Sexuality

Capitalism and Desire

According to classical and modern social thought (e.g., Karl Marx, Norbert Elias), modern capitalism and civilization were tied to increasing control—external and internal—over the body's desires. In their Marxist reading of Sigmund Freud, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school argued that human instincts and passions are repressed and distorted in modern civilization and capitalist society. In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse maintained that economic discipline in capitalism requires a higher burden of sexual regulation and repression than any other civilization. Technical progress has made possible capitalism's capacity to manipulate libidinal instincts for commodity exchange by engineering [Page 1282]sexuality into individual needs. This remodeling of consumers' instinctual structure is highly ambivalent. Marcuse referred to this as “repressive” or “institutionalized desublimation” (2002, 77), which intensifies sexual energy, but at the same time reduces the erotic—the polymorphous and self-transcendent quality of libido—to sexual satisfaction.

The German Marxist philosopher Wolfgang F. Haug extended this line of thought. In his analysis of “commodity aesthetics,” he highlighted commodity culture as the prime domain of sexualization. Haug sketched a double exploitation in capitalism's “technocracy of sensuality”: it demands the deferral of immediate gratification at work, but compensates for this alienating self-discipline in consumption. However, the sexual images and sexualized goods provided by consumer culture create desire for more rather than less. Instead of satisfying these unfulfilled desires, wishes, and anxieties, consumer culture exploits them and gears them to its own ends by enticing customers to believe that commodities are the real answers to their lust or unmet needs. Haug vividly described how commodities are staged as love objects, which, by means of their sensual and sex appeal, throw “wooing glances” (Marx) at potential customers and lend themselves readily as instruments for the consumers' own courtship rituals. A gendered and sexualized subtext clearly pervades his analytical notion of the relation between the commodity and the consumer. The “malicious” commodity, whose illusionary appearance promises more than “she” is ever able to deliver, deceives, bribes, and fobs off the (male) consumer, distracting him from his true needs. Despite the fallacy of determinism in the technocratic modeling of sensuality, both these accounts remain key texts for the study of sexuality and consumption.

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