insistence on the value of negativity, on negativity as the condition of possibility of a meaningful – or liberated – life, issues a counterargument to the postcritical turn elaborated by Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, among others.⁴ Postcriticism has warned of the limits and dangers of critique, arguing that the negativity of critique deprives students and scholars not only of the pleasure of aesthetic and social experiences but also of the capacity for affirmation. Critical criticism, it seems, is deadening. It fails to take objects on their own terms, forcing them to become mere vehicles for contextual factors. In contrast, McGowan suggests that nothing is more deadening than the absence of negativity, that it is a lack of interpretation – a failure to get beyond the surface, to move past description into the realm of speculation – that forecloses satisfaction. Postcriticism has its pleasures, but is it really satisfying? All of this is to say that McGowan renews the practice of ideology critique by committing to the transhistorical role of loss, as well as the shattering force of satisfaction.

Although a great deal of critical prose has been dedicated to desire, Capitalism and Desire stands out for the way in which it rigorously distinguishes satisfaction from pleasure, salvaging a genre of desire irreducible to the equilibrium of the pleasure principle. The problem, however, is that the book is not abstract enough. This might seem a strange claim, given that I’ve argued that McGowan has a habit of reducing sociality to the play of a single structural opposition (pleasure versus satisfaction), but abstraction need not imply lack of complexity. As Louis Althusser argues so forcefully, theory is practice – theoretical practice – and, as such, it possesses its own nuances, its own rich ecology.⁵ McGowan’s serial analysis of cultural objects, everyday practices, and pro-market ideologies overshadows the relative autonomy of theory. McGowan touches on the perverse complexities of Lacan’s, Hegel’s, and Kant’s theories, but he does not provide that thick description of structures found in work by Kojin Karatani, Kiarina Kordela, and Samo Tomsic, among others. I find myself wishing for more elaborate inquiries into the transcendental structures of subjectivity, into the interplay between the linguistic dimension of the unconscious and the materiality of capitalist reproduction, or into the relationship between the scene of therapy and the scene of revolution. Put differently, Capitalism and Desire puts too much weight on interpretation as such. It valorizes the experience of getting beyond pleasure, of assuming the position of the analyst, but it does not spend enough time dissecting the operative concepts of interpretation or connecting interpretation to other practices. Interpretation risks becoming an end in itself.

At the same time, McGowan’s resolute commitment to interpretation should be praised for its therapeutic value. In a historical moment – call it the Trump era, the Anthropocene, or late, late capitalism – when the dreadfulness of capitalism seems so overwhelmingly obvious, McGowan wants his readers to train their speculative muscles to look beyond the fetishistic appearances of capitalism, to ask not simply how capitalism works but also why capitalism: Why does it have such a hold on us? Why is it still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? If I describe the value of this contribution to critical thought as therapeutic, it is because it opens up a scene of analysis – a theoretical and practical milieu in which to examine and work on desire, to reconfigure libidinal economies, to insist on the non-identity between pleasure and satisfaction. Capitalism and Desire leaves its readers dissatisfied, which is to say that it allows them to realize how truly miserable capitalism is making them. That is the book’s undeniable power.

Footnotes

1. Breu suggests this analytics through the concept of avatar fetishism.

2. See, for instance, Frank, Robinson, and Lowe – there are, of course, far too many examples to list.

3. McGowan’s valorization of love, as distinguished from romance, is close to Badiou’s classification of love as a truth-event, especially in In Praise of Love. Berlant, however, offers a much-needed complication of the valorization of love against romance, in Desire/Love.

4. Two prominent examples of the postcritical turn are Best and Marcus, and Felski. For critical responses to the postcritical turn, see especially Lesjak, Rooney, and Haines.

5. I am thinking especially of the essays in For Marx as well as Althusser’s contribution to Reading Marx.

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor. “The Idea of Natural History.” Telos, vol. 60, June 1984, pp. 111-124.
• Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster, Verso, 2006.
• Althusser, Louis, et al. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, Verso, 2016.
• Badiou, Alain, with Nicholas Truong. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush, New Press, 2012.
• Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books, 2012.
• Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1-21.
• Breu, Christopher. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
• Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. Monthly Review Press, 1967.
• Haines, Christian P. “Eaten Alive, or, Why the Death of Theory is Not Antitheory.” Antitheory. Palgrave, Forthcoming.
• Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Translated by Sabu Kohso, MIT P, 2005.
• Kordela, Kiarina. Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology. SUNY P, 2013.
• Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, Spring 2013, pp. 233-277.
• Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015.
• McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016.
• Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. U of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Rooney, Ellen. “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form.” differences, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 112-139.
• Tomsic, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. Verso, 2015.