Translator's Introduction To Bernard Stiegler's 'Pharmacology Of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism And Libidinal Dis-economy'

Abstract

There is a long history of trying to marry psychoanalytic theory with economic theory, consisting in all those philosophical attempts throughout the twentieth century to unify the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. This history is not without resemblance to the attempt in physics to unify the standard model of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces (described by quantum chromodynamics) with gravitational force (described by general relativity). If there is any significance to be found in this resemblance, then this depends firstly on how we judge what it means to say that in both cases this fundamentally concerns the question of energy, and secondly how we judge what it means to say that in both cases it is a question of energetic systems, which also means, lawful systems, though where this notion of 'law' more names a problem than a guide to a solution. Nevertheless, just as physics strives to complete the standard model by incorporating gravity in order to create what is called a unified field theory, so too Bernard Stiegler strives to compose various orders of knowledge and understanding into what he calls 'general organology,' the central ornament of which is a modified form of Gilbert Simondon's 'theory of individuation'. If this is to compare two theoretical projects indubitably operating in very different registers, then it still serves to indicate the scope and ambition animating Stiegler's intellectual labours. The appeal if not indeed the theoretical necessity of composing the psychoanalytic and the economic, lies in the fact that both are matters of 'need', or, alternatively, of 'desire'. But this alternative immediately brings to the fore the question of the relation of these two terms--need and desire. Within psychoanalysis we already find these terms distinguished through Freud's account of the difference between desire and drive; and within that economic system we call capitalism we find a set of paradoxes consisting in the fact that a production system, allegedly and traditionally, is governed by the needs of those whom it is intended to serve, but that today this system seems founded (and to founder) on stimulating a form of consumer behaviour that appears utterly detached from any way in which 'needs' were hitherto understood. Just as the historicity of desire in psychoanalytic theory demands explanation in relation to the apparent atemporality of what Freud calls the drives, so too the extreme historicity if not the industrialisation of the desires animating consumer behaviour seems to confront the weak theoretical edifice underpinning economic theory insofar as such theory rests on the notion of timeless needs. And this would be a weakness detectable even in Marx's economics, in spite of his account of commodity fetishism, an account that was perhaps the emblem heralding for later Marxists and others the need for an encounter with psychoanalysis. What also underpins the persistence of these attempts is the fact that the psychoanalytic and the economic have already been married, not merely in theory but in practice, a fact the genealogy of which takes us back to the marriage of Freud's sister to Freud's wife's brother. The offspring of this marriage was none other than Edward Bernays, who was, thus, Freud's double nephew, and who saw in Freud's theories an opportunity for application, which he undertook in the United States, and which eventually led to what we now call marketing and to the consumerism of what continues to be referred to as the American way of life. (1) If it was not awareness of this genealogy and its significance that led to most of these attempts to marry psychoanalysis with economics in theory, it is nevertheless the case that among the effects of this practical composition was the decoupling of the production system from needs as conventionally understood, accompanying the recognition by producers that gains in productivity (or perhaps, overall, a temporary reversal or brake on the systemic tendency of such gains to decline) could be garnered by manipulating minds and spirits to consume what they had never before thought they needed, that is, all the products that spring from an ever-accelerating system of permanent innovation. …