T – LIBIDINAL

Economic engagement means investments in the libidinal economy

Lyotard 74 [jean-françois, French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist with cool hair,
“libidinal economy”, translation by Iain Hamilton Grant, University of Indiana press, NishN
(come at me)]
Every political economy is libidinal. There is one thing, then, which makes us say: there is no primitive
society, that is to say: there is no external reference, even if immanent, from which the
separation of what belongs to capital (or political economy) and what belongs to subversion
(or libidinal economy), can always be made, and cleanly; where desire would be clearly
legible, where its proper economy would not be scrambled. And this should be clearly understood:
'scrambled' does not mean 'thwarted', tainted, by a foreign, evil instance. This is simply the problematic of alienation, it is, to invoke
another brother, what still belongs in anti-Oedipus to the thought of an error or of a criminal act. 'Scrambled' means that the
economy of desire cannot be attributed, just like ambivalence, not only because it is Eros and the death drive, but
because the effects of each instance arc inascribable, as we have said. Scrambled then, by itself
and in itself not crossed and alienated by another political economic order. There is no alienation
from the instant one escapes the critical relation. There is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange
as in the alleged ‘symbolic’ exchange. And this is the second thing to he said in a more provocative or affirmative
way, concerning our gloss of 'there is no primitive society'. ¶ Not merely: there is no other 'regional' reference, but: capitalism is
also a primitive society, or: the primitive society is also a capitalism. This latter statement first: of
course, savages do not capitalize goods; but who considers that it is only the fully mercantile instance of the great Zero that sanctions
and indeed demands the scrupulous balancing of the inflows and outflows of affects (in the form of relatives, words, beasts, lives,
sexes), hanging over and maintaining these societies? Take the ethnological descriptions that you might set against us as embarrassing
counter-examples, the most embarrassing; at random, the mad witches that Michel Leiris frequents in Gondar, the terrifying murder,
the Jakugi's wooden arch hung for three nights over the neck of the young girl who must perish, a murder announced, honored in all
insomniac chant, so admirably described by Pierre Clastres. 14 Of course there arc extreme intensities here and there, and
ambivalence, this is the least one can say. But even this possibility of the Indian hunter's criminal love and hate with regard to his
fellow countrywoman is not important, nor is the orgasmic and mortiferous exaltation of women stained with the blood of sacrificed
beasts; what is important is that these indisputable intensities are also read in terms of order, and even of the return to order, that the
tensions which all at once inscribe themselves at the extremities or at the center of the social surface fully participate in the sense that
they do not in any way subvert it, but literally compose it, and thus circulate in it as exchangeable, intelligible, semiotic signs. Good,
Baudrillard would doubtlessly put up with us speaking in this way: societies of the gift and counter-gift, he would say. ¶ But, if so, he
would then have to admit this: that 'symbolic¶ exchange' is also an exchange in the sense of political
economy. However, let us now try this other proposition, and see what¶ comes of it: this dissimulation of intensities into values
and values¶ into intensities is no less active in capitalist society. Just as there is a capitalist order of savages (which sanctiol1s Levi-
Strauss's imperialism, but what imperialism is not sanctioned by a guarantor of order, by a desire for balancing out, active in the
dominated society¶ itself?), so there are errant forces in the signs of capital. Not in its margins as its marginals, but dissimulated in its
most ' nuclear'. The most essential exchanges, the most 'alienated' or ' fetishized'¶ exchanges in Baudrillard's eyes. If we do not
recognize this, then in¶ ten years' time we will start up another new critique, the critique of¶ the 'critique of the political economy of
the sign'. But it is extraordinarily difficult to recognize the desire of capital such as it is instantiated here and there; as, for example, in
labor, in the awful mundane sense of the grind for which not even the worker today has enough words of contempt and disrepute; or as
in the object, the same object whose force [puissance] Baudrillard's fascination has for¶ its p art, justifiably, so helped us to recapture
through its power: isn't fetishism an opportunity for intensities? Doesn't it attest to an¶ admirable force of invention, adding events,
which could not be more improbable to the libidinal band? From where would you¶ criticize fetishism, when you know that one
cannot criticize¶ homosexuality or masochism without becoming a crude bastard of the moral order? Or again indeed, investment
in the time of capital, this strange simultaneous placing-in-reserve and anticipated expenditure¶ of libidinal
intensities, which is implied in the system of¶ banking and currency; an analysis of this might be attempted later.¶ Or more
simply, investment in the system as such. In general, a¶ characteristic by which one Gell-Man, a great physician, finds¶ himself a
collaborator with a Westmoreland, a pathetic scientific 'criminal' from the Vietnam war, one characteristic of the decisive¶
congruence, and doubtlessly not exclusive of others , between science and capital. And yet the investment in the system,
in value, in¶ the constitution of pieces of the libidinal b and in terms which only¶ have value
through 'difference' or reference, and in the establishment of the laws of these cross-
references - that is to say the¶ deranged investment in the bond and its accomplice, lack ("
Like a drug whose supply one doesn't even ask for again - for the lack of it is as much a having as any other.') - In the sense of
Freudian libidinal economy, in the Metapsychology or The Ego and the Id, can't this investment give rise to vertiginous
intensities? Were not Einstein's most artistic inventions also driven by this desire, by the conviction that God, as he said, certainly
does not play at dice? And what is lost in this? Nothing at all. ¶ But, you will say, it gives rise to power and
domination, to exploitation and even extermination. Quite true; but also to masochism; but the
strange bodily arrangement of the skilled worker with his job and his machine, which is so often
reminiscent of the dispositif of hysteria, can also produce the extermination of a population: look at the
English proletariat, at what capital, that is to say their labor, has done to their body. You will tell
me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always that or die, this is the law of libidinal
economy, no, not the law: this is its provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire; 'that or
die', i.e. that and dying from it, death always in it, as its internal bark, its thin nut's skin, not yet as its price, on the contrary as that
which renders it unpayable. And perhaps you believe that 'that or die' is an alternative?! And that if
they choose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine of the machine,
fucker fucked by it, eight hours, twelve hours, a day, year after year, it is because they are
forced into it, constrained, because they cling to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests
to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they - hang on tight and
spit on me enjoyed [ils ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of
hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed
the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they
enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition
had constructed for them , enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous
anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.¶ And let's finally acknowledge this jouissance,
which is similar, Little Girl Marx was clear on this point, in every way to that of prostitution, the
jouissance of anonymity, the jouissance of the repetition of the same in work, the same
gesture, the same comings and goings in the factory, how many penises per hour, how many
tons of coal, how many cast-iron bars, how many barrels of shit, not 'produced', of course,
but endured, the same parts of the body used, made use of, to the total exclusion of others,
and just as the prostitutes' vagina or mouth arc hysterically anaesthetized, through use, through
being used, so the worker's ear as described and analyzed by Tomatis, who, next to an alternator functioning at 20,000 Hz, peacefully
writes his letters and hears the nest noises; and when Tomatis makes his audiogram study, he notices that the resonant range
corresponding to the alternator functioning at 20,000 Hz, is neutralized, mute. Hence a hysterical treatment of a
fraction of the auditory body, whore assemblage, the libidinal use demanded, of course, by
the 'conditions of labor', which arc also, however, those of prostitution. It goes without saying, of course, that
we say this without any condemnation, without any regret, on the contrary by discovering that there has been, and perhaps still is, the extraordinary dissimulated-dissimulating
force of the worker, force of resistance, force of jouissance in the hysterical madness of the conditions of labor which the sociologists would call fragmented without seeing what
libidinal intensities these fragments can convey as fragments.¶ How can we continue to speak of alienation when it is clear that for everybody, in the experiences he has (and that
more often than not he cannot properly have, since these experiences are allegedly shameful, and especially since instead of having them, he is these experiences) of even the most
stupid capitalist laborer, that he can find jouissance and a strange, perverse intensity, what do we know about it? - When it is clear that not one 'productive' or 'artistic' or 'poetic'
metamorphosis has ever been accomplished, nor will be, by a unitary and totalized organic body, but that it is always at the price of its alleged dissolution and therefore of an
inevitable stupidity that this has been possible; when it is clear that there has never been, nor ever will be such a dissolution for the good reason that there has never been nor ever
will be such a body bound up in its unity and identity, that this body is a phantasy, itself fairly libidinal, erotic and hygienic = Greek, or erotic and supernatural = Christian, and
that it is by contrast with this phantasy that all alienation is thought and resented in the sense of ressentiment which is the feeling aroused by the great Zero as the desire for return.
But the body of primitive savages is no more a whole body than that of the Scottish miners of a century ago, there is no whole body.¶ Finally, you must also realize that such
jouissance, I am thinking of that of the proletariat, is not at all exclusive of the hardest and most intense revolts. Jouissance is unbearable. It is not in order to regain their dignity
that the workers will revolt, break the machines, lock up the bosses, kick out the deputies, that the victims of colonization will set the governors' palaces on fire and cut the sentries'
throats, no, it is something else altogether, there is no dignity; Guyotat has so admirably put this into writing with regard to Algeria. There are libidinal positions, tenable or not,
there are positions invested which are immediately disinvested, the energies passing onto other pieces of the great puzzle, inventing new fragments and new modalities of
jouissance, that is to say of intensification. There is no libidinal dignity, nor libidinal fraternity, there are libidinal contacts without communication (for want of a 'message'). This is
why, amongst individuals participating in the same struggle, there may exist the most profound miscomprehension, even if they arc situated in the same social and economic
bracket. If some Algerian fights for four years out in the brush or for a few months in the urban networks, it is because his desire has become the desire to kill, not to kill in general,
but to kill an invested part, still invested, there's no doubt about it, of his sensitive regions. Would he kill his French master? More than that: he would be killed as the obliging
servant of this master, to disengage the region of his prostitute's consent, to seek other jouissances than prostitution as a model, that is to say as the predominant modality of
investment. Nevertheless, instantiating itself in murder, perhaps his desire remained still in the grip of the punitive relation that he meant to abandon, perhaps this murder was still
a suicide, a punishment, the price due to the pimp, and still servitude. But during this same struggle for independence, some other 'moderate', even centrist, Algerian, decided on
compromise and negotiation, he sought quite another disposition of jouissance, his intelligence dismissing such a death and swearing in calculation, already nourishing contempt
for the body and exalting words as negotiation demands, hence also his own death as the death of flesh in general, not as the prostitute body, a very acceptable death to the Western
talker. Etc. ¶ Now these disparities, which are heterogeneities of investment in the erotic and deadly fluxes, are of course also found within any social 'movement' whatsoever,
whether minute, on the scale of a factory, or immense, when it spreads to a whole country or continent. But apart from the movements of open revolt, notice that these singular
'hysterical' jouissances, for example, or those we might call 'potential', so akin to modern scientificity, or again those by which a ' body' is installed within the increased
reproduction of capital, where it is entirely subordinated to the measurement of time saved and time advanced - and indeed all these instantiations (b tally sketched here), even
when the capitalist machine is humming in the apparent general boredom and when everybody seems to do their job without moaning, all these libidinal instantiations, these little
dispositifs of the retention and flow of the influxes of desire are never unequivocal and cannot give rise to a sociological reading or all unequivocal politics, to a decoding into a
definable lexis and syntax; punishment incites both submission and revolt, power, the fascination of pride and autodepreciative depression, every 'discipline' demands passion and
hate, even if these arc only the indifference in Marx's sense, of whomever performs it. Hence ambivalence, said Baudrillard. And we say: much more than that, something else
besides this condensed house of love and disgust or fear, which in general will be vulnerable to the attack of a semiotic or hermeneutic analysis of affects; no interpreter is afraid of
polysemia; but at the same time and indiscernibly something which is a functioning Of dysfunctioning term in a system, and something which is abruptly implacable joy and
 How many iron bars,
suffering; at once ambivalent signification and tension, dissimulated into one another. Not only the and/or, but the silent comma: ', '.¶

tons of sperm, decibels of carnal shrieks and factory noises, more and still more: this more
may be invested as such, it is in capital, and it must be recognized that not only is it
completely insane, we fully accept this, it is no more nor less vain than either political
discussion on the agora or the Peloponnesian war, but it is especially necessary to recognize that this is not even a matter of
production. These 'products' are not products, what counts here, in capital, is that they are endured and endured in quantity, it is the
quantity, the imposed number that is itself already a motive for intensity, not the qualitative mutation of quantity, not at all, but as in
Sade the frightening number of blows received, the number of postures and maneuvers
required, the necessary number of victims, as in Mina Boumedine, the abominable quantity of
penises which penetrate through many entrances into the woman who works lying on the
oilcloth on a table in the back room of a bar: