Capitalism and Desire, by Todd McGowan (chapter 3)

[3] Shielding Our Eyes from the Gaze

T H E I M AG E O F N E U T R A L I T Y

In The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) describes the mysterious villain Keyser Soze by comparing him to the devil and quoting, without citation, Baudelaire. He claims, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” By hiding his existence, the Devil can operate stealthily through seemingly self-motivated human actions. Though many on the Left equate capitalism with the Devil, capitalism operates in exactly the opposite fashion. Its basic trick consists not in hiding its existence but in proclaiming that it exists. This trick proves so effective that it blinds not just the true believers but also even some of the system’s most thoughtful detractors.

Of course, capitalism really exists in the sense that it functions as today’s controlling economic system, but it doesn’t exist as the substantial ground of our being, which is the status that it has for the capitalist subject.

Capitalism is not the default economic system that results from the failure to decide politically on some alternative. It is political through and through. Its existence depends on the collective decision that brought it into being and that continues to sustain its development, and it is in this sense that it doesn’t exist. But this decision is difficult to see. Whereas one could easily link the existence of communism to a revolutionary decision that creates its rule, no such decision inaugurates capitalism. No one would mistake the communist system that arose in Russia in 1917 with the natural order of things. But capitalism appears as a neutral back70

ground that emerges out of being itself, an economic system that simply develops on its own and continues unabated unless it encounters political interference.

Capitalism owes much of its strength as an economic system to its guise of neutrality, to its illusion of belonging to the order of existence.

If it isn’t a system at all or even a way of life, but just the way of life, then the idea of contesting it is nonsensical and doomed to failure. According to this way of thinking, the communist revolutions of the twentieth century ran aground not because of their own internal contradictions but because they attempted to violate the economic laws of nature. The idea of capitalism’s natural status or its correlation with human nature provides the fundamental obstacle to any attempt to contest capitalism’s dominance. Before one can challenge capitalist relations of production, people must believe that capitalism doesn’t exist, that it results from a break within the structure of being itself rather than simply deriving from that structure. The key to taking this step lies in an investigation of how the nonexistence of capitalism becomes evident. It does so only at moments of crisis, which is what gives crisis its theoretical fecundity.

Though subjects within the capitalist universe experience themselves as free (free to make money, free to consume what they want, and so on), the system spares them the weight of the decision. We make numerous decisions every day concerning what to do, where to go, and what to buy, but none of these decisions occurs outside the confi nes of the narrow limits of our given possibilities. The political decision, the decision concerning our way of life itself, disappears within the capitalist horizon.

None of our everyday choices involves the risk of a radical transformation, but all offer the security of a well-known terrain instead. This security is the direct result of the belief in the substantial existence of capitalism, a belief the system itself requires and sustains.

Belief in the existence of capitalism has become especially pronounced with the absence of any economic alternative. Political theorists today often lament the absence of political engagement among subjects within the capitalist economy. The problem is not just that few actively engage in political struggle but that it is difficult to conceptualize the world in political terms. Rather than seeing themselves as incessantly confronted by political questions, subjects today tend to accept the given order as the natural state of things. This acceptance represents a retreat from politics Shie l ding O ur Ey e s f r om the G a z e

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because politics necessarily involves a rupture with what is given. By conceiving oneself as a political subject, one loosens, ipso facto, the grip of the given order. As Jacques Rancière points out, “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies,’ that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying.” Taking oneself to be a political subject creates a disruption in what is given insofar as it reveals the political structure of the given.

As political subjects, we see the given not as given but as the result of a political victory.

Though Rancière correctly sees the need for politicization, the marginalization of economy in his thought obscures how this politicization might occur. Today politicization requires a disruption in the naturalness of the capitalist economy, but this economy works constantly to present itself as natural, which is why such a disruption is difficult to conceive or experience. It is not enough simply to call for a return to politics. As long as capitalism persists in the guise of a natural system that simply exists, such calls will go unheeded. Grasping the vulnerability of the capitalist system requires taking stock of its strength.

Capitalism’s appeal as an economic system stems in part from its capacity for protecting subjects from seeing their own role in constituting the system in which they participate. Capitalism seems to run on its own.

Subjects participate in it, but their decision to participate or not does not appear to affect the functioning of the system. This is why capitalists who decide to outsource their labor or to manufacture deadly products (like guns or cigarettes) defend their actions with the claim that someone else would be acting this way if they weren’t. In other words, the system, not individuals themselves, is culpable for the sins committed within it. Subjectivity entails responsibility, but capitalist subjects evade any sense of responsibility because the system obscures their role in what transpires.

By keeping the awareness of this role at bay, by promulgating a sense that capitalism exists, the capitalist system produces the appearance of solid ground beneath the subject’s feet. Though Marx and Engels point out the deracinating form of capitalist relations of production in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, this uprooting of traditional guarantees and realities leads to the formation of an even more deeply imbued 72

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sense of ground that capitalism offers. This sense of ground derives from the seeming emergence from being itself that inheres within the capitalist system. Capitalism’s form of appearance is that of the natural order of things. Because it commands us to follow our own self-interest rather than question where this interest lies, capitalism can present itself as the economic system most proximate to the givens of our biology.

Capitalism’s reliance on the idea of self-interest is the foundation for its claim to a connection with human nature. But it is this connection that Freud thoroughly demolishes. Though we often think of Freud as the cynical thinker who discovers self-interest at the heart of every altruistic action, the basis of his thought—the discovery of psychoanalysis itself—derives from subjects acting contrary to their self-interest with maddening consistency. Acting according to self-interest is not the default subjective position but actually represents, for Freud, a psychic impossibility (even under capitalism, a system that rewards such action).

What characterizes the subject’s state of being is not self-interest but a process that involves the repeated subversion of self-interest. If I am to attain satisfaction, I must sacrifice my self-interest, and this is what subjects constantly do, even those who believe themselves to be fervently pursuing it.

Though capitalism demands that subjects act out of their self-interest, it sustains itself through their self-sabotage. If subjects were able to pursue self-interest, they would immediately unite to overthrow the capitalist system and create a more efficient and equitable economic system. Capitalism is not in anyone’s interest, not even that of the most successful capitalists. Bill Gates must endure the burden of capitalist dissatisfaction with what he has every bit as much as the worker in a sweatshop.

Capitalism does not permit anyone to avoid the dissatisfaction that inheres in a universe based on the demand for ever increasing accumulation. But as long as subjects remain within the capitalist universe, they can derive satisfaction from their self-sabotage, while disavowing this form of satisfaction and believing themselves to be purely self-interested—and thus purely natural—beings.

Freud tries to cure neurotics, but he has no illusions about rendering them happy by allowing them to pursue their self-interest. Even Freud cannot turn a neurotic into an alien. His melancholy statement at the end of Studies on Hysteria testifies directly to this conclusion. He defines Shie l ding O ur Ey e s f r om the G a z e

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therapeutic success not as allowing the realization of self-interest but as “transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Common unhappiness is Freud’s term for the subject’s inability simply to pursue its self-interest. A system structured around the pursuit of selfinterest is in no way suited to the inherent structure of subjectivity, but instead results from a political decision that subjects continue to make unconsciously through their participation in the capitalist system. But capitalism relies on disguising this decision through the appearance of naturalness.

L I F E D U R I N G WA RT I M E

It is no coincidence that the great ideologues of unrestrained capitalism base their support for capitalism as an economic system on the fact that it coincides with the nature of being itself. For such figures, capitalism is not so much an economic system as the way of the world. This is clearly the position of Ayn Rand, whose novel Atlas Shrugged represents perhaps the leading treatise of capitalist ideology. The unrepentant boldness of its claims—its celebration of self-interest as the only virtue—suffices to recommend it above the relative timidity of F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, who accept some mitigation of rampant self-interest. In the novel, Rand divides characters into the producers who actually create value and the moochers who just appropriate the value created by the producers. Whereas Marx views the working class as the producers and the capitalist class as the appropriators of the value created by the working class, Rand conceives capitalists as the only true producers.

In an explanation to a fellow producer, the character Francisco d’Anconia posits a natural world in which the production of money exists outside any societal structure that makes this production possible.

He proclaims, “Money is made —before it can be looted or mooched— made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.” As Rand sees it, the capitalist engages in a pure act of production that takes place outside any system that would regulate it. It is a natural act. Production relies solely on the effort of the productive few, people like Francisco d’Anconia, Henry Reardon, Dagny Taggart, and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.

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Rand envisions all the producers going on strike in order to protest the political system that interferes with their natural productivity. Her polemic becomes ideological insofar as it fails to account for the political structure of the capitalist economy in which these producers dominate.

They succeed not simply by virtue of their own productivity or ingenuity but also through the systematic regulations and structures that create the conditions of possibility in which this productivity can thrive. Regulations of capitalist society are not simply barriers to capitalist productivity but also its very condition of possibility. Capitalist production, in other words, cannot exist except against the background of the capitalist political decision that produces an unnatural (despite its appearance) economic system. Without stable capitalist social relations, neither Henry Reardon’s new metal nor Dagny Taggart’s trains would be conceivable.

Rand misses this important dimension of the producers’ success because she assumes that capitalist relations of production are the natural or neutral background against which all human activity takes place. For Rand, capitalist relations of production are ubiquitous, which is why capitalism has a substantial existence.

Rand’s philosophy of identity (which she claims wrongly to take from Aristotle) depends on this same misperception produced by capitalism’s form of appearance. She believes that identity simply is, that a = a. But the statement of identity—the claim that a = a—transfigures the fact of identity. The statement of identity implies a political decision to assert a claim about the world and a psychic investment in the claim about identity. This claim distorts the world that it constitutes. The claim of identity becomes an inextricable part of the identity, and this is what Rand’s philosophy cannot accommodate. Her blindness to the distortion of subjectivity finds its crowning avowal in the name that she gives to her philosophy— objectivism. Objectivism is not just Rand’s personal way of thinking; it is also the philosophy that capitalism’s obfuscation of subjective distortion demands. The purported objectivity of the journalist under capitalism is the not-so-distant cousin of Rand the objectivist thinker. One can trace this error back to the founding theorists of capitalism.

In the Wealth of Nations, though he doesn’t use the term capitalism, Adam Smith defines the capitalist economy as an economy based on the pursuit of self-interest, but self-interest remains a pure presupposition of Smith’s philosophy. He never attempts to argue for his conception of Shie l ding O ur Ey e s f r om the G a z e

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humans as self-interested beings because he associates self-interest with nature itself. It is in this sense that capitalism is the natural economic system. Once Smith adopts this starting point, the justification for capitalism necessarily follows. The pursuit of individual self-interest, given the market logic of supply and demand, leads to societal good. Though Smith avoids Rand’s absolute libertarianism, he does share her insistence on an identification of the pursuit of self-interest with the inherent structure of humanity. This is not, unfortunately, an error confined to champions of capitalism such as Rand and Smith. One can even find it among communist philosophers in their attacks against capitalism. Throughout his writing, Marx is careful to stress just how unnatural capitalism is, even though he doesn’t always say this in a critical way. But for someone like Alain Badiou, capitalism and reliance on self-interest equate with nature itself.

Like other students of Louis Althusser (such as Jacques Rancière), Badiou’s communist philosophy represents a plea for a political intervention that would displace the priority that economy has in capitalist society. Economy has no place in Badiou’s political vision of revolution. But the emphasis Badiou places on political as opposed to economic intervention causes him to grant capitalism a natural status, to presuppose its existence.

In Badiou’s thought, capitalism exists: it has the status of being the background of pure animality against which we might act. As he points out in his treatise on former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, “Whoever does not clarify the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, because the words have little importance—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporary, that is to say capitalist, name for this animality is: competition. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more.” Though Badiou champions communism as the alternative to capitalism, what is significant about these lines is his characterization of capitalism. Here as elsewhere, Badiou equates the capitalist system with human animality and thereby takes the capitalist system at face value when it presents itself as a system emerging out of nature. According to Badiou, there was no event that occasioned capitalism, no capitalist event, and there can be no economic event or rupture within the realm of economy. In explicit contrast to

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politics, economy is defi nitely not a truth procedure. Any economic intervention in society plays into the hands of capitalism, according to Badiou, because economy itself is de facto capitalist. Capitalism is economy as such.

By equating capitalism with economy as such, Badiou creates a broader target for critique and a clearer path for politics. Revolutionary politics becomes the political decision itself, not just the decision for communism. But the theoretical cost of this wager is too high. Badiou grants capitalism its fundamental ideological contention—its association with nature. He admits, in other words, that capitalism exists. In so doing, he implicitly concedes that Ayn Rand’s premises are correct, even if her conclusions are not. He agrees to fight the battle for communism on a capitalist terrain.

In contrast to Marx, Badiou sees economy as an alternative to politics rather than conceiving the economy in political terms. This gesture from one of capitalism’s most thoughtful opponents suggests just how widespread capitalism’s image of neutrality has become. Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism through its historical emergence represents perhaps his most significant achievement insofar as it provides a counterweight to the image of neutrality. This way of thinking about capitalism gives the lie to its alignment with natural being, but one need not be Marx or a Marxist to recognize this.

S E E I N G T H AT O N E S E E S

The difficulty of seeing the unnatural status of capitalism is akin to the problem that besets subjects confronted with the visual field. The relationship between the subject and the visual field provides a homology for the subject’s relationship to the capitalist system, a homology that enables us to see capitalism’s unnatural status and its power to hide this unnaturalness. Though capitalism is a system that shapes the activities of subjects within it and not a field that captures their look, it does nonetheless share a key element with the field of vision. In both cases the terrain appears natural and given to us as subjects irrespective of our engagement in it. That is to say, capitalism and the visual field seem to exist on their own in a neutral state with regard to the subjects who engage

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PRAISE FOR CAPITALISM AND DESIRE “Capitalism and Desire turns around the predominant leftist whining about the devastating psychic consequences of global capitalism, about how it undermines elementary structures of psychic stability which enable individuals to lead a meaningful life. The focus of Todd McGowan’s effort is, rather, the enigma of the success of capitalist ideology: how was it possible for such a destabilizing life practice to fully capture the libidinal lives of billions, how was it possible that continuous crises and states of exception only strengthened its hold? In short, how is it possible that capitalism again and again imposes itself as the cure for the crisis it brings about? In answering these difficult questions, McGowan has produced a classic.”

—Slavoj Žižek “McGowan’s argument is positively brilliant—almost every page brings a startling insight and every chapter compels an exciting reorientation of thought. Because of its paradigm-shifting originality, Capitalism and Desire places McGowan among the most prominent critical thinkers of his generation and competes admirably even with the very best work of the generation before him.”

—Mari Ruti, author of The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living

“With Capitalism and Desire, McGowan provides an admirably accessible and intellectually sophisticated analysis of the real connections between capitalism and psychoanalysis. This is a wonderful book demonstrating immense intellectual vitality—it is simply impossible to ignore.”

—Fabio Vighi, author of Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

“How many syntheses of Marx and Freud have been forged in an attempt to ground a critique of capitalism—only in the end to fail? After tallying their individual failures, this smart book goes on to confront their underlying problem: a botched reading of Freud. Relying on Lacan’s radical re-ecavation of Freud, McGowan offers brand-new ideas about the subject’s ensnarement in the 'freedoms' of capitalism and the possibilities of resistance to them.”

—Joan Copjec, author of Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

“The immense satisfaction of McGowan’s latest and most ambitious book is achieved, appropriately enough, by putting capitalism to the test of a suitably profound (and paradoxical) conception of satisfaction. Astonishingly far-ranging in its references yet written in perfectly limpid prose, Capitalism and Desire sets a new high-water mark in contemporary social and political philosophy. A dazzling work of theory.”

—Richard Boothby, author of Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has To Teach Us About Sex and Gender COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U

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