Introduction for The Sexual Economy of Capitalism
INTRODUCTION
WHILE I WAS WORKING ON THIS BOOK, many acquaintances inquired what I mean by the phrase “the sexual economy of capitalism.” I often asked them in return whether they would like to hear the short and vulgar answer or a more refined one. Most of them preferred the former, so I will ask the forgiveness of more sensitive readers and start with it. In capitalism men do not buy women as wives, and this nonbuying is part of what shaped the economy. That marriage is no longer managed as an exchange, and that husbands no longer own their wives, are obvious fundamental facts about gender relations in liberal societies that distinguish them from traditional patriarchal ones. What tends to escape our attention, however, is that by the same token these are also basic facts about exchange, money, and ownership that distinguish capitalist economies from precapitalist ones. The nonbuying of women should be considered a positive property of the capitalist forms of money, exchange, and ownership, manifested in the eroticization of economic life. Advertising is but the most conspicuous manifestation of this. From the perspective afforded by advertising, capitalism seems to be an economy where wives are not owned, at least not formally, yet everything one buys is a woman. This book takes the transformation in gender relations as a starting point for an economic theory of capitalism, addressing ostensibly gender-neutral questions: What is capitalist money? What is its relation to finance and capital? What is economy? What is the difference between an economy encompassing wives alongside things such as lands, tools, and houses, and one that consists, formally at least, only of things?
For a more detailed presentation, let me turn to the tactlessness of economics. It is sometimes of great intellectual merit that, regardless of their answers, which are often off the mark, economists pose tactless questions—not unlike speaking about money at a dinner party. Such a tactless question has attracted the attention of some economists lately regarding the institution of monogamous marriage: why is it that rich men in affluent societies do not marry more than one wife (Adshade 2013)? The significance of this question is highlighted by an assumption shared today by both economists and many of their critics, namely that market relations have come to dominate society as a whole. The manifestation of this assumption within economics is usually called “economic imperialism,” a term that designates the belief that the concepts and tools of the discipline can be applied to any sort of human behavior, including marriage. On the critical side, a similar assumption informs the study of neoliberalism, which is understood as a political agenda aiming to reshape society to the form of the free market. So that is the full meaning of the economists’ tactless question: if social life is indeed increasingly permeated by market logic, why is it that rich people still marry only one wife? They can afford more than one, some of them may want more than one, and if they are rich enough, we can speculate, they might find women who would share them as husbands with other wives.
It goes without saying that the solutions that economists provide to the riddle are misguided, yet they are nonetheless worth reading. For one thing, they underline how the basic fact of marriage poses a challenge to the mainstream economic worldview and suggests the need for an alternative. More importantly, at the root of these failed explanations one notices a shadow: a notion of ownership that still haunts monogamy, a shadow which economics can neither contain nor dismiss. Marina Adshade cites two economic explanations for the persistence of monogamy. The first one is formulated with populations in view: “If there are equal numbers of men and women in a polygynous society, then it is a mathematical reality that some men will be disenfranchised from the market for marriage (and possibly sex) because of that institutional arrangement” (Adshade 2013, 115). Monogamy laws, according to this view, are instituted by rulers and governments to pacify the masses: “Being a poor man in a country in which other men are extremely rich is one thing, but being a poor man who will never be able to marry while other men have many wives is quite another” (126). This should be read carefully. From this specific economic perspective one answer to the question of why capitalist societies stick to monogamy is that they are not capitalist enough. They can withstand huge inequalities in the allocation of things and money, so long as in marriage they maintain a socialist regime that entitles any man to precisely one wife.1
As this explanation draws on laws, politics, and rulers, Adshade maintains that it does not fully solve “the mystery of monogamy,” namely, its persistence in industrial societies. She supplements it with a further explanation more strictly economic in nature. As income gaps widen in affluent societies, so do the gaps in human capital. Richer men want children with higher capabilities to support them in old age, and for that purpose they need wives with higher human capital. Let us quote Adshade’s formulation, with its intentional or inadvertent dismissal of the demands of political correctness: “Monogamy has emerged as the dominant marriage institution because the demand for high-quality children has increased the value of high-quality women in the marriage market, making it difficult for even wealthy men to afford more than one wife” (Adshade 2013, 128). (Now, just imagine the supreme quality of Jeff Bezos’s wife!) In this further explanation, it is not laws and politicians that sustain the socialist regime in the allocation of wives, but market forces themselves. They maintain its basic principle—one wife for one man—while attenuating its egalitarian nature by inscribing differences between women.
Why should we dwell on these economic explanations? Noneconomists would probably dismiss them as sexist fantasies masked in the rhetoric of a sober science and offer instead a host of commonsensical explanations drawing on notions of religion, tradition, or love. Marriage is a religious institution, which the Judeo-Christian tradition sanctioned in a monogamous form. Modern societies have indeed gone through processes of secularization, but the persistence of monogamy shows that these processes were never completed. Moreover, notions of love and romance, which substituted for marriage’s religious justification, are also colored by monogamy. They present an ideal of marriage as a union of two souls, and they too have their form of persistence. We can put these objections aside for the meantime, because above all the economic explanations make a categorical mistake regarding the meaning of institutions. Adshade explains that monogamy “has emerged as the dominant marriage institution” because of the forces of supply and demand of wives. Yet to claim that a free market in marriage leads, by itself, to a monogamous pattern would mean precisely that monogamy is not an institution. The concept of institutions, after all, is called for to explain patterns of human activity that are irreducible to individualistic motivations. Such patterns persist regardless of, or even in contrast to, individuals’ egoistic motivations. Accepting the economic explanation for the persistence of monogamy would only make the fact that the law sanctions monogamy all the more mysterious.
The economic explanations of monogamy are important precisely because of their overtly fantasmatic nature. Addressing them, one should keep in mind that the concept of social institutions does not by itself provide a full explanation for the persistence of monogamy. At least not an interesting one. Although human reality is patterned by institutions, these do not always designate a simple form of persistence. Institutions do not refer to things that simply “remain as they have always been,” but more importantly to things that persist throughout changing historical contexts. It is indeed important to draw attention to the institutional nature of monogamous marriage, but only as a backdrop for a further set of questions: What is it exactly that persists with monogamy? How does it persist? What meanings of it persist and what new meanings does it acquire while traveling through different historical contexts, as diverse as slavery, feudalism, and capitalism? It is against this background that the economic explanations acquire their significance. They spell out the economic meaning of marriage in free-market societies, which can appear only in a fantasmatic form, because they aim to subsume within the ahistorical economic mindset an institutional inheritance which is essentially foreign to it. Read as a fantasy, Adshade does a good job in formulating two complementary aspects of the economic meaning of marriage today: wives are the most prized possessions of men, and they are prized because they infringe the regulation of private property through the free market.
Regarding the first aspect, the economic explanations of monogamy recapitulate the strand of feminist thought that couples the history of the family with that of private property. Friedrich Engels put forward this line of thought in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1902), and Simone de Beauvoir developed it further in The Second Sex (1956). They trace the origin of the family to the agrarian revolution. Cultivated lands required ongoing intensive investment of work, for which the family was essential. Lands and tools also constituted the first goods to be transmitted across generations. The strict regulation of sex under monogamous morality was the means to ascertain that a man passes his property to his own sons. This speculation perfectly demonstrates the difference between a historical outlook and the dominant economic one. Whereas economists aim to solve the mystery of the persistence of monogamy, the historical speculation explains the persistence of monogamy as a mystery (that is, as a vestige of the past, not fully comprehensible in the official language of the present). Engels and de Beauvoir do not dissolve the mystery of monogamy, but juxtapose it with another mystery, that of private property. The need to ascertain the right of inheritance does not solve the mystery of monogamy because it only raises a further one: why do men toil so hard to cultivate their property only to bequeath it to their true sons? This overlapping of mysteries is not a fault in argumentation. Rather, it suggests that mystery is part of the substance of history: what it transmits through time is precisely what transcends the individualist horizon. De Beauvoir is more aware of this than Engels. She points out that the juxtaposition of the questions of the family and of private property brings about a further mysterious association: between property and immortality. The owner of property, she writes, “transfers, alienates his existence into his property; he cares more for it than for his very life” (de Beauvoir 1956, 106). Engels and de Beauvoir do not provide a solution to the riddle but answer the question with another question. Inheritance mediates the relation of fatherhood in terms of property relations, but the inverse is also true: blood relations confer meaning on private property. Private property provides an answer to the question “How is a man the son of another?” He is a son, among other things, as a future inheritor. But in the same manner, fatherhood provides an answer to the question “How is a piece of land one man’s property?” It is property as a future inheritance to one’s sons. In both cases, a question is summoned as a reply because each of the questions rests on an insoluble uncertainty. Fatherhood is an uncertain relation: monogamy partially solves the factual aspect of this uncertainty, and inheritance provides it with content. Yet private property is also an uncertain relation, and that is what its coupling with monogamy brings to the fore. Property is also tainted with mystery, insofar as it transcends the horizons of individuals and their selfish motivations. To identify its origin with the need to regulate inheritance means that private property is a mysterious social arrangement from the outset. Engels’s reference to biology in his theory, with the invocation of the uncertain status of fatherhood, might mislead us to read it as proposing a natural basis for ownership. In truth, biology, precisely because in the case of fatherhood it designates uncertainty, is invoked to denaturalize ownership from its very beginning. The reformulation of Engels’s and de Beauvoir’s views in the language of contemporary economics proves a crucial point: private property still must be rethought once the economic perspective encompasses the family. Engels problematized it through the association of property with the patriarchal tradition which encompassed wives in the circle of ownership. Adshade shows how a patriarchal fantasy keeps informing property relations in societies that have formally left patriarchy behind.
The second aspect of the economic meaning of monogamy we find in Adshade pertains more specifically to capitalism. She explains that in preindustrial nations, where the goal of marriage is to “produce as many children as possible . . . potential wives are not so different from each other” (Adshade 2013, 128). It is in capitalism that women, in their unique individuality, become a prized possession, and they assume this role precisely because they infringe the dynamics of private property regulated by the free market, through the socialist monogamy regime. This vulgar idea, too, has its partial parallel in critical thought. In her wonderful book Family Values, Melinda Cooper shows how the question of the family became the site of the strange convergence between neoliberalism and social conservatism. Moreover, she shows how the family assumed this role because of its externality to the market. Her argument goes against a commonsensical yet misguided trend in critical thought that sees neoliberal capitalism as destructive of family life. One can immediately see the logic that drives this trend: long-term family obligations stand in contrast to flexible labor relations, to the notion of the self as an entrepreneur, to the pervasive nature of the calculating frame of mind, and so on. Reasonable as it may appear, this critical trend ignores the apparent fact that some of the most important champions of neoliberalism, including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman, were also avowed spokespersons for family values. The root of this shortsightedness of critical thought, according to Cooper, is a tendency “to conflate capitalism itself with the logic of the market” (2017, 14). In her view, by contrast, the family is “internal to the dynamic of capital” (15) precisely in its externality to the market. From a Marxist perspective the dynamic of capital, in its limitless process of generation and accumulation of value, is indeed destructive of all traditional social formations. Yet it must also reassert such formations as a condition for the realization of value in the form of private wealth. The standard view takes literally the popular theme of “the crisis of the family” as a sign of its coming dissolution—a position which locks critics in a nostalgic view of traditional family values, as an anchor of a critique of neoliberal capitalism. Cooper, by contrast, portrays the crisis as a mode of the ongoing existence of the family, a symptom of the need to “reinvent” it: “If the history of modern capital appears on the one hand to regularly undermine and challenge existing orders of gender and sexuality, it also entails the periodic reinvention of the family as an instrument for distributing wealth and income” (17).
Cooper grounds her critique on Marx’s Grundrisse, but for the meantime it may be useful to illustrate it with a simpler text, which is also closer to the canonical tradition of economics. In “The Backward Art of Spending Money,” published in 1912, Wesley C. Mitchell posed a naïve question, in the most illuminating sense of the term. Modern societies have developed systematic knowledge about making money. Why is it, then, that knowledge about spending money remains rudimentary in form? His answer to the question portrays the family as a site of constitutive anachronism. The contemporary economic role of the family is defined by its lagging behind economic transformations, its persistence beyond its traditional economic roles. In preindustrial societies “the family was the unit in large measure for purposes both of producing and consuming goods” (Mitchell 1912, 269). With industrialization, production was transferred to bigger units, more susceptible to rationalization and systematization. Consumption, by contrast, remained confined to the family home under the direction of the housewife, due to “our race-old instincts of love between the sexes and parental affection, long since standardized in the institution of monogamy.” For that reason, from the economic perspective, “the art of spending lags behind the art of making money” (270–71).
The concept of lagging is crucial. It is the mode of existence of the family as a residue, a remnant of the past, articulated economically in monetary practices. In Cooper’s terms, lagging is how the family is reinvented. It does not designate simple persistence in the sense of remaining the same. The family changes, reinvented, precisely because it now appears lagging, a vestige of the past. “Reluctantly we have let the factory whistle, the timetable, the office hours impose their rigid routine upon our money-making days; but our homes we have tried to guard from intrusion by the world of machinery and business” (Mitchell 1912, 271).
We should not let Mitchell’s sentimental tone mislead us. Sentimentality is part of how the family is reinvented. When the family was the locus of both production and consumption—when it directly assumed the form of a basic economic unit—there was presumably less need for a sentimental view of it. This sentimentality, however, does not designate the family as external to the economy. That would be an absurd position if we keep in mind that “making money and spending money are strictly correlative arts” (Mitchell 1912, 269). Because a dollar spent is a dollar earned, the sentiments that mark the economic backwardness of the family are a supplement of rationalized money making. The family thus marks an internal split within the economy. It is a gendered split, between masculine and feminine roles, articulating different economies underlying money making and money spending, production and consumption, the family home and the business enterprise.
Some of the reasons Mitchell lists for the impossibility of rationalizing the art of spending money are inherent to the tasks of the housewife. These are more varied than those of engineers and managers (“She must buy milk and shoes, furniture and meat, magazines and fuel, hats and underwear, bedding and disinfectants, medical services and toys, rugs and candy. Surely no one can be expected to possess expert knowledge of the qualities and prices of such varied wares” [Mitchell 1912, 271]). More importantly, her tasks differ from that of the businessman in that they entail an ethical dimension, a consideration of ends. The businessman has a clear and measurable aim: “to make money becomes an end in itself.” The housewife’s goals are inherently incalculable: “to spend money involves some end beyond the spending.” The housewife cannot avoid questions of what constitutes the good life: “She can tell herself that she seeks the happiness of her husband and herself, the fair development of their children. But before these vague statements can serve as guides in the intensely practical problem of spending money, she must decide what happiness and development mean in concrete terms for her particular husband and children” (277). In Weberian terms, the difference between the art of spending money and the art of making money is not an opposition between rationality and sentimental irrationality, but between two forms of rationality. The masculine art of making money obviously follows Weber’s notion of formal rationality, based on value-free, goal-oriented calculation. The feminine art of spending money involves substantive rationality, which takes into account values and ends rather than focusing solely on the means to achieve ends (Weber 1978, 85).
Other causes for the backwardness of the art of spending money are rooted in the social organization of the family as a “separate sphere.” Mitchell points them out through an amusing thought experiment. Despite the numerous obstacles, “a surprising number of women achieve individual successes” in their art. “If housekeeping were organized like business,” he concludes, “these efficient managers” would have been promoted to senior positions and “supervise the work of many others to the advantage of themselves and the community.” The privacy of family life, upon which “we jealously insist,” makes this possibility absurd. Even advice to inefficient neighbors, let alone supervision, is not welcome in this respect: “These neighbors, and even the husbands of these neighbors, are prone to regard critical commentaries upon their slack methods, however pertinent and constructive in character, as meddlesome interferences” (Mitchell 1912, 274).
That is an early version of the logic underlying Adshade’s explanations of monogamy. Wives are a prized possession precisely because the family infringes the dynamics of the free market. The jealously guarded privacy marks the family home both as exception to the logic of the market and as exceptionally valued. Mitchell, however, is an institutional economist, a favorite student of Thorstein Veblen, and in his intellectual environment economics and history are not exclusive of each other but complementary perspectives. This can explain why love, so conspicuously absent from the arguments of contemporary economists that Adshade cites, finds a place in his economic analysis of the family. In the historical dimension of his argument, love is the form of persistence of monogamous marriage beyond its patriarchal origin, which entailed direct or indirect ownership of women. In its economic dimension, love designates a bifurcation of economic rationality, where the family home, as an integral part of the economy, deviates from the rational calculating spirit of the free market. Love also gestures at a shift in the subject matter of economic history, from men and women to masculinity and femininity. Traditional patriarchal families consisted of men owning women. The modern family, as a residue of this past, transposes the gender distinction into contrasting and complementary gendered economic categories, articulating an inner split within capitalist economy: a masculine rational art of making money and a feminine irrational art of spending money.
The family and the economy have kept on changing from Mitchell’s time. Women have entered the world of business and labor, and the term housewife has become offensive, replaced by the gender neutral homemaker. The “crisis of the family” recurrently invoked since the 1970s rendered Mitchell’s sentimental attitude obsolete. The matrix he outlined, though, still informs our imagination, as exemplified by the reality TV series The Real Housewives. The participants in this prolific franchise are rich women, and while many of them do have careers, the shows focus on their social lives and their lavish money spending. A price tag—aimed at sustaining the shock value of the show—appears on screen whenever a purchase decision is considered. The “real” in the show’s title, however, is not a simple euphemism for “rich.” It is the real of reality TV, opposed as it is to realism: the unbelievable real, the scandalous real, or the impossible yet necessarily real. Money and women confer this sense of “unreal reality” on each other. The participants are “real housewives” insofar as they are preoccupied with spending money, and more so because the vacillations regarding how to spend are not ameliorated but worsened by having a lot of it. Their money is the real and crazy money of lavish spending, as opposed to the calculating rationality of money making.
Another television series, The White Lotus, presents with mathematical precision the gendered nature of money. A plotline in the first season revolves around the relationship of a rich heir with his fortuneless fiancée. The second season presents a mirror image in a plotline about a rich heiress and her new husband. The relations of the protagonists to their money are diametrically opposed. The male heir has entered the family business, and his relation to his money is natural. He expects everyone to treat him as a rich man and is constantly annoyed when reality does not align with his expectations. The question of whether his fiancée wants him for his money or for his personality is meaningless for him because his money is a part of who he is. The female heiress inherited her fortune from an abusive father and has no idea about business and money management. Her money is an uncanny object, a foreign body which defines her yet is incomprehensible to her. It is hers but also alien to her. She cannot know whether people around her, including her husband, want her for herself or for her money. Her money drives her crazy and keeps her out of touch with reality.
The family is lagging behind the market economy. This lagging lies in the background of the alarm about the crisis of the family, which envisions a future when the temporal gap will close and sexual life and procreation will be completely overtaken by market logic. As Cooper notes, this idea confers on the prevalent critique of the juncture of economy and the family its sentimental, and unwittingly conservative, undertone. What should be added, however, is that critics alarmed by the possibility of the market overpowering the family disclose a historical shortsightedness. There actually was a time when sex and procreation were fully submerged in the economy. It is called traditional patriarchy. In that historical context, monogamy was directly both a private property regime and a sexual regime, without any tension between the two dimensions. The family is lagging in the sense that monogamy has persisted beyond its economic underpinning. In this sense lagging is not an ominous sign but simply the mode of existence of the family in capitalism. Maybe monogamy will indeed disintegrate eventually. But then again, if it does, maybe capitalism will also evolve to a different economic regime.
Groundbreaking feminist writers, like de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Carole Pateman, Arlie Hochschild, and many others made us see how capitalism confers new forms on the patriarchal tradition of marriage: how the family retains a patriarchal kernel within the liberal world which is formally foreign to it. This book aims to contribute to this tradition through a reversal of perspective, shifting the focus to capitalism rather than patriarchy. For the feminist cause, it was important to expose a secret dimension of continuity between patriarchal and liberal societies. Feminist writers showed in different ways how ownership of women is encoded in liberal societies’ notions of love and romance, of the happy family, of male and female forms of labor, and even of intercourse. What they often stopped short of is exploring the consequences of their discoveries for an economic theory proper to capitalism. The very notion of private property must be rethought if ownership of women is still encoded in various ways in our societies. Private property is not the same institution when it encompasses women and things, or, as economics believes, only things, or, as is the case with capitalism, formally only things and informally also women. This book therefore argues that the whole theoretical infrastructure of economic theory must be reworked once sex and the family are included within the economy. A whole set of ontological economic questions needs to be rethought in that light: What is ownership? What is money? What is a market exchange? What are goods and commodities? What is capital? What is finance? Mitchell’s argument provides a localized demonstration of this need in the context of money. Economic common sense conceives of money as a universal equalizer: a means to other ends, a standard measure of value that makes all things quantitatively commensurable and supports an all-encompassing sphere of calculability. The family bifurcates this picture. On the side of its making, money is indeed an equalizer that supports comprehensive calculability, although against economic common sense in this context it is also an end in itself; on the side of its spending, money is a means to external ends, but these are marked by incalculability and incommensurability. As we shall see, Mitchell’s view is too naïve, as the bifurcated aspects of spending and making infiltrate each other. Yet it suffices to demonstrate the aim of this book. By conceiving of money and other economic objects in their entanglements with sex and gender, it proposes the notion of sexual economy as an economic theory appropriate to capitalism.
Why Sexual Economy?
In recent years there has arisen a renewed interest in the idea of libidinal economy. Developed in different versions by thinkers such as Marcuse, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lyotard, libidinal economy designates a psychic counterpart of capitalist economy. It points to structures of desire and eroticism supplementing the workings of capital and underpinning consumer culture. I share this basic motivation of the framework of libidinal economy, yet this book approaches it from the starting point of sexual economy. It is a more concrete starting point. In contrast to libidinal economy, sexual economy refers to the direct entanglements of sex and gender with the economy, beginning with relatively simple questions: Are wives owned? Is marriage a form of exchange? Which economic exchanges between men and women are legitimate, and which are obscene? Why is it obscene to exchange sex for money, and what does it imply about capitalist money? Why is prostitution abhorred in sexually liberal capitalist societies, and how does this abhorrence differ from precapitalist stigmas of prostitution? The turn to such questions aims to fill a gap left open in the framework of libidinal economy. This framework leaves open the question of mediation: how does an economic regime come to be inscribed on the psyche? This question should be answered in terms of an economic theory. If capitalist economy is distinguished by its unique forms of desire, it must be because it is also distinguished by the forms of its basic objects and concepts: because money, goods, exchange, and ownership have uniquely capitalist forms, distinguished from their precapitalist versions.
To address the various dimensions of the uniqueness of capitalist economy, this book turns to the history of economic thought, which during the twentieth century went through an intellectual catastrophe. From a discipline submerged in philosophical controversies—as it was during most of its modern history, and as it rightly should be, since it addresses the insoluble question “What is a human being?”—economics became a technical field (which does not mean that it lacks a philosophy, but only that it misperceives its own philosophy as a factual truth). In Thomas Kuhn’s terminology it became a natural science, organized around a paradigm, which dictates not only how questions are answered, but also which questions can be posed.2 Sometime during the second half of the twentieth century, economists stopped arguing about the building blocks of the economy, namely, about the proper conceptualizations of money, goods, capital, exchange, and private property. To understand the extent of this intellectual catastrophe, imagine a situation where sociologists unanimously agree on the question of what society is, and literary scholars agree on the question of what literature is. The unpleasant odor of a technocratic society accompanies such imaginings.
My turn to the history of economic thought is thoroughly biased. What the discipline has left out during its crystallization as a science is, as a rule, much more valuable and interesting than what it has kept in. At least for the questions of this book. Marx and Veblen are the most important pillars in the alternative conceptualization of economy I present. Alongside them are three thinkers that once belonged to the field of knowledge of the economy but are no longer present in the discipline: Weber, Sombart, and Mandeville. At first sight, the views of these thinkers seem to differ widely. Once grouped together as alternatives to the mainstream, some similarities in basic principles arise. All of them, in different manners, pave ways to conceive of capitalism as a historical economic regime. They surpass, in different manners, the now established dichotomy between history, colored by notions of contingency, and economics as an abstract and general theory. Their historical sensitivity is expressed in numerous differences from standard economic theory. Without going into details, two general distinctions are paramount. First, these writers open the question of the delineation of economy, of what subject matter belongs in the scope of economic inquiry. A central contested subject is gender relations: the inclusion of the family, marriage, love, sex, and prostitution within the compass of economy. The second distinction of these writers is less apparent and rarely explicitly mentioned. They all provide ways to conceive of what money cannot buy as a crucial economic concept. That is a central axis of the argument in this book: specifically in capitalism, the relation of money to what it cannot or should not buy must be a part of its economic definition. What money cannot buy does not denote something noneconomic, but rather a unique economy that pertains specifically to capitalism. It is positively expressed in economic life: in economic motivations and ends, in the movements of money, and increasingly in the nature of consumer goods (again, a superficial look at advertising confirms this: everything we buy can hold the promise of providing something that money cannot buy).
These two facets provide a compact formulation of my argument: the exclusion of gender relations from the sphere of exchange with the twin rise of liberalism and capitalism did not result in an economy consisting exclusively of inanimate objects. Rather, it transformed the economy, reorienting it around what money cannot buy. It is expressed in the eroticization of various aspects of economic life: of money, goods, capital, and ownership. Their eroticized versions distinctly differ from their standard economic conceptualizations.
Overview
The first chapter of the book presents some basic concepts for a study of the sexual economy of capitalism. These concepts are summoned to outline the unique topology of capitalist economy, a strange map in which the family assumes a place of an external inside. The family is external to the market yet internal to the economy. Critical thought tirelessly reiterates the idea that capitalism involves an expansion of market logic to all spheres of life. It is a misleading idea which deeply damaged critical perspectives on capitalism. From a broad historical perspective, the anxiety about the expansion of markets in fact reflects a narrowing of the sphere of exchange. An economy where all things are given to exchange is closer in form to what anthropologists used to call a primitive economy. In such an economy, there is nothing despicable about exchange. It is a noble and uniquely human deed. The capitalist free market was shaped by the exclusion of some things from the sphere of exchange, most notably marriage. This exclusion conferred on the market its odious form, as a context of human activity governed by selfishness and cynicism. A double movement shapes this form: that what is outside the market is now conceived as noble is the flipside of the fact that economic exchange appears ignoble. If these ideas sound strange, consider the cliché that in capitalism everything has a price. What it means is not that the market expands to swallow the whole of social life, but precisely the opposite: that capitalist economy is not identical to the market. That everything has a price means that there are things which are related to money, and maybe acquired by money, not through market exchange. The chapter argues that this distinction is relevant to our understanding of the market itself because its outside is reflected inside it, rendering it different from its standard view as a tool of universal leveling, a mechanism that makes all things commensurable. Another linguistic peculiarity, often used in advertising, demonstrates this: the word priceless does not necessarily mean “noneconomic.” Often, and most typically in advertising, it means “expensive.” Again, this does not simply mean that “everything can be bought,” but rather that the standard concept of price as grounded on exchange of equivalents is unfit for capitalism.
The second chapter addresses the question of sex in economic thought. What would economics have looked like if it had included sex in its scope? Strangely enough, the question is not at all hypothetical. Two seminal texts from the beginning of modern economic thought allow us to pose it concretely. Adam Smith imagined an economy populated with artisans, laborers, rentiers, and capital owners. His provocative predecessor Bernard Mandeville portrayed a gaudier landscape, consisting also of husbands and wives, prostitutes, and mistresses. The chapter shows that much more than a question of vocabulary is at stake. Two completely different sets of foundations for economic thought, distinguished by the presence or absence of sex, were laid down by Smith and Mandeville. Much later, with the emergence of economic imperialism, sex reentered the scene. The chapter shows that this reemergence of sex is but a completion of its disavowal, which began with Smith’s prudish rewriting of Mandeville. It reflects not an interest in sex, but an erotic attachment to economics: a conviction that its models can explain everything, that they can explain sex in exactly the same manner that they explain food consumption.
The third and the fourth chapters address, respectively, the twin topics of marriage and prostitution. It is specifically in capitalism that these topics are indeed twinned: when marriage is supposed to be motivated exclusively by love, any pragmatic motivations for marriage (and is there one completely free of them?) might cast on it a suspicion of prostitution in disguise. The chapters explore respectively the economies underlying love-marriage and prostitution as two mirroring forms of what money cannot buy: a sublime form and an obscene one. The third chapter presents the economy of love as subverting the accepted hierarchy between luxuries and needs. Revisiting Sombart’s claim about the origin of capitalism in the rise of illicit love, alongside readings of nineteenth-century realist novels and of some courting practices, the chapter shows that love designates an economy where luxury assumes a necessary form. The fourth chapter focuses on the weird monetary aspect of prostitution. If, for male clients, prostitution is a sexual experience mediated by money, it is, at the same time, an experience of money mediated by sex: a monetary experience of sex and an erotic experience of money. As such, prostitution is a symptomatic exception of capitalist economy, diverging from the standard understanding of everyday exchanges, but also embodying a disavowed aspect informing them. Prostitution consummates the fact that in capitalism money can buy everything. This fact informs, in one way or another, everything that we buy, but is obscured by the limited nature of those things. As the chapter shows, this status of symptomatic exception explains the prevalent cultural association between prostitution and finance.
The fifth chapter moves from specific contexts of sexual economy to a broader view of the eroticization of consumption as a whole, beyond its direct entanglements in interpersonal gender relationships. For that purpose, it follows the transformations in the economic expressions of what money cannot buy throughout the twentieth century. Its theoretical anchor is Veblen’s theory of the leisure class, which provides the most concise tools for understanding what money cannot buy as an economic concept. This concept is embodied in the difference between conspicuous leisure, associated with the lifestyles of old money, and conspicuous consumption, associated with the nouveaux riches. The refined practices of conspicuous leisure are, by definition, what the nouveaux riches strive to imitate but cannot buy. During the twentieth century conspicuous leisure lost most of its economic significance. The chapter shows, however, how a new figure has taken its place: the cool attitude or cool person. These were originally associated with counterculture and rebellion, rather than with social elites, yet the cool attitude inherited the basic features of the social phenomenology of conspicuous leisure: inimitability, effortlessness, and nonchalance, supporting a silent judgmental and exclusionary mechanism. Moreover, in its use in marketing, cool replicated the economic function of conspicuous leisure, as embodying what money cannot buy. Buying something cool is precisely what practically makes it uncool. The rise of cool requires an ontological inquiry into the status of modern consumer goods. Conspicuous leisure could embody what money cannot buy due to its immaterial nature. Set against mere material consumption, it acquired a spiritual quality. In parallel to the dissolution of conspicuous leisure, goods have become increasingly spiritual. The rise of cool in marketing presents a paradox: things that money buys embody also what it cannot buy. They have become ephemeral objects: desirable at one moment but threatening to become a source of embarrassment.
The sixth chapter offers a reversal of perspective: instead of considering the economy from the vantage point of sex, it takes a look at contemporary sexual culture to uncover its economy. Dating practices, hook-up culture, and pornography show how financial logic increasingly informs mainstream versions of male desire and female eroticism. Like the rest of the book, this chapter focuses exclusively on normative heterosexual relations. The omission of any reference to nonheterosexual relations may require an explanation. It results from the historical perspective underlying the argument. Heterosexual monogamy was for centuries a cornerstone of property regimes. Understanding capitalism as a historical economic regime means locating the lines of change, persistence, and most notably persistence-through-change that connect it to these property regimes. Nonheterosexual relationships did not play an equivalent role in precapitalist economies. That is not to say that the sexual economy of capitalism is irrelevant to contemporary forms of nonheterosexual relations. The demand for the right to marry, which plays a central role in agendas of many gay movements, suggests otherwise. However, it falls outside the scope of the argument of this book to inquire into this.
Notes
1. Notice that the economists’ unusual reference to “rich men” rather than “rich persons” is not a slip of the pen but an integral part of the argument. If rich women could also marry multiple husbands, then the riddle would vanish, since theoretically everyone would be able find a spouse.
2. Unlike academics in other branches of the social sciences, Kuhn writes, economists are not much bothered by the question of whether their discipline is a science. Yet this fact has to do less with the content of their work and more with its social, institutional form: “Is that because economists know what science is? Or is it rather economics about which they agree?” ([1962] 1996, 161).