THE IMAGE OF NEUTRALITY
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.”1 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 background 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 confines 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 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.”2 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.3 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 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.4 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 therapeutic success not as allowing the realization of self-interest but as “transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”5 Common unhappiness is Freud’s term for the subject’s inability simply to pursue its self-interest. A system structured around the pursuit of self-interest 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.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
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.6 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.”7 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.
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.8 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.9
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 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.10
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.”11 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 politics, economy is definitely 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.
SEEING THAT ONE SEES
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 them. They present themselves as simply partaking in the order of things. Just as no political decision inaugurates the capitalist system, none constitutes the visual field.
This appearance of naturalness is more pronounced in the visual field than with any of the other sensory fields. While touch, taste, hearing, and smell often result from an evident and active decision—someone moves forward to embrace us or bakes us a cake to eat, for instance—sight most often makes use of what lies before our eyes apparently without any act that forges what we see. In the other sensory fields, it is easier to discern the subjective distortion or decision that constitutes the field. Perhaps this is clearest in the case of taste, where the subject’s own desire so evidently determines the status of the field. If I hate spinach, this will shape how I experience the green leafy substance in my mouth. Though I may believe that spinach simply tastes awful, I can grasp how it tastes awful for me and how my taste plays a role in its status as awful. I can even, through an act of radical imagination, consider the existence of someone who might take pleasure in eating it.
With vision the situation is much more difficult. What I see and how I see it appears to exist in front of my eyes, and the role that my desire plays in constituting this scene is not at all evident. The visual field, in other words, does not appear distorted by desire. I assume that others, standing where I stand, will see what I see in the way that I see it. Vision, ironically, does not seem to be a question of my act of seeing. The illusion of naturalness renders the subjective distortion of the visual field—its reliance on our act of seeing to constitute it—almost impossible to detect. But it is not quite impossible. We see this distortion of desire primarily in works of art, like films or paintings, where the constitutive role of our subjectivity can become more prominent.
In his Seminar XI Jacques Lacan names the distortion that desire produces in the visual field le regard or the gaze. The introduction of this term immediately opens Lacan to a horrible misunderstanding that derailed Anglo-American film theory for decades.12 The gaze, as Lacan theorizes it, is not the simple act of looking and the mastery involved in that act (as the English-speaking interpreters of Lacan had it), but rather the point at which the distortion caused by the subject’s desire becomes visible as a disruption in the visual field.13 In short, the gaze is nothing but the way that the subject’s desire deforms what it sees. It is the impossibility of a neutral or natural field of vision. At the point of the gaze, the subject is an absent presence in the visual field that is responsible for the field’s distorted character, its lack of neutrality. The gaze is political in the sense that it exposes the unnatural status of the apparently natural visible world.
When we see the gaze, we see that the visual field is not simply there to be seen but constituted around our vision of it, distorted by our desire. This distortion then forces us to reexamine everything that we see. As Joan Copjec notes in her account of the gaze, “At the moment the gaze is discerned, the image, the entire visual field, takes on a terrifying alterity.”14 We see that our desire has been taken into account by what appears to be a neutral visual field. The neutrality of this field vanishes, and the political decision that inaugurates it becomes apparent. The encounter with the gaze transforms the subject by creating an awareness in the subject of its role in producing what it sees.
The typical Hollywood film obscures the gaze by presenting the visual field as simply there for the spectator to see. In the same way, capitalism presents the economic field as existing apart from the activity of the subjects whose activity constitutes it. The typical Hollywood film doesn’t just propagate capitalist ideology; it utilizes the form of capitalist economy and acts on the spectator the way that capitalism acts on the subject. In both cases one cannot readily recognize one’s involvement in the system. The obfuscation of the gaze enables subjects to believe that the economic and visual fields operate without the subject’s activity.
The gaze exposes the tendentious nature of the apparently neutral visual field: what seems to be simply there to be seen becomes evident as a structure created around the subject’s desire. What appears in front of the subject thus loses its independent and external status for the subject. The distance that inheres in the act of looking collapses through the emergence of the gaze. In this sense, the trauma of encountering the gaze is nothing but the trauma of encountering the constitutive power of one’s own desire in shaping what one sees even before one sees it. The gaze as an object that causes our desire is most powerful in the visual field due to the apparent independence that this field has for us. Its manifestation always occasions a traumatic shock.15
We can see an instance of an encounter with the gaze in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). The film recounts the travails of an unnamed driver (Ryan Gosling) who helps his neighbor, Standard (Oscar Isaac), to commit a robbery in order to pay a debt that he incurred while in prison. Even though he sees the folly of the plan, the driver agrees to go along because he has fallen for Standard’s wife Irene (Carey Mulligan). During the robbery, Standard is killed by the same criminals who forced him into the crime, and after the driver escapes with the money, they come after him. The film’s key scene occurs in an elevator at the driver’s apartment building, where a hit man rides with the driver and Irene.
Understanding that both his own life and Irene’s are at stake, the driver attacks the hit man with extreme violence and brutally kills him by beating him to a bloody pulp. Though Irene had begun to fall in love with the driver, especially after the death of her husband, here she looks on with complete shock. Though she recognizes that the driver is saving her, the violence he displays reveals the impossibility of any life together with him. He shows that he is capable of a level of brutality with which she could not simply coexist. The scene concludes in a striking fashion: Irene exits the elevator, and the shot focuses on the door as it closes in front of her disoriented look. This is the encounter with the gaze.
The shot of Irene’s shocked face does not itself represent the gaze. The horror of her look exposes the gaze or distortion within the elevator. Her exclusion from the scene as the elevator door shuts reveals the unnatural or distorted status of what we have just witnessed. The driver’s brutality—necessary as it might have been—was not simply a natural response to a threat but a horrible display of excess. Irene’s look shows it to be unnatural, inadmissible within the bounds of social interaction—a gaze. Her look signals to the spectator that the driver’s extreme violence did not fit within the spectator’s field of vision, and this look makes it impossible to take voyeuristic pleasure in the violence. In this sense, the film, despite its graphic violence, represents one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of such violence in contemporary cinema. It exposes this violence as the result of a political decision or a desire, and it associates both the film’s protagonist and the spectator with this decision. From this moment on, there is no possibility of any romantic bond between the driver and Irene. The driver exists in a position that the film exposes as excessive.
When the elevator door closes in Drive, the camera remains within the elevator and thus leaves the spectator with the driver rather than with Irene. The spectator is positioned within the distortion or the gaze itself. The possibility of a typical life within society lies on the other side of the elevator door. In this sense, the film alludes to a similar exclusion in one of the most famous scenes in American cinema, an exclusion that also involves an encounter with the gaze. At the end of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the door shuts on Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the violent war veteran who has finally returned his niece to her family after years of Indian captivity. Though both films facilitate an encounter with the gaze that reveals the distortion of the visual field, the position that each film takes relative to this encounter is completely opposed.
While Drive leaves the spectator with the driver to inhabit the distortion, The Searchers remains inside the house as it excludes Ethan Edwards and the distorting gaze from the visual field. The film’s point here is that social normalcy depends on the exclusion of the gaze, which exposes the unnatural status of this normalcy. But Drive pushes this logic even further by locating the spectator within the distortion itself. With this gesture, it becomes apparent that the distortion is inescapable. One can shut the door on it, but we remain on this side of the barrier.16 Most films, to be sure, do not expose the gaze in this way. Instead, they work to hide the spectator’s investment in the image.
The link between the cinematic gaze and capitalism becomes most evident in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a film most often seen as a straightforward capitalist fantasy. This fantasy shows the importance of the individual and the ability of a network of family and friends to overcome the machinations of a big capitalist. In the fantasy proffered by the film, the capitalist system takes care of the working class and allows them to succeed. Though the big capitalist, Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), is the film’s villain, Capra nonetheless shows how the small capitalist can thrive and provide the backbone for the formation of a supportive community. When the community comes to the rescue of George Bailey (James Stewart) at the end of the film and supplies the money that he owes to Potter, it seems as if capitalism is compatible with the values that its insistence on self-interest would appear to thwart. Though this ideological fantasy is certainly operative, the film’s relationship to the capitalist system is much more complex and involves its depiction of a neutral field of vision. This image of neutrality is much more ideological than the capitalist fantasy that the film proffers.
The decisive section of It’s a Wonderful Life is the fantasy sequence in which the angel Clarence (Henry Travers) shows George Bailey what life would be like without him. We see the quaint small town of Bedford Falls transformed into the squalid Pottersville, a city where corruption and self-interest are ubiquitous. Others have noted that this fantasy sequence simply provides Capra the opportunity to present the capitalist reality of his time, but what we see is not simply the social reality. Instead, by subtracting George Bailey from the filmic universe, the film shows us the distortion of the capitalist gaze. George’s presence obscures the gaze, and his absence unleashes it. The excesses and horrors of the capitalist system become visible because George’s crisis leads to an encounter with the gaze. Clarence exposes him to the gaze not just in order to convince George to remain alive but also to reassure him about his investment in the capitalist system. It is this investment that renders Pottersville invisible, and when George accepts his former role at the end of the film, the image of Pottersville once again recedes from view. Bedford Falls tames the gaze and thereby allows us to believe that the capitalist system simply exists.
In the cinema the gaze emerges at moments of narrative crisis, at moments when the spectator’s sense of mastery and distance evaporates. When the gaze emerges, the visual field loses its illusion of neutrality, and the distortion produced by the spectator’s desire that stains the image becomes visible. This distortion most often remains hidden, but it manifests itself whenever we encounter the gaze, during any crisis when the cinema reveals how our investment as spectators skews what we see. In the same way, the moment of crisis exposes the capitalist gaze—its status as one economic system among others that we must either accept or reject. The moment of crisis within capitalism makes the unnaturalness of capitalism evident. These moments represent political opportunities or opportunities for politics. They stage what we might call an encounter with the gaze.
OCCUPY THE CRISIS
Capitalism functions through the same illusion of neutrality or naturalness as the visual field. The possibility for an encounter with the gaze or the subjective distortion that produces capitalism exists also within the field of capitalist economics. Here the encounter is just as difficult to produce as it is within the field of vision. Most of the time, capitalist relations of production create enough prosperity that few question the neutrality of these relations. But the gaze is ever present within capitalism and always ready to appear. When it does, the political decision undergirding the capitalist economic system becomes visible.
The tendentious status of capitalism—the gaze within capitalism—becomes most visible during crises. This is why it is not surprising that the clearest challenges to capitalism have occurred during times of economic tumult. We can see three undeniable instances in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Great Depression occasioned the emergence of a social safety net in the United States, a definitive political intervention into the economic realm designed to modify the structure of capitalist relations of production. Even if Franklin Roosevelt attempted to save capitalism from the threat of communism with the New Deal, this intervention nevertheless shifted the terrain of the discussion and exposed the unnatural nature of capitalism. The capitalist system left capital itself idle and unable to stimulate economic activity. There was no capitalist solution to this failure. The United States needed the New Deal because capitalism could not simply work on its own without destroying itself.
The American economy in the early 1970s was not in the same moribund condition that it was in during the 1930s, but Richard Nixon’s decision to sever the link between the U.S. dollar and gold—the elimination of the gold standard—represents another instance where capitalism’s nonexistence becomes apparent. On August 15, 1971, Nixon tried to stem the tide of inflation and massive foreign redemption of dollars for gold by freeing the dollar from its link to the American supply of gold. As a result, the Federal Reserve could print dollars in response to impending or actual economic crises and thereby work to abate them. The turn away from gold ushered in a much more flexible and much more evidently political monetary policy. Though monetary policy had always been political, Nixon’s action exposed its tendentiousness—and the tendentiousness of capitalism as a whole.
Even more than Roosevelt, Nixon was attempting to save or harmonize capitalism rather than destroy it. But his response to the economic crisis he confronted makes even clearer capitalism’s break from the natural world. The link to gold enables us to believe that capitalism functions on a solid foundation, that it is rooted in an element of the natural world. We can find gold on the periodic table and identify its atomic number, in that way assuring ourselves of its natural status.17 The dollar has no atomic number. One needn’t be an alchemist to create dollars, just the owner of the proper printing press. The dollar doesn’t provide any reassuring link to the natural world but makes evident the act of faith on which all monetary systems rest. This is why Nixon’s act eliminates the illusory connection to nature. During the crisis of 1971, the American economy would bear the mark of politics.
The financial crisis of 2008 produced a phenomenon almost exactly the converse. Rather than exposing the politicized structure of the economy, it ushered the capitalist economy onto the political scene. The question of the injustice inherent in capitalism emerged as the salient political question. This indicated a disruption in the usual order of American politics, which has historically worked to marginalize fundamental capitalist questions in favor of cultural ones or small economic ones. Even the widespread use of the signifier capitalism revealed an expansion of the political field to include the terrain of capitalist economy.
The birth of the Occupy movement out of the 2008 financial crisis was the vehicle for this expansion: the crisis in which financial managers became even wealthier through the immiseration of others and the government intervention to save the banking system laid bare the interpenetration of politics and the capitalist economy. Operating according to its own logic, the system self-destructed, and it required an extraordinary political act to avoid complete collapse. Once this became evident, the Occupy movement could make the case that the antagonism between the 1 percent and the 99 percent had a political, rather than a natural, status.18
Due to the specific nature of the capitalist crisis, it reveals capitalist relations of production as unnatural. Though it is possible to denaturalize capitalism at other times, the moment of the crisis marks one of the few times that capitalism’s distance from nature manifests itself. The crisis acts on the capitalist system as the film does on the visual field: it facilitates an encounter with the distortion that constitutes the system but remains repressed within it.
Of course, crises do not begin with capitalism. Throughout its history, humanity has endured crisis after crisis. Crises even predate humanity: the object from space that crashed into Earth and killed the dinosaurs provoked a crisis not just for the beings that became extinct but for all life. In this case, and in those involving precapitalist humanity, the crisis is always a bout of scarcity when natural conditions obstruct the production of goods necessary for survival. Capitalism does not eliminate the crisis, but radically transforms it from the crisis of scarcity into the crisis of overproduction. In one sense, who cares? A crisis is grave whether it results from scarcity or overproduction. But their political status is completely different. This transformation of the crisis reveals the wholly unnatural status or nonexistence of the capitalist system.
The natural world engages in a constant struggle with scarcity. Plants and animals must either fight with each other or cooperate—neither strategy is more natural than the other, despite what appears self-evident—in order to survive in a world that provides a limited number of resources for them. A crisis comes about for animals, for instance, when they can no longer find enough food in their particular locality. Precapitalist humans suffer the same types of crises as animals and thus appear to be simply human animals, to be natural beings. But capitalism revolutionizes the crisis that humanity confronts and thereby exposes humanity’s fundamental break from the natural world.
The capitalist economy enters into crisis not through scarcity but through overproduction, the production of an excess of commodities with a paucity of consumers for these commodities. Recessions and depressions are the result of too many goods, not too few. What is telling is not only the form of the capitalist crisis but the measures taken to ameliorate it. All attempts to create a stable system reveal its unnatural and unharmonious status. For instance, the Keynesian solution of excessive state spending shows that capitalism doesn’t properly function as a natural order. The immiseration that capitalism causes is not the result of its inability to produce enough commodities for consumers to buy but the by-product of the excess it produces. Even on the most commonsensical level, the fact that an excess of production leads to a crisis can only seem bizarre.
The housing crisis of 2008 makes this logic perfectly clear. The crisis was not the result of a lack of houses for people who needed them but of an excess of houses with no one to pay for them. Vacant houses began to proliferate, which led to a drop in the value of existing houses and a near total collapse in the production of new houses.19 The term used to describe the precursor to the crisis—the housing bubble—testifies to the problem of overproduction. Whereas early humanity struggled to find enough shelter, subjects of capitalism suffer from having too much of it.
The 2008 crisis didn’t just leave us with a surplus of housing, however. Surpluses were evident throughout the economic landscape. As David Harvey notes, the postcrisis world was “short on cash and awash with surplus houses, surplus offices and shopping malls, surplus productive capacity and even more surplus labour than before.”20 No one could mistake an excess of commodities and an excess of the capacity for producing more as a natural problem. All of a sudden, with the crisis of overproduction, capitalism ceases to exist and becomes the product of a political decision. Overproduction renders the capitalist system as such visible.
But the crisis of overproduction creates an awareness that doesn’t exist at any other time. Marx recognizes this in the Grundrisse, where he notes, “capital has no awareness whatever of the nature of its process of realization, and has an interest in having an awareness of it only in times of crisis.”21 The crisis forces capitalism to take stock of how it realizes value and to control this process in a conscious way. But the problem with this awareness, from Marx’s perspective, is that it will always be fleeting: when the crisis passes, the awareness will pass as well. The crisis of capitalism will never facilitate a lasting consciousness of capitalist relations of production because such a consciousness would destroy these very relations. But for those not invested in the preservation of capitalist relations of production, the crisis represents an unparalleled opportunity. The crisis reveals the capitalist gaze, the unnatural status of capitalism, the decision that sustains its relations of production. Just as the subject can experience the gaze in its field of vision, it can also experience the gaze, even though this gaze is not visual, within the structure of capitalism.
Although the structure of capitalism is not homologous with the structure of the visual field, thinking about capitalism in terms of the gaze follows from the apparent neutrality that both structures share. When we look at a visual field, it appears not as a field constructed around our desire but rather as field already there to be seen. No background lights fall from the sky as in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) in order to reveal to us that our look has informed what is visible to us. Visual reality successfully presents itself as a background against which and in which we desire rather than as a field thoroughly colored by our desire. In the same way, when we confront capitalism, it appears as a neutral economic system that simply exists in the absence of any political intervention. Capitalism passes itself off as the economic system given by being itself, just as the visual field does. It passes itself off as existing.
The traumatic encounter with the gaze, the moment of confronting one’s own desire as a distortion of the world in which one exists, renders this world unnatural and foreign. The world ceases to be a habitual space in which one can dwell and becomes a groundless field based solely on the desire of the subjects that exist within it. The gaze exposes the world itself as nothing but a presupposition of the desiring subject, a structure lacking any independent existence or substantive weight. The world is not the background in which we desire but emerges only through the force of desire. What appears as substantial and preexisting subjectivity depends for its substantiality on the subject’s role in its constitution. This is not to say that there is no objective material reality, that everything exists only in an ideal realm, but rather that this objective reality is inextricable from a subjective distortion, a gaze, that divides it from itself and on which it depends. The dependence of objectivity on this subjective distortion makes the world unheimlich, which is why we seek refuge from the gaze.
When the crisis occurs, capital ceases to flow smoothly, and the money necessary to buy commodities and restart this flow of capital remains dormant. The crisis causes capital to lose its productivity, and even Rand’s producers cannot rediscover it. We see that capitalism does not work like a neutral background but rather distorts social relations. The failure of capital itself to resolve the crisis—its reliance on state intervention—exposes its unnaturalness and the decision that permits its survival. The crisis confronts us with the possibility that capitalism might fail, with evidence that it exists only through our efforts to bring it into being. The danger of the crisis for capitalism is not that it will bring about an economic catastrophe from which the system cannot recover but that it will expose the system’s nonexistence and thus create an opportunity for the encounter with the gaze. And this encounter would make possible another form of economic decision, an economic event.
FASCISM OR EMANCIPATION
Moments of crisis within capitalism facilitate an encounter with the gaze, but they are not necessarily always revolutionary. Oftentimes, the response to this encounter is a fascist reaction. The same economic crisis that occasioned the New Deal in the United States gave birth to Nazism in Germany. The moment of the gaze’s emergence makes the political dimension of the economy evident, but it does not point in any necessary political direction. The gaze presents us with a political opening that can either lead toward a leftist or a rightist mobilization.
The key to the political valence of the encounter with the gaze lies in the interpretation of the gaze itself. If we interpret the gaze as the distortion of an otherwise balanced and neutral system, then we will respond with fascistic efforts to restore the capitalist system’s imaginary neutrality through the violent exclusion of the source of the distortion. In other words, the fascist believes that the gaze—the distortion of the capitalist system—is not inherent in the system but an excess that corrupts the system from the outside. Fascism is the attempt to purify capitalism, but it necessarily fails because capitalism’s impurity inheres within the capitalist system itself. There is no such thing as a purified capitalism, which is why the fascist project of eliminating the impurities is always an unending one. The more Jews the Nazis sent to the death camps, the greater the Jewish threat loomed.
Emacipatory politics, in contrast, interprets the gaze not as an external distortion of the neutral capitalist system but as the indication of the system’s inherent imbalance and partiality. That is, the distortion of the crisis is nothing but capitalism’s own inherent imbalance. The point of emancipatory politics is not the elimination of the gaze but identification with it. The struggle between the forces of fascism and the forces of emancipation is one between two fundamentally opposed responses to the crises of capitalism. Fascism views the crisis as an anomaly that one might repair, while emancipatory politics sees the crisis as the moment at which capitalism reveals the truth of the distortion lurking in its own structure. The appeal of fascism is almost always stronger because it offers the assurance that a neutral background exists and enables us to avoid confronting the trauma of a political decision.22 But fascism preserves and extends the very crisis that it promises to ameliorate.
In The Usual Suspects, a moment of crisis occurs that occasions just the effect that a crisis in capitalism does, and it points the spectator toward emancipation rather than fascism. After hearing the testimony of Verbal Kint, customs investigator Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), along with the spectator, comes to the conclusion that he will not discover the identity of the criminal responsible for the death of twenty-seven people in a boat explosion at the harbor. But as Kint walks free, Kujan looks around his office and recognizes various terms that Kint used during his testimony on various items (a coffee cup, a poster on the wall, and so on). As the film cuts from item to item, the fictionality of Kint’s account of the incident becomes evident to both Kujan and the spectator. Through the juxtaposition of these images, director Bryan Singer creates an encounter with the gaze.
At this point we must revisit the entire experience of the film and reinterpret what we have seen. Rather than being a neutral account of the events that preceded the explosion, the film has depicted a fiction structured around the desire of Verbal Kint—who is, in fact, Keyser Soze. Whatever assurance we felt about the events we were seeing evaporates with this encounter with the gaze produced by the crisis within the narrative. Our investment as spectators in the desire of Keyser Soze himself becomes apparent during this encounter. The crises of capitalism create a similar opportunity for radical reinterpretation that the encounter with the gaze offers. Rather than viewing capitalism as the background for our actions, we might view it as the product of them. In this way we lose the guarantee of a neutral playing field and gain responsibility for the very turf on which we exist.