Kurt Newman Irvine Paper

Labor-management politics in the 1950s often seen as dull, bureaucratic, story of

New Men of Power. The reason is: we dont know how to look at desire and death
drive. Historians of capitalism, in general, do not know how to talk about desire. E.g.
William Leach. So the 1950s intellectual history of labor and capitalism might tell us
something interesting.
Schumpeter: Economic activity may have any motive, even a spiritual one, but
its meaning is always the satisfaction of wants (1911) wants and satisfaction
Professor Lionel Robbinseconomics as study of the causes of material
welfareEconomics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship
between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses quoted in Sweezy, Theory
of Capitalist Development, 4. Sweezy notes: This does not look very much like the
definition of a science of social relations. It purports to be rather a definition of a science
of human behavior in general but in fact economic theorizing is primarily a process of
constructing and interrelating concepts from which all specifically social content has
been drained off (4-5)
Lets begin with three texts published in the years 1956, 1957, and 1958,
respectively: Allen Ginsburgs Howl, Harvey Swadoss Myth of the Happy Worker, and
Leonard E. Reeds I, Pencil (1958).
Howl gives us our papers title and central allegorical image:
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!
Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! (...)
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks
and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and

banks!
Like Ginsberg, Harvey Swadoss The Myth of the Happy Worker takes on the
mythology of Utopia Unlimited in the Fat Fifties. (172) Swados tells us that while
Eisenhower-era bourgeois America harbored the impression that the problems of the
workers have been stabilized, if not permanently solved, the US in the 1950s
remained substantially proletarian. The nature of working-class work, however, grew
continually more immiserating: thus, the workers attitude toward his work is generally
compounded of hatred, shame, and resignation.1 Reflecting upon his experience in
factories in 1956, Swados wrote: If (workers) expectations have changed at all in recent
years, they would seem to have narrowed rather than expanded, leaving a psychological
increment of resignation rather than of unbounded optimism. (172) It is not simply
status hunger that makes a man hate work that is mindless, stupefying, sweaty, filthy,
noisy, exhausting, insecure in its prospects and practically without hope of advancement.
(173-74) Almost without exception, the men with whom I worked on the assembly line
last year felt like trapped animals. Depending on their age and circumstances, they were
either resigned to their fate, furiously angry at themselves for what they were doing, or
desperately hunting other work that would pay as well and in addition offer some variety,
some prospect of change and betterment. They were sick of being pushed around by
harried foremen sick of working like blinkered donkeys, sick of being dependent for
their livelihood on a maniacal production-merchandising setup, sick of working in a place
where there was no spot to relax during the twelve-minute rest period. But since the
assembly line demands young blood the factory in which I worked was aswarm with
1

Harvey Swados, The Myth of the Happy Worker in Leon Litwack, ed. The American Labor Movement
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 171-72.

new faces every day; labor turnover and absenteeism to rampant that the company was
forced to overhire in order to have sufficient workers on hand at the starting siren.
Sabotagebananas stuck in tailpipes, nuts and bolts thrown in tail fins, raw aggression.
Sooner or later, if we want a decent society we are going to have to come face to face
with the problem of work. ()

If this is what we want, lets be honest enough to say so. If we conclude that there
is nothing noble about repetitive work, but that it is good enough for the lower
orders, lets say that, too. But if we cling to the belief that other men are our
brothers including millions of Americans who grind their lives away on an
insane treadmill, then we will have to start thinking about how their work and
their lives can be made meaningful (176).
Finally, Leonard E. Reeds I, Pencil: the complex combination of miracles
which manifest themselves in Nature to which is added an even more extraordinary
miracle: the configuration of creative human energiesmillions of tiny know-hows
configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and
in the absence of any human master-minding!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely
organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove
all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow
(see how death drive subtends also libertarian visions of capitalism in the 1950s)

Who is this Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks, identified by Ginsberg
as the representative of postwar capitalism? He is, at the most basic level, a reanimated
Babylonian demon, mentioned in the early pages of the Hebrew Bible, who endlessly

demands payment in the form of children. He also bears a family resemblance, it seems,
to the Greek Minotaur, chosen by the economist Yannis Varoufakis as the iconic
representative of the USs role in international capitalism following the demise of Bretton
Woods.
A good guess is that Ginsberg borrowed Moloch from Russian authors Alexander
Herzens From Another Shore (1850). Herzen, in turn, had railed against Moloch as the
spirit of present sacrifice for future gains in the context of Tsarism: Nature never makes
one generation the means for some future end, Herzen wrote, and humans should
follow suit.

Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them,
only recedes and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes can give
back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth.
Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive today to the sad role of
caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on or of wretched
galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some
mysterious treasure and with the humble words progress in the future inscribed
on its bows?2
Moloch plays a different role for Ginsberg than for Herzen, reflective of differences in
time and space that separate the two texts. Moloch, for Herzen, presides over a neofeudal economic logic and an agrarian regime of surplus extractions; Moloch, for
Ginsberg is the household god of the American oikos in the Age of Affluence.

Ginsbergs circa-1956 Moloch guides us to our central concern: pinning down a

historically specific conceptual constellation structured around negative affect and
2

Alexander Herzen, From Another Shore. Quoted in David Engerman, Modernization From the Other
Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard, 2003).

paranoid fantasy vis--vis capitalisms endemic drive towards repetition, routine, and
redundancy. The phenomenon that David Riesman called, in a collection of essays
published in 1962: Abundance for What? The near future that Vance Packard, in The
Waste Makers, mocked as the dysfunctional Cornucopia City. My argument here is that
Ginsberg, Riesman, and Packard were part of a larger response by intellectuals to a
constituent feature of capitalism that, until Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),
lacked a proper name. Historians of capitalism do not speak much about death drive,
for obvious reasons, but it is a conceptual innovation at the core of capitalist everyday life
after the triumph of the corporate form, and central to the critical accounts of capitalism
provided by intellectuals after World War I.3
Taking as his central image a childs repetitive, apparently endless yo-yo game,
Freud christened this dimension of experience death drive. A notoriously difficult
concept, we will put a pin in death drive for the time being. It will suffice, I hope, to
think of it heuristically in the following way: what Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle is that we add a third column to the political economists chart of human
motivation (the traditional Column A for the minimization of pain, stress, and tension;
Column B for the realistic, ego-driven, pursuit of pleasure).
Freud tells us that this new, third column has something to do with desire beyond
the reduction of tension to a minimum, and more powerful than the modest joys of the
reality principle. In neurotic societies (as Karen Horney described the United States in
the 1930s), desire has becomes a problem: neurotics orient themselves around
demands, perceived or stated, real or imagined. What Freud argues, above all, in
3

There is some literature suggesting that death drive is a particularly pronounced feature of the newer
finance-driven capitalism; one of the inquiries pursued in this paper is whether there is not a much longer
history of death drive and capitalism. Cite Zizek and Dean here.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is that the desire beyond the pleasure and reality
principles seems to be susceptible to a slide into a compulsion to repeat, a locked groove.
Instead of desires linear narrative, death drive takes the form of an endless loop. This
strange character of desire and drive is something that philosophers have long
contemplated. It is not that Freud is talking about something new, and it is certainly not
the case that Freud formulated in any coherent and systematic way (however valiantly
some try to make it into a working structural model of psychic life): the primary
conceptual innovation lies in the beyond of the title. What we need to think withwhat
we need to try not to get beyond or transcendis the titles key term beyond the
pleasure principle. It is enough to say there is a beyond to get the ball rolling.
Freud borrows from Soren Kierkegaard the image of repetition unto death (this
is where the death to the death drive comes in, and not from any suicidal impulse
suicide is in many ways the very opposite of the death drive), and he suggests that
unlike desire, which always takes the form of a thirst ultimately disappointed by its
temporary quenching, death drive is the realm in which the aim reaches its
satisfaction. Like the gambler at the one-armed bandit with a bucket of change, or the
hardcore drug addict, this satisfaction comes at the cost of a certain suspension of time
and removal from the world. This is the mysterious Column C of the death drive: so
long as we add it to the chart and mark the empty spaces with an x, we can proceed
productively without lingering too long in the wilds of Freudian theory.
Returning to Ginsberg, Swados, and Reed, we can locate the main iterations of
death drive in the 1950s (along the tripartite division that I think structures the death
drive in capitalism more generally: the perverse (Moloch enjoys), the sacred (Swadoss

worker and the margin of humanity being crushed/animalized), and the entropic (Reeds
pencil and the dangers of planning).
If it is objected that Moloch does not seem to belong on this chart of the hedonic
calculusMoloch is, after all, a harbinger of pain and suffering, of sadism and
brutalitywe should return to Ginsbergs poem for a second reading. In Howl, Ginsberg
emphasizes that, whatever the consequences for everyone else, Moloch enjoys. And he
intimates that there is some pleasurehowever counterintuitive it is to think or
blasphemous to voicein identifying with Molochs destructive pleasures. Isnt this
exactly what Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Erving Goffman,
Richard Hofstadter, Hannah Arendt, Wilhelm Reich, C. Wright Mills, Stanley Elkins, and
Stanley Kubrick were all trying to work their heads around at this very moment?
To spin off this list of intellectuals is not to endorse any of their respective
syntheses (though some of them have survived most of the tests of time). In fact, these
are not the intellectuals to whom I attend in this essay: we know a fair bit about their
articulation of postwar pessimism and interrogation of authoritarian identifications.
Instead, I wish to look at intellectuals who faced down Moloch and the death drive
on the shop floor, in relation to the labor question as it presented itself in the 1950s
broadly defined, the conflict over productivity and output restriction in an era of mass
bureaucratic unionism and pattern bargaining. In the 1950s, labor-management struggle
was shaped by the recent history of the successive failures of both Taylorism and Elton
Mayo-style human resources management schemes. Neither had proven effective at
raising productivity without triggering massive shop-floor discontent and sabotage; as a
result, many firms began to experiment anew with piecework and new incentive systems.

Along with continuing battles over featherbedding and labor racketeering, haunted by
earlier discourses of soldiering and malingering, and in view of the imminent specter
of automation, the 1950s witnessed intense focus on the palpable pointlessnessfrom the
perspective of the workerof industrial labor, and the apparent futility of attempts to
induce greater levels of productivity. Everyone seemed to know that productivity was on
the decline, but no one seemed capable of measuring output (or even defining it
coherently). Other countries like Germany and Japan, newly propped up by Marshall Plan
and post-Bretton Woods monetary and trade policy, seemed to be evincing productivity
regimes twice or three times as robust as that of the US. Then again, the data for that
comparison was sketchy at best. (France and Latin America, of course, were consistently
hounded as bastions of idleness and featherbedding).

Conventional wisdom took the form of nervous councils of despair, as in liberal

Republican economist Alexander Herons Why Men Work (1947). (We should recall that
the very existence of a book entitled Why Men Work is in and of itself historically
interesting. For the vast run of human history, such a question could never be formulated,
let alone asked). *See, for example, Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason: Work
as we know it is a modern invention. Work in the form which we recognize and perform
it, and to which we give a central place in the life of the individual and society, was
invented, then subsequently generalized only with the coming of industrialism. Work, in
the modern sense, bears no relation to the tasks, repeated day after day, which are
indispensable for the maintenance and reproduction of our individual lives. Neither
should it be confused with the toil, however demanding it may be, which individuals
undertake in order to complete tasks of which they, or their family, are the sole

beneficiaries (13)

Stanford economist John P. Troxells foreword to Why Men Work presents the
problem: financial rewards and penalties had ceased to be wholly equal to the
important task that we entrust to theminducing men to work. For most of the gainfully
employed, Troxell noted, there is no clear promise of a prize for sustained effort, and
no great likelihood of penalty for withholding itnot in time of full employment (v).
True, he observed, we would rather work than loaf, and we enjoy productive work;
bootless effort or made work of any type is despised. However, a general distaste for
loafing is a very different thing from that zeal for hard work which is essential to full
production (v-vi). In fact, intellectuals in the ensuing years would question whether this
was correct. Donald Roy, and the scholars he inspired: William F. Whyte and Alvin
Gouldner.

Freud once wrote of war--; reminds us of William James and the Moral
Equivalent of War; Troxell similarly observed that while wars bring out the impulse for
hard work, crises are not always at hand to spur men on. Brings us very close to
death drivewar, in all its horrific madness, is longed-for to induce productivity (but
for what?) Keynes and purposivenessNorman O. Brownwhen do we actually eat the
cake?

Troxells commitments are to productivism: what we urgently need is not full

employment alone but full production as well. Since Herons title is about why
men withhold effort, his title might seem curious. This is interesting in and of itself: the

pleasure principle, as in Simon Pattens pleasure economy or Warren Susmans hidden

history of comfortnot in leisure hours, but on the job itself. What would be beyond
this pleasure principle is death drivethat is what Roy, Gouldner, and White are
writing about.

Incredible distillation of the Elton Mayo ethos: Can we develop an aggressive

willingness to share the satisfactions which are yielded by creative phases of work? Can
we find ways to provide a more democratic participation in the planning of work, without
losing the advantages which flow from the centralized and basically autocratic direction
of the production process?

Exhibit D: Vance Packard The Waste Makers (1960)

Climax of featherbedding fights in 1960sand the death drive dimension of antifeatherbedding discourse can be seen in Vance Packards The Waste Makers. Entropic
vision (its epigram: Dorothy L. Sayers A society in which consumption has to be
artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and
waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand).

Packards dystopian fantasy of Cornucopia City: One fourth of the factories of

Cornucopia City will be located on the edge of a cliff, and the ends of their assembly
lines can be swung to the front or rear doors depending upon the public demand for the
product being produced. When demand is slack, the end of the assembly line will be
swung to the rear door and the output of refrigerators or other products will drop out of
sight and go directly to their graveyard without first overwhelming the consumer market
(4)

The laborers in Corncucopia City: The Guild of Appliance Repair Artists has passed a
resolution declaring it unpatriotic for any member even to look inside an ailing appliance
that is more than two years old. (4) Identifies death drive: Man throughout recorded
history has struggledoften against appalling oddsto cope with material scarcity.
Today there has been a massive break-through. The great challenge in the United
States is to cope with a threatened overabundance of the staples and amenities and
frills of life The United States is already finding that the challenge of coping with its
fabulous productivity is becoming a major national problem (paradox of productivity;
moral crisisprodigality (6-7)

Howard Brick on Bells circle: end of ideology circle of American thought

Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Edward Shils: shaped not only by
cold war embrace of US foreign policy but also by their social-democratic disposition.
International body they joined: the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF)
In many cases, they had entered the postwar academy after spending early years in
socialist and communist movements and undergoing a prolonged deradicalization that
drew them away from their Marxist roots, though they usually refrained from defending
capitalism as such. In effect, they fell back on a ready-made intellectual and political
heritage, of social liberalism and the interwar postcapitalist vision, which provided means
for them to choose the West in the cold war while also vesting their confidence in the
social-democratic potential of an evolving status quo. Their studied reconsideration of
Marxist premises followed the three dimensions that first nourished reformist aspirations
after World War I: industrial democracy, new-economy ideas of state intervention, and
pluralism. In this regard they cited the status of organized labor after the wartime
confirmation of CIO legitimacy and collective bargaining, the apparent efficacy of
countercyclical government action, and the multifold character of class and power. Like
Dahrendorf, they doubted that the bourgeoisie retained the Belle Epoques sealed
combination of wealth, power, and status, and they grew fascinated with the proliferation
of new middle class groups (163)

The idea of an end of ideology germinated in the years after World War II, and its
history from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s comprised many of the diverse elements
that figured in the tortuous political developments of those years. Most clearly stated at
an early point by Albert Camus in 1946, a wished-for end of ideology connoted a
dismissal of totalitarian doctrines and enthusiasm, besmirched by the blood of millions, in
hopes of reinvigorating in their place a genuine radical humanism. Later, at the founding
meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, the anti-communist Arthur
Koestler evoked an end-of-ideology notion when he declared that the need for political
unity against the Soviet totalitarian enemy meant the words socialism and capitalism,
Left and Right have today become virtually empty of meaning (some, like H. Stuart
Hughes and the Frankfurt School intellectuals, turned to end of ideology in a much
more dystopian keyan order in which all significant social conflict was suppressed in
favor of a bureaucratically controlled or administered society). Revelations of CIA
funding for the CCF have made scholars think of the group as essentially para-state; but
there was, Brick argues, a genuinely new intellectual project at its coreagainst
nationalized industry and Hayeks indemnification of planning. Raymond Aron: market
and plan were nothing but ideal types (163)
CCF were fundamentally mixed economy thinkers; as SML put it: The ideological
issues dividing left and right had been reduced to a little more or a little less government
ownership and economic planning
The writer who came to be most identified with the phrase (the end of ideology) still
showed signs of residual anticapitalist animus through the 1950s. (164)

Joyce Appleby, for example:

That world-reshaping force came when a group of natural philosophers gained an
understanding of physical laws. With this knowledge, inventors with a more practical
bent found stunning ways to generate energy from natural forces. Production took a
quantum leap forward. Capitalism a system based on individual investments in the
production of marketable goods slowly replaced the traditional ways of meeting the
material needs of a society. From early industrialization to the present global economy, a
sequence of revolutions relentlessly changed the habits and habitats of human beings. The
puzzle is why it took so long for these developments to materialize.Appleby, Joyce
(2009-12-22). The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 7984). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Capitalism of course didnt start out as an ism. In the beginning, it wasnt a system, a
word, or a concept, but rather some scattered ways of doing things differently that proved
so successful that they acquired legs. Like all novelties, these practices entered a world
unprepared for experimentation, a world suspicious of deviations from existing norms.
Authorities opposed them because they violated the law. Ordinary people were offended
by actions that ran athwart accepted notions of proper behavior. The innovators
themselves initially had neither the influence nor the power to combat these responses. So
the riddle of capitalisms ascendancy isnt just economic but political and moral as well:

How did entrepreneurs get out of the straitjacket of custom and acquire the force and
respect that enabled them to transform, rather than conform to, the dictates of their
society? Many elements, some fortuitous, had to be in play before innovation could
trump habit. Determined and disciplined pathbreakers had to persist with their
innovations until they took hold well enough to resist the siren call to return to the
habitual order of things. Its not exactly a case of how small differences can have large
impacts through a chain of connections. The better simile would be breaking a hole in a
dike that could not be plastered up again, after letting out a flood of pent-up energy. But
breaking that hole requiredAppleby, Joyce (2009-12-22). The Relentless Revolution: A
History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 137-147). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle
Edition.
curiosity, luck, determination, and the courage to go against the grain and withstand the
powerful pressures to conform. Just as the capitalist system has global reach today, so its
beginnings, if not its causes, can be traced to the joining of the two halves of the globe.
Europe, Africa, and Asia had been cut off from the Americas until the closing years of the
fifteenth century. Even contact between Europe and Asia was confined to a few overland
trade routes used to transport lightweight commodities like pepper and cinnamon. Then
European curiosity about the rest of the world infected a few audacious souls, among
them Prince Henry the Navigator.Appleby, Joyce (2009-12-22). The Relentless
Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 147-152). W. W. Norton &
Company. Kindle Edition.
In view of this spectacular activity across the globe, it may seem a bit perverse for me to
pinpoint the beginnings of capitalism in one small island kingdom in the North Atlantic.

Yet only in England did these dramatic novelties produceAppleby, Joyce (2009-12-22).
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 196-197). W. W.
Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
the social and intellectual breakthroughs that made possible the emergence of an entirely
new system for producing goods. A series of changes, starting in farming and ending in
industry, marks the point at which commerce, long existing in the interstices of traditional
society, broke free to impose its dynamic upon the laws, class structure, individual
behavior, and esteemed values of the people. Although thousands of books have been
written about this astounding phenomenon, it still remains something of a mystery.
Visiting the Vatican Museum several years ago, I was struck by the richness of life
captured in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century paintings there. They were full of plants,
furniture, decorations, and clothing! I couldnt help but contrast these lavish depictions of
everyday life with plain feaures of England. How counterintuitive that this poor, cold,
small, outlandish country would be the site of technological innovations that would
relentlessly revolutionize the material world!Appleby, Joyce (2009-12-22). The
Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 197-204). W. W.
Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Smith placed economic development in a long sequence of progressive steps that had
evolved over time. This interpretation of the history of capitalism as moving forward
effortlessly has produced the greatest irony in the history of capitalism, an explanation of
its origins that makes natural what was really an astounding break with precedent. This
view also depends upon people already thinking within the capitalist frame of reference.
According to Smith, capitalism emerged naturally from the universal tendency of men

and women to truck and barter. In fact it took economic development itself to foster
this particular cultural trait. Smith turned an effect into a cause. For Smith and his
philosophical colleagues, economic change had slowly, steadily led to the accumulation
of capital that could then pay for improvements like the division of labor that enhanced
productivity. No cultural adjustment had been considered necessary because underneath
all the diversity in dress, diet, and comportment beat the heart of economic man and
presumably economic woman. Because the full elaboration of economic developments in
England took place over two centuries almost seven generations of lived experience
it was possible to imagine it as the evolutionary process that Smith described.Appleby,
Joyce (2009-12-22). The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle
Locations 281-290). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
but the distinctive characteristic of capitalism has been its amazing wealth-generating
capacities. The power of that wealth transformed traditional societies and continues to
enable human societies to do remarkable things.Appleby, Joyce (2009-12-22). The
Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Kindle Locations 417-418). W. W.
Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Better is the account provided by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblithin
Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
Capitalism, but it too is not entirely satisfying.
that is to say, reached far beyond the purview of capital, and even of the economy,
and offered a comprehensive vision of the social order that prescribed new roles for
government, family, and the individual while declaring that they now applied to
everyone. That same universality also provoked furious debates over access to money and

credit and the states responsibility in regulating that access, over the place of moral
constraint in a system based on maximization and risk, and over the proper relationship
between public welfare and private interest, and between wages and work. The history of
capitalism is not, then, just an account of transaction costs, economies of scale, and
diminishing returns, but of social habits, cultural logics, and the (2011-12-21).
Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
(Kindle Locations 91-97). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
conditions of system-building as well. All were now harnessed to the engines of
change, which contemporaries increasingly referred to as progress and which
economists would eventually call, ironically using an agrarian metaphor, growth. But
nature had been decisively subjugated by an integrated circuit of steam-navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of
rivers, [and] whole populations conjured out of the ground that far exceeded anything
all preceding generations together had ever experienced, as the Communist Manifesto
breathlessly pronounced in a survey of the great transformation in 1848. Americans were
equally impressed, and concerned, with the unprecedented scope and scale of industrial
change. A crazing, unobservant, lightning-like speed had taken control of their lives, a
New York memoirist noted in 1843. General fermentation and excitement of matter and
of mind was the result, which threatened our great political and civil institutions and
the social and moral principles upon which they depend for their existence and
perpetuity. The danger was born of capitalisms systematic disregard for custom and
convention once these lost their utility. Longstanding hierarchies and traditional forms of
authority were subsequently, and unsentimentally, discarded. Capitalism, it could be said

although few have said (2011-12-21). Capitalism Takes Command: The Social
Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Kindle Locations 97-106). University of
Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
There was no contradiction here between the two characterizations. Rather, the
system could not work without such constant threats of collapse. Any talk of perfect
competition or equilibrium was no more than that, and a misleading rhetoric at best. In
practice, the system would stagnate if it did not continually expand, innovate, exploit
asymmetries, and restlessly move capital, people, information, and goods from here to
there and back again in search of higher returns. The workings of credit were a good
example of this nervous logic. Credit allowed humanity to reshape time and spaceto
level mountains and valleys, as it werein accordance to ones ambitions. The promise
to pay (that is, to assume a debt) thus became the primary medium of exchange in the
capitalist system. This then resulted in a double form of dissociation, for not only was a
currency of promises intrinsically separate from the things being traded, but it was also
increasingly separated out from any actual relationship between particular persons. This
was because debts themselves were soon being bought and sold in their own networks of
exchange, which, of course, generated more credit and thus more exchange. In such
circumstances, the very possibility of assigning intrinsic value to money, or even to
goodsof the kind that measured the (2011-12-21). Capitalism Takes Command: The
Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Kindle Locations 128-136).
University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Material relations were consequently removed from the closed, parochial context of
community, family, and personality and transplanted to an objective economic sphere

where membership was open to any and all rational agents.5 Theirs was a historically
specific, and even historically peculiar, rationality. It found high expression in personal
and bureaucratic calculations of risk, and in the consequent utilization of contracts,
insurance policies, securities, and bankruptcy laws, among a growing inventory of other
market-powered tools, to ameliorate those market-generated dangers, if not to actually
take advantage of them. Individuals were in a position to either gain or lose but, in any
event, they all became vulnerable to forces beyond their control and, often enough,
beyond their perception. The systemic instability of this order has consequently made it
an elusive subject of inquiry. The orthodox division of scholarly labor, for instance, while
yielding plentiful, discrete studies of the firm, working-class consciousness, technological
change, and free-market ideology, among other pertinent subjects, has devoted far less
energy to exploring the multidisciplinary intercourse by which capital became an ism
and business became a political philosophy. (2011-12-21). Capitalism Takes Command:
The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Kindle Locations 147-156).
University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
And so, rather than ask Who built America?a common query of social and labor
historians once hoping to peel away all the brokered layers of mediation in search of the
real, labor-driven source of wealthwe find ourselves asking Who sold America? or,
perhaps more to the point, Who financed those sales? The ensuing paper trail keeps
leading in circles, and cycles, through a thickening web of interpersonal opportunism that
dissolved stability and absoluteness into motions and relations, (2011-12-21).
Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
(Kindle Locations 310-313). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

as Georg Simmel described the fundamental dynamic of market society.10 It was a

nervous basis for social order, no doubt, and a most profitable one. (2011-12-21).
Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
(Kindle Locations 313-314). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Productivity is not well understoodbut that has not stopped economic thinkers from
making confident pronouncements about its causes and effects. That, in and of itself,
interests us: does it not deliver us into the realm of fantasy and anxiety?
For example, in 1961, NBER economist Solomon Fabricant wrote: Productivity has
been much discussed in recent years, and too frequently misunderstood. While people
were correct to fixate upon productivity, Fabricant arguedit was, after all a measure
of the efficiency with which resources are converted into the commodities and services
that men want and was also a prerequisite for better levels of economic well-being and
greater national strengthno one really knew how to properly measure it. (Worth
emphasizing this cluster of ideasnational health/body politics, foreign policy
comparative dimension, cult of efficiency). This elusive termcrucial to the
determination of costs, prices, profits, output, employment, investment, inflation, the
business cycle, and the rise and decline of industries; and all of the Kennedy-era
buzzwords: industrialization, research and development, automation, tax reform,
cost-price squeeze, improvement factor, wage inflation, foreign dollar
shortagewas, however, a subject surrounded by considerable confusion. People
used the same word but meant different things: As a consequence, various figures on
productivity change come into use, and these often differ in significant degree. The
calculation of the rate of productivity change, Fabricant revealed, was not a question of

fixed quantities; properly speaking, productivity was a historical question, entirely

dependent upon the comparison of norms in one period to norms in another: What the
past or current rate of productivity change is depends on the particular period for which
the calculation is made. If no reference is made to the period, and if the period varies
considerably from one context to another, confusion results.4
Compounding this problem was a shortage of reliable statistical information (which
should make us pause and ask: if productivity was so important to capital, why didnt
capital know how to measure productivity?). Fabricants conclusions are, in fact, rather
amazingly tentative, compared to the confidence with which he introduced the topic :

As has been said, the questions in which productivity enters are important. They are
also difficult. We all have far to go before any of us can claim to understand fully the
process of productivity change, its causes, or consequences, or to see clearly the way
to deal with the issues involved.5

According to an increasing number of economists from the mid-1950s on, the countrys
existing statistical framework for assessing macroeconomic growtha system
constructed during depression and warwas ill-suited for the nations dynamic postwar

Solomon Fabricant, Basic Facts on Productivity: An Introduction by Solomon Fabricant, in John W.

Kendrick, Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton University Press for the National Bureau of
Economic Research, 1961). National Bureau of Economic Research, Number 71, General Series, xxxv.
5
Fabricant, xxxvi.

economy. The problem lay in the countrys price indexes, which were used to deflate
figures on output and expenditures As the common argument went, because the
indexes failed to account properly for changing consumption patterns and for innovationincluding dramatic increases in product quality and entirely new kinds of goodsthey
systematically overstated consumer inflation and understated the growth of real income.
In turn, this statistical miscalculation produced a host of misguided assessments and
policy proposals. Here, the concern with measuring growth intersected the constantutility approach to price indexes: in the eyes of many younger neoclassical economists, a
utility-based index could provide a superior analysis while also creating a conceptual link
between macroeconomic statistics and the neoclassical theories that had come to
dominate American microeconomics after the Second World War.6
The key to understanding the history after 1960 is recognizing a theme we have
encountered throughout this book: the desire of many economists to eliminate subjective
judgments from economic measurement, especially when such judgments have
potentially normative ramifications. In part, this desire stemmed from general
epistemological goals, such as making economics more scientific in the supposed mold
of the natural sciences. But more generally, it was a function of the growing ties between
economics and policy. If economists wee to claim that their discipline had any claim to
neutral, technical knowledge, surely that claim required them to have neutral, apolitical
factsnamely, economic statistics. (e.g., Milton Friedmans 1953 distinction between
positive and normative economics, a distinction which continues to govern many
economists conception of their discipline. Moreover, for government statistics in
6

Thomas A. Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 18802000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 299.

particular, avoiding subjective, potentially normative judgments appeared essential; to do

otherwise would seem to undermine the rationalized foundation of modern political
economy.
Professional imperatives: for institutional economists, this took methodological form.
Concepts should be operationally defined (if you cant measure it, dont use it); statistics
should isolate particular variables (dont combine changing prices and quantities in a
single index). (318)
Neoclassical economists kept modified versions of these commitments and added
theoretical components, especially a commitment to consumers as utility maximizers.
(319)
Welfare and National Accounts
The US national accountthe generic name for a statistical system that provides a
coherent and consistent way to assess a nations economic activity, especially its
production. These calculations provided the source for commonly cited measurements of
economic growth, such as national income, GNP and GDP (319)
*Deleuzegenuinely metaphysical, and genuinely post-structural ideas of what a
concept isalong the lines of a piece of music or work of artwith an entirely
pragmatic, jurisprudential frame for thinking about the value or salience of a concept

Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Notes

For Lacan, repetition is explained best explained by returning to Freuds 1914 essay
Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through which culminates in chapter five of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
This is where repeating first presents itself: Wiederholen (repeating) is related to

Erinnerung (remembering)
The subject in himself, recalling his biographyonly goes to a certain limit, the Real:
and this provides the key, because the whole history of Freuds discovery of repetition as
function becomes clear only by pointing out in this way the relation between though and
the Real (49)
The hysteric repeats because she does not know what needed to be remembered
Nothing has been more enigmatic, vis--vis the bipartition of pleasure principle and
reality principle, than this repetition
Why did repetition first appear at the level of what is called traumatic neurosis? Is
repetition connected to mastery of a traumatic event? But who mastersand what is
there to be mastered? We do not know precisely where to situate the agency that would
undertake this operation of mastery.
In BPPFreud shows that what occurs in dreams of traumatic neurosis appears at
the level of the most primitive functioninga question of binding energy.
Remembering is gradually substituted for itself and approaches nearer to a sort of
focus or centerhere we encounter the resistance of the subject, which becomes at that
moment repetition in act.
Encounter with the realan appointment to which we are always called with a Real
that eludes us
The Real is beyond the return, the automaton: by which we see ourselves governed
by the pleasure principle
It is quite obvious, throughout Freuds research, that the Real is the object of his
concern
The Real first presented itself in the form of trauma: we are now at the heart of
the radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the opposition of the pleasure
principle and the reality principle
Subjectifying the cause/trauma: In effect, the trauma is conceived as having necessarily
been marked by the subjectifying homeostasis that orientates the whole functioning
defined by the pleasure principle.
Our experience then presents us with a problem, which derives from the fact that, at the
very heart of the primary processes, we see preserved the insistence of the trauma in
making us aware of its existence.
How can the dream, the bearer of the subjects desire, produce that which makes the
trauma emerge repeatedlyif not its very face, at least the screen that shows us that it is
still there behind?
Let us conclude that the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves an essential

part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle
Encounters: Souffrance
Zwang
The primary processwhich is simply what I have tried to define for you in my last few
lectures in the form of the unconsciousmust, once again, be apprehended in its
experience of rupture, between perception and consciousness, in that non-temporal
locus another locality, another space, another scene, the between perception and
consciousness
We can, at any moment, apprehend this primary process.
If Freud, amazed, sees in this the confirmation of his theory od desire, it is certainly a
sign that the dream is not a phantasy fulfilling a wish
For it is not that, in the dream, he persuades himself that the
son is still alive. But the terrible vision of the dead son taking
the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself
heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by the
loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object.
It is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can
occur. Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate
this not very memorable encounterfor no one can say
what the death of a child is, except the father qua father, that
is to say, no conscious being.
For the true formula of atheism is not God is deadeven by
basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder,
Freud protects the fatherthe true formula of atheism is God
is unconscious.

The place of the real, which stretches from the trauma to the
phantasyin so far as the phantasy is never anything more
than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something
determinant in the function of repetitionthis is what
we must now examine. This, indeed, is what, for us, explains
both the ambiguity of the function of awakening and of the
function of the real in this awakening. The real may be represented
by the accident, the noise, the small element of reality,
which is evidence that we are not dreaming. But, on the other
hand, this reality is not so small, for what wakes us is the other
reality hidden behind the lack of that which takes the place of
representationthis, says Freud is the Trieb.
But be careful! We have not yet said what this Trieb is

and if, for lack of representation, it is not there, what is

this Trieb? We may have to consider it as being only Trieb to
come.
How can we fall to see that awakening works in two clirections
and that the awakening that re-situates us in a constituted
and represented reality carries out two tasks? The
real has to be sought beyond the dreamin what the dream
has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation
of which there is only one representative. This is the real
that governs our activities more than any other and it is psychoanalysis
that designates it for us.

Freud is not dealing with any repetition residing in the

natural, no return of need, any more than is Kierkegaard. The
return of need is directed towards consumption placed at the
service of appetite. Repetition demands the new. It is turned
towards the ludic, which finds its dimension in this new
Freud also tells us this in the chapter I referred to last time.
Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely
alienation of its meaning. The adult, and even the more advanced
child, demands something new in his activities, in his
games. But this 'sliding-away' (glissement) conceals what is the
true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity
constituted by repetition in itself. It can be seen in the child,
in his first movement, at the moment when he is formed as a
human being, manifesting himself as an insistence that the
story should always be the same, that its recounted realization
should be ritualized, that is to say, textually the same. This
requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling
signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able
to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating
the primacy of the significance as such. To develop it by
varying the significations is, therefore, it would seem, to elude
it. This variation makes one forget the aim of the significance
by transforming its act into a game, and giving it certain outlets
that go some way to sadsFjing the pleasure principle.
When Freud grasps the repetition involved in the game
played by his grandson, in the reiteratedfort-da, he may indeed
point out that the child makes up for the effect of his mother's
disappearance by making himself the agent of itbut, this
phenomenon is of secondary importance. Wallon stresses that
the child does not immediately watch the door through which
his mother has disappeared, thus indicating that he expects to
see her return through it, but that his vigilance was aroused

earlier, at the very point she left him, at the point she moved
away from him. The ever-open gap introduced by the absence
indicated remains the cause of a centrifugal tracing in which
that which falls is not the other qua face in which the subject is
projected, but that cotton-reel linked to itself by the thread that
it holdsin which is expressed that which, of itself, detaches
itself in this trial, self.mutilation on the basis of which the order
of significance will be put in perspective. For the game of the
cotton-reel is the subject's answer to what the mother's absence
has created on the frontier of his domainthe edge of his
cradlenamely, a ditch, around which one can only play at
'jumping.
This reel is not the mother reduced to a little ball by some
magical game worthy of the Jivarosit is a small part of the
subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his,
still retained. This is the place to say, in imitation of Aristotle,
that man thinks with his object. It is with his object that the
child leaps the frontiers of his domain, transformed into a well
and begins the incantation. If it is true that the signifier is the
first mark of the subject, how can we fail to recognize here
from the very fact that this game is accompanied by one of
the first oppositions to appearthat it is in the object to which
the opposition is applied in act, the reel, that we must designate
the subject. To this object we will later give the name it bears
in the Lacanian algebrathe petit a.
The activity as a whole symbolizes repetition, but not at all
that of some need that might demand the return of the mother,
and which would be expressed quite simply in a cry. It is the
repetition of the mother's departure as cause of a Spaltung in
the subjectovercome by the alternating game, fort-da, which
is a here or there, and whose aim, in its alternation, is simply that
of being the fort of a da, and the da of afort. It is aimed at what,
essentially, is not there, qua representedfor it is the game
itself that is the Rep rsentanz of the Vorstellung. What will become
of the Vorstellung when, once again, this Reprasentanc of the
motherin her outline made up of the brush-strokes and
gouaches of desirewill be lacking?
I, too, have seen with my own eyes, opened by maternal
divination, the child, traumatized by the fact that I was going
away despite the appeal, precociously adumbrated in his voice,
and henceforth more renewed for months at a timelong
after, having picked up this childI have seen it let his head
fall on my shoulder and drop off to sleep, sleep alone being
capable of giving him access to the living signifier that I had

become since the date of the trauma.

You will see that this sketch that I have given you today of
the function of the tuche will be essential for us in rectifying
what is the duty of the analyst in the interpretation of the
transference.
Let me just stress today that it is not in vain that analysis
posits itself as modulating in a more radical way this relation
of man to the world that has always been regarded as knowledge.
If knowledge is so often, in theoretical writings, related to
something similar to the relation between ontogenesis and
phylogenesisit is as the result of a confusion, and we shall
show next time that the very originality of psycho-analysis lies
in the fact that it does not centre psychological ontogenesis on
supposed stageswhich have literally no discoverable foundation
in development observable in biological terms. If develop.
ment is entirely animated by accident, by the obstacle of the
tuchI, it is in so far as the tuch_ brings us back to the same point
at which pre-Socratic philosophy sought to motivate the world
itself.
It required a clinamen, an inclination, at some point. When
Democritus tried to designate it, presenting himself as already
the adversary of a pure function of negativity in order to
introduce thought into it, he says, It is not the that is
Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a
Ch. 6. The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze
Fascinating intro on cards and sets
To haul, to draw. To draw what? Perhaps, playing on the
ambiguity of the word in French, to draw lots (tirer au sort).
This this compulsion, would then direct us towards the
obligatory cardif there is only one card in the pack, I can't
draw another.
The character of a set, in the mathematical sense of the term,
possessed by the playof signifiers, and which opposes it for
example to the indefiniteness of the whole number, enables us
to conceive a schema in which the function of the obligatory
card is immediately applicable. If the subject is the subject of
the signifierdetermined by itone may imagine the synchronic
network as it appears in the di Ch 7
Anamorphosis
()

Skip to section: The Transference and the Drive

Ch. 13 The Deconstruction of the Drive
I can only write this introduction in the wake of Freud, in so far as this notion is
absolutely new in Freud
The term Trieb certainly has a long history, not only in psychology or in physiology, but
in physics, and of course, it is no accident that Freud chose this term.
But he gave to Trieb so specific a use, and Trieb is so integrated into analytic practice
itself, that its past is truly concealed. Just as the past of the term unconscious weights on
the use of the term in analytic theoryso, as far as Trieb is concerned, everyone uses it
as a designation of a sort of radical given of our experience. (161)
Sometimes, people even go so far as to invoke it against my doctrine of the unconscious,
which they see as some kind of intellectualization as if I were ignoring what any
analyst knows from experience, namely the domain of the drive.
We will meet in experience something that has an irrepressible character, even though
repressionsindeed, if repression there must be, it is because there is something beyond
that is pressing in.
There is no need to go further in an adult analysis; one has only to be a child therapist to
know the element that constitutes the clinical weight of each of the cases we have to deal
with, namely, the drive.
There seems to be here, therefore, a reference to some ultimate given, something archaic,
primal. Such a recourse, which my teaching invites you to renounce if you are to
understand the unconscious, seems inevitable here.
Now, is what we are dealing with in the drive essentially organic?
Is it thus that we should interpret what Freud says in a text belonging to BPPthat the
drive represents the Ausserung der Tragheitsome manifestation of inertia in the
organic life?
Is it a simple notion, which might completed with reference to some storing away of this
inertia, namely, to fixation, Fixierung?
Not only do I not think so, but I think that a serious examination of Freuds elaboration of
the notion of drive runs counter to it.
Drive (pulsion) is not thrust (pouse). Trieb is not Drang, if only for the following reason.
In an article written in 1915that is a year after the Einfuhrung zum Narzissmus

entitled Tried and Triebschicksaleone should avoid translating it by avatar Schicksal

is adventrue, vicissitudein this article, Freud says that it is important to distinguish four
terms in the drive:
Drang, thrust
Quelle, the source
Objekt, the object
Ziel, the aim
Of course, such a list may seem quite a natural one
My purpose is to prove to you that the whole text was written to show us that it is not as
natural as that
First of all, it is essential to remember that Freud himself tells us at the beginning of this
article that the drive is a Grundbegriff, a fundamental concept (162)
When Freud introduced the drive into science: the concept of the drive would either be
verified or disproven
Freud, in working with the notion of drive, looked to fundamental concepts of physics
His masters in physiology are those who strive to bring into realization, for example, the
integration of physiology with the fundamental concepts of modern physics, especially
those connected with energy
How often, in the course of history, have the notions of energy and force been taken up
and used agains upon an increasingly totalized reality!
This is certainly what Freud foresaw.
Somewhere he says: the drive belongs to our myths
For my part, I will ignore the term mythindeed, in the same text, Freud used the
word convention, which is much closer to what we are talking about, and to which I
would apply the Benthamite term, fiction (a term preferable to model, which has
been all too much abused) (163)
Let us look at the four terms laid down by Freud in relation to the drive:
Thrust
First, thrust will be identified with a mere tendency to discharge.
This tendency is produced by a stimulusthe transmission of an additional energy
On this matter, Freud makes a remark that has very far-reaching implications
Here, too, no doubt, there is stimulation, excitation, Reiz
Here, too, no doubt, there is stimulation, excitation, to use the
term Freud uses at this level, Reiz, excitation.
(nm. allurement, attraction, enticement, temptation, something which excites interest and

attention; stimulus, incentive, urge; v. irritate, annoy, itch, anger, tease; arouse, excite,
stimulate, provoke, urticate, sting) (163)
Freuds Reiz, however, is used when speaking of drive as differentiated from any
stimulation coming from the outside world: it is an internal Reiz.
What does this mean?
In order to explicitate it, we have the notion of need, as it is
manifested in the organism at several levels and first of all at the
level of hunger and thirst.
This is what Freud seems to mean when he distinguishes internal excitement from
external excitement.
Freud does not mean that Trieb is a question of pressure, need like hunger or thirst
Then what does he mean?
Is he referring to something whose agency is exercised at the level of the organism in its
totality?
Does the real qua totality irrupt here?
No. It is always a question quite specifically of the Freudian field itself, in the most
undifferentiated form that Freud gave it at the outset: the Real-Ich.
The Real-Ich is conceived as supported, not by the organism as a whole, but by the
nervous system.
I am stressing the surface characteristics of this field by treating
it topologically, and in trying to show you how taking it in the
form of a surface responds to all the needs of its handling.
This point is essential: Triebreiz is that by which certain elements of this field are, says
Freud, invested as drive.
This investment places us on the terrain of an energyand not any energya potential
energy, forFreud articulated it in the
most pressing waythe characteristic of the drive is to be a
konstante Kraft, a constant force (164)
In the drive, there is no question of kinetic energy; it is not a question of something that
will be regulated with movement
The discharge in question is of a quite different nature, and is on a quite different plane

The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function,
which always has a rhythm.
The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that is has no day or
night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It has a constant force. (165)
At the other end of the chain, Freud refers to Befriedigung, satisfaction, which he writes
out in full, but in inverted commas.
What does he mean by satisfaction of the drive? Well, that's
simple enough, you'll say.
The satisfaction of the drive is reaching one's Ziel, one's aim.
The wild animal emerges from its hole querens quem devoret (searching for something to
devour) and when he has found what he has to eat, he is satisfied, he digests it.
The very fact that a similar image may be invoked shows that one allows it to resonate in
harmony with mythology, with, strictly speaking, the drive.
One objection immediately springs to mind it is rather odd
that nobody should have noticed it, all the time it has been
there, an enigma, which, like all Freud's enigmas, was sustained
as a wager to the end of his life without Freud deigning to offer
any further explanationhe probably left the work to those
who could do it.
You will remember that the third of the four fundamental vicissitudes of the drive that
Freud posits at the
outsetit is curious that there are four vicissitudes as there are
four elements of the driveis sublimation.
Well, in this article, Freud tells us repeatedly that sublimation is also satisfaction of the
drive, whereas it is zielgehemmt, inhibited as to its aimit does not attain it.
Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression.
In other words for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you.
Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I was fucking
(166)
That's what it means.
Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment.

Between these two termsdrive and satisfactionthere is set

up an extreme antinomy that reminds us:
Key: the function of the drive has for me no other purpose than to put in question what
is meant by satisfaction (166)
All those here who are psychoanalysts must now feel to what
extent I am introducing here the most essential level of accommodation.
It is clear that those with whom we deal, the patients, are not satisfied, as one says, with
what they are.
And yet, we know that everything they are, everything they experience, even their
symptoms, involves satisfaction.
They satisfy something that no doubt runs counter to that with which they might be
satisfied, or rather, perhaps, they give satisfaction to something.
They are not content with their state, but all the same, being in a state that gives so little
content, they are content.
Key: The whole question boils down to the followingwhat is
contented here?
On the whole, and as a first approximation, I would say that
to which they give satisfaction by the ways of displeasure
is neverthelessand this is commonly acceptedthe law of
pleasure.
Let us say that, for this sort of satisfaction, they give themselves too much trouble.
Up to a point, it is this too much trouble that is the sole justification of our intervention.
One cannot say, then, that the aim is not attained where
satisfaction is concerned. It is.
This is not a definitive ethical position.
But, at a certain level, this is how we analysts approach
the problemthough we know a little more than others about
what is normal and abnormal.
We know that the forms of arrangement that exist between what works well and what
works badly constitute a continuous series.
What we have before us in analysis is a system in which everything turns out all right,

and which attains its own sort of satisfaction.

If we interfere in this, it is inso far as we think that there are other ways, shorter ones for
example. In any case, if I refer to the drive, it is in so far as it is at the level of the drive
that the state of satisfaction is to be rectified.
This satisfaction is paradoxical. When we look at it more
closely, we see that something new comes into playthe category of the impossible.
(166)
In the foundations of the Freudian conceptions, this category is an absolutely radical one.
The path of the subjectto use the term in relation to which, alone, satisfaction may be
situatedthe path of the subject passes between the two walls of the impossible.
This function of the impossible is not to be approached without prudence, like any
function that is presented in a negative
form.
The impossible and the real; in Freud, it is in this form that the real, namely, the obstacle
to the pleasure principle, appears.
The real is the impact with the obstacle; it is the fact that things do not turn out all right
straight away, as the hand that is held out to external objects wishes.
But I think this is a quite illusory and limited view of Freuds thought on this point.
The real is distinguished, as I said last time, by its separation from the field of the
pleasure principle, by its desexualization, by the fact that its economy, later, admits
something new, which is precisely the impossible (167)
But the impossible is also present in the other field, as an
essential element.
The pleasure principle is even characterized by the fact that the impossible is so present
in it that it is never recognized in it as such.
The idea that the function of the pleasure principle is to satisfy itself by hallucination is
there to illustrate thisit is only an illustration.
By snatching at its object, the drive learns in a sense that this is precisely not the way it
will be satisfied. For if one distinguishes, at the outset of the dialectic of the drive, need
from the pressure of the driveit is precisely because no object of any Not, need, can
satisfy the drive.
Even when you stuff the mouththe mouth that opens in
the register of the driveit is not the food that satisfies it, it is,
as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.

That is why, in analytic experience, the oral drive is encountered at the final term, in a
situation in which it does no more than order the menu.
This is done no doubt with the mouth, which is fundamental to the satisfactionwhat
goes out from the mouth comes back to the mouth, and is exhausted in that pleasure that I
have just called, by reference to the usual terms, the pleasure of the mouth (167-68)
This is what Freud tells us. Let us look at what he saysAs
far as the object in the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no
importance. It is a matter of total indifference.
One must never read Freud without one's ears cocked. (168)
When one reads such things, one really ought to prick up one's ears.
How should one conceive of the object of the drive, so that
one can say that, in the drive, whatever it may be, it is indifferent?
As far as the oral drive is concerned, for example, it is
obvious that it is not a question of food, nor of the memory of
food, nor the echo of food; nor the mother's care, but of
something that is called the breast, and which seems to go of
its own accord because it belongs to the same series.
If Freud makes a remark to the effect that the object in the drive is of no importance, it is
probably because the breast, in its function as object, is to be revised in its entirety.
To this breast in its function as object, objet a/cause of desire,
in the sense that I understand the termwe must give a function
that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive.
The best formula seems to me to be the followingthat la pulsion en fait le tour (the
drive moves around the object/the drive tricks the object)
I shall find other opportunities of applying it to other objects. Tour is to be understood
here with the ambiguity it possesses in French, both turn, the limit around which one
turns, and trick (168)
I have left the question of the source till last.
If we wished at all costs to introduce vital regulation into the function of the drive, one
would certainly say that examining the source is the right way to go about it.
Why? Why are the so-called erogenous zones recognized only in those points that are

differentiated for us by their rimlike

structure?
Why does one speak of the mouth and not of the oesophagus, or the stomach?
They participate just as much in the oral function. But at the erogenous level we speak of
the mouth, of the lips and the teeth, of what Homer calls the enclosure of the teeth.
The same goes for the anal drive. It is not enough to say that
a certain vital function is integrated in a function of exchange
with the worldexcrement.
There are other excremental functions, and there are other elements that participate in
them other than the rim of the anus, which is however, specifically what, for us too, is
defined as the source and departure of a certain drive.
Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage.
It is not a montage conceived in a perspective referring to
finality.
This perspective is the one that is established in modern theories of instinct, in which the
presentation of an image derived from montage is quite striking.
Such a montage, for example, is the specific form that will make the hen in the farmyard
run to ground if you place within a few yards of her the cardboard outline of a falcon, that
is to say, something that sets off a more or less appropriate reaction, and where the trick is
to show us that it is not necessarily an appropriate one.
I am not speaking of this sort of montage.
The montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented
as having neither head nor tailin the sense in which one
speaks of montage in a surrealist collage.
If we bring together the paradoxes that we just defined at the level of Drang, at that of the
object, at that of the aim of the drive, I think that the resulting image would show the
working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock's feather emerges, and tickles
the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful.
Indeed, the thing begins to become interesting from this very fact, that the drive defines,
according to Freud, all the forms of which one may reverse such a mechanism.
This does not mean that one turns the dynamo upside-downone unrolls its wires, it is
they that become the peacock's feather, the gas-tap goes into the lady's mouth, and the
bird's rump emerges in the middle (169)

This is what he shows as a developed example.

Read this text of Freud's between now and next time, and you will see that it constantly
jumps, without transition, between the most heterogeneous images.
All this occurs only by means of grammatical references, the artifice of which you will
find easy to grasp next time.
Incidentally, how can one say, just like that, as Freud goes on
to do, that exhibitionism is the contrary of voyeurism, or that
masochism is the contrary of sadism?
He posits this simply for grammatical reasons, for reasons concerning the inversion of the
subject and the object, as if the grammatical object and subject were real functions.
It is easy to show that this is not the case, and we have only to refer to our structure of
language for this deduction to become impossible.
But what, by means of this game, he conveys to us about the essence of the drive is what,
next time, I will define for you as the trace of the act (170)
Answer to question of Dr. Green:
Lacan invokes: a certain chapter in energetics. (170)
In a limited system, there is a certain way of inscribing each
defined point, as characterized in terms of potential energy
Between the closest pointsone speaks of scale notation or
index.
One can now define each point by a certain derivation
you know that in infinitesimal calculus it is one of the ways
of dimensioning infinitely small variations.
For each point, then, there will be a derivation in relation to the slope immediately next to
it, and this derivation will be noted for each point of the field.
This derivation may be inscribed in the form of a vector and we can compose the set of
vectors.
There is, then, a law that seems odd at first sight, but which is certainly regarded as
fundamentalthat which, from a particular vectorwhich realizes the composition of
these derivations connoted by each point of the field from the point of view of potential
energy that which, therefore, from a particular vector, crosses a certain surface
which is simply what I call the gap (b_ance), from the fact that it is defined by a rim-like

structureis, for the same surface, a constant.

The variations of the system being what they maybe, what is potential at the level of the
integration, what is called the flux, is therefore constant.
What we seem to be dealing with, therefore, in the Drang of
the drive is something that is, and is only, connotable in the
relation to the Quelle, in so far as the Quelle inscribes in the
economy of the drive this rim-like structure.
Physiological variations, deep variations, those that are inscribed in the totality of the
organism, are subjected to all the
rhythms, even to the very discharges that may occur as a result
of the drive.
On the other hand, what characterizes the Drang, the thrust of the drive, is the
maintained constancy which, to
take a fairly useful image, measures up to an opening that is,
up to a certain individualized point, variable.
That is to say, people have big mouths to a greater or lesser degree.
Sometimes it might even be useful to take this into account, in the selection of analysts.
But, anyway, that's something I shall be concerned with in another context.
This has not exhausted the question you asked, but it provides
the beginning of a rational solution to the antinomy that you raise, and which is precisely
what I left in suspense.
For I stressed what Freud stressesthat, when the system functions in contact with the
Umwelt, it is a question of discharge, and when it is a question of Triebreiz, there is a
barrier.
This is a point that does not receive enough attention.
(171)
But what can that mean?
There is no barrier, unless the investment is in the field itself.
So, in fact, what we have to designate is thisin so far as the field itself involves this
investment, there can be no question of the functioning of a barrier.
Dr. Mathis: One question concerning the rim-like structure.

When it is a question of the mouth and the anal rim, do you locate the eroticization at
both extremities? Where do you place what may occur at the level of the oesophagus, at
the gastric level, in sniffing, in vomiting, at the level of the trachea? Is there something
profoundly different there from what you have articulated at the level of the lips?
LACAN: I confined myself to the two rims concerned in the
digestive track. I could also have told you that the rheumy rim
of our eyelids, our ears, our navels, are also rims, and that all
this is part of this function of eroticism. In the analytic tradition,
we always refer to the strictly focused image of zones reduced to their function as rim.
This does not in the least mean that, in our symptomatology, other zones do not come into
play. But we consider that they come into play in that fall-out zone that I call
desexualization and function of reality.
Let us take an example. It is in the function in which the sexual object moves towards the
side of reality and presents itself as a parcel of meat that there emerges that form of
desexualization that is so obvious that it is called in the case of the hysteric a reaction of
disgust.
This does not mean that we say that pleasure is located in these erogenous zones.
Desire is concernedthank God, we know only too wellwith something quite
different, and even with something quite different from the organism, while involving the
organism at various levels.
But what satisfaction is the central function of the drive intended to produce it? It is
precisely to the extent that adjoining, connected zones are excluded that others take on
their erogenous function and become specific sources for the drive.
Of course, other zones than these erogenous zones are concerned in the economy of
desire.
But note well what happens whenever they emerge.
It was no accident that I chose the function of disgust.
There are really two major aspects of desire as it may emerge in the fall of sexualization
on the one hand, disgust produced by the reduction of the sexual partner to a function
of reality, whatever it may be
(172)
and, on the other hand, what I have called, in relation to the scopic fucntion, invidia,
envy. Envy is not the same thing as the scopic drive, nor is disgust the same thing as the
oral drive.
(173)

Ch. 14 The Partial Drive and Its Circuit

At this point, I will resume my discourse on the drive. I was
led to approach it after positing that the transference is what
manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the unconscious, in so far as that
reality is sexuality.
I find that I must pause here and ask myself what this very affirmation involves.
If we are sure that sexuality is present in action in the transference, it is in so far as at
certain moments it is manifested in the open in the form of love.
That is what it is about. Does love represent the summit, the culminating point, the
indisputable factor, that makes sexuality present for us in the here and now of the
transference?
Freud's text, not, certainly, any specific text, but the central import of those writings that
deal with the drives and their vicissitudes, rejects such a view in the clearest possible
way.
It was this text that I began to approach last time, when I was trying to make you feel in
what a problematic form, bristling with questions, the introduction of the drive presents
itself.
I hope that many of you will have been able to refer to this text in the meantime
Even on a first reading, you would have been able to see that this article falls entirely into
two partsfirst, the deconstruction of the drive; secondly, the examination of das Lieben,
the act of love. We shall now approach this second point.
Freud says quite specifically that love can in no way be regarded as the representative of
what he puts in question in the term die ganze Sexualstrebung, that is to say, the
tendency, the forms, the convergence of the striving in the sexual, in so far as it
culminates in Ganze, in an appreciable whole, that would sum up its essence and
function.
The whole point of the article is to show us that with regard to the biological finality of
sexuality, namely reproduction, the drives, as they present themselves in the process of
physical reality, are partial drives.
Key: In their structure, in the tension they establish, the drives are linked to an economic
factor. (175)
This economic factor depends on the conditions in which the function of the pleasure

principle is exercised at a level that I will take up again, at the right time, in the term
Real-Ich.
Let me say at once that we can conceptualize the Real-Ich as the central nervous system
in so far as it functions, not as a system of relations, but as a system intended to ensure a
certain homeostasis of the internal tensions. (175)
It is because of the reality of the homeostatic system that sexuality comes into play only in
the form of partial drives.
The drive is precisely that montage by which sexuality participates in the psychical life,
in a way that must conform to the gap-like structure that is the structure of the
unconscious. (176)
Let us place ourselves at the two extremes of the analytic
experience.
The primal repressed is a signifier, and we can
always regard what is built on this as constituting the symptom
qua a scaffolding of signifiers.
Repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to the functions of signifiers.
Although their structure is built up step by step like any edifice,
it is nevertheless, in the end, inscribable in synchronic terms.
At the other extreme, there is interpretation.
Interpretation concerns the factor of a special temporal structure that I have tried to
define in the term metonymy.
As it draws to its end, interpretation is directed towards desire, with which, in a certain
sense, it is identical.
Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself
In between, there is sexuality.
If sexuality, in the form of the partial drives, had not manifested itself as dominating the
whole economy of this interval, our experience would be reduced to a mantic, to which
the neutral term psychical energy would then have been appropriate, but in which it
would miss what constitutes in it the presence, the Dasein, of sexuality.
The legibility of sex in the interpretation of the unconscious
mechanisms is always retroactive

It would merely be of the nature of interpretation if, at each moment of the history, we
could be certain only that the partial drives intervened effectively in time and place.
And not, as one tended to believe at the beginning of analytic experience, in an erratic
form.
That infantile sexuality is not a wandering block of ice snatched from the great ice-bank
of adult sexuality, intervening as an attraction over an immature subjectthis was proved
at once in analysis and with what, later, might seem a surprising significance.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud was able to
posit sexuality as essentially polymorphous, aberrant. The spell
of a supposed infantile innocence was broken. Because it was
imposed so early, I would almost say too early, this sexuality
made us pass too quickly over an examination of what it essentially represents.
(176)
That is to say that, with regard to the agency of sexuality, all subjects are equal, from the
child to the adultthat they deal only with that part of sexuality that passes into the
networks of the constitution of the subject, into the networks
of the signifierthat sexuality is realized only through the
operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives, partial
with regard to the biological finality of sexuality.
The integration of sexuality into the dialectic of desire passes
through the bringing into play of what, in the body, deserves
to be designated by the term apparatusif you understand by
this that with which the body, with regard to sexuality, may fit
itself up (s'appareiller) as opposed to that with which bodies may be paired off
(s'apparier).
If all is confusion in the discussion of the sexual drives it is
because one does not see that the drive represents no doubt, but
merely represents, and partially at that, the curve of fulfilment
of sexuality in the living being.
Is it surprising that its final term should be death, when the presence of sex in the living
being is bound up with death?
Today I have copied out on the blackboard a fragment of
Heraclitus, which I found in the monumental work in which
Diels has gathered together for us the scattered remains of the
pre-Socratic period. To the bow (Bios), he writes, and this
emerges for us as one of his lessons in wisdom which, before all
the circuit of scientific elaboration, went straight to the target, to the bow is given the
name of life (Bios), the accent being this time on the first syllable) and its work is death.

What the drive integrates at the outset in its very existence

is a dialectic of the bow, I would even say of archery.
In this way we can situate its place in the psychical economy
Freud now introduces us to the drive by one of the most traditional ways, using at every
moment the resources of the language, and not hesitating to base himself on something
that belongs only to certain linguistic systems, the three voices: active, passive, and
reflexive.
But this is merely an envelope.
We must see that this signifying reversion is something other, something other than what
it dresses in.
What is fundamental at the level of each drive is the movement outwards and back in
which it is structured.
(177)
It is remarkable that Freud can designate these two poles
simply by using something that is the verb: to see and to be seen to torment and to be
tormented.
This is because, from the outset, Freud takes it as understood that no part of this distance
covered can be separated from its outwards-and-back movement, from its fundamental
reversion, from the circular character of the path of the drive.
Similarly, it is remarkable that, in order to illustrate the
dimension of this Verkehrung, he should choose Schaulust, the
pleasure of seeing, and what he cannot designate other than by
the combination of two terms in sado-masochism.
When he speaks of these two drives, and especially of masochism, he is careful to
observe that there are not two stages in these drives, but three.
One must distinguish the return into the circuit of the drive of that which appearsbut
also does not appearin a
third stage.
Namely, the appearance of ein neues Subjekt, to be
understood as followsnot in the sense that there is already
one, namely the subject of the drive, but in that what is new is the appearance of a
subject.

This subject, which is properly the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to
show its circular course
(178)
It is only with its appearance at the level of the other that what there is of the function of
the drive may be realized (178-79)
It is to this that I would now like to draw your attention.
You see here, on the blackboard, a circuit formed by the curve
of this rising and redescending arrow that crosses, Drang as it is
in its origin, the surface constituted by what I defined last time
as the rim, which is regarded in the theory as the source, the
Qjulle, that is to say, the so-called erogenous zone in the drive.
The tension is always loop-shaped and cannot be separated
from its return to the erogenous zone.
Here we can clear up the mystery of the zielgelzemmt, of that
form that the drive may assume, in attaining its satisfaction
without attaining its aimin so far as it would be defined by a
biological function, by the realization of reproductive coupling.
For the partial drive does not lie there. What is it?
Let us still suspend the answer, but let us concentrate on this
term but, and on the two meanings it may present. In order to
differentiate them, I have chosen to notate them here in a
language in which they are particularly expressive, English.
When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what
he brings back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the
way taken. The French word but may be translated by another
word in English, goal. In archery, the goal is not the but either,
it is not the bird you shoot, it is having scored a hit and thereby
attained your but.
If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the
point of view of a biological totalization of function, would be
the satisfaction of its end of reproduction, it is because it is a
partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.
This theory is present in Freud. He tells us somewhere that
the ideal model for auto-eroticism would be a single mouth
kissing itselfa brilliant, even dazzling metaphor, in this respect
so typical of everything he writes, and which requires
only to be completed byaquestion. In the drive, is not this mouth
what might be called a mouth in the form of an arrow?a
mouth sewn up, in which, in analysis, we see indicating as
clearly as possible, in certain silences, the pure agency of the
oral drive, closing upon

Schumpeter notes: