Bad Exchanges
The editors
We are beginning, yet again, from the absolute zero of collective devastation. Why, we may wonder, is there a mandate to start every narrative of progress from abyssal places of conquest and extermination? We know, historically, that capitalism’s style of production restarts itself—time and again—primarily through enclosure and dispossession, then measured with a smile of coerced assent to market logic. The time-clock of productive capitalist exploitation overlays devastated environments, genocided peoples, and extracted landscapes. Unbothered and unrestrained by any baggage in this drive to possess, capitalism projects ahead and promises a full recuperation of these losses in some future time, when profit is realized, when the moral arc of the universe bends toward the equal opportunity of rational economic actors and their sensible financial activity. In that future time, measured in financial quarters, we are told justice will be served through the rarefied realms of market activity. Finally, all the violence that capitalism demands, in order to start up and manage itself, can be transformed into a net gain.
And yet, there is no arc. It is a false geometric figure, used to square this bad exchange. There is no justice to come at the end of the quarter. For those on the wrong side of the ledger of society, progress into greater stability, security, and “healthy” productivity is a mirage—always in the offing, each of us caught on a hamster wheel of pathos to produce more for less. The uninterrupted cruelty of the business cycle might be variously mapped and primed by the apparently rational architects of the political economy, but it more resembles a cascading and infernal series of circular trade-offs—a bad infinity of wishing for progress in a political-economic structure that precludes its possibility. Modernity requires a concession, avant la lettre, to the conditions of an economic exchange that never stops extending debt. That debt is, in our current political-economic conjuncture, the measure of collective discontent: whether floated on the turbulent seas of credit, or indentured in the hard realities of loans and usury, all for the sake of a tranquil picture of socially harmonious economic relations nowhere in evidence. For any individual, one unavoidable and dominating form of psychical suffering is the hopeless attempt to square the circle of what capital demands—and takes—from each of us so that we might live, however barely, in this world.
Intimate critics of this order of things are ever born into this picture, but there are two among them habitually called forth: Freud and Marx, who shared more than is often acknowledged, especially a sense that we are necessarily, and symptomatically, in thrall to that which causes the misery. Taken together, they author what might blandly be called a methodological commitment, but that does not express their painstakingly pursued aims: the dismantling of what produces a surplus of needless suffering, personally and at scale. Without this emphasis on where their respective interventions are lodged, one can get wrapped up in separating them from one another in order to underline what’s irreconcilable. Here, again, we would be redoubled: Freud, the theorist of irreconcilable psychical conflicts; Marx, the theorist of irreconcilable political-economic realities. In both cases, the praxis pursued in their names is lost to an obsessional preoccupation with preserving their unique canonical status: the endless clinical work of traversing transference, the collective adventure of overcoming the historical organization of capitalism in perpetuity.
The failure to reconcile two thinkers born in the 19th century—at whatever level, theoretically or otherwise—seems quaint next to the fact that we have still not managed to overcome the capitalist organization of society, despite its depredations amid violent hostility to its dissidents everywhere. The veritable opposite reigns: capitalism, in its liberal expression or otherwise, uniquely determines forms of life on earth, and all contenders to alternative forms of social organization have been largely marginalized, vanquished, incorporated, or subordinated, such that defenders of capitalism hardly have solid alibis in order to blame ideological opponents for the suffering it causes. Yet, as ever, capitalism is embattled within its own reproducible exploitation, everywhere reinforcing its dominion—restless, anxious, and implacable in its worldwide domination and quest for more growing markets, pushing madly to the end of destroying the earth’s habitability itself.
“We are beginning, yet again, from the absolute zero of collective devastation.”
In such a situation, Freud and Marx remain on the same side in helping us to flip this apparently reasonable world upside-down, where what is unreasoned, unconscious, and uncaptured by capitalism’s bad exchanges have as much to say as the rationalizing calculations of economic actors—wherein the possibilities of the world are reduced to money exchanging hands, whatever the irrational costs of political-economic investments. In this respect, they survive as thinkers of an irreducible antagonism against what appears to exist eternally and everywhere the same in the ruling futures of illusion—redeemed in the ledgers of financial heaven, engorged on the dissatisfying satisfaction of innovated wares, and wholly consumed by giving the labor of oneself over to capital’s uniform machinery. This imposed homogeneity would ensure the solipsistic ideological wish that capital should exist all alone, only reproducing, circulating, and acquiring itself—money in, money out, the surplus appropriated by a few, forever.
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But, as Freud knew well, money lives in the mind, too, not just the checkbook. We all note the polysemic rhyme of alienation, setting out the terms of symptom and cause: economic alienation traverses psychical alienation. Psychoanalysis shows us how this starts not with the first wage-relation but, indeed, at birth.
The baby is helpless, at the ready for annihilation or its opposite—life provided here and everywhere by reproductive labor, by love. The parent knows this, and so does the child. The baby is intershot with two kinds of exchange: one real and one imagined, the milk and the so-called mother of the mind, being fed and the meanings of being fed. How the baby manages the slings of these two exchanges—the basic demands for attention and presence, feeding and clothing—marks them for life. Psychoanalysts have continually renovated this story, but they all agree on this one thing.
But the baby doesn’t just take—it also gives, or so Freud noticed when observing children. The baby, of course, learns to give on instruction: “give it to me!” And so the baby does. In its fantastical imagining of the Oedipal triangle, the baby gives back its image redoubled—it offers a proxy. The baby can’t yet reproduce, so it produces. The gift of its insides, of shit, is proudly borne. “It is probable that the first meaning which a child’s interest in faeces develops is that of ‘gift’ rather than ‘gold’ or ‘money,’” Freud writes, noting the difference between what enters into exchange and circulation. He continues, “Since his faeces are his first gift, the child easily transfers his interest from that substance to the new one which he comes across as the most valuable gift in life.” This single observation led Freud to his great mathematical principle of equivalence: money is equal to babies, feces, and gifts.
Later, Freud would link this scene of exchange, the mother’s demand and the baby’s vexed capitulation, to analysis: “Those who question this derivation of gifts should consider their experience of psycho-analytic treatment, study the gifts they receive as doctors from their patients, and watch the storms of transference which a gift from them can rouse in their patients.” In his initial understanding of the cost of psychoanalysis, Freud felt that the exchange of ear for cash mirrored what was seen in the nursery.
And Freud was right: psychoanalysis is not somehow separate from this scene of demand and answer. Indeed, these economics appear in psychoanalysis all the time. Psychoanalysis costs us to pay to talk? How could it be justified to pay someone to listen? And how did this exchange of time and ear for money and speech become codified? Psychoanalysis tried to solve the early exchanges by compounding the problem. Freud’s first thought about money was about professionalizing his nascent science—commanding the fee. Much like Charcot insisted only the true hysteric could come under the sway of hypnosis, Freud thought his patients would have to be the worried well, and that the fee would be the sole medium of respect for psychoanalysis. The more it hurt, the faster symptoms would slacken.
Although popular perception arrests Freud in the middle of authoring this thought, it was far from his final edict on the matter. The economic histories of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, are much more varied than that flat presentation suggests. By 1918, right before the close of the Great War and at the start of the Spanish Flu pandemic, Freud proposed to use free clinics and state institutions to provide mass mental health care. At the first gathering of international psychoanalysts since the start of that war, Freud argued in a speech that there would first have to be a large increase in practicing psychoanalysts, and that initially private charities would have to provide economic backing for such new institutions. If these material conditions were met,
“the poor man [would] have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the lifesaving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis, and can be left as little as the latter to the impotent care of individual members of the community. . . . Such treatments will be free.”
Here, from the middle of an international crisis, Freud flexibly imagined a future in which treatment would resemble a gift.
Stymied by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, as historian Elizabeth Danto shows, his vision was taken up by the Second Generation of psychoanalysts. A network of free clinics in ten cities was successfully authored by those who wanted a psychoanalysis for all, including Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson. That we have largely repressed this history—and that of the many free clinics that followed—is a sign of their import. The field seemingly cannot recall that by deleting money from the frame, new and responsible forms of care called psychoanalysis are possible.
Ever since Freud decided that money is equivalent to the gift of shit, or the appearance of the baby, psychoanalytic approaches to economics have sought to clarify these fascinating fetishes and their exchange: economics as libidinal and economics as political. Peculiarly unlike sadism, which pleasurably and aggressively believes it gets what it wants, masochism posed what Freud called “an economic problem.” This problem turned his initial notion on its head: he had thought that pleasure and pain oscillate across a quantitatively balanced exchange—that an increase of pleasure inevitably corresponds to an equal decrease in pain, and vice versa. Masochistic fantasies—the desire for our own destruction and pleasure in the experience of pain—destabilize this exchange. The introduction of the death drive redrew the entire picture, allowing Freud to understand masochism’s play within inextricable antagonisms. Drive theory, in other words, finally repudiated a homeostatic model of net gains and losses. At least after 1920, psychoanalysis wholly rejected the contraction of psychical life and libidinal energies into a straightforward story of tightly inventoried economic exchange—right as a free psychoanalysis was achieved for some.
“The field seemingly cannot recall that by deleting money from the frame, new and responsible forms of care called psychoanalysis are possible.”
With its repudiation of a reductively economic model, the death drive arrived to psychoanalysis as the token of libidinal economy and its bad exchanges—its instabilities, excesses, privations, and irrationalities—contra political economy’s fantasy of perfect exchanges between rational actors. As Samo Tomšič reminds us, “Freud’s crucial political insight was that every social order builds on libidinal economy.” Capitalism, in turn, “mobilizes the structural deadlocks of libidinal economy” and exploits them for profit, promising a redemptive arc of losses recovered through the bad bargain itself—via exploitation as the inevitable, even at times enjoyable, path toward squaring psychical-political conflicts.
Preying on this agonizing political-economic and libidinal problem in social relations, fascism, both in Freud’s time and ours, wishes away the destabilizing element in masochism—something Freud once considered an ethical achievement—by channeling and weaponizing sadism against parts of ourselves we wish to harm and destroy, converting the ambivalences of masochistic fantasies into annihilative sadistic ones at an extreme rate and pace. So long as capitalist organization is ascendant, this psychical and political-economic conversion into fascism’s total war and destruction remains—a disavowed self-destruction, displaced onto others, making grave remains. This is yet another reason to abolish this overextended historical period of capitalism supreme. Fighting against the worst of possible outcomes, we again find ourselves amid catastrophes present and forecasted. The project of constructing positive solidaristic bonds that would help us toward that collective overcoming is uneasy and uncertain—no small matter to mobilize collectively the slings and arrows of ever-antagonistic relations.
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Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx more simply turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, always balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.
Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and imposed political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Reason, for that matter, is an acquired taste. We reason ourselves into the order of things, and we acquire and shape ourselves into reasonable beings through the bitter fruits of labor. That labor goes toward reproducing oneself and others, while reproducing capital, but therein lies the rub and the contradiction: the reasonable labor of reproducing ourselves—making new strangers we call babies, enlarging society itself in the aggregate—continually runs up against the reduction of that work to the unreasonable and imposed compulsions of capital. So much, then, is left out of the bad exchange: the daily and nourishing labors and pleasures of life transformed into the undead labor of the dominant class’s surpluses. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from precocious life to premature death, where the workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot.
That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self that makes the exchange possible. An uncanny travesty of dialogue, the exchange between worker and capital tarries with the unreasoned mute compulsions of capitalist social organization. This dynamically total system is ever a bit beyond what can be articulated about it, but it always has its say on what we do and do not do, what we can and cannot do, what we must resist but have failed to fully overcome—yet. Giving voice to the perpetually imposed bad side of racial capitalism, speaking against capital’s self-enriching monologue, Fanon once wrote of how he “was up against something unreasoned. The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason. I felt knife blades open within me.”
So far as the social organization of capital makes unreasonable demands on our time—distorting the shape of our life—the knife always cuts from inside-out in revolt and conformity alike. The adjustment to this apparently rational political-economic order is not, for all that, without its scars, mementos of alienation and exploitation. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how that stunting force of the political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.