PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM
Can we psychoanalyze capitalism? Freud himself would probably have had his doubts. Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, he questions whether or not one can psychoanalyze an entire society and concludes that one cannot. The problem is not a practical one. Even though one cannot submit an entire society or an economic system to a series of psychoanalytic sessions, every social order and every economic system speaks through articulations that betray its psychic resonances, and we can analyze these articulations from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory. For Freud, the barrier to psychoanalyzing a society is a theoretical one. The psychoanalyst can’t condemn an entire society as neurotic, for instance, because this diagnosis depends on a standard of normalcy with which to contrast the neurosis. But the irony of this conclusion coming in a book that psychoanalyzes social order as such must have escaped Freud. He is able to perform this act because no social order is complete and perfectly self-identical. Rather than being self-contained and thus impervious to critical analysis, every society opens up a space outside itself from which one can analyze it and make a judgment on it. The same holds for capitalism as a socioeconomic structure. The space for the psychoanalysis of capitalism exists within the incompletion of the capitalist system.
If we accept the verdict that we cannot psychoanalyze capitalism as a socioeconomic system, then we implicitly accede to the arguments of the apologists for capitalism. Defenders of the system claim that capitalism is a function of human nature—that there is a perfect overlap between capitalism and human nature—and thus that there exists no space from which one might criticize it. From this perspective, any foundational critique is inherently fanciful and utopian. But much more than other socioeconomic systems, capitalism necessarily relies on its incompleteness and on its opening to the outside in order to function. One can psychoanalyze capitalism though the very gaps the system itself produces and through its reliance on what exceeds it. It is the case, however, that the practice of psychoanalysis has not always been equal to this task.
Many critics of capitalism associate psychoanalysis with capitalism. It functions, according to this critique, as one of capitalism’s ideological handmaidens. It has the effect of shoring up potential dissidents and transforming rebellious subjects into more quiescent ones. This tendentious understanding of psychoanalysis is not wholly unjustified. In its practice (especially in regions of the world most fervently committed to capitalism, like the United States), psychoanalysis has certainly played a role in enhancing the docility of its patients rather than unleashing their revolutionary passion. But the verdict on psychoanalytic practice is decidedly mixed. Psychoanalytic theory has played a key role in the critique of the capitalist system, though it has never played the decisive role.
Most of the attempts to understand how capitalism works have focused on its economic structure or on the social effects that it produces. While important, these approaches necessarily miss the primary source of capitalism’s staying power. The resilience of capitalism as an economic or social form derives from its relationship to the psyche and to how subjects relate to their own satisfaction. This is why psychoanalysis is requisite for making sense of capitalism’s appeal. Psychoanalysis probes the satisfaction of subjects and tries to understand why this satisfaction takes the forms that it does. It does not transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but analyzes why certain structures provide satisfaction despite appearances. In this sense, it represents a new way of approaching capitalism and of understanding its staying power.
To psychoanalyze a system is inherently to criticize it. But previous efforts at marshaling psychoanalysis for the critique of capitalism have consistently placed psychoanalysis in a secondary position. Critique has been primary, and critics have deployed psychoanalysis to serve the critique. In the chapters that follow, I will do the reverse: the psychoanalysis of capitalism will remain the motor for the analysis, and if a critique of capitalism emerges from this psychoanalysis, it will never become the driving force of the analysis. Of course, no one is a neutral analyst of capitalism. But it is my contention that immersing oneself within its structure and within its psychic appeal must function as the prelude to any effective critique or defense of the system.
THE INJUSTICE OF EQUALITY
When the critique of capitalism began in earnest in the nineteenth century, the focus was on the injustice of the system. Capitalism may have unleashed society’s productive forces to a hitherto unforeseeable extent, but this expansion of productivity brought with it vast differences in wealth. It was a system in which the material benefits did not enrich those who directly made them possible. The mere investment of capital received an almost infinitely greater reward than the hours of toil that produced this reward. The setup itself appeared unjust and gave rise to a range of possible remedies for this injustice—from radically egalitarian communal retreats to the total transformation of the society.
But as defenders of capitalism have noted, the mere fact of this critique is itself a testament to the justice of the system. It is only after the introduction of the capitalist economy that one can recognize the injustice perpetuated by unequal relations. In this sense, capitalism has only itself to blame for the critiques leveled against it. The idea of equivalence inheres within capitalist relations of production: any commodity can be traded for any other, and even time, the one resource that we cannot replenish or replace, acquires a price and thereby becomes a factor of equivalence. The worker trades labor time for wages and thereby makes clear that time relates to the general commodity form just like any other commodity. The fact that everything can be made equal reveals that everything isn’t, and this makes possible the critical response.
Prior to the capitalist epoch, inequality inheres in economic systems themselves, not in their failure to realize the equality that they already promulgate (as is the case with capitalism). In a society where slaves perform the labor, there is no sense of even a disguised equality between the laborer and the master who benefits from this labor. The same inequality continues in feudalism, where the feudal lord offers serfs livelihood in exchange for their labor. The inegalitarian nature of this exchange is admitted from the beginning. The lord holds all the cards, and the serfs can only try to make themselves useful for the lord. In any system involving masters and servants or citizens and slaves, revolt is possible—Spartacus, for instance, is not unthinkable—but its chances of success are limited because it challenges not just the system’s structural arrangement but also its philosophical basis. To grant freedom to Spartacus would amount to an admission of equality that would have undermined the entire Roman world.
With capitalism, the economic relation ceases to be inherently unjust, which is why the blatant persistence of injustice gives rise to critical voices only after the birth of capitalism. The idea that the greatest philosopher of his time, like Aristotle, would not only countenance but justify slavery becomes impossible to imagine within the capitalist epoch.1 Even though the critique of injustice is most often a critique of capitalism, it is to capitalism itself that we owe the emergence of this critique. It is not by chance that Karl Marx educated himself by reading the first theorists and defenders of capitalism. They help to make possible the critique of the system they set out to justify. Though capitalism doesn’t invent the concept of equality, it is the first economic system to include this concept within its mechanism of production.
From the beginning to the end of his analysis, Marx takes the injustice of the capitalist system as his point of departure. In the early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he laments the impossible bind that confronts the worker, for whom no amount of labor will pay off. He writes, “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.”2 The system is rigged against the worker: it rewards the capitalist, not the worker, for the extra productivity that the latter achieves. The theorization of this injustice becomes the foundation of Marx’s fully developed analysis of capitalism.
In his mature work, Marx specifies more clearly the site of the injustice—the appropriation of surplus value. The exchange between the capitalist and the worker is equal as far as it goes. The capitalist provides a wage in exchange for the worker’s labor time. But the injustice comes from the creative power of labor itself. In the act of laboring, workers don’t just produce enough to sustain themselves but rather an excess, and the capitalist capitalizes on this excess in the form of surplus value, which translates into profit. Without the excessive productivity of labor that falls outside the realm of an equal exchange, the capitalist would be left without any profit. As Marx comes to recognize, profit is theft. That is the acme of the egalitarian critique of capitalism, and this critique predominates into the beginning of the twentieth century.
According to this critique, capitalism is an unjust economic system because it deprives those who produce value of the value they produce. It reduces the working class—that is, the productive class—to bare reproduction. Workers receive a necessary wage, a wage necessary for their reproduction as productive laborers, not a wage necessary for the enjoyment of life. Marx believes that the capitalist will not pay workers more than this necessary wage, and thus they cannot enjoy the surplus value that they themselves produce. This excess belongs instead to the capitalist, who organizes production but doesn’t herself or himself generate value. A system such as this cannot be just.
From the standpoint of this egalitarian critique, capitalism works out well for the capitalists and poorly for the workers. The incentive to change it rests wholly with the workers, whose interests are dramatically opposed to those of the capitalists. Marx never thinks to address his critique to the capitalists because they find the system, as he sees it, perfectly satisfying. Though they are on the wrong side of history, they want to preserve capitalist relations of production intact and fight to keep them so. In the twentieth century, however, this understanding of the capitalist undergoes a radical transformation as the fundamental critique of capitalism shifts to a new territory.
THE REPRESSIVE ECONOMIC APPARATUS
It is difficult to overestimate Freud’s impact on the critique of capitalism. But mobilizing his thought for emancipatory politics meant finding the possibility for hope amid the bleakest despair. As Michel Onfray rightly notes in his scathing account of Freud, he created “a viscerally pessimistic philosophy in virtue of which the worst is always certain.”3 Despite Freud’s conviction that the worst is certain, that we will never be able to overcome repression and realize our desires, his understanding of repression allowed for the development of the leftist critique of capitalism in a wholly unanticipated direction. No anticapitalist thinker of the nineteenth century thought to criticize the repressive nature of the capitalist system, but in the twentieth century, thanks to Freud and the critics who took up his mantle, it became almost impossible to avoid it.4
The critique of capitalism for most of the twentieth century was a critique of capitalism’s repressiveness, though of course the critique of inequality never disappeared. The turn from equality as the primary ground of contestation to repression resulted in an expansion of the challenge to the system. Capitalism became a problem not just for workers toiling without just remuneration for their labor but also for the exploiters themselves. Even the capitalist enjoying the profits deriving from the appropriation of surplus value remains caught within the spell of repression. The factory owners who can buy whatever they want nonetheless suffer under a system that prohibits any proper satisfaction of desire. The problem with capitalist success is not so much the inequality it produces as its intractable emptiness. This development of the critique required the revolution to do more heavy lifting: it would promise not only equity but also deliverance from repression.
The turn from the critique of inequality to the critique of repression manifests itself most clearly in the case of the Frankfurt School. Whereas Marx takes capitalist inequality as the fundamental problem confronting the critic of capitalism, the Frankfurt School, in a stunning turnaround, sees the equality that capitalism produces as its chief danger. Rather than failing to engender equality, the capitalist form of injustice is a forced equality. Capitalism’s repressiveness functions through the elimination of all genuine difference, and thus even the communist attack on capitalism falls into its trap by leveling all difference through enforced economic and social equality.
The Frankfurt School’s critique of capitalist equality reaches its apex in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Here Adorno offers a revelatory statement that incorporates both an unremitting indictment of capitalism’s elimination of difference and one of his few positive proclamations about an anticapitalist alternative. He begins, “That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.”5 As Adorno sees it, capitalism’s victory does not consist in leaving the proletariat outside, but in their inclusion within a repressive system in which nothing unique or singular can persist. This is a line of thought that one could not imagine from Karl Marx, even though Adorno clearly situates himself in the Marxist tradition, as do the other members of the Frankfurt School. But their Marxism has encountered the thought of Sigmund Freud.
Adorno goes on to offer a vision of emancipation that also veers away from that of Marx. It is not a society in which the workers appropriate the value that they themselves produce but one in which singularity could remain intact. Adorno continues, “An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.”6 This idea of emancipated society takes as its starting point as much Freud’s analysis of repression as Marx’s of capitalism. Repression, according to the Frankfurt School, is the forgetting of what fails to fit within the capitalist system, and the critical task becomes one of drawing attention to this repressed material. This repression is not, however, always sexual repression, as it would be for other theorists attempting to bring Marx and Freud together.
Several anticapitalist theorists following in Freud’s wake equated the destruction of capitalism with the complete elimination of sexual repression. They either worked to bring about sexual liberation with the belief that this would portend the end of capitalism, or they worked to combat capitalism with the belief that this would free repressed sexuality. Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich were the key exponents of this position, but it gained popular support in the student movements of the 1960s, in which the idea that political and sexual revolution were intertwined became an accepted dogma. Both Gross and Reich believed that political and sexual revolution would be mutually reinforcing. If one produced sexual revolution, that would lead to political revolution, and vice versa. Hence, they often theorized about how changes in either the political or sexual arena might lead to the elimination of repression in both.
One can see this intertwining of the political and the sexual in much of Gross’s late work. The title of his essay “Zur funktionellen Geistesbildung des Revolutionärs” (On the Functional Intellectual Formation of the Revolutionary) makes evident his political aspirations. There the link between these aspirations and his investment in psychoanalysis comes to the fore. Toward the end of the essay, he says, “As a precondition of each moral and spiritual renewal of humanity is the necessity for a total freeing of the coming generation from the violence of the bourgeois family—and even the patriarchal proletarian family is bourgeois!”7 Contra Freud, Gross sees neurosis as the result not of the fundamental antagonisms of human sexuality but of the repressive force of the bourgeois family and the restrictions that it places on the free expression of sexuality. Gross conceives of free sexuality—the slogan of the 1960s—as the basic human desire. The proletarian revolution would not only free workers from their chains but also sexuality from bourgeois repression.8
In the years after Gross’s premature death at the age of forty-two in 1920, Wilhelm Reich took up the mantle of the revolutionary psychoanalyst. Like Gross, Reich links neurosis to social repressiveness, and, also like Gross, he believes that political revolution is inextricable from sexual revolution. His attack on the repressiveness of capitalist society finds its most cogent expression in The Sexual Revolution, a work that attacks bourgeois marriage and restrictions on forms of abnormal sexuality.9 Whereas Gross largely faded into history, Reich became a theoretical point of reference for the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.10 The relative success of the sexual revolution and the failure of the political revolution had the effect of quieting the dream that we might overcome repression completely. There are few followers of Reich today.
For the most part, critics of capitalism accepted Freud’s contention that no society could do without some degree of repressiveness. But they added a codicil to this contention that renders it less politically stultifying. The prevailing idea among leftist critics of capitalism has been that the system demands too much repression. If every society requires some repression in order to function, capitalism requires what Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization calls “surplus repression.” Whereas Marx targets surplus value as the embodiment of the problem with capitalism, Marcuse places surplus repression in this role. This turn tells us everything we need to know about the transformation of the critique of capitalism. Now, we can demand a socialist alternative on the grounds of this additional repression in capitalism that a socialist society would eliminate. The problem isn’t the inequality involved with the appropriation of surplus value, but the unnecessary demand for surplus repression that creates a society of one-dimensional equals.11
Even when capitalist society seems to allow for the fulfillment of desire, the repressive regime continues to function. Happiness under capitalism is not an index of a break from repression. As Marcuse puts it, “the individual lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life: he desires what he is supposed to desire; his gratifications are profitable to him and others; he is reasonably and often exuberantly happy.”12 As long as desire remains within the channels that capitalism provides for it, there is no possibility for satisfaction, just a false happiness that serves as the form of appearance for profound dissatisfaction. Desire directed toward commodities is inherently repressed desire. Satisfaction requires breaking from the logic of the commodity altogether, and this becomes the hope for revolution.
Once the idea of repression enters into the critique of capitalism, the idea of revolution itself undergoes a complete revolution. Marx invests revolution with the promise of equality: it would create a world in which everyone had access to the fruits of her or his own labor and in which no one would be excluded. After Freud, however, equality is no longer enough; revolution must do more. A communist revolution would free desire from the trap of repression. There would be equality, but there would also be an elimination of the surplus repression the exchange economy demands. This does not necessarily imply complete sexual liberation, as Gross and Reich would contend. Instead, the revolution would inaugurate a society where sublimation took the place of repression or where repression was no longer omnipresent.13 This image of revolution depends on the identification of the capitalist economy with a form of repression that goes beyond what is necessary. But perhaps it is time to revisit this longstanding identification and question whether the essence of capitalism lies in its repressiveness.
Of course, the putting into question of the link between capitalism and repression has already been accomplished. In the first volume of the History of Sexuality and in some of his lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault challenges the repressive hypothesis and even names Reich as a specific target for critique. He begins the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a direct riposte to the identification of capitalism with repression. He claims, “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”14 For Foucault, power in the capitalist system doesn’t function through repression, not through negation or prohibition, but in a positive way. Power produces desire rather than just restricting it. Foucault’s redefinition of power and categorical rejection of the repressive hypothesis attempt to point toward a third version of the critique of capitalism—beyond injustice and beyond repression.
But even as Foucault mocks the association of capitalism with the repression of sex, his critique takes the same angle as that of the Freudian Marxists from whom he distances himself. That is to say, Foucault abandons the idea that capitalism demands the repression of desire, but he clings to a belief that capitalism blocks or damns up what would otherwise flow freely. His vitalism—his insistence on the spontaneous power of life itself—leaves him incapable of fully abandoning the image of capitalism as a system of constraint. Though capitalism doesn’t constrain desire, its discursive regime of sexuality that forces sex to speak and that forces bodies to become sexualized acts as a barrier to the flow of bodies and pleasures. Foucault’s politics consists in unleashing this flow, which is why he would feel so comfortable writing a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s panegyric to decoded bodily flows.
Ironic though it may be, the critique leveled by Foucault is just another version of the attack on repression. Despite what Foucault himself says, the model for the freeing of bodies and pleasures—the ethic he pronounces at the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality—is the liberation of desire that one finds clearly articulated in the thought of Gross and Reich. Bodies and pleasures do not suffer from repression, according to Foucault, but power does stifle them. This is the key point: power doesn’t permit the free movement of bodies and deprives them of the pleasure that they are capable of experiencing. Critique or revolution then fights against this restriction. Though Foucault rejects the terms repression and desire, his replacements—power and bodies—perform precisely the same roles. In this sense, he does not mark a new epoch in the history of the critique of capitalism.
Foucault’s diagnosis of what transpires with capitalism clearly differs from the traditional Freudian Marxists, but his response is homologous. He is a Freudian Marxist—he is Otto Gross—in disguise. Life must be disentangled from power in order to discover the pleasure that capitalism blocks. Despite his vehement disdain for the counterproductivity of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault remains within the vision of emancipation proffered by its champions.
FINDING SATISFACTION UNSATISFYING
Both Marx’s critique of capitalism’s injustice and the pseudo-Freudian critique of capitalism’s repressiveness focus on what the economic system denies to its adherents rather than what it provides for them. This focus unites Marx, Reich, and Foucault. It has been primarily the apologists for capitalism, as one might expect, who have focused on what the system does offer. But we can examine what capitalism provides from the perspective of critique. Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don’t recognize as such. That is, capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity.
In this light, this book represents a third direction in the critique of capitalism. Rather than taking inequality or repression as the starting point, it begins with the satisfaction that capitalism provides. The problem, I contend, is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies. The capitalist regime produces subjects who cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and to thus to the promise, constantly made explicit in capitalist society, of a way to escape this dissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of the commodity.
The fundamental gesture of capitalism is the promise, and the promise functions as the basis for capitalist ideology. One invests money with the promise of future returns; one starts a job with the promise of a higher salary; one takes a cruise with the promise of untold pleasure in the tropics; one buys the newest piece of electronics with the promise of easier access to what one wants. In every case the future embodies a type of satisfaction foreclosed to the present and dependent on one’s investment in the capitalist system. The promise ensures a sense of dissatisfaction with the present in relation to the future.
One of the constant complaints from critics of capitalism is that the capitalist system has the ability to incorporate every attack by integrating the attack into the system. The accuracy of this truism is readily apparent in the way that commodification works. Capitalism seizes apparently revolutionary practices or figures and transforms them into commodities. An acquaintance with a Che Guevara T-shirt or a Karl Marx coffee mug, let alone the sight of sex toys in a shopping mall or eco-friendly cars at the neighborhood dealership, seems to bespeak its truth. But the secret of capitalism’s integration of critique lies not in the process of commodification, no matter how self-evident it appears. The secret is in the promise. If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through this gesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game.
The promise of the better future is the foundation of the capitalist structure, the basis for all three economic areas—production, distribution, and consumption. If we examine only the field of consumption, universal commodification seems to hold the key, whereas if we confine ourselves to the field of production, the imperative to accumulate appears foundational. In the field of distribution, it is the idea of speed: one must move commodities to market in the least amount of time possible. If we look at what these three fields have in common, however, the answer is the promise of the future. One buys the commodity to discover a potentially satisfying pleasure, one accumulates more capital to some day have enough, and one speeds up the distribution process to increase one’s future profit.15 Any sense of satisfaction with one’s present condition would have a paralyzing effect on each of these regions of the capitalist economy.
This is the problem with the insistence on revolutionary hope: it partakes of the logic that it tries to contest. Revolutionary hope represents an investment in the structure of the promise that defines capitalism. As a result, it is never as revolutionary as it believes itself to be. Though obviously the act of promising precedes the onset of a capitalist economy, once this economy emerges, the promise enters completely into the capitalist logic. To take solace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism sells more vehemently than it sells any commodity. As long as one remains invested in the promise as such, one has already succumbed to the fundamental logic of capitalism.
From the early Charles Fourier and Robert Owen to Fredric Jameson and Antonio Negri, the idea of a better future has driven the Left in its critique of capitalism. In his discussion of Marx, Jacques Derrida exemplifies this type of investment, as he emphasizes the emancipatory promise at the heart of his deconstructive politics. He notes, “Whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come.”16 While every other concept is subject to deconstruction, this promise of “justice-to-come” functions as the condition of possibility for deconstruction and thus cannot be deconstructed. Deconstruction does not encapsulate the entirety of anticapitalist politics today in any sense, but Derrida’s investment in the promise is representative. But it is just this investment in the promise that must be abandoned, along with the sense of dissatisfaction inherent in it. As long as radical politics operates with the belief that revolution will remove some of the prevailing repression, it accepts the ruling idea of capitalism and buys into the fundamental capitalist fantasy. No revolution can transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but this is how revolution has been conceived throughout the entirety of the capitalist epoch. The revolutionary act has to be thought differently. The revolutionary act is simply the recognition that capitalism already produces the satisfaction that it promises.
And yet, this revolutionary act is far more difficult than storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace. In the latter instances, all that is required is sufficient political force. But the break from the promise of a better future seems theoretically untenable alongside a position of critique. Critique appears to imply a future ideal from which one launches the attack on the capitalist present. The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future. Why would one be critical at all without such a promise? What could be the possible ground for the critique?
This work attempts to answer these questions by situating the future not as a possibility on the horizon but as the implicit structure of the present. There is, in other words, no future to realize except to accede to the exigencies that are already written into the ruling capitalist system. The point of critique is not promissory, not futural, but wholly immanent.
Obviously, a critique that is not futural still points toward a future that is better in some sense of the term. One cannot avoid implicitly positing some version of a better future when one analyzes the present—otherwise one would simply accept the present rather than analyzing it. But the point is that one must not imagine a future that would produce a level of satisfaction history has hitherto denied to us. There is no deeper or more authentic satisfaction that will overcome the antagonisms of society or the failures of subjectivity, despite what anticapitalist revolutionaries have traditionally promised. We do not need the belief in a future replete with a deeper satisfaction in order to reject capitalism, if that is what we decide to do.
The alternative to capitalism inheres within capitalism, and the revolutionary act is one of recognizing capitalism’s internal and present future. The measuring stick for critique is not the promise of a better future but capitalism’s underlying structure. The identification or recognition of this structure provides the key to the emergence of an alternative. Capitalism’s hold over us depends on our failure to recognize the nature of its power.
Capitalism functions as effectively as it does because it provides satisfaction for its subjects while at the same time hiding the awareness of this satisfaction from them. If we recognized that we obtained satisfaction from the failure to obtain the perfect commodity rather than from a wholly successful purchase, we would be freed from the psychic appeal of capitalism. That is not to say that we would never buy another commodity, but just that we would do so without a psychic investment in the promise of the commodity, which is already, in some sense, a revolution. This change would eliminate the barrier to structural changes to our socioeconomic system and would create a different system. Problems of political organization and struggle are difficult, but they pale in comparison to the problem of capitalism’s psychic appeal. Understanding the importance of the psychic investment in the capitalist economy and the need to break from it is Freud’s legacy for the contemporary critique of capitalism.
The great task for twentieth-century critical thought was that of bringing Marx and Freud together, of thinking through the analysis of capitalism in light of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. In order to carry out this task, thinkers alit on the role that capitalism played in repression. But repression was not Freud’s last word on the unconscious. It became increasingly less important as his thought changed toward the end of his life. This change in the significance of repression occurred as the structure of Freud’s system underwent an overhaul. Whereas the early Freud associated repression with unacceptable sexual desires, the later Freud linked it the subject’s intractable attachment to loss.
With Freud’s 1920 discovery of the subject’s tendency to repeat loss and failure, the edifice of psychoanalysis underwent a profound readjustment. Rather than targeting sexual repression, Freud turned his focus to the satisfaction that the subject derives from repeating experiences that don’t provide pleasure. This forces Freud to distinguish between pleasure and satisfaction, and he concludes that satisfaction trumps pleasure. Repetition comes to define subjectivity for Freud: the unconscious doesn’t just hide disturbing sexual ideas from the subject’s consciousness, but impels the subject to act in ways that subvert its own interests, and the subject finds satisfaction in these acts because they produce a lost object for the subject to desire and enjoy. The subject’s satisfaction is inextricable from self-destructive loss, and even though it represses its self-destructiveness, lifting this repression would provide no relief. After 1920, Freud discovers a subject that incessantly undermines itself, and this undermining extends to all attempts at a cure.
As Freud sees it, the fundamental proof of an attachment to loss and failure is the refusal to be cured that patients display. Freud labels this refusal the “negative therapeutic reaction,” and its emergence suggests that subjects find satisfaction in their suffering. If therapy threatens to relieve this suffering, patients often respond by finding ways to make themselves worse again. Freud doesn’t dismiss this behavior as a function of neurosis but sees in it a verdict on the subject as such. It manifests itself most clearly in the inability of any subject to live out a harmonious existence. Freud concludes that the satisfaction of subjects depends on a disturbance to their psychic equilibrium, on the absence of what they desire rather than its presence. The presence of an object reveals its inadequacy, while its absence allows the subject to find it satisfying. This creates a world in which subjects subvert their own happiness in order to sustain their satisfaction.
Freud himself has difficulty formulating the implications of the new theory of subjectivity and integrating it into his existing theory, and yet it represents the most radical moment of Freud’s thought because it enables us to understand why subjects so often fail to act in ways that would obviously benefit them. That said, many refused to follow Freud in this discovery, and those who tried to combine Marx and Freud often adhered to the early Freud, the Freud of repressed sexuality. This makes sense for the revolutionary: Freud’s early model provides a clearer target for emancipatory politics than his later model, which seems difficult to reconcile with any form of politics other than complete conservatism. The later Freud is a far more politically pessimistic thinker.
According to the first model, we repress a possibility that we hope to realize. According to the second, we repress an act that we are perpetually accomplishing. Though Freud locates at all times the source of neurotic illness in the past—“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” as Freud and Josef Breuer put it in the opening work of psychoanalysis—the emphasis moves from a past desire for a different future to the repetition of a past trauma in the present.17 Freud emphasizes repression less in his later thinking because it provides no barrier at all to the effectiveness of repetition.
In a certain sense, we might think of the early Freud, the Freud focused on sexual repression, as a thinker still invested in the capitalist ideology of the promise. Even if he refused to believe in the possibility of fully overcoming repression, he nonetheless viewed psychoanalysis as a solution that promised a better future. The shift that the patient could undergo is palpable. After writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, Freud recognizes that the repetition would act as a constant barrier to a better future, and he becomes increasingly skeptical about fundamental change in individuals and in society. The attitude that Freud takes to the subject’s repetition becomes less futural because the possibility of overcoming repression ceased to play a central role.
The repression of sexual desires appears to work: though subjects may manifest these desires through obsessional rituals or hysterical pains, they are not actually having the illicit sex of their unconscious fantasies. Repeatedly adjusting one’s batting gloves (as many baseball players do) may in fact be a wholly sexual act, but not everyone will readily recognize it as such. One can do it in public without violating laws against public indecency, whereas one could not openly masturbate in the same situation without risking arrest. Similarly, no one interprets the silence of the hysteric who cannot speak as a public performance of fellatio. Repressed sexuality manifests itself in symptoms—like adjusting one’s batting gloves—that don’t themselves appear sexual. Repression not only brings suffering to the subject but also shelters this subject from the obvious manifestations of its repressed sexuality. This is not the case with the compulsion to repeat. Though Freud believes that the subject represses the idea of its repetition, the satisfaction that the repetition of loss produces occurs without abatement or obstruction.
Repression becomes a less important category in Freud’s later thought because he comes to accept that the repression provides no barrier at all to the satisfaction the subject derives from repetition. As long as repression concerned just sexuality, Freud could believe in the transformative effect of lifting it. Psychoanalysis, according to this early conception, might enable the patient to pass from dissatisfaction to satisfaction by uncovering the repressed. This offers a tidy link between psychoanalysis and revolutionary politics, between Otto Gross and Rosa Luxemburg.
Once the idea of a satisfying repetition takes hold, however, this image of psychoanalysis ceases to be tenable. There is no clear political gain from lifting the repression associated with repetition. All that psychoanalysis can do—the extent of its intervention—is to assist the patient in recognizing its mode of repeating and the satisfaction that this repetition provides. The dream of freeing patients from dissatisfaction dies with the discovery that patients resist the psychoanalytic cure precisely because they already have the satisfaction that psychoanalysis promises them.
The thinkers who have brought Freud to bear on the analysis of capitalism have turned to psychoanalysis to prove that capitalism is even more dissatisfying than earlier critics thought it was. The problem is not just inequality for the working class but repression for all. For someone like Adorno, this is apparent in the widespread investment in astrology among capitalist subjects. While it appears as a harmless enough interest, astrology infects the social order, especially the middle class (and not necessarily the economically oppressed), with a false satisfaction. In his essay “The Stars Down to Earth,” Adorno notes, “It is as though astrology has to provide gratifications to aggressive urges on the level of the imaginary, but is not allowed to interfere too obviously with the ‘normal’ functioning of the individual in reality.”18 The popularity of astrology columns in newspapers, even if one reads them just for fun, signals the existence and repression of desires that the system cannot gratify. The victims of capitalism in Adorno’s eyes are not just the working class but everyone subjected to the repressiveness inherent in the mode of subjectivity that capitalism demands.
This broadening of the analysis of capitalism has led to stunning insights into just how expansive the problem of capitalism is, but at the same time, this new critique buys the capitalist dream with its insistence on dissatisfaction. It could do this only insofar as it stuck to Freud’s early theory of the psyche and refused to integrate his later thought. This later Freud has had no place in the critique of capitalism as it was developed by traditional Freudian Marxism in the twentiethth century. As a result, the task of bringing Marx and Freud together remains for us today. If the real Freud is the Freud of the subject’s self-destructiveness, then this is no easy task. The fit between this Freud and Marx is not a comfortable one.
The aim of this book is not to provide another catalogue of capitalism’s horrors or its defects. That is the province of other works. Instead, it tries to understand why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure. The starting point of this power is capitalism’s relationship to desiring subjectivity, which the first chapter investigates. The next chapters that make up the core of the book explore how capitalism protects us—from the encounter with the public, from our gaze, from sacrifice, from the absence of guarantees, from infinitude, from our nonproductivity, from love, and even from abundance. But it does enable us to experience the sublime in everyday life, as the concluding chapter shows. The book ends with capitalism’s sublimity, but this is also where it starts. The staying power of capitalism, its resistance to critique, is inextricable from its production of sublimity, which gives it the power to satisfy. Capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism. No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.