positions

Capitalism and Perversion:

Reflections on the Fetishism of Excess in the 1980s

William Pietz

Ross’s philosophy is, “We’re going to have a party, a very sophisticated,

complicated party.’’ -0. C. Adams, consulting psychologist to RJR
Nabisco, on CEO F. Ross Johnson, quoted in Burrough and Helyar, Bar-
barians at the Gate
I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left
side? he answered. the desire of raising other men into a perception of
the infinite.- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

During the last decade, our country witnessed an unprecedented conflagra-

tion of economic assets that took us from being the greatest creditor nation
in the global economy to being its greatest debtor. Liberated by a handful of
deregulatory federal laws and administrative decisions, hundreds of previ-
ously sedate bankers, sports-obsessed corporate executives, and colorful con
men kindled the savings of thousands of average citizens, many of them

positions 3:2 0 1995by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 536

retired seniors who saw the accumulation of a lifetime of hard work go up

in smoke, in the greatest bonfire of vanities the world has yet seen. Pouring
millions of dollars into monumental constructions of unneeded office build-
ings, condominium complexes, and luxury resorts, which either were never
completed or, when completed, could never begin to turn a profit, these
antiheroes of the 1980s became notorious for the sumptuous excesses that
characterized both their business practices and their personal lives. From
the famous Beverly Hills “predators’ balls’’ put on by Drexel Burnham’s
Michael Milken, where prospective investors were entertained by Frank
Sinatra and Diana Ross and lectured to by the Golden Nugget casino’s
Steve Wynn,’ to what a N e w York gossip columnist called the “perfect
party” thrown by leveraged buyout king Henry Kravis in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Medieval Hall, where, after a recital by a teenage violin
virtuoso, guests enjoyed a banquet of fantastic expense, followed by a pri-
vate tour of the new 160-piece Degas exhibit2 . . . from corporate reception
areas decorated with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of English
and Chinese antiques, to the RJR Nabisco airport hangar in Atlanta with its
quarter-million dollars’ worth of landscaping and its walk-in wine closet3
. . . from the jet that flew thousands of miles with a single canine passenger,
the German shepherd belonging to F. Ross Johnson,4 to the one that flew
Vernon Savings’s Donald Ray Dixon to France for a twenty-two thousand
dollar wine-tasting trip at company expense5 . . . from connoisseur bankers
who amassed acres of masterpiece paintings, classic cars, and antique mag-
ical devices, to the would-be cowboy banker whose belt-buckle contained a
tiny derringer and who kept a cash roll of ten thousand dollars stuffed
down one boot6. . . from the New Phoenician luxury hotel outside Phoenix
that was the desert fantasy of moral decency-crusader Charles Keating, to
the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas where Sunbelt Saving’s Edwin “Fast Eddy’’
McBirney indulged a different fantasy by holding a party for fifty friends
and customers at which four showgirls did a striptease, engaged in a display
of lesbian lovemaking, then performed fellatio on preselected guests,7 the
notion that capitalism follows a Protestant ethic of thrift-minded personal
austerity and self-denial has, not for the first time, been put into question in
a most extreme manner.
This question is the topic of my essay. My guiding themes are capitalism,

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 537

perversion, and fetishism. My deeper theoretical concern is the relation

between rationality and materiality in the formation of social values.

American Nihilism in the 1980s: Poststructuralist Theory

and Supply-side Economics

My point of departure is an essay by Jean-Joseph Goux entitled “General

Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” that appeared in an issue of Yale
French Studies devoted to the work of Georges Bataille. In that essay, Goux
argues that the Reagan era marked a fundamental “metamorphosis of cap-
ita1,”a one that highlights the contradiction in Bataille’s attempt, in his
three-volume work The Accursed Share, to formulate a more general cri-
tique of political economy than that envisioned by Karl Marx. In what
Goux characterizes as “a remarkable and dazzling operation of ethnologi-
cal decentering,”9 Bataille proposes reversing the categories employed in
both political economics and its common Marxian critique by situating the
capitalist social economy in a broader historical and ethnographic context:
capitalism then appears as a logic of social life comparable to those logics
that led to human sacrifices among the Aztecs, monumental religious con-
structions like the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, extravagant displays
and sumptuous feasts such as we find in the court of Versailles, and, espe-
cially, the potlatch ceremonies of Native American peoples, in which valu-
able goods were actually destroyed in public rituals.
Bataille’s reading of the description of potlatch in Marcel Mauss’s essay
The G@ was the catalyst for his formulation of what he called “the laws of
general economy.” Bataille argues that what emerges from this broader his-
torical picture as the fundamental problem of economics is not scarcity, pro-
duction, and utilitarian value, but rather excess, consumption, and expendi-
ture of the surplus in nonproductive use. Every social economy at most
times has more resources and energy at its disposal than it is able to employ
for the maintenance and growth of the system itself. Wealth may be defined
as the excess “energy” available to a society: some of this can indeed be used
for growth, but “if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth,
it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not,
gloriously or catastrophically.’’IO War is only the most prominent form of

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 538

such expenditure. Indeed, it is in the manner in which resources are wasted

through unproductive activities-whether military, religious, artistic, or
erotic -that Bataille locates the creative kernel of both the social and the
sacred. According to Bataille, public forms of luxurious consumption and
conspicuous waste are the ground on which new relations of rank and sta-
tus are determined. T h e potlatch for him is both the most perverse such
mode, from the utilitarian perspective of capital, and the one that most
clearly reveals the social truth of the general economy: the truth that the
expenditure of things functions as the acquiring of social power. While gift
economies may still be reduced to a rational logic of exchange based on rec-
iprocal obligation and the assurance of future return, potlatch ceremonies
in which goods are publicly destroyed by the rich in a display of magnifi-
cent contempt for wealth cannot be so easily reduced. However doubtful
his description of potlatch may be from the perspective of contemporary
ethnography, Bataille’s argument is worth considering. Let me quote from
a long passage in The Accursed Share:
Potlatch is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes
bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable
riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, chal-
lenging, and obligating him. T h e recipient has to erase the humiliation
and take up the challenge. . . . Gift-giving is not the only form of potlatch:
A rival is challenged by a solemn destruction of riches. In principle, the
destruction is offered to the mythical ancestors of the donee; it is little dif-
ferent from a sacrifice. . . .[Tlhe squandering of this surplus itselfbecomes an
object of appropriation; what is appropriated is the prestige it gives to the
squanderer (whether an individual or a group), which is acquired by him as a
possession and which determines rank. . . . Rank is entirely the effect of this
crooked will. In a sense, rank is the opposite of a thing: What it founds is
the sacred, and the general ordering of ranks is given the name of hierar-
chy. [Hieros is Greek for “sacred.”] It is the stubborn determination to treat
as a disposable and usable thing that whose essence is sacred, that which is
completely removed from the profane utilitarian sphere. . . . Rank, where
loss is changed into acquisition, corresponds to the activity of the intellect,
which reduces the objects of thought to things.”

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 539

As Goux puts it, “Whereas the profane is the domain of utilitarian con-
sumption, the sacred is the domain of experience opened by the unproduc-
tive consumption of the surplus: what is sacrificed.”’* It is this surplus,
which is found in all societies, that constitutes what Bataille calls “the
accursed share,” that part of a society’s wealth whose useless expenditure
establishes the sphere of the sacred and the ground of social hierarchy.
T h e contradiction that Goux discerns in Bataille’s argument lies in the
latter’s Weberian conception of capitalism as a form of social life thoroughly
structured by “a utilitarian and productivist rationality,”l3 that iron cage of
desacralizing, self-interested, bureaucratic rationality so gloomily cele-
brated by Max Weber as the fate of human history. Goux points out that
this view of capitalism contradicts Bataille’s own argument regarding the
universality of the law of the general economy. Bataille argues that every
society prior to capitalism was one of “sacrificial expenditure,”l4 but he begs
the question of (to quote Goux) “What happens to the demand of the
sacred in capitalist society? . . . what happens to ostentatious expenditure in
ca pi ta1i sm ? 15
”

Goux’s provocative move is to find the extension to capitalism of

Bataille’s notion of the general economy in the work of the American writer
whom Ronald Reagan once characterized as his favorite author, George
Gilder, whose 1981book entitled Wealth and Poverty was one of the most
popular expressions justifying supply-side economics. Gilder’s work is a
sort of intoxicated restatement of Schumpeter’s celebration of the crucial
role of the entrepreneur in capitalism. Far from contrasting capital invest-
ment to the potlatch of the American Northwest, Gilder equates them.
Goux paraphrases Gilder’s supply-side reasoning in the following passage:

T h e current notion of a self-interested, parsimonious capitalism, moti-

vated only by the interest of material gain, is erroneous. At the origin of
“capitalism” is the gift, not self-love and avarice. T h e conceptual basis of
this seemingly paradoxical affirmation is a classical economic principle
known as Jean-Baptiste Say’s law: “Supply creates its own demand.” Such
is the modern, contemporary form of potlatch. T h e essence of capitalism
consists in supplying first, and in obtaining an eventual profit only later.
T h e capitalist invests (he supplies goods and services), but he is never

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 540

sure of the return, of the recompense for his supply. T h e movement, says
Gilder, is the same as in the potlatch, where the essence of the gift is not
the absence of all expectation of a countergift but rather a lack of cer-
tainty regarding the return.16

Like Baudrillard and many other recent critics on the cultural left, the neo-
conservative Gilder appeals to the material fact of indeterminacy in histori-
cal outcomes to denounce socialism for denying Say’s law: that supply cre-
ates its own demand by seducing the consumer into new forms of desire.
T h e planned economy of socialism is thus condemned for presupposing a
fixed set of natural, unchanging human needs, which it then endeavors to
satisfy, thereby stifling the creativity of the material economic process and
the spontaneity of subjective desire alike. In this “irrationalist legitimation
of the capitalist universe”I7 offered implicitly by post-Marxist theorists and
explicitly by Gilder, the essence of economic production is that of an unpre-
dictable process which “supplies in order to create desire.”18 In their com-
mon denunciation of socialism and of all rationalist economics, reactionary
free-market libertarians and radical democratic post-Marxists characteristi-
cally emphasize (I would argue, overemphasize) the categories of contin-
gency and indeterminacy as the crucial concepts for comprehending mate-
riality and subjectivity alike.
This irrationalist celebration of contingency and indeterminacy down-
plays the fact that some events d o have a significant degree of predictability
and that some desires are fixed, through their grounding in physical and
institutional structures or past historical events, prior to the occasions of
their libidinal expression. Instead, we get a quasi-theological testament to
the productivity of chance per se. As Goux puts it:

Profit resides in chance. Understood in this way, the spirit of capitalism

thus participates in the fundamental mystery of any human situation: its
opening onto the unpredictable and the undecidable. . . . T h e ultimate
metaphysics of capitalism is the theology of chance-our only access to
the future and to providence. . . . Gilder sees the noble and glorious side
of the entrepreneur; he makes of him a gambler who sacrifices in order
to “supply” with an always uncertain result: wealth or bankruptcy. It is
in so gambling that he earns his rank.”

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 54 1

In the supply-side view, far from being the servant of market mechanisms
and consumer demand, the capitalist is rather a creative and generous spirit,
a great-souled prolific gambler whose stakes are desire and whose gain is
social status. Although Bataille and Gilder both celebrate the glorious (and,
need one add, masculine?) courage of the risk-taker whose all-or-nothing
wagers create new prestige for himself and new wealth for the whole of
society, where Bataille sees an orgy of unproductive expenditure that repre-
sents the Nietzschean overcoming of all morality, Gilder finds the true lib-
ertarian ethic of capitalist production, an ethic which vindicates Gilder’s
own highly traditional, and indeed highly reactionary, moral values. Nev-
ertheless, they are one in their critique of “utilitarian and productivist ratio-
nality.” This critique uses the alleged insight into the material and libidinal
creativity of chance to make an argument debunking neoclassical economic
theories of market equilibrium, since these are based on the assumption of a
measurable equivalence of value between supply and demand, and on a
conservation of economic values over time. T h e theoretical nihilists of the
1980s correctly pointed out that neoclassical explanations of marginal price
equilibrium presume a balanced equation of stable utilities and “disutili-
ties” whose premises lie outside economic science per se in the utilitarian
psychology attributed to market-producers and commodity-consumers. T h e
stable conservation of values between the materially objective goods of the
supply side and the capriciously subjective desires of the demand side is an
enabling presumption for utilitarian, rational-choice economic models. But
the thinkers of aleatory metaphysics, whether their patron saint is Niet-
zsche or Schumpeter, argue that such a presumption cannot be true, since
values lack any decisive material determination (contrary to the arguments
of “essentialists” and “foundationalists”) and that new or excess values-
wealth and profits- are the result of radical, materially indeterminate, cre-
ative acts.
T h e genius of Goux’s essay is to show how the critiques of utilitarian
rationalism developed by both Bataille and Gilder fail as the result of a fun-
damental assumption that they share. If novel desire, and thus new forms
of wealth and social life, are the product of sheer aleatory play- if the use-
values of commodities and social goods are the arbitrary expressions of an
infinitely plastic libido- if all needs are in truth radically contingent

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 542

desires- then there is no theoretical basis for distinguishing between pro-

ductive and unproductive use, and hence for identifying any one portion of
social wealth as the accursed surplus which is the object of Bataille’s argu-
ment. Similarly, there is no basis for Gilder’s identification of the entrepre-
neurial ethic of capitalist commodity production with a particular set of
moral norms. Moreover, the radical indeterminacy of the human libido cel-
ebrated by Bataille and Gilder in their critiques of rationalist theories of
capitalism has always been a fundamental presupposition of rationalist util-
itarian economics itself. As Goux rightly states, “political economy has
effected a denormativation of use, returning ‘utility’ to the most subjective
whims of individual choice.”*()Goux thus shows us how both these self-
avowedly radical social discourses in fact reaffirm liberalism’s most funda-
mental presupposition about subjectivity and desire: that these are in
essence (or, if one prefers, in their lack of determinate or qualified essence)
processes of contingency and chance, processes sovereign unto themselves
which may be brought into being and acted upon by a transcendent will,
but which may not be judged or evaluated by any terms other than their
own. Bataille and Gilder, poststructuralism and Reaganomics, represent
irrationalist critiques of the economic theory of capitalism whose own irra-
tionalist presumptions are internal to the liberal conceptual framework that
is required by capitalist social institutions themselves.

Capitalism, Fetishism, and Perversion

T h e Nietzschean poststructuralist and the supply-side libertarian both

affirm the sovereign importance of a category, excess or surplus, that is
based on a distinction- the differentiation of superfluous desire from what
we might term structural or homeostatic need-whose illegitimacy is a
fundamental presupposition of their own antifoundationalist critiques.
What Goux’s examination makes clear is that the characteristic poststruc-
turalist and supply-side overvaluations of historical contingency, libidinal
indeterminacy, and freely produced surplus or excess derive from the con-
ceptual framework of utilitarian liberalism itself. Moreover, this liberal
social theory, fully articulated during the nineteenth century, might be
located in the more general modern transformation of European intellec-

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 543

tual categories that we find crystallizing in the late seventeenth century:

specifically, the effective elimination of earlier conceptions of the essential
role of tychic processes in the temporal-material world by reducing chance
to the nonsignificance of material particularity and combinatorial contin-
gency (conceived as the insignificant “micro” dimension of law-governed
phenomena, the trivial froth upon turbulent waves that are merely the visi-
ble expression of deeper trends and structures). At the same time, the
notion of significant chance-generated effects was displaced to the field of
human psychology (that is, to the caprices of the prerational component of
human nature or the unconscious mind). Radical chance becomes a charac-
teristic of subjectivity; the chance-driven expressions of the latter are distin-
guished from the law-governed events of a “thoughtless” material world.
T h e idea of materially embodied subjectivity, of “matter that thinks,” has
itself been the great unthinkable idea for modern liberal cosmology, having
been formulated as a sort of @an for the Enlightenment by the liberal
philosopher John Locke.2’
Liberal theories tend to posit a split perspective on economic subjectivity
that students of nineteenth-century European colonial and sex-gender dis-
courses may find familiar. Like the superstitious native of colonial traders’
tales and the fixated pervert of late-nineteenth-century sexology, the com-
modity-craving consumer is attributed with a subjectivity of sheer caprice
that latches onto objects in moments of chance encounter (though, in this
case, the primal scene of fetish formation is found in department store dis-
plays and commercial advertisements). Viewing these unpredictable libidi-
nal fixations with all the rational detachment of empirical social science, the
commodity producer and the economist regard their own enlightened sub-
jectivity as something apart from that of the consuming masses, just as the
objects that they wish to accumulate for themselves- capital and knowl-
edge-are believed to belong to an order that transcends the system of
commodities and its pleasure principle of consumer desire. I would suggest
that one historical ground of this split perspective, and of the conception of
desire as a brute contingent fact, may be found in the problem of cross-
cultural value judgment confronted by colonial agents of capitalist institu-
tions. T h e much repeated anecdote that is the locus classicus of this notion
expresses the extent to which the liberal utilitarianism that claimed to be a

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 544

universal philosophy of human nature was forged from the particular expe-
rience of British administrators in India. Here is the version from Lionel
Robbins’s (1935)influential An essay in the nature and signzjicance of economic
science
I well remember how they [Robbins’s doubts about the continuity
between economic and political science] were brought to a head by my
reading somewhere-I think in the work of Sir Henry Maine-the
story of how an Indian official had attempted to explain to a high caste
Brahmin the sanctions of the Benthamite system. “But that,” said the
Brahmin, “cannot possibly be right-I am ten times as capable of hap-
piness as that untouchable over there.” I had no sympathy with the
Brahmin. But I could not escape the conviction that, if I chose to regard
men as equally capable of satisfaction and he to regard them according
to a hierarchical schedule, the difference between us was not one which
could be resolved by the same method of demonstration as were [sic]
available in other fields of social judgment. . . . “I see no means,” [the
economist, W. S.] Jevons had said, “whereby such comparisons can be
accomplished .”22

T h e problem of the alleged capriciousness of “pre-rational” subjectivity and

of the contingency of desire derives from the inability of liberal social the-
ory to conceive any way to compare the value judgments of different indi-
viduals, a problem dramatized by the incommensurability of value judg-
ments drawn from different cultures. By the expression of their own
preferences, individuals are understood as having the capacity to aggregate
and prioritize their own desires and aversions (conceived as the subjective
quantification of “utilities” and “disutilities”), but social scientists lack any
such guide for the aggregation of social values within a libidinally or cul-
turally diverse population. Utilitarian economists can indeed explain why
the dollar that a millionaire gives to a homeless beggar has more value for
the beggar (the dollar represents a greater proportion of the total money
possessed by the poor person than it does the total dollars owned by the rich
man), but there is no way to perform a comparison among qualitatively dif-
ferent “use values” or among the incommensurable desires of different
individuals that various material goods and interactions satisfy. T h e result

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 545

is that modern social theory splits its perspective on material desires and
values, accepting individual acts of consumption as contingent psychologi-
cal facts that must simply be accepted as brute data, while the overall social
economy that determines how much of certain goods are produced and
who gets them is judged apart from its material impact on individuals’ lives
according to technical standards of market-clearing efficiency and Pareto
optimality. T h e intensity of suffering experienced by a population is
regarded as external to the rational science of economics.
Some years ago it struck me that this characteristic problem of the social
value of economic objects for incommensurable subjects, as well as liberal
social theory’s related inability to conceive of materiality and subjectivity
nondualistically, was most fully expressed within social theory itself by the
discourse about “fetishism.” What I would like to do in the rest of this essay
is to reconceptualize the question of capitalism raised by the financial cata-
clysm of the 1980s by means of the conception of fetishism that has emerged
from my previous studies of the general historical discourse about “fetish
worship” and the more specific notion of capitalist fetishism developed by
Marx.
Beginning in 1985, I published a series of essays which traced the theo-
retical discourse about “fetishes” from its origin in sixteenth-century, Afro-
European cross-cultural trade on the coast of West Africa, to its elaboration
as a general theory of the “primitive” mentality by Enlightenment intellec-
tuals in mid-eighteenth-century Europe and its subsequent appropriations
by founding thinkers of the nineteenth-century human sciences. Inspired
by Foucault’s notions of the discursive archive and historical universals, my
aim was not to approach the idea of fetishism from any particular, metathe-
oretical framework, but rather to see if some distinctive thematics informed
the statements about fetishes and fetish worship that composed the histori-
cal archive itself. What emerged from this study was a constellation of four
themes which seemed to frame a novel problem in the tradition of Western
theoretical discourse: the problem of how any social value could become
fixed in material objects which in themselves lacked any inherent inten-
tional meaning or orientation toward the fulfillment of human purposes.
T h e first and most fundamental of these themes concerned the material-
ity of the fetish object: far from being the mere symbol of an immaterial

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 546

spirit, or a merely instrumental means to communicate with the powers of a

transcendent realm, the fetish was conceived as itself the material site of
divine forces whose efficacy was inseparable from the singular formation of
the particular object. T h e specific nature of the process of fetish formation
was the second characteristic theme evident in the discursive archive that I
was studying. This process was viewed as a radically contingent encounter
between previously heterogeneous elements- most notably some material
object and the current desire of the fetishist-which came to be associated
in a singularly fixed manner. While the real power of the fetish object was
its ability to enact a repetition of the original articulation between its other-
wise heterogeneous components, its hold over the credulous fetishist was
the irrational belief that this object of personal fixation was the necessary
means for bringing about some desired end. From this conception emerged
a third theme that concerned the overvaluation of fetish objects resulting
from a conflation of material causality and intentional action. As a result of
this process of contingent fixation, theorists of fetishism reasoned, the fetish
was regarded as a material object endowed with the supernatural power to
fulfill human desires and social goals. Such a delusional belief that natural
or constructed things could act with the purposive intent of persons violated
the fundamental Enlightenment reality principle of the distinction between
the nonteleological, amoral order of the physical world and the intentional,
moral order of human society. This theme of the primitive, infantile trans-
gression of the boundaries of civilized reality-consciousness in the attribu-
tion of supernatural power and social value to material things also raised
the more radical problem of the historical specificity and cultural relativity
of all social value codes. Moreover, in addition to this sociological issue, a
fourth theme relating to the psychology of the individual subject appeared
in the archive of fetish statements with surprising regularity. This involved
the intimate association of the fetish-in contrast to other sorts of sacra-
mental objects, such as the idol or the icon-with the living body (or, more
accurately, the embodied self) of the believer. T h e fetish worshiper, it was
thought, conceived these supernatural objects as acting through and upon
earthly bodies, rather than immaterial souls, in order to gratify o r frustrate
material desires. T h e essential power of the fetish was the power over life
and death itself. Fetishists were thought to experience this as an intensely

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 547

personal relation to the object of supernatural fixation. Far from being the
autonomous, free-willed individuals pictured in Christian theology and lib-
eral psychology, fetish worshipers seemed to conceive their subjectivity as in
essence embodied and to feel that their very selfhood and identity depended
upon maintaining their relation to particular objects.
These four themes of nontranscendental materiality, radically historical
or contingent fixation, overvaluation of the power of personified things, and
object-dependent self-identity seemed to delineate the distinctive idea of
fetishism, both within the archive of statements about “fetishes” and in
relation to Western theoretical traditions. Arising from European Enlight-
enment readings of merchants’ accounts of cross-cultural trade with non-
European peoples, the novel theory of religious fetishism and the primitive,
fetishistic mentality played such a surprisingly prominent role in the initial
formulations of the modern social theory in the nineteenth century because,
I would suggest, it expressed a novel problematic concerning the relation of
social values to material things which became salient with the generaliza-
tion of impersonal market relations as a principle of social order. That is to
say, Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism was to some extent already
implicit in the discussions of religious fetishism which he read as a young
man in the 1840s.
Despite this, I believe that Marx’s development of the notion of fetishism
in his mature work is of unique importance. T h e idea of fetishism was a
product of the Enlightenment: indeed, it was the Enlightenment’s concep-
tion of the pure condition of unenlightenment. From the French philosophe
Charles de Brosses, who coined the word itself in 1757, to Sigmund Freud
and the latest poststructuralist psychoanalytic treatments of fetishism, this
discourse has articulated a fundamental problem of great conceptual diffi-
culty for liberal theory without being able to escape the basic categories and,
one might say, cosmology of the Enlightenment. O f all the thinkers who
elaborated a theory of fetishism, it is Marx alone, I believe, who managed to
do this.
This claim will hardly seem plausible to those who view Marx as a deter-
ministic materialist who lacked any theory of subjectivity, desire, or the his-
torical contingency of needs. However, despite the claims of Bataille and
Gilder and many others, Marx was more than familiar with the truth of

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 548

Say’s law that what production produces first of all is desire and that the
consumer’s desire is the ground of production. In the Grundrisse, Marx,
having some fun with the Hegelian style of expression, but developing an
argument he intends to be taken seriously, writes:

Consumption creates the motive for production; it also creates the object
which is active in production as its determinate aim. If it is clear that pro-
duction offers consumption its external object, it is therefore equally
clear that consumption ideally posits the object of production as an inter-
nal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of pro-
duction in a still subjective form. . . . Production thus not only creates an
object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.23
Marx’s conception of the social process of material production did not
derive from the mechanistic determinism of eighteenth-century material-
ism but rather from the materialist insights of Hegelian dialectics. T h e
aspect of fetishism that for the Enlightenment was its great crime against
reason, its attribution of social value and personal power to material things,
was, for Hegel, the normal and necessary principle of social unification.
One need only look at the discussion in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of the
economy as a “system of needs”24 to see that Hegel understood the function
of the circulation of material goods as a vehicle for the recognition of social
status and hence as the materially mediated intersubjective ground of social
unity. In commodity production, Hegel argued, people come to realize
they can only satisfy their own desires by offering objects for sale which
satisfy the desires of others. In recognizing the desire of the other in the
objects one presents for their consumption, one thereby gains the means to
gratify one’s own desire. In this very recognition of what one might call the
libidinal claims of others enacted in the social exchange of goods, the status
of social actors as freely purposive, autonomous beings is also expressed
and objectively legitimated- although, for Hegel, the full recognition of
the subjective freedom of the individual is only actualized in the recogni-
tion of people as citizens by the political institutions of a state whose laws
guarantee the rights of individuals to make autonomous choices in deter-
mining the private actions and public policies which shape a given form of
social life.

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 549

T h e significance of the materialist dimension of Hegel’s philosophy for

Marx has been discussed in a recent book by the political theorist Robert
Meister.25 Meister shows the relation of these sociological insights of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to the more psychological insights of the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit. Hegelian dialectics is grounded on the phenomeno-
logical description of the fundamental contradiction structuring human
experience: the subjective experience of finding oneself to be an essentially
embodied being, the experience, in Meister’s words, “of being simultane-
ously both a subject and an object; a someone and a something; an ‘I’ and a
‘me.”’26 Again, what the Enlightenment viewed as the aberrant perspective
of the fetishist, Hegel viewed as normal. Unlike liberal Enlightenment
thought, which accepts the distinction between the objective and the sub-
jective as two autonomous modes of knowledge and experience, and unlike
poststructuralist thought, which viewed this distinction as just another
false dualism to be deconstructed as an arbitrary differential structure and
thereby overcome, dialectical phenomenology privileges this particular sort
of dualism as grounded in direct experience and as representing two
reversible modes of perception. That is, the human mind has the capacity
to regard various internal and external phenomena as alternately subjec-
tive or objective. Particular desires may be experienced subjectively as part
of one’s conscious intentional free will, while others appear objectively as
internal, alienated compulsions; just as various external entities may be
regarded as other subjects like oneself, or they may be reified as intention-
less things. For Hegel, the capacity to make distinctions between what is
subjective and what is objective, between what is contingent and change-
able and what is necessary and environmental, and then to alter one’s ideas
and perceptions as a result of confronting the contradictions posed by the
way one has made these distinctions, is the fundamental dialectical capac-
ity structuring both personal and social consciousness.
T h e relation of this capacity to the problem of perversion has recently
been discussed by the analytic Marxist Jon Elster in a book entitled Sour
Grapes. T h e title refers to the familiar parable of the fox who wants some
grapes until he realizes he cannot get them, whereupon he decides they are
sour and hence undesirable. This is an example of the way in which subjec-
tive desires may be altered as a result of a change in objective expectations.

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995

Elster calls this “adaptive preference formation.’’ There are also instances of
“adaptive perception’’ where what is changed is not one’s subjective desire
but one’s belief regarding the objective situation. (Apparently in the French
version of the story, the fox decides the grapes are green and hence not
ripe.27) Perversion comes in when changes are “counteradaptive”: the exam-
ple for subjective desire is the notion that “forbidden fruit is always
sweeter”; the objective, perceptual counterpart is expressed in the saying
“the grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard.”*8From Elster’s ana-
lytic perspective, all these are examples of “dissonance reduction”; that is,
they are libidinal and cognitive mechanisms responsive to the tension
caused by the experience of contradictions. As Meister argues, Marx viewed
ideologies similarly, as efforts to resolve the contradictions that people feel
in themselves as the result of their positioning in a multiplicity of social
institutions which define their interests and identities in different ways. T h e
potential schizophrenia this may cause-for example, the woman who is a
bad wife within the institution of the family because she is a good worker in
her job within the economy, or vice versa-is, from the Marxian stand-
point, a symptom of more fundamental contradictions within and between
the institutions composing a particular society as they cooperate and conflict
in the ongoing material process of social reproduction. Indeed, it is in
Marx’s application of Hegelian dialectical analysis to the problem of institu-
tional contradictions, as a method of ideological critique, that we find his
distinctive theory of subjectivity and the ground of that politics of identity
with which Meister has dealt.
My interest here is the issue of capitalism and perversion raised by the
notion of fetishism found in Marx’s work on Capital. T h e understanding
of this notion has been more hindered than helped by the overemphasis in
cultural Marxist and post-Marxist writing on “commodity fetishism.”
Commodity fetishism was only one aspect of the concept of fetishism
found in Marx’s four-volume work. Marx viewed the overall process of
capitalist production as a process of fetishization, that is, of thejxation-
the realization and accumulation- of surplus value in material things
which were attributed with a supernatural power to create social wealth.
This objective social illusion entailed a displacement and reification of the
power proper to living, laboring persons, who in turn became dependent

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 55 1

in their concrete lives and self-identities on this type of overvalued power

object, capital.
T h e commodity is only one side of such fetishism: capital is the other and
the more significant side. Indeed, Marx’s whole dialectical analysis of mod-
ern political economy is guided by the contradiction that all economic
objects in capitalist society are simultaneously market commodities and
capital investments, objects of exchange and objects of accumulation. For
Marx, the completion of the fetishization of societies by the system of capi-
tal, the moment when capital appears in its “perfected” form as a fetish,
arises only with the full development of banking and finance capital in the
form of money as interest-bearing capital, money that seems to have the
immaculate miraculous power to generate a surplus of profit by itself out of
itself.
Interest-bearing credit money and the other instruments of finance capi-
tal are the purest expression of the capitalist conception that wealth and the
process of social reproduction and growth is rightly driven by the motive of
monetary profit. From its first ideological formulations, political economy
has justified this claim by offering a theory of market relations as a sort of
providential process of benevolent moral perversion. Recall the subtitle of
the early-eighteenth-century writer Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees:
“Private Vices, Public Virtues.’’ Mandeville countered the criticism of the
new commercial world preached by traditional moralists by arguing that,
while they were right that the market motives of greed, avarice, and pride-
ful self-interest were indeed vices in private morality, in the new sphere of
civil society these very vices became “public virtues,” leading to collective
prosperity and social well-being. This notion was the origin of Adam
Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand” which supposedly gave the
microchaos of market competition a beneficial macroteleology. Smith, how-
ever, and after him Ricardo, provided a more rational ground for market-
place morality by developing a labor theory of economic values in which all
participants in the process of production-workers, capitalists, and those
who provided scarce resources and money -were understood to receive
back a just proportion of the value they put into production in the form of
monetary quantities (wages, profits, and rent or interest).
As Robert Meister demonstrates in Political Identity, Marx performed a

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 552

sort of Kantian or critical appropriation of this labor theory of value insofar

as it tried to explain the surplus value which was the portion of product
sales allotted to the capitalist. Marx’s idea was that profits and other forms
of monetary surplus value could only be rationally explained as deductions
extracted from the labor value that working producers put into things. This
technical theory of exploitation as surplus value that represented unpaid
labor time seemed in Marx’s day to bear a direct relation to the concrete mis-
ery and deprivation suffered by nineteenth-century industrial workers.
Nevertheless, Marx’s actual theory does not require such a direct relation,
and indeed the displacements of the sites where surplus value is created in
production, realized in market exchange, and accumulated in the form of
new capital investments, positively required, as Meister points out, a situa-
tion of unequal exploitation among workers in different industries and
indeed, in the modern global economy, in different nations. This means
that some workers who are exploited in a technical sense may be relatively
prosperous and may find it contrary to their own material interests to iden-
tify politically with the working class as a whole. T h e politics of Marx’s the-
ory of exploitation was not that workers should receive the full value of
their labor in the form of monetary wages- this was the position of certain
utopian socialists such as Proudhon whom he strongly criticized- but
rather that the use of the social surplus value extracted in exploitation
should be a political object subject to democratic accountability. T h e poli-
tics of surplus value exists not (or, not only) on the microlevel of the indi-
vidual laborer’s direct monetary compensation, but rather on the
macrolevel of capital investment decisions that distribute the social surplus
toward new production and the needs and desires such production will sat-
isfy. Marx’s notion is that the motive of monetary profits as the basis for the
decisions that determine our collective future will systematically benefit
some -that is, the capitalist class and political rulers who make these deci-
sions- at the expense of others. As investment capital becomes increasingly
concentrated in the form of large public and private funds (the social secu-
rity fund, pension funds, insurance funds, public and private health care
funds) the political truth of that mysterious power-object, capital, becomes
increasingly evident: the truth that capital is not an impersonal objective
thing but is rather the material form of the social power to command future

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 553

labor and resources, thereby deciding which future needs and desires will
be satisfied and, in the process, targeting certain social groups for various
benefits and others for deprivation and suffering.
T h e truth that capital is a historically specific form for the material
expression of temporal social obligations is increasingly revealed in
moments when the pure fetish-form of capital gains a certain autonomy, as
in the 1980s. Liberal theorists might explain away the events of the 1980s as
the arbitrary aberration of certain idiosyncratically perverse individuals like
Donald Dixon and Charles Keating or as the accidental decadence of a gen-
eration of top-level officers in the managerial capitalism that the economic
historian Alfred Chandler says distinguishes the American system of mar-
ket production.29 Alternately, liberal economists might view these events as
merely the unforeseen, aberrant consequence of government policies that
created “perverse incentives” for businessmen, in the case of the S&L deba-
cle, by deregulating the interest rates that savings and loan banks could
offer depositors and charge borrowers, as well as the types of loans they
were permitted to make, without also deregulating the federal insurance
system which guaranteed that losses to bank depositors would be covered
by federal tax dollars. This produced what the economist Edward Kane
calls “zombie banks” who were able to transcend their “natural death from
accumulated losses by the black magic of federal guarantees.”30 These zom-
bie banks were then able to engage in fraudulent practices in which, in
effect, they lent themselves (in the guise of technically independent invest-
ment groups) vast amounts of money at high fees (thereby scoring spectacu-
lar profits on their income statements and impressive asset growth on the
balance sheets) for investments that were not so much high-risk gambles as
certain failures, failures whose losses would be covered by federal insurance
funds. Like all purely capitalist fraud, the essence of this system was the
Ponzi scheme, a swindle named in honor of its master, the famous Boston
con man of the 1920s, Charles Ponzi. T h e principle involved is basically
that of a chain letter. T h e con man offers high interest rates on some pro-
ject, thereby attracting waves of eager investors; the interest earnings of one
wave is paid off with the money of the next, with healthy profits left over
for the swindler, who, when new investors dry up, absconds with the
remaining funds. T h e Ponzi scheme is the characteristic perversion internal

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 554

to the basic structure of capital. Not only does it reveal the disjunction of
capitalism’s driving motive, monetary profit, from the production of con-
crete wealth for the use of society, but it also illuminates the abstract irra-
tionality that is the temporal essence of capitalism. T h e latter is equally evi-
dent in the temporal dimension of the utilitarian psychology that political
economics requires as its complement: this is expressed in the notion of
what is called “time preference,” the concept that justifies the charging of
interest on loaned money by positing that people prefer, and hence the
economy values, real present goods over expected future goods.31 T h e tem-
poral blindness this formalizes was expressed informally in Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent testimony to Congress when he
expressed bewilderment at the current drastic drop in consumer confidence
when all economic indicators showed that the current recession is far
milder than that of the first years of the Reagan administration, when pub-
lic confidence was much higher. Somewhat later, he mused that this might
have something to do with people’s anxiety about the future caused by their
sudden perception of the instability of the value of their personal assets and
their suspicion that the social security and pension funds upon which they
were relying for their later years may not effectively exist by then.
From the sort of Marxian perspective articulated by Meister, this appears
far less mysterious, since Marxian analysis proceeds by criticizing the super-
ficial representation of economic reality expressed in price indicators and
capitalist accounting systems by relating these to the political demographics
of changing income distributions and population trends, such as the on-
going shift of the American population, caused by the baby boom and
longer life expectancy, from a three-generational triangle with a relatively
few seniors at the top to a four-generational rectangle with a far greater
proportion of nonworking retirees whose health care and other basic needs
will expand drastically by the first decades of the twenty-first century.32 The
demographic effects of investment decisions are external and invisible to
the forms of decision calculation and economic accounting through which
capitalism represents society to itself as a market economy. T h e truth this
disavowal of demographic impacts indicates is the fact that there is no nec-
essary correlation between the investments that will bring capital funds and
private speculators the greatest profits, and those that will best bring about

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 555

that distribution of productive resources and social entitlements most likely

to meet the (to some extent)predzctable future needs of society. This is espe-
cially true when the needs of the many depend on the investment decisions
of the few whose institutionally structured interests differ from those of the
many and who are not accountable to them. Because the institutions of the
liberal democratic state are neither powerless nor immune to popular pres-
sure, a new politics of generational equity, health care, and social insurance
funds may well emerge as the practical critique of the capitalist finance
fetishism that exploded in the last decade.
There is a final point worth making about the fetishistic moment of the
1980s. In their desublimated libidinal intoxication, the cowboy capitalists of
the 1980s seemed to gather into the theater of financial fetishism the dis-
tinctive fetishisms of other social institutions that compose our society. Art-
works were at once overvalued and debased in the giddy rush by rich col-
lectors and conspicuous consumers; sexual excesses took a form that seemed
to reveal the fundamental fetish structures of institutionalized gender rela-
tions;33 and so on. To a large extent, all of this might be approached from a
Marxian perspective. Employing the Marxian method developed by Meis-
ter, one can study the contradictory relation of the social identities that exist
within and across institutions that appear in moments of social crisis and
excess. T h e privilege of economic fetishism among the multiplicity of insti-
tutional fetishisms that characterize our society derives from the fact that
money is our general form of entitlement to the full range of resources,
goods, and services available in society, even, in practice, those usually con-
cealed fetish forms which social and political institutions forbid as immoral
or illegal.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is one aspect of perversion that a
Marxian approach cannot find any way to deal with. This is the notion of
perversion as paraphilia. Paraphilia is the term used in the standard psychi-
atric definition of perversion.34 Etymologically, it is composed of the Greek
word for love,philia, and a prepositional prefix, para, meaning a deviation;
and the word might be read to indicate, not so much a deviance of love
toward its object, but, in a stronger sense, a love of deviance as such, a desire
or compulsion toward precisely what is most undesirable- the sort of
compulsion that leads some to eat excrement and perform acts of radical

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 556

debasement. That is, it raises what Freud called “the economic problem of
masochism,” a problem which the rational-choice perversion theory of
Elster and the “dissonance reduction” model seems unable to approach save
in the vague intuition that the human mind has a tendency “to go to
extremes.”35 Both Elster, following the argument of Paul Veyne, and Freud
view masochism as a kind of compromise formation for the insufficiently
sublimated, as a way to gratify forbidden pleasures and knowledge in the
very act of submitting to an order of moral repression. This argument does-
n’t satisfy me, and I think there is something being expressed in writers like
Bataille that is both truer and more dangerous. If, as the concept of
fetishism implies, the embodied self is itself experienced as a value subject
to increase and diminishment as a result of historical action of the sort that
causes fixation and trauma, then perversion in the strong sense might be
viewed as a drive to seek out those perilous situations of passionate intensity
in which the value of the self is put at radical riJ4 in a way that may result in
a condition of greater dignity or greater degradation. In the final section of
this essay, I would like to consider the sort of materialist theory and model
of “fetishism” that might be able to take this into account.

Rationality, Materialism, and the Temporal Value of Social Power

A critical model of social fetishism would appeal to a pragmatic conception

of rationality and dialectical criticism, a materialist phenomenology of
intentionality, and a historical analysis of the relation between value objects,
social power, and personal identity. Following Marx, I would view such a
theory as a contribution to the socialist critique and transformation of the
system of capital.
When the term rationality is employed in a negative sense, it is usually
being criticized from the perspectives of empiricism or pragmatism. A
rationality that is only concerned with abstract definitions and logical con-
sistency is considered insufficiently empirical because it ignores the signifi-
cance of experimental observation and historical evidence, and it is consid-
ered insufficiently pragmatic because it refuses to locate its abstract
definitions and principles in the operational activities and practical contexts
which are the true ground of their meaning. But when the phrase rational

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 557

thought is used in a positive sense, it is usually understood to include these

other dimensions. This is at least true for materialist conceptions of rational
thought, since materialism assumes that objects exist only in a context of
events and that thoughts occur only in a context of actions. As I understand
it, a pragmatic and empirical rationality is a process of self-critical articula-
tion which characteristically analyzes actions and events through three
interrelated types of concepts: principles, values, ends, goals (the reasons
why one does something or why some event happens); means, methods,
procedures, mechanisms (how one goes about doing something or how
some event is produced); and effects, results, impacts, outcomes (what is
actually accomplished through doing something, what becomes altered
when some event occurs). Rational thought tries to articulate the relevant
principles, means, and effects of some activity. Doing this allows the thinker
then to engage in a process of practical decision by judging the merits of one
set of alternatives through the other two: for instance, by considering alter-
native procedures in the light of the goal one is trying to accomplish and the
likely impact of employing a particular procedure for accomplishing it; or
judging the significance of some general principle or value in the light of
the concrete behaviors that enact it and the real effects of those actions; or
judging the desirability of some result or state of affairs in the light of the
principles involved and the causal factors responsible for it. Thought which
strives for understanding by employing this triad of distinctions is what I
understand by rational thought. Rational thought which revises its own
concepts and categories upon confronting contradictions in the course of
such inquiry is what I understand by dialectical criticism.
T h e materialist aspect of such rational criticism may be found in its
enabling distinction between the intentions (purposes, principles, goals) of
some personal project or institutional policy and the actual outcomes
against which these may be gauged, including the unintended conse-
quences of actions and programs (what economists term “externals”). Mate-
rial facts are thus conceived only in contrast to intentions and intended con-
sequences. Hence the use of the term “material forces” is apt, since forces
are nonintentional causal factors. A notion of materiality as those aspects of
knowledge and experience which are at once external and present to per-
sonal and social intentionality points to the sort of materialist theory of

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995

intentional thought and life that is, in my opinion, the great unthinkable for
liberal social theory with its absolutist dualisms between mind and matter,
between subjectivity and objectivity, and between moral society and the
physical world. Hegelian dialectics went beyond such dualism by focusing
on the mutual relation and changeable dynamism between what people
constitute as objective and environmental and what they regard as subjec-
tive and open to intentional determination. It was, of course, Feuerbach
who first sought to reground this dialectical process from the conceptual
and institutional idealism of Hegelianism to our experience of the sensu-
ously material world and to social history, and Marx’s early critiques of
Hegelian dialectics developed highly suggestive advances along these lines
that his later work presumed but never explicitly theorized. I follow Vivian
Sobchack (Addressof the Eye, 1992)in finding the materialist theorization of
subjectivity as an essentially embodied intentionality suggested by Marx’s
writings in the existential phenomenology inaugurated by Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty. Such a materialist phenomenology always begins by describing
the situated, reversible relations between particular embodied, intentional
subjects and particular meaningful objects and experienced events. A ratio-
nal criticism would identify the purposes and values such forms of life the-
matize, the embodied actions and institutional structures that are the mate-
rial means for realizing these purposes and values, and the intended and
unintended consequences of these activities. From such a perspective, some-
thing like “fetishes,” objects and qualities that are experienced as embody-
ing personal and social values, would seem to be normal rather than prob-
lematic. If the notion of fetishism is to have any useful specificity, it must
refer to objective phenomena that are valued with an exceptional intensity
by individuals or by a society in general. T h e history of the discourse about
fetishism suggests that fetishes may be conceived as excessively valued
material objects upon which the very existence and identity of an individ-
ual, cultural group, or society is experienced as depending. This would in
turn suggest that a critique of fetishism should begin with a materialist phe-
nomenology of historically particular fetish objects. T h e embodiment rela-
tions and institutional structures articulated by such inquiry into socially
valued objects should then follow two paths: first, a Marxian analysis of
such objects should locate their excessive valuation in the conflicts and con-

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 559

tradictions between the structures of social power reified in the multiplicity

of institutions that compose a given social formation; second, the intensely
personal investment of individual identities in such objects should be stud-
ied by relating them to those arguments and those dramatized scenarios of
the libidinal imagination wherein people express their own understanding
of the ground of their own self-worth (or lack of it). That is, the critique of
fetishism should begin with value objects and then trace these forms of
value to objective structures of social power and to subjective conceptions of
personal worth. Indeed, this is not really alien to the sort of criticism Marx
pursued. Recent post-Marxists have berated Marx for his supposedly con-
tradictory scientific invocation of objective historical trends determined by
institutional structures, on the one hand, and his voluntarist appeal to sub-
jectively motivated political action by social groups, on the other. But, far
from debunking Marx’s project, this illuminates the value of Marx’s critical
method, not for the production of yet another general social theory, but for
the articulation of an informed and self-critical politics that is formed from
both an objective analysis of social structures in the process of change and a
reasoned subjective identification with and political commitment to certain
social groups.
T h e point of such a materialist analysis of the interrelations of value
forms, social power, and personal identities, in my opinion, is that it affords
a simultaneous analysis of capitalist economics and moral perversion from
the ethical standpoint of democratic socialism. In regard to the former,
what could awkwardly be termed the capitalist understanding of capital is
best grasped by examining its conception of money. Money is, of course, a
measure and expression of value. Moreover, it functions as a store of a cer-
tain kind of power, purchasing power. Liberal economics grounds these
functions of money in what it terms the fundamental function of money,
that of a means of commodity exchange. T h e specifically capitalist function
of money, as a means of investment for future production and contractual
obligation between social agents, is not discussed as part of the essence of
money, and is taken u p in separate discussions of what is called the “time
value” of money. As I have discussed, it is precisely in the time value of
money that Marx locates both the fetishization and the social truth of
money. By employing a labor theory of surplus value to relate economic

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 560

measures of monetary profits to the demographic flows of laboring groups

among the various sectors of economic production (and unemployment),
Marx provided a method of social scientific inquiry able to subsume liberal
economics in a broader socialist analysis of monetarized economies. T h e
use of such quantitative analysis for a democratic politics has been devel-
oped at length in Meister’s Political Materialism and there is no need to sum-
marize his arguments here. What might have some use is to indicate how a
complementary project for cultural studies, one informed by the pluralist
ethical standard required for a democratic socialism, might be framed.
I believe there is, as I have said, a reason why writers like Bataille and
more recent poststructuralist theorists have tended to interrogate and
even celebrate what conventional morality has termed perversion. If per-
version is the violation of the ethical norms of a society that one believes
to be systemically unjust and oppressive to certain groups, then certain
activities deemed perverse could be legitimately embraced as a sort of
emancipatory cultural politics. But beyond this, writers who have empha-
sized the importance of chance and risk have touched on a deeper truth
about the process through which dignity, self-worth, and even- that
most impossible word- love, are won. From this perspective, even prac-
tices of sadomasochism, to take the touchstone for normative theories of
perversion, cannot be deemed perverse if the participants are putting their
senses of self radically at risk in a manner that may result in a greater
mutual sense of self-worth and a more open capacity for love. If, however,
debasement and degradation are not the means of risk by which self-value
may be increased but rather the desired end itself, this could legitimately
be judged a perversion of love. Norman 0. Brown once titled a book of
his Love> Body in order to offer something like a nontheological but still
religious and radically socialist standard for judging society as a material
unity (a body) in which people interact and form social relations that are
ultimately understandable as forms of love. Surely one cannot adequately
understand a figure of the 1980s like Charles Keating without taking into
account the furiously homophobic patriarchal ideal that drove him to lead
crusades for “moral decency,” to pack his company with overpaid rela-
tives, and to attempt to realize a paradisical resort filled with only the very
wealthy who would share his “family values,” a vision which drove him

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism and Perversion 56 1

beyond all bounds of economic rationality. It is a fundamental contradic-

tion of capitalist market society that it both undermined the objective
institutional power of an older patriarchal society36 and yet placed in posi-
tions of great power within capitalist society the social agents who felt
most threatened and diminished by capital’s subversion of structures of
patriarchal domination. T h e fetishism of the excess of the 1980s in the
United States must thus be viewed not merely as moment of crisis in
which public catastrophe further revealed the social essence of capital, but
as a moment when men in power, feeling their identities and the ground
of their sense of self-worth at risk, performed acts of excess that are also
rightly judged as perversions of love, that social principle that dare not
speak its name.

Notes

This essay is dedicated, and indebted, to Norman 0. Brown, who persistently drew my
attention to the work of Bataille and GOUX,and without whose conversation this essay
would not have been written.
I Connie Bruck, The Predator? Ball: The Inside Story of B e x e l Bumham and the Rise of the Junk
Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin, 1989), 16.
2 Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (New
York: Harper and Row, 1990), 128-129.
3 Ibid.,94.
4 Ibid.,95.
5 James O’Shea, The Daisy Chain: H o w Borrowed Millions Sank a Texas S&L (New York:
Pocket Books, 1991),66.
6 Steven Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of America? Savings and
Loans (New York: Harper, 199r), 55.
7 James Ring Adams, The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal (New York: Wiley, 1991),224.
8 Jean-Joseph GOUX,“General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism,” Yale French Studies 79
(1990): 224.
9 Ibid.,206.
10 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. I (New York: Zone, 1988),
21.

II Ibid., 67-74 (italics in original).

12 GOUX,“General Economics,” 207-208.
13 Ibid., 207.

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

positions 3:2 Fall 1995 562

‘4 Ibid., 208.
‘5 Ibid., 209.
16 Ibid., 21I .
‘7 Ibid., 2 1 2 .
18 Ibid.
‘9 Ibid., 213, 215.
20 Ibid., 221.
21 John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), I -26.
22 Quoted in James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1990),770.

23 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nico-
laus (New York: Random House, 1973),91-92.
24 G. W. F, Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press,
1952). 126-133.
25 Robert Meister, Political Identity: Thinking through Marx (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell,
1991).
26 Ibid., 32.
27 Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1983), I 23.
28 Ibid., I I I .
29 Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).47-234.
30 Edward J. Kane, The S 6 1 , Insurance Mess: H o w Did It Happen? (Washington, D.C.: Urban
Institute, 1989), 4.
3’ Murray N. Rothbard, “Time Preference,” in Capital Theory, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Mil-
gate, and Peter Newman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990),239.
32 Fr ank Levy, Dollars and Dreams: T h e Changing American Income Distribution (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the
American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1990);Phillip
Longman, Born to Pay: The N e w Politics of Aging in America (Boston: Houghton Miftlin,
1987).
33 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressingand Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge,
1992); Jann Matlock, “Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing,
Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion, 1882- 1935,” in Fetishism as Cultural Dzscourse, ed.
Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993),3-6; Robert
A. Nye, “The Medical Origins of Sexual Fetishism,” in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cul-
tural Discourse, 13-30.

Published by Duke University Press

 positions

Pietz I Capitalism a n d Perversion 563

34 American Psychiatric Association, “Paraphifias,” in DiagnosricandScacistical Manual of Men-

tal Disorders, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association), 266-267.
35 Elster, 118.
36 For an excellent discussion of this see the chapter on “Eros and Ethos” in Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution:jucksonianAmerica, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press,
‘99’).

Published by Duke University Press