Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction, all manner of seduction (which is itself a highly ritualized process) disappears behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for the immediate realization of a desire. Our center of gravity has in fact shifted toward an unconscious and libidinal economy which only leaves room for the total naturalization of a desire bound either to fateful drives or to pure and simple mechanical operation, but above all to the imaginary order of repression and liberation.
Nowadays, one no longer says: ‘You’ve got a soul and you must save it,’ but: ‘You’ve got a sexual nature, and you must find out how to use it well.’
‘You’ve got an unconscious, and you must learn how to liberate it.’
‘You’ve got a body, and you must know how to enjoy it.’
‘You’ve got a libido, and you must know how to spend it,’ etc., etc. This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. This is the form which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies.
“I conceptualize capitalism in terms of a historically specific form of social interdependence with an impersonal and seemingly objective character. This form of interdependence is effected by historically unique forms of social relations that are constituted by determinate forms of social practice and, yet, become quasi-independent of the people engaged in these practices. The result is a new, increasingly abstract form of social domination—one that subjects people to impersonal structural imperatives and constraints that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of concrete domination (e.g., personal or group domination), and that generates an ongoing historical dynamic. […] Interpreting Marx’s analysis as a historically specific critique of labor in capitalism leads to an understanding of capitalist society which is very different from that of traditional Marxist interpretations. It suggests, for example, that the social relations and forms of domination that characterize capitalism, in Marx’s analysis, cannot be understood sufficiently in terms of class relations, rooted in property relations and mediated by the market. Rather, his analysis of the commodity and capital—that is, the quasi-objective forms of social mediation constituted by labor in capitalism—should be understood as an analysis of this society’s fundamental social relations. These impersonal and abstract social forms do not simply veil what traditionally has been deemed the “real” social relations of capitalism, that is, class relations; they are the real relations of capitalist society, structuring its dynamic trajectory and its form of production.”
— Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination
Percepts as Raw Material We are the victims of a tradition according to which the senses furnish nothing better or worse than the raw material of experience. The physical world, although magnificently organized by the laws of nature, is supposed to present no lawfulness to the eyes. The appearance of the world—we are told—is shapeless, and shapeless is the image caught and transmitted by visual perception.
countervisuality 