Lyotard Essay
– might somehow precipitate an as-yet unimaginable transformation, if not actually an end, of capitalism.
Thus, by the time Lyotard comes to re-read Marx through the lens of libidinal economy after the failure of the socialist revolutionary desire called ‘May 1968’, libidinal spending of the not-for-profit or wasteful variety has been thoroughly rehabilitated in what Lyotard calls ‘the world of capital as the
Milieu
of universal prostitution’.
79
The figure of the prostitute as compulsive spender has lost all oppositional force and is again synonymous, as she was for Marx more than a century earli er, with the logic of money itself. But the difference between Lyotard and
Marx, here, is that Lyotard’s libidinal fixation on the prostitute is shameless and uninhibited by …show more content…
81
‘Proper’ economics
Mention of Keynes brings us, in conclusion, to the discourse of economics
‘proper’, which clearly also deserves some credit for the tw entieth-century rehabilitation of spending-for-spending’s-sake. For, the other side of the story of libidinal economy that I have been sketching is the story of how the mid-twentieth-century marketing and advertising indu stries and econ- omists themselves challenged the orthodoxies of neoclassical economics and its premise of homo oeconomicus by rediscovering that the desire to spend, for its own sake, could itself be marketed
82
; it could also be elabo- rated into influential theories of economic salvation through spending by economists such as Keynes in the 1930s and George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan, in the 1940s. It was against the same background of the Great Depression to which Reich and Bataille were responding that Keynes (himself well-acquainted with the psychoanalytic
Thus, by the time Lyotard comes to re-read Marx through the lens of libidinal economy after the failure of the socialist revolutionary desire called ‘May 1968’, libidinal spending of the not-for-profit or wasteful variety has been thoroughly rehabilitated in what Lyotard calls ‘the world of capital as the
Milieu
of universal prostitution’.
79
The figure of the prostitute as compulsive spender has lost all oppositional force and is again synonymous, as she was for Marx more than a century earli er, with the logic of money itself. But the difference between Lyotard and
Marx, here, is that Lyotard’s libidinal fixation on the prostitute is shameless and uninhibited by …show more content…
81
‘Proper’ economics
Mention of Keynes brings us, in conclusion, to the discourse of economics
‘proper’, which clearly also deserves some credit for the tw entieth-century rehabilitation of spending-for-spending’s-sake. For, the other side of the story of libidinal economy that I have been sketching is the story of how the mid-twentieth-century marketing and advertising indu stries and econ- omists themselves challenged the orthodoxies of neoclassical economics and its premise of homo oeconomicus by rediscovering that the desire to spend, for its own sake, could itself be marketed
82
; it could also be elabo- rated into influential theories of economic salvation through spending by economists such as Keynes in the 1930s and George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan, in the 1940s. It was against the same background of the Great Depression to which Reich and Bataille were responding that Keynes (himself well-acquainted with the psychoanalytic