The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Revolution - David Bennett

Published in 2016 by Lawrence and Wishart, London, UK

314 pages

Sex and money: two driving forces that explain much of human behavior. This tantalizing duo has long been a potent force within our experience of life, shaping the way we think about our bodies and how we relate to one another. While we may not often consciously think of it, the discourses surrounding sexuality and economics have often been deeply intertwined. The way we think about money has influenced our theories of human sexuality ever since the Enlightenment when libidinal energy and sexual desire were framed as a kind of “currency of desire,” which could be wisely invested or foolishly wasted.

In his 2016 book, The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Revolution, scholar David Bennett gives us an intellectual history of the intimate connections between economics, sex, politics, and psychology from the 18th century to the present day. Combining critical theory with an intellectual history of the libidinal economy, Bennett seeks to demonstrate the power of economic language to shape the ways in which we think about sexuality and desire, and how we think about our sexuality influences our political and social formations. 

Overview: 

Bennet gives evidence for his thesis by taking us through a wide array of examples and case studies through history, helping us understand “how economic tropes have shaped theories of mind-body and their links with both the business and the politics of sexual desire in consumer culture” (36). He begins the book by giving us a brief historiography of the ways in which discourses on sex and economics have been intertwined since the 18th century. The first law of thermodynamics (energy  is neither created nor destroyed, but rather transformed) is the key to understanding the debate, as various writers and scientists, and economists described human sexuality and sexual energy in terms of “expenditure” and “investment.” In the second chapter, Bennet examines this economic language in regard to the act of onanism (masturbation). He shows us the ways in which moralists and doctors like were debating the use of investment/expenditure for not only the development of personal moral character and a healthy psyche but for the good/ill of the entire social fabric (most markedly via the familial structure). Through these chapters, it is the expenditure or the conservation of sexual energy (as well as one’s personal wealth), that Bennett analyzes and deconstructs. 

In the third chapter, Bennett delves into the ways in which psychoanalysis, far from offering a cure for capitalist consumption, was actually utilized by advertisers in order to appeal to new markets. Bennet utilizes a particular case study (namely, the marketing theory revolution introduced by Ernst Dichter known as Motivational Research) to analyze the budding relationship between psychoanalysis and advertising. Dichter, a student of Freud, immigrated to the US in 1938 and took a job with a market research company that sought to quantify and gather data on the public’s milk-drinking habits. Over the next few years, Dichter learned, by conducting interviews, that people projected their sense of self into products, seeing the brands they buy as extensions of their own personalities (do we have any Disney fanatics reading this review?). Dichter argued that in an economy of scarcity, the ego makes rational economic decisions based in need, while in an economy of abundance, the id needs to be persuaded to shop by generating desire itself. Thus, Bennet argues, “the major difference was that where Freud’s technique was production-oriented and driven by the work ethic, Dichter’s was consumption-oriented and governed by the pleasure principle of spending” (105). In 1957, Vance Packard wrote and published an expose on Dichter’s motivational Research, The Hidden Persuaders, which became an international bestseller. In it, Packard critiqued Dichter’s supposed use of subliminal advertising (although much of this has been shown to be false, though it still survives through persistent wives tales and myths) and Dicther’s sexualization of commodities. While Motivational Research saw a steady decline afterward, this case study showed the ways in which psychoanalysis (and sexuality) served as a beneficial tool for the development of Cold-War era consumerism, in which the multiplication of brand identities was catered to the self-defined subject who sought to differentiate themself through the consumption of particular brands. 

The fourth chapter analyses the ever-changing figure of the prostitute as an archetype in Victorian and early 20th-century discourse. Throughout literature, the prostitute serves as a liminal figure that is both a danger to the moral fabric of society, but also one who spends excess income on unproductive commodities (perfume, fancy dresses, fashion, etc). Essentially, the prostitute was seen as having an inability to save money, just as she refused to conserve her sexual energy. Bennet relates this framework of the prostitute to the psychoanalytic analysis of the shopper, the development of the department store, and the medicalization of kleptomania. Bennet then goes on to link the figure of the prostitute as a proto-revolutionary figure to Wilhem Reich’s “sex-economic theory” of limitless libidinal spending as a way to build an ideal society, which was later picked up by Bataille and helped to produce consumerist culture by celebrating spending for spending’s sake, as an end in itself. Bennet connects this political potential of unrestrained spending to Lyotard’s critique of Marx and his Economie Libidinale, which advocates for giving into this process in hope of exacerbating capitalism’s own revolutionary tendencies to ultimately serve as its own end through self-destruction (144-145). 

Toward the end of the chapter, Bennett begins to analyze libidinal spending by contrasting its role in capitalism and socialism, as he asks why the Sexual Revolution took root in capitalist America rather than Socialist USSR.  Through the development of consumerist culture, Bennet argues that we see the development of a new type of consumer; rather than the consumer as homo economicus (where one constantly evaluates the utility of a commodity relative to its cost), we see the rise of the homo desiderans or homo sexualis (one who’s desire exceeds reason and is always in excess of any particular object, aka “I didn’t know I wanted it until I saw it, and now I have to have it”). Thus, according to Bennett, through the work of Reich, Marcuse, Bataille, and Lyotard, we see the drive to spend, rather than invest, is “redefined not as the libidinous subversion of capitalism, but its very currency” (149). 

Following the thought of Reich, Marcuse, Bataille, and Lyotard, the fifth chapter is concerned with the two opposing views of libidinal spending; one of careful, carefully selected spending via Freud, Gandhi, and Slater against one of unrestrained libidinal expenditure via Reich (though tempered by Marcuse). This opposition is further illustrated and brought into the realm of economics through the work of John Maynard Keynes and George Marshall, who Bennett depicts as economists who advocate for spending for its own sake. While this form of economics was unheard of in the 19th century, it slowly became the dominant form within economic theory of the 20th century. Connecting this idea to the critiques of bourgeois society by Marcuse and Bataille, we come to the question of the revolutionary potential of sexual liberation. Does sexual spending exhaust us and limit our ability to focus our time and attention (libidinal energy) onto other, perhaps more important causes, or is unrestrained sexual spending the key to revolution?

Attempting to answer this question, the sixth chapter examines two case studies of utopian communities that utilized the principles of unrestrained economic and sexual spending: the 19th century Oneida Community in New York and the late-twentieth-century Friedrichshof Commune in Germany. After a brief digression on electric sex and how the connections between electricity and sexuality have been discussed since the 1700s, Bennett gives a historical overview of the Oneida Community (1848-1880) and its leader, John Humphrey Noyes, who taught theological perfectionism, advocated for communal sexual spending (although coitus reservatus served as a form of birth control since ejaculation "drained men's vitality and led to disease"), and instituted theological/social science-centered rules for the commune, connecting sexual spending, male continence, and economic production. In a similar fashion, the seventh chapter examines the Friedrichshof Commune (1972-1990) and its leader, Otto Muehl, who following the teachings of Wilhelm Reich, sought to break down the social habits of bourgeoise society through the establishment of “free-sex” economics, which quickly turned authoritarian and hierarchical. 

Through both of these case studies, Bennett concludes that the attempt to establish communities centered around unrestrained sexual spending only served to create hierarchical biopolitical regimes that look very little different than what came before. Bennet writes of these communities, “What the Oneida and Friedrichshof experiments in collectivizing desire suggest is that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ or un-rule-bound sexual desire, merely different regimes of sexuality by which desire is defined, generated and channeled” (222). Although these communities ultimately failed, Bennett argues that they did anticipate the way that the 20th-century consumer was transfigured from homo economicus to homo desiderans, in which “desire itself is sold back to us as a desirable commodity” (232).

The eight and final chapter recounts the history of psychoanalysis in Russia from the 1920s to the present day. Bennett recounts how, in the early 20th century, the Soviet Union embraced psychoanalysis as a way to remodel and structure the economy through changing the psychology of the people (through the utilization of an “orphanage” program that sought to study children raised with psychoanalytic principles but primarily served as childcare for Party officials, including Stalin’s son). Despite the symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s (including Trotsky’s affinity for psychoanalysis and Pavlovian conditioning to help shape the minds of the masses (245)), the practice of psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline was eventually repressed and banned during Stalin’s purge, which deemed psychoanalysis to be a bourgeoise, Western pseudoscience. Regardless of its censorship, Freudian psychoanalysis was still taught and read covertly and illicitly; In fact, during the Stalinist period, one of the best ways for an academic who was interested in psychoanalysis to access the censored material was to become a critic of Freud. 

Eventually, by the 1980s, Freudism was slowly becoming decriminalized and was officially revived in the 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a neoliberal Russia. Psychoanalysis now serves a status symbol among the wives of oligarchs and acts as a sort of salve against the guilt of capitalist expenditure. Utilizing personal examples from his own trips to Russia, Bennett argues that the mafia-centered gangster capitalism that saturates the contemporary Russian economy acts as a kind of “black economy- or a shadow corporate state,” controlling 80% of all stock and 30% of all capital in Russia as of 1995 (263, 265). Bennet ends his book on a rather defeatist note, arguing that in the lack of shame and guilt of modern capitalists, psychoanalysis might now be obsolete, writing in a despondent tone, ‘It is hard to imagine what, if anything, psychoanalysis might have left to say to “economic man...in the neoliberal era of capital...the question of psychoanalysis’s future relationship with homo economicus is a moot one” (p. 269).

Commendations:

In The Currency of Desire, Bennett makes a compelling case for the intersecting discourses of sexuality and economics as he recounts the symbolic language surrounding money in relation to libidinal economy. Bennet rapidly, yet deftly, takes us from the Enlightenment to the present day, showing us the ways in which writers and economists alike have utilized economic vocabularies to describe and delineate the contours of desire. Through this examination, Bennett argues that far from liberating or freeing sexuality from repression, writers and theorists through the centuries have rather utilized economic vocabulary to repress the machinations of capitalism in relation to our desire, giving rise to a modern consumerist culture unconcerned with homo economicus (aka rational spending) and rendering psychoanalysis, in the absence of a guilty conscious, potentially useless. 

One of the book’s most powerful and intriguing chapters concerns the life and work of Ernst Dichter, the psychologist responsible for founding the marketing field known as “Motivational Research” (and first coined the term “focus group”). This chapter, which reveals the ways in which marketing shifted to “motivating” (aka “tricking”) consumers to buy commodities that they did not need, but rather objects that generated desire itself, is focused in its scope and sharp in its argumentation. In short, it is a fascinating account of the ways in which sexuation and advertising were capitalized throughout the middle of the 20th century, redefining the human subject in order to maximize consumeristic spending. 

The following chapter is also a fascinating case study that connects the figure of the prostitute to capital via libidinal investment. Toward the end of the chapter, Bennett comments on the rise of women’s fashion in the wake of the development of the department store (a new social space for women of the age) and the fears of distinguishing the everyday Victorian woman, in her lavish dresses and perfume, from the spendthrift prostitute, as they could be anywhere among the population. While Bennet does not mention this connection, I can’t help but to relate this to the perpetuation of Anti-Semitism in Nazi propaganda specifically Fritz Hippler’s 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”). In a similar fashion to descriptions of the Victorian prostitute, the film portrays the Jewish individual as manipulative and deceptive, warning the audience “it is only the keen-eyed amongst us who recognize his [the Jew’s] racial origins...and people lacking in intuition allow themselves to be deceived by this mimicry and regard them as being in truth their equals. Therein lies the dreadful danger, for even these 'civilized' Jews remain foreign bodies in the organism of their hosts, no matter how much their outward appearance may correspond to that of their hosts.” Again, while Bennet does not address this, I would be interested to see the ways in which discourses on the libidinal economy and currency circulation also apply to anti-Semitism in the early 20th century, and what such an analysis might shed light on contemporary instances of intolerance and “Othering.”

Similarly, the two case studies toward the end of the book provide a focused and insightful analysis of sexual revolution, economic communitarianism, and why they often revert to oppressive, hierarchical systems. The Oneida Community and the Friedrichshof Commune each give us a perceptive example of how the task of collectivizing desire and “liberating” sex is doomed from the start; sex and desire can never truly be untethered from rules and regulation, but only defined, directed, and channeled through different systems. These chapters tie in nicely with the preceding chapter, in which Bennet sets up these case studies by examining the work of Reich, Marcuse, Bataille, and Lyotard, essentially giving us the necessary theory before proceeding to how we can use their ideas to examine these historical social movements. 

Each of these examples shows Bennett at his best. When he focuses on a particular case study,  we can see the ways in which the language of economics and sexuality are intimately interconnected. While each chapter stands on its own and is generally unrelated to previous chapters, they all have this common theme that connects them, which makes Bennet’s argument all the more powerful and convincing. As such this book would serve as a great resource for someone teaching a course on sexuality and psychoanalysis.

Critique:

On the other hand, in contrast to the rest of the book, the first two chapters are particularly dense and dry. To be fair, the introduction and first chapter serve more as historiographies rather than focused case studies. I know that historiographies never really make for the most engaging reading, but the beginning of the book was a bit overly verbose and jumped back and forth between authors and eras, making it not the most easily accessible work straight out of the gate, especially if you have no background in psychoanalysis or history. To his credit, Bennett’s work becomes much more digestible and cohesive as it progresses, so it just takes a bit of stumbling through the language of the beginning to get the hang of how terms are being utilized and how they will inform the rest of the book’s central arguments. 

By contrast, over on the opposite end of the book, Bennett decides to end his examination on a rather pessimistic and defeating note. To be fair, I see why he thinks that psychoanalysis has nothing left to say to a consumerist society. In his examination, it seems that the language of desire is forever constrained to the machinations of capitalism, and any attempt to utilize desire in new, post-capitalist ways has only served to reify and establish hierarchical structures of authority. As Bennett shows us throughout this work, psychoanalysis has often been used as a catalyst to further capitalist goals (aka profit), and now that we live in a hyper-consumerist society devoid of guilt and culpability, a constructive psychoanalytic project increasingly seems like a fantasy. While I do hold on to the belief that psychoanalysis still has emancipatory potential, I do acknowledge Bennet’s struggle with seeing it. 

Maybe he, along with Zizek, are correct: perhaps the genie is out of the bottle. Maybe Pandora’s box has been opened and can’t be closed again; maybe we are destined to exist in excess and the only question now is how to manage it. However, while I do not agree with Bennett that hyper-consumerism is an unstoppable force to which there can be little remedy, I do agree that, if we are to move beyond the current social and economic order, then it will take a shock to the system to ultimately affect change. The question is whether the shock will either break or wake us. Perhaps we are no longer homo economicus, but must we also be consigned to live in the excess as homo desiderans? Can we imagine redefining the human subject as homo communitas, homo caritas, or even homo fides (community, love, or faith)? Regardless, I do hold hope that a proper psychoanalytic/theological project can break beyond the bounds of capitalism, engage with our desire, and channel them toward cooperative, emancipatory ends.

Conclusion:

In the end, The Currency of Desire serves as a compelling account of the ways in which the discourses surrounding money, sexuality, and economic exchange consistently inform one another over the past few centuries. While Bennett, throughout much of the book, engages with psychoanalysis and libidinal economy much more thoroughly than economics as a social science, he still invites us to investigate the deeper connections between market research, critical theory, Keynesian economics, and libidinal economy. It would be interesting to connect this work with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, investigating the ways not only in which the language of economics shapes our understanding of desire, but also how capitalism is simultaneously fueled by and perpetuates our psychic pathologies and mental illnesses (mania, depression, compulsion, etc). Bennett’s book challenges the common presumptions of traditional economists and serves as a useful and insightful resource for those interested in the intersection of sexuality, economics, and psychoanalysis.