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ABSTRACT
Capitalism channels the subject’s sublimation into the commodity, which causes the subject to misidentify the nature of its freedom. The self-limiting freedom of sublimation becomes the unlimited freedom to do anything of the commodity form. Self-limiting freedom becomes liberal freedom. The liberal notion of freedom is a foundational misconception build into the commodity form itself. Even theorists of freedom not explicitly attempting to champion capitalism often fall into the trap of theorizing freedom along the lines of the misconception that capitalist society produces. When the subject directs its sublimating power to a commodity rather than to an ordinary object, it necessarily sees freedom as the opening to an ever-increasing horizon of possibility. The commodity causes the subject to see freedom as the freedom to have more because the commodity form includes within it the promise of a more bountiful future. One invests in a commodity, either financially or psychically, in order to partake in the commodity’s magical power to produce exponentially greater returns. The commodity form transforms capital into additional capital, so that the free act comes to represent unlimited possibility. Under capitalism, this logic of accumulation becomes grafted onto the free act of sublimation. Freedom becomes deformed into the choice for an unending drive to accumulate .
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Notes
1 Jean-Paul Sartre originates the idea that the subject’s freedom lies in the project that it chooses for itself, but Sartre’s existentialism rests on an explicit rejection of the unconscious. As Sartre sees it, if our acts can be unconscious, this vitiates the possibility of freedom. The absence of the unconscious in Sartre’s philosophy leads him to misunderstand the project. For Sartre, the most basic project is the desire to transcend all limitation. Or, as he puts it, ‘man is the being whose project is to be God’ (Sartre Citation1956, 724). What Sartre misses here is how the subject discovers enjoyment not by overcoming all limitation but through the limit.
2 See Freud Citation1957.
3 Even though he proffers a different conception of sublimation, Jacques Lacan actually provides one of the best examples of Freud’s version of sublimation. In his Seminar XI, he states,
for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what [sublimation] means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment. (Lacan Citation1978, 165–166)
4 Although he is not theorizing the act of sublimation, Georg Simmel already has a premonition of the way that sublimation creates value in the Philosophy of Money. He states, ‘Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them’ (Simmel Citation1990, 67). Sublimation is what moves an object into the realm of inaccessibility that Simmel views as the key to desirability.
5 The film Mystic Pizza (Donald Petrie, 1988) depicts a pizza maker who operates a small pizza joint in Mystic, Connecticut, and simply enjoys making pizzas. The film depicts a sublimation that exists within the capitalist universe but doesn’t really partake of it. But the success of the film had the effect of radically transforming the small pizza joint into a major tourist attraction and a global capitalist enterprise that shipped frozen pizza around the world. Due to this success, the sublime quality of Mystic Pizza dissipated. Instead of an act of sublimation, making pizzas became a way of generating capital. The narrative surrounding the restaurant Mystic Pizza reveals the tension that exists between sublimation and capitalist accumulation. That said, it is only thanks to the film that I was able to eat a Mystic Pizza, so I can hardly lament this development.
6 This is the primary and enduring insight of Sartrean existentialism. For Jean-Paul Sartre, there is no inherent significance anywhere, but this simply means that the burden of significance falls on the subject itself.
7 Beginning in 1997, Mastercard ran a series of advertisements (that the company used for decades) touting the ability of Mastercard to pay for various items, while indicating that there was something priceless that it couldn’t buy. In the most compelling of these advertisements, a zookeeper is sick, and an elephant takes a Mastercard to go to the drugstore for him. As he shops, the narrator says, ‘Hot soup, $4; cold medicine, $11; tissues, $1; blanket, $24’. When the elephant delivers this care package, the narrator concludes, ‘Making it all better … priceless’. The great ideological victory in these advertisements lies in the implication that the commodity form frames even what exceeds the commodity form. As a result, the form perfectly contradicts the explicit message.
8 This line is apocryphally attributed to American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, but there is no certainly surrounding this attribution. We do know, however, that it must have been someone invested in the logic of the commodity form.
9 See Freud Citation1957.
10 Theodor Adorno criticizes capitalist freedom for the falsity of the choices that it presents to the subject. As he puts it in Minima Moralia, ‘Freedom would not be to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices’ (Adorno Citation1978, 132). The commodity form represents a trap because it dictates a narrow range of possibilities.
11 Kojin Karatani draws our attention to the subjectivity at work in consumption. He points out that ‘if workers can become subjects at all, it is only as consumers’ (Karatani Citation2003, 290). Karatani sees the point at which workers become subjects – when they are buying commodities – as the moment of the act. By seeing the point of consumption as capitalism’s weak point, Karatani offers an alternative conception of revolutionary change to that of Marx.
12 Although she doesn’t emphasize the necessity of the uselessness it produces, Rosa Luxemburg points out that capitalism does not aim at producing use values for the consumer. This is what the defenders of capitalism from David Ricardo to John Maynard Keynes to Paul Krugman get wrong. She states, ‘Capitalist production is not production for the purpose of consumption, but the production of value. Value relations govern the entire production process as well as the reproduction process’ (Luxemburg Citation2015, 16). The excess of capitalist production derives from its absolute disdain for utility.
13 Unfortunately, this is not simply a made-up example but one from my own life. Despite my hostility to the commodity form, when it comes to skull caps, I remain utterly seduced by it.
14 My own copy of the Standard Edition has several dust jackets that are almost in tatters, but I have never removed them, nor have I resorted to taping them together. As long as they remain in their original form, I can recognize the value in their uselessness.
15 Although he doesn’t take it far enough, John Maynard Keynes correctly apprehends that economic prosperity depends on the production of the useless. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he notes,
Just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance; and each of these activities has played its part in progress—failing something better. (Keynes Citation1964, 130)
16 Marcuse argues that capitalist society has the ability to integrate the sublime works of art that have an antagonistic relationship to it, thereby stripping art of its sublime power. This is repressive desublimation. In One-Dimensional Man, he states,
The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. (Marcuse Citation1991, 64)
17 Marx does have an inkling of the unimportance of use value in capitalist society. This is why he begins calling exchange value simply value. For Marx, exchange value is the value that rules in the capitalist system. But the problem is that Marx nonetheless believes in an ultimate utility of the commodity for the consumer.
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Todd McGowan
Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Universality and Identity Politics, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and other works. He edits the Film Theory in Practice series at Bloomsbury and is coeditor with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press.