Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism

Abstract

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism David Bennett (bio) “Erotic conduct,” Georges Bataille tells us in his study of Sade, “is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting.” Glossing the rigorous antirationalism of the libertine doctrine, Bataille goes on: If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions . . . use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. . . . [W]e always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. 1 By contrast with the so-called “producer ethic,” which preaches the ascetic virtues of frugality, sobriety, and the self-repressing postponement of pleasure in the interests of productive labor, the so-called “consumer ethic” stimulates the economy by promulgating the values of spending not saving, self-gratification not self-denial, the pleasures of consumption rather than the dignity of labor. The emergence of consumerist culture in the “West” has been variously dated from the “decadent” 1890s, the “modernist” 1920s, and the “countercultural” 1960s—the decade when Heffner’s Playboy and Penguin’s Lady Chatterley helped to turn countercultural recreational sex into what has been called the “dominant pornographic culture” of contemporary transatlantic consumerism. 2 By identifying the “decisive discovery” of “what spending can really mean” with a Sade pictured as being struck by this “violent truth” in the loneliness of the Bastille as he watched the guillotine at work from his cell window, Bataille dates the emergence of the consumer ethic—and of the spender as “sovereign”—from the very moment of the Bourgeois Revolution itself (SSM 169, 171). It is with the figure of the “sovereign” spender that this paper will be concerned: a figure ambiguously positioned on the dividing-line between [End Page 269] law and the underworld, between “white” and “black” economies, in the writings of early twentieth-century sexual psychologists like Freud and D. H. Lawrence, whose inconclusive efforts to separate a discourse of desire from the discourse of economics reveal (I shall argue) the profound complicity of the consumer and producer ethics in the early twentieth-century moment of that other “long revolution,” the sexual revolution, which is coterminous with modernity itself. Like Lawrence, Freud prided himself on plainspeaking. In 1913 he warned his colleagues that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy,” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”: “money matters” and “sexual matters.” 3 An ironic warning, you may think, since it was psychoanalysis that taught the twentieth century the impossibility of speaking plainly about money: taught it that speech about money is invariably metaphoric, to be decoded into speech about sex—taught it, in other words, a cardinal principle of the consumer ethic: the imperative of eroticizing money, never economizing on sex. Freud’s case histories continually “dematerialize” economic relationships—the relationships of unequal property and power enacted in the taking, giving, lending, or withholding of money—decoding them into symbolic expressions of erotic desire and denial, secondary transcriptions of a truth anterior to money, the originary truth of sex. This, at least, is the familiar Freud, the one whose “overvaluation of sexuality,” as Jung put it, “has brought upon him the justified reproach of pan-sexualism.” 4 But now consider how the opposite process can occur in Freud’s writing. Addressing fellow clinicians in his 1913 paper “On Beginning the Treatment,” Freud explained why the bourgeois patrons of his new therapeutic technique were making a sound investment in spending their income on the unorthodox practice of purchasing a daily hour of the doctor’s time. Laying down what he called the “rules of the game” for...