A PRODUCTIVE SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION
The victory of capitalism over traditional societies is a victory over the ideals of historical continuity and community. In order for capitalism to rule the world, markets and private property are not enough. It requires a new ideal to gain ascendency over the sedimented ideals of traditional societies. This new ideal is productivity and its maximization. As Joyce Appleby points out, capitalism became the ruling economic system at the moment when “the ideal of productivity finally became dominant.”1 Once this ideal takes hold, even capitalism’s detractors accept it as their starting point. A capitalist world is a world where productivity is implicitly—and often explicitly—the highest value.
Productivity orients capitalist subjects around an end to be accomplished, and this end promises to exhaust the means used to achieve it. That is, the means are important only for the end that they accomplish. This is a defining capitalist idea, and the devaluing or erasing of means is essential to capitalism. Labor is important not for its own sake but for what it produces—for the capitalist and the consumer. The end may be the realization of profit or the enjoyment of a commodity. But in both cases the actions done to make this end possible lose all importance.
Capitalism’s focus on ends spares the subject from the encounter with the trauma of means. The means involve work and the effort that it demands. But the real trauma of means as opposed to ends is that they are never over and done with. When we think in terms of the end product and the accumulation of capital, we don’t have to consider the perpetual process required to create the product and the capital. The goal of the end replaces the repetition of the means and enables us to believe in the possibility of concrete and lasting accomplishments that will ultimately deliver us from incessant repetition. Capitalism directs subjects toward ends that they can achieve and obscures means that no amount of productivity will allow them to escape.
At the same time, however, the capitalist system relies on means to accomplish its ends. The capitalist and the worker must devote themselves to the actions that will bring about productivity. The system even requires moments in which the means disrupt productivity in order to reenergize it. Capitalism uses means for the sake of expanding its productive ends, but it never permits subjects to invest themselves in means while remaining in the capitalist universe. Capitalist subjects can think about the goals they want to fulfill without recognizing that they can never really leave the terrain of means, which inheres in subjectivity itself. The degradation of means is central to capitalism’s psychic appeal.
In this sense, there seems to be a natural affinity between capitalism and utilitarian philosophy. Though there are prominent utilitarian philosophers (like Peter Singer) who struggle for a more ethical version of capitalism or even for socialism, the philosophy itself, with its focus on ends rather than means, fits the capitalist a priori structure. In other words, the fact that John Stuart Mill is a prominent theorist of both capitalism and utilitarianism should not surprise us. At the beginning of his treatise on utilitarianism, Mill foregrounds the overriding importance of ends. He claims, “All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient.”2 This idea that the end drives our actions emerges out of capitalism’s privileging of productivity.3
Of course, the idea that we act to realize ends does not originate with capitalist modernity or with utilitarian philosophy. One finds this emphasis on ends throughout Aristotle’s thought, especially when he begins the Nicomachean Ethics with the claim that all our actions aim at the realization of some good. But there is a key difference between Aristotle and capitalism. The former views ends as an engine for our actions, but ends don’t exhaust our actions or extirpate the means used to attain them. This is what occurs with capitalism. Its emphasis on productivity precludes every attempt to value means on a par with ends. The result is that all affirmations about the intrinsic value of labor have an inherently anticapitalist hue to them.
To put it in the terms of psychoanalysis, capitalism focuses the attention of the subject not on the lost object that causes its desire but on the object that it desires. The capitalist subject is always looking forward to new objects that might attract its desire. In the capitalist universe, objects of desire proliferate and are highly visible. Just walking down the street forces multiple encounters with these objects in the form of advertisements, the cars that people drive, even the clothes that others wear. But the visibility of objects of desire in the capitalist system corresponds to the invisibility of the object that causes our desire.
The object of desire obscures the object-cause of desire or lost object. As we saw in chapter 1, the object of desire is an empirical object, existing in the everyday world, that one can obtain in the form of a new car, a new dress, or a new boyfriend. The lost object that causes desire, however, has no substantial existence and causes the subject’s desire only insofar as it is lost. The lost object is loss as such and functions to animate the subject as a being capable of acting in the world. We act—we take an interest in the world—because we begin with loss, with the loss of what we never had. This initial loss defines us as subjects. Thinking about desire in terms of the object of desire makes desire much easier to contemplate. Instead of being doomed to failure, it becomes a worthwhile investment. This realignment of our experience of desire constitutes an essential part of capitalism’s charm.
Though capitalism succeeds in deflecting attention from the lost object to the object of desire, it cannot make the object of desire satisfying when the subject obtains it. In fact, capitalism relies on the dissatisfaction that follows from obtaining the object of desire to stimulate consumption. If the commodity proves disappointing, the subject will have to buy another, more improved version. The eighty-inch television will surely provide the satisfaction that the fifty-five-inch one didn’t. The older wine will prove more enjoyable than the newer (and cheaper) vintage. But eventually subjects grow wary of this perpetual game of dissatisfaction. Though the commodity always promises a complete satisfaction, it never delivers on this promise. No television can ever be large enough.4
Despite the images of satisfaction that float around capitalist society, it is a society structured around the subject’s dissatisfaction. If consumption simply satisfied the subject, it would destroy itself and eliminate profit rather than increasing it. A satisfied customer ceases to consume enough to sustain a capitalist economy. The capitalist subject must thus live through a constant struggle between the image of satisfaction that others seem to have and its own perpetual dissatisfaction. Perhaps this contradiction sends them into psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis owes its existence to capitalist modernity. It emerges in response to the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism produces through its incessant focus on the object of desire. Whereas capitalism privileges the object of desire to the exclusion of the lost object, psychoanalysis reverses this valuation and identifies the lost object as the central force within the subject. Psychoanalysis doesn’t make existence fully satisfying for the subject by giving it a fully satisfying object. Instead, it turns the subject’s attention to the integral role that loss has in its satisfaction and reveals the inexistence of a fully satisfying object.
The psychoanalytic cure involves leading the subject to the point where it can embrace the partial satisfaction that the lost object provides. It is a satisfaction of not having rather than having—and thus radically opposed to capitalist productivity. The idea is not one of accepting the necessity of some dissatisfaction by acceding to the reality principle. Instead, the subject grasps that it already has the satisfaction that it seeks. The partial satisfaction of not having always trumps the illusory total satisfaction associated with having the object of desire. This is the lesson of psychoanalysis in a nutshell.
The combat that psychoanalysis wages against capitalism is not a frontal assault. Instead, it works to transform the subject’s attitude toward loss and thus render the subject incapable of investing itself in capitalist productivity and accumulation. Thus, if one leaves psychoanalysis and continues to struggle for enrichment or for accumulating additional commodities, the psychoanalysis has functioned as productive therapy rather than as psychoanalysis. This is the verdict that we can unequivocally render on the analysis that Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) undergoes in the television series The Sopranos. Though it disturbs his ability to continue his accumulation (of money, of women, of power), it never seriously throws this project into question. This represents a perfect image of psychoanalytic failure. Instead of helping subjects like Tony Soprano to accumulate with a good conscience, psychoanalysis aims at creating a recognition that loss is inextricable from satisfaction.
The rarity of psychoanalytic practice actually working to reconcile subjects with the lost object as the source of satisfaction testifies to the triumph of the ideal of productivity within capitalist society even at the site most diametrically opposed to this ideal. By and large, nonproductive psychoanalysis—that is, psychoanalysis as such—becomes productive therapy. Practices that don’t accede to the productive ideal either die or quickly transform themselves. The fate of psychoanalysis in capitalist society bespeaks the near omnipotence of this ideal. Despite its emphasis on the nonproductivity of the lost object, psychoanalysis primarily functions as an ideological handmaiden to the productive ideal.
But the victory of the productive ideal is not, for all that, entirely secure. Its vulnerability does not only reside in workers who experience their labor devalued but also in subjects who become dissatisfied with the dissatisfaction necessarily created by the focus on ends. Attention to the means lurking within capitalist ends leads to the possibility of a different economic system. Capitalism depends on an investment in productive ends, but its dependence on means opens the door to the recognition of satisfaction that it cannot tolerate.
THE RECOGNITION OF LABOR
Capitalism creates a strict separation between loss and satisfaction, just as it separates labor from profit. This is what leads to the denigration of labor. Despite the integral role of the worker in the creation of profit, capitalism focuses attention just on the moment where profit becomes realized rather than when it is produced. The end is what matters, and the capitalist does what she or he can to increase profit, even if this means pushing workers past the point of their physical and psychic limits.5
In Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936) the image of Charlie Chaplin being sucked into a machine after failing to keep pace with the ever increasing demands of the industry chief captures the indifference of the capitalist to the plight of the worker.6 Though this is obviously an exaggerated portrait of capitalist production and conditions have improved for most workers today, there are still many unable to keep up with the demands for hyperproductivity, even in supposedly advanced countries. These conditions persist because, for the capitalist, there is no intrinsic relationship between labor and profit. Labor is only a tool to achieve profit, not a part of the profit process. The mistreatment of workers is inextricable from the capitalist conception of the world.
Labor is the means toward the end of profit, and the site of the means is always traumatic. The trauma of means resides in its capacity not to be realized as an end. The means might lead to the end, but it also might not. The means might remain nonproductive, and labor might not realize a profit. Capitalism relies on the means of labor, but it refuses to grant the means any status of its own. There is, in other words, no space for the acknowledgment of pure means—that is, the means that might not realize itself in an end—within the capitalist system. The means is only there to be realized in the end of production.
Capitalism’s apotheosis of productivity leads to its disdain for any refusal to actualize the means as an end. The refusal to actualize the means insists on the value of the means independent of the end that it guides it, and this refusal manifests itself most commonly in the strike, which has not become the privileged labor action by accident.7 The strike confronts the capitalist with a show of the means subtracted from its end. Capitalists abhor strikes not simply because they cut drastically into profits but because they indicate an implicit challenge against the entire capitalist order. When we go on strike, we demonstrate the significance of the means as opposed to the ends. Even when the strike is just a bargaining tool—and thus a means to a clear end—its form belies its function. The idle laborer and the idle machine disturb the universal faith in productivity that rules the capitalist universe. Capitalism demands that all means serve an end. The structure of capitalism is necessarily teleological: it gives priority to the final cause, which would be the realization of value in the sale of the commodity.
In the second book of the Physics, Aristotle distinguishes between four forms of causality—the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. Aristotle sees all causes as necessary, but the final cause holds a special place for him because it is determinative in the world. We act, in the last instance, on behalf of the final cause rather than the other three forms of causality. Aristotle says, “that for the sake of which tends to be what is best and the end of the things that lead up to it.”8 Because Aristotle’s world is a world of the good in which we act in order to realize certain goods, the final cause necessarily holds sway for him.9
Though modern science departs from Aristotle on almost every question, nowhere is its rupture as violent as on the question of causality. Modern science does not permit the researcher to introduce at any point the question of the final cause or the reason why an event occurs. When observing a new species of plant, for instance, we cannot ask why it came into existence, for what purpose.10 Nature is purposiveness without any ultimate purpose. No scientist would dare make an argument for introducing a final cause. Doing so would testify to a premodern belief in God’s divine plan.11 The rejection of the final cause defines modern science.
Though evolutionary theory seems to embrace a version of the final cause with its conception of adaptation, genuine evolutionary scientists scrupulously distance adaptation from any teleological purposiveness. Evolutionary change occurs through adaptation to the exigencies of the environment, not for the sake of an ultimate external goal (like the ability to see, for instance). The development of a particular organ in a species thus has a completely contingent status. It is always the product of a series of efficient causes that led to the creation and not a final cause. The link between evolutionary science and the final cause is entirely illusory and stems from a basic misunderstanding of this science.
Just after modern science jettisoned the final cause from all its inquiries, Spinoza did the same for philosophy. In the appendix to book 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza targets the belief in final causes as an illusion that we must abandon. Because we experience our own ability to realize ends in the world, we assume, Spinoza argues, that God has the same ability on a grander scale. We assume, in other words, that nature follows from God’s free will, just as we assume our actions follow from our free will. Both assumptions are faulty because neither we nor God has a free will to guide actions. No final cause guides the natural world, and we do not have the power to direct our action by positing an end toward which they aim. The only cause, for both modern science and Spinoza, is Aristotle’s efficient cause. The final cause represents a dream of control that has become untenable in the modern world.
And yet, capitalism, the system that comes into existence alongside modern science, insists on the final cause without any hint of abandoning it. Without the final cause, capitalism would lose itself in the satisfaction of the pure means and fail to actualize all the potential value that it unleashes. The psychic structure of the capitalist subject remains immersed in the final cause as the engine for its actions. The final cause directs capitalists toward the moment of value’s realization in the exchange process, and it turns attention away from labor. Means must become ends, and productivity must become the productive act. A system that values productivity above all else must cling to the outdated philosophy of the final cause.12
The idea of the final cause has such great staying power not simply because the logic of the capitalist requires it (though it does). It endures by allowing subjects to view themselves, to paraphrase Descartes, as masters and possessors of themselves and their future. The final cause is a conscious plan we lay out and attempt to realize through a series of little efficient causes. The philosophy of the final cause assumes that our conscious plans, our professed intentions, drive our actions. But such a vision misses the extent to which the unconscious generates satisfaction by upsetting these plans.
I may, for instance, begin with the final cause of finding a romantic partner who treats me with more kindness than my previous ones. I consciously choose one who seems to fit the bill. But because I am also an unconscious being, I will, for better or worse, choose someone who appeals to my unconscious desire, even if she appears to serve my final cause. Thus, I end up with a partner who treats me just like my previous partners did, in spite of the studiously conceived plan to avoid this eventuality. Perhaps straightforward aggressiveness now becomes passive aggressiveness. The same lack of kindness repeats itself now under the guise of kindness, but this guise allows me to avoid confronting the trauma of my own repetition. In the same way, we seek respite from the trauma of unconscious repetition by placing our faith in the final cause, and this respite is precisely what capitalism offers us.
The central role played by the final cause in capitalism affects the approach that businesspeople take toward their enterprises. They do not contemplate questions about the significance of what they aim to produce or about the state of the workers who will produce the commodity. Instead, they focus entirely on the end. Great exponent of the free market Ludwig von Mises describes this disposition in detail. He notes,
The businessman, the acting man, is entirely absorbed in one task only: to take best advantage of all the means available for the improvement of future conditions. He does not look at the present state of affairs with the aim of analyzing and comprehending it. In classifying the means for further production and appraising their importance he adopts superficial rules of thumb. He distinguishes three classes of factors of production: the nature-given material factors, the human factor—labor, and capital goods—the intermediary factors produced in the past. He does not analyze the nature of the capital goods. They are in his eyes means of increasing the productivity of labor. Quite naïvely he ascribes to them productive power of their own. He does not trace their instrumentality back to nature and labor. He does not ask how they came into existence. They count only as far as they may contribute to the success of his efforts.13
Though von Mises later adds that the economist can’t share this single-mindedness of the businessperson, he does correctly insist that it is requisite for success in the marketplace. The capitalist is necessarily a teleological being focused entirely on the goal of creating profit by realizing the potential value created by the production process.14
Capitalism and modern science arise at roughly the same point in history and often work in tandem (when capitalists employ scientists to develop new products for them, for instance). But the centrality of the final cause in capitalism and its banishment from modern science reveals an incongruity. In the midst of a modern world where science has stripped away the sense of purpose given by the final cause, capitalism recreates a purpose. Every act within the capitalist universe originates in a purpose: the capitalist’s will to create a profit, the consumer’s will to find a satisfying commodity, and the worker’s will to earn enough to live well. The mastery implicit in the final cause suffuses the capitalist system.
The final cause appears determinative everywhere within the capitalist universe. There is no means that remains just a means. Every means must lead to an end, or else it has no worth at all. Capitalism capitalizes on every means by placing it under the regime of the end, a regime in which the final cause appears to bring everything under its auspices. But the final cause is nothing but capitalism’s retrospective illusion. No one acts on behalf of a final cause: no one creates a new commodity in order to realize a future profit; no one plays the lottery in order to purchase a new house; no one goes to church in order to attain eternal salvation. The purpose of the act exists within the satisfaction of the act itself, not in what the act actualizes. This is Spinoza’s great insight and the basis for his implicit critique of the incipient capitalist system.15 But in order to recognize the absence of the final cause and the presence of a series of efficient causes, one must change one’s perspective from that of ends to that of means.
THE VIRTUES OF INTERRUPTION
In a number of works dedicated to potentiality, Giorgio Agamben has advocated just this type of change in perspective. He identifies potentiality not with the capacity to realize one’s desire but with the satisfaction that comes from the failure to realize it. As he argues in the essay “On Potentiality,” “To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being.”16 Potentiality implies impotentiality and failure, an ability to identify with one’s own inability to realize a desire.17 Potentiality is an immanent alternative that exists within the capitalist system. Despite its insistence on all potentiality realizing itself in actuality, capitalism relies on impotentiality or the interruption of productivity to create new values and to sustain the functioning of the system.
The insistence on impotentiality is not just a protest against capitalism’s demand for productive ends. It is also—and perhaps more importantly—an act that contains within it the essence of capitalism’s productivity. Impotentiality’s refusal blocks the process of capital’s actualization, but such refusals are the real source of value. Capitalism relies on subjects of impotentiality even when they destroy potential productivity, because these subjects open up other avenues for productivity. Even though capitalism demands productivity and reduces laborers to instruments of reproduction, it desires and in fact requires an interruption of this pure productivity. The special talent of capitalism lies in its capacity for marshaling the threat of impotentiality in the service of its regime of actuality. This is why the political valence of impotentialty is never cut and dried.
Within the capitalist mode of production, the interruption of productivity becomes a new way of creating surplus value. As Hannah Arendt theorizes it, capitalism—and communism, about which she is equally critical—demands the reduction of all potentially active subjects to laborers. Labor, which is nothing but the reproduction of life itself, becomes the only possible mode of relating to one’s existence. Work (which is world creating) and action (which is the realm of the political) cease to be viable concerns within the modern capitalist universe. The dominance of labor and its pure productivity create a world in which there is no value at all, and this destruction of value forms the basis for Arendt’s critique of capitalism and communism.18
But what Arendt misses is the impossibility of a system continuing to survive just for the sake of surviving.19 Even when we claim to want only to survive, we must find some satisfaction in this survival or else we wouldn’t bother with it. Pure survival simply isn’t worth the effort, either for the individual or for the socioeconomic system. Every system needs a source of value, and in order to create it, capitalism relies on the interruption of the pure productivity—or, to put it in Agamben’s terms, the interruption of actuality—that it explicitly demands. Pure productivity cannot create value, which is precisely why Marx sees capitalism’s production of value infinitely shrinking. This process, for Marx, will ultimately lead to capitalism’s decay and overthrow. But capitalism finds new forms of value in those moments when productivity stops and when an interruption manifests itself. This is what Marx fails to anticipate, and his failure is due to his investment in productivity as the fundamental value. Withdrawal from the capitalist system energizes the system by providing it with a new potential that it must work to actualize.
We can see an exemplary case of this in any great modernist work of art. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is simply a urinal torn from the system of productivity, an interruption of that system. Though Duchamp’s work had a scandalous effect at the time of its initial appearance, its interruption of productivity later became the site of immense productivity. Many art historians consider it one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century, and replicas appear in museums around the world. It now generates revenue through museum admissions, T-shirt sales, and related ventures. Duchamp’s work marks a genuine interruption of capitalist productivity, but that productivity uses such interruptions as the fuel that propel it forward.
Even though it is difficult to imagine Duchamp’s Fountain bringing new life into a decaying capitalist mode of production, this is nonetheless what happens. Duchamp’s work is not just resistance but also interruption, and capitalism requires interruption in order to survive. Fountain and other similar works force capitalism to change course and begin to do things differently in order to respond to the refusal that they embody. Perhaps Duchamp’s subtraction of the urinal from the regime of productivity would create a change in the construction of urinals or of museums, for instance. Perhaps this refusal would lead to the privileging of a wholly new commodity. Insofar as it reduces subjects to beings of pure survival, capitalism would destroy itself, but it can thrive insofar as it can make use of figures such as Duchamp’s urinal. What doesn’t fit is just as necessary to the perpetuation of capitalism as what does. This applies as much to people as it does to objects.
Nowhere is this reliance on those who don’t fit clearer than in the world of fashion. New fashions derive not from insiders but from outsiders, subjects exiled from mainstream society. To take the most obvious example, the style of baggy pants did not emerge in the Upper East Side of New York or from Paris but from street gangs. But it quickly spread to clothing production and provided untold millions in profits for manufacturers who undoubtedly scorned (and didn’t socialize with) the gang members who started the trend. The figures that interrupt productivity drive the productivity of the market, even though they receive no monetary benefit for their creative act. They are the exiles from the capitalist system, but they are every bit as integral to it as Donald Trump and Bill Gates.20
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY
Capitalist society is the first society to live on the interruption of those who opt out of it. In traditional society, opting out represents a mortal danger that occasions exile or the death penalty. This is what occurs in the case of Socrates. He turns away from the law of Athens and listens to his own conscience as the ultimate guide. Athenian society has no way to deal with this act of defiance and thus puts Socrates on trial. In his Philosophy of World History, Hegel takes note of the justice of the death penalty that the Athenian people pronounce on Socrates.
Even though Socrates transforms the history of the world by locating truth in the individual subject rather than in external authority, his introduction of this new principle into Athenian life represents a fundamental revolt against that form of life. The people thus have no choice but to try to eliminate the danger. Hegel claims, “On [Socrates’] behalf he had the justification of thought; but for their part the Athenian people were completely in the right too: they must have been deeply aware that respect for the law of the state would be weakened and the Athenian state destroyed by the principle that justification resides in one’s own inwardness. Thus it is quite correct that the teaching of Socrates appeared to the people as high treason; accordingly they condemned him to death, and Socrates’ death was the highest justice.”21 Despite this act of justice, the contagion of individualism that Socrates birthed had already entered into Athenian society. The society may have killed Socrates, but he destroyed the society by infecting it with individualism. Like every traditional society, Athens had no way to accommodate itself to the refusal of its demands. Every such refusal puts the entire social order at risk.
Capitalism, in contrast, can not only tolerate the refusal of its demands but relies on such refusals—outbursts of nonproductivity—in order to sustain itself. When subjects refuse to enter into the regime of productivity and actualize themselves, they inject new possibilities into the capitalist system and create new values. This doesn’t mean that resistance is futile and that nonproductivity changes nothing, only that capitalism can capitalize on it. Whereas the newness Socrates creates in Athenian society destroys that society, capitalism depends on such figures of refusal.
Capitalism’s reliance on the outburst of nonproductivity that is politically opposed to the system is manifest in the response to the student movement of the 1960s. For many leftists, the 1960s—and especially May 1968—represent a highpoint in recent political history.22 In contrast with the apolitical years of the 1980s and 1990s when university students around the world seemed more focused on finding a place within the capitalist economy than on asserting themselves politically, the 1960s were a time of dissatisfaction with this economy, a time when many tried to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”23 The student radicals took up a position of nonproductivity and refused to comply with capitalist society’s demand that they become productive members of this society. They were a group who preferred not to contribute to capitalist relations of production.
The nonproductivity of the student movement became literal in the free speech movement at Berkeley. Led by Mario Savio, Berkeley students began by protesting against, as the name of the movement suggests, university restrictions on speech. When the police arrived to arrest students who occupied university buildings, the students responded in a unique way that indicated their commitment to nonproductivity. Rather than go quietly with the police or resist arrest—what seem to be the only two legitimate options for someone in this situation—they let their bodies go limp so that the police had to drag them from the buildings. When this happens, the resistance against capitalist society and the refusal to go along with the demands of that society confront every viewer of the scene.
The development of this form of resistance represents a brilliant strategy on the part of the free speech movement precisely because it is not just a strategy. The form of the protest is the expression of its content. Fighting back against the police does not simply run the risk of escalating repressive violence. It also involves an assertion of productivity and testifies to an inherent complicity with the capitalist system against which one is struggling. The limp body, in contrast, does not just negate but rather affirms nonproductivity.24
Though the authority figures of capitalist society responded to the revolts with displays of force, capitalism as a system found revitalization in them. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello rightly note in their discussion of May 1968 in France, “it was by recuperating some of the oppositional themes articulated during the May events that capitalism was to disarm critique, regain the initiative, and discover a new dynamism.”25 This final point is the most significant. The assertion of nonproductivity within capitalism’s regime of productivity fuels the regime. Capitalism requires the assertion of nonproductivity in order to continue to survive, as nonproductivity renews capitalism by providing it with a limit that it must conquer. In response to the student revolts, it had to realign itself in accordance with the demands that they articulated. New products and professions followed in the wake of these revolts.
The insistence on nonproductivity in the student revolts of the 1960s went beyond limp bodies. It manifested itself in the insistence on sexual liberty, in the refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, in demands for university reform, in advocacy for civil rights, and so on. The nonproductivity of the revolts was the source of new value for capitalist society. This is most clearly the case with the sexual revolution.
The status of sexuality after the student revolts of the 1960s underwent a vast transformation. The idea that sex should be restricted to married life became outmoded and restricted to a nostalgic reaction to sexual liberation. Even if most people did not take up the practice of free love, the relaxation of sexual mores proliferated throughout capitalist society. Though some had the dream that sexual liberation would topple capitalism, the effect was quite the contrary. The movement opened a new market and allowed capitalism to expand into a previously unavailable domain.
After sexual liberation, sex became a new source of value. Businesses began selling more sexy underwear, revealing clothes, and sex toys. The pornography industry began in earnest in the United States in the 1970s, and it opened up a vast field of production to meet an increasing demand. In fact, in 1972 the porn film Behind the Green Door (Artie Mitchell and Jim Mitchell) was the fourth highest grossing film of the year in the United States, beating out popular mainstream films such as Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) and The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972). And in a more indirect manner, sex became fecund territory for advertisers, as innumerable companies began to appeal to consumers by associating their products with sex. One can now see sexually explicit advertisements that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s. Rather than harming capitalism, sexual liberation helped to save it.
But this should not imply that valuing the means and nonproductivity is a fool’s errand, that it simply feeds the society from which it withdraws. The problem lies in the approach that we take to the means. Capitalism requires thinking in terms of the final cause, and prioritizing the means does not fit smoothly in this context. If we recognize capitalism’s dependence on the means and insist on the means for its own sake, we undermine the logic that sustains capitalist production. Once the priority of the means becomes apparent, we move beyond the confines of the capitalist system.
The linchpin of a critique of capitalism—and the formation of a workable alternative—rests on valuing the means over the end. Rather than acquiescing to capitalism’s use of means for the end of the production of value, rather than submitting the means to the reign of the capitalist final cause, we can turn our attention to the means in itself. Attention to the means is always the revolutionary gesture, even when it ultimately becomes transformed into actuality.
In other words, we must always treat productivity as nonproductivity, as a means that is not necessarily leading anywhere. If we insist on sustaining our focus on the priority of the means rather than its future end, we are already beyond the capitalist system. We can see an example of this in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In that novel, Márquez depicts a banana manufacturer invading a fictional Colombian town of Macondo. After the company massacres striking workers, a downpour ensues, and the company vows to suspend production until the rain stops. Márquez depicts the rain lasting for four years, which destroys the company’s fortunes as it also ruins the town. This depiction of nonproductivity—four years of incessant rain—points the way out of capitalism’s need for productivity. We must accept, Márquez implies, the traumatic isolation that comes with the rain if we want to avoid falling back into the trap of capitalist productivity and its insistence on actualizing all potentiality.
If subjects could be reduced entirely to their actuality and thus to their reproductivity, then they would cease to be political or ethical beings. A focus on the means and on nonproductivity frees us from the teleological force of actuality. This is why capitalism now presides over the evanescence of political contestation as such. Within a capitalist economy, the problem is not that potentially political subjects have become satisfied consumers but that all subjects value only ends. In such a system, the political act becomes unthinkable and even absurd. The step toward politicization requires a reorientation of our thinking in the direction of means. As long as we reside on the turf of ends, capitalism retains an advantage that no amount of consciousness raising could overcome. Only the uncovering of our own nonproductivity has the ability to tip the balance away from capitalism’s dominance. Any argument of behalf of authentic nonproductivity is inherently a critique of capitalism and an implicit decision for an alternative, but it arrives at that alternative solely out of the implicit logic of the capitalist system itself. The alternative to capitalism lies in the means that capitalism requires and yet cannot avow.
THE IMMANENT ALTERNATIVE
Perhaps the most vexing question for those who challenge capitalist relations of production is the one that asks what system will replace the capitalist one. Communism has been discredited, and those who hold onto the idea of communism, like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, have no concrete account of what this idea would look like in practice. It is communism as an ideal, as Badiou readily admits, rather than as a concrete historical possibility. Their communism informs their thinking and practice, but it is not a system ready to be imposed. Other champions of communism, like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, also fall victim to this inability to envision the communist future in anything other than superficial and ambiguous terms. They are cautious not to invoke any concrete descriptions that might function as rallying cries for a political movement. Still others, like Simon Critchley or Judith Butler, champion resistance to capitalism as an end in itself and offer no sense of an alternative.26
Though the political position of unceasing resistance to capitalism and the state seems proximate to a focus on means, one should make an absolute distinction between them. Resistance conspicuously avoids the possibility of taking power. Privileging the means, on the other hand, represents an alternative organization of society, in which productivity and the final cause are no longer determinative. A politics that privileges the means has no problem determining the structure of the social order. In contrast with the proponents of resistance like Butler and Critchley, proponents of the means insist of seizing the reins, even if only indirectly in the manner of the people of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The champions of the means don’t display the caution that proliferates among the partisans of resistance.
This caution is perhaps an effect of the failed communist experiment of the twentieth century. Even Badiou, who is not reluctant to embrace the signifier communism, understands that the revolutionary mindset of the twentieth century cannot serve the twenty-first. The revolutionaries of the twentieth century produced tragedies that the revolutionaries of the twenty-first century must avoid.27 The embrace of the horror of the real leads straight to the gulag, which is the effect of thought attempting to outstrip the act. The catastrophes of the twentieth century, as Badiou sees it, are the result of an effort to think a new system into being rather than to maintain fidelity to the material revolutionary event. The result in the twenty-first century is a philosophical caution, even among the most committed revolutionaries.
In one sense, this philosophical caution about advocating for a new socioeconomic system is warranted. It reflects, on this single issue, the victory of Hegel over Marx. For Marx, the only purpose of philosophical thought consists in its contribution to political practice. As the final thesis on Feuerbach has it, philosophy must forego interpretation in order to commit itself to political transformation. Hegel’s ambitions for philosophy are much more modest. He claims that any political ambitions are simply beyond philosophy’s province. As he puts it in the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes.”28 According to Hegel, it would seem that philosophy can play no role at all in politics other than identifying the proper questions that our epoch poses and interpreting them. The philosopher cannot theorize a new future.
But even though the philosopher cannot anticipate the future socioeconomic system that might arise after capitalism, she or he can identify how another system already exists implicitly within the current system. This is possible with the category of the means. Though capitalism incessantly transforms means into ends, nothing necessitates this transformation, and in fact, it always occurs with many hiccups. The means are always present along with the end. Thus, privileging the means represents the alternative to capitalism waiting to be discovered. Its discovery depends on a philosophical act on our part.
Usually, theorists cannot take the lead in revolutionary upheavals. When they do, disaster almost inevitably follows. 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 and insist on the means for its own sake and not for what it will produce. By doing so, we do not magically leap outside the constraints of our present situation; we do not “jump over Rhodes.” Instead, we show that there is no need to make this jump. 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.
Privileging the means is an alternative system to capitalism existing within the capitalist framework. By bringing this system to light, we don’t unleash productive capacity in the way that Marx dreamed. Instead, we unleash our capacity to pursue means for their own sake, what Agamben calls means without end. We immerse ourselves in the traumatic satisfaction of work that matters more than its goal. The product becomes a by-product of the means, not the end that the means aims at accomplishing. It is only in such a system of pure means that we can finally abandon the tyranny of the final cause.