Alenka Zupančič reviews Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, 2016 Columbia University Press
“With the onset of capitalism, the speaking being enters a system that promises relief from the absence that inheres within the basic structure of signification.”
According to McGowan this promise (whichs also the promise of a better future) is an essential feature of capitalism. It is also what m akes critique of it very difficult: for how are we to criticize capitalism without (at least implicitly) proposing a better (alternative) future? Yet the moment we do this, we get entrapped into the logic of capital: “The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future.”
Interestingly, German philosopher Frank Ruda dedicates his recently published book Abolishing Freedom almost entirely to a very similar task, formulated by Ruda in slightly different terms, namely as an attack on the concept of freedom as potentiality (to be realized). Freedom as possibility, as potentiality, as capacity to do something (exemplified in the liberal capitalist freedom of choice), argues Ruda, has become a signifier of oppression and functions as the best antidote to actual freedom.
Once the mode of possibility enters the game and structures it, one should resist understanding or presenting the stakes simply in terms of possibility versus actuality (actual action), that is, in terms of the opposition between a possibility and its realization.
For this is precisely how freedom as oppression works in practice. It works following the logic of the superego, most concisely defined by Žižek as the reversal of the Kantian “you must, therefore you can” into “you can, therefore you must.”
Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means an at any price: You can do it, therefore you must!
The culture (and economy) of possibilities is not suffocating simply because there are so many possibilities, but because we are supposed not to miss out on any of them. A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them is not the kind of person this system needs.
What we are expected to do is to realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities. Which is precisely where “actual” freedom has to be situated: not simply in the actual realisation of possibilities, but in “unscrewing” the very framework which is based on the idea of freedom as possibility to be (yet) realized.
Ruda proposes to do this by advocating what he calls “comic fatalism.” He formulates several slogans of such fatalism: they suggest that a way out of this freedom-as-oppression is to act as if there were no future
- “Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!”
- “Act as if you were dead!”
- “Act as if everything were always already lost!”
There is thus an interesting connection between the way in which both McGowan and Ruda see the dismantling of the promise/potentiality (set in the future) as a crucial step in undermining the ideological and libidinal power of capitalism.
This proximity goes very far, for the way in which McGowan proposes to go about this undermining could actually be formulated in a single maxim coined upon Ruda’s examples:
“Act as if you were already satisfied!”
As he notes explicitly, McGowan sees the most important novelty of his approach to the critique of capitalism in conceiving the core of the problem not in terms of the injustice or inequality (following Marx), nor in terms of repression (following the Frankfurt school) – including the Foucauldian reversal of the “repressive hypothesis” – , but it terms of satisfaction.
The promise of a better future is the promise of a future (full) satisfaction which drives our desire. Yet what we don’t see is that the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is precisely the real s ource of satisfaction. This real source of satisfaction is traumatic in its nature, and capitalism – with both its economic and ideological structuring – allows this traumatic source to remain unconscious. It provides a gigantic armature for the metonymy of our desire, and hence protects us against confronting the trauma of loss as constitutive (and not empirical).
The ultimate commodity sold (to us) by capitalism is not this or that commodity, but its dissatisfaction as such: “No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.”
Dissatisfaction, and the repetition of the failure to find full satisfaction is the very source of satisfaction that accompanies capitalism. It is the reason what we cling to it so tightly.
By accepting the psychic or psychoanalytic perspective adopted by McGowan there nevertheless remains one question that concerns what we may call “material conditions of the reproduction of our psyche”. This question is intrinsic to the psychoanalytic theory itself.
The unconscious is out there
Jacques Lacan
Lacan is famous for his statement that “the unconscious is out there”, which implies that we can perhaps also change it only out there. Commodity functions as it does because of our attitude to it, but such an attitude is already part of the commodity as its objective functioning, and this functioning continues pretty much independently of what we think and know about the object in the first instance.
