Good Sex Illustrated (3 page)
A sorcerer who claims that paid-for magic practices can heal a sick person, recover livestock, bring luck to a harvest or hunt, make a woman fertile, etc., takes advantage of the same system of misappropriation. The expenditure undertaken by his client is carried out in pure loss; but the beliefs that he has received from the group tell him that such an expenditure is fruitful and that, if the investment fails, it’s because the expenditure wasn’t enough, or that the service requested is beyond the power of all possible expenditure, or that he himself, the client, is an obstacle to the process that should have satisfied him. In such a case, institutionalized deception consists of two stages: learning that “all expenditure must produce”; and incentive for an expenditure that produces nothing, but from which a third profits, and which enforces a social order. Conforming to this is a fundamental condition for belonging to the group, a proof of that belonging, a way of confirming the covenant and perpetuating the order.
Providers of imaginary services in contemporary society take action using the same mechanism: suppliers of prayers and deities, psychotherapies, beauty care, fashion, funeral services, every kind of advice, insurance, education; mass media, learning, vacations, etc. Most of these people are, for good reason, on the side of the exploiting order, although they hold only average privileges and lateral functions, like vultures keeping an eye on a flock, and it’s common to compare them to these carrion-feeders.
An example of a more interesting misappropriation, because it’s a matter of a very pure capitalization of the
body,
is the galley. The galley slave remains, in our metaphors, the model for the slave. Who was it? A man reduced to a muscle machine and plugged tooars. The energy produced under duress operated the oars and moved the boat. This boat carried owners, property, the powerful or their power. The goal of travel was profit. The galley-slave-motor was therefore condemned to a forced investment, a production of energy at the interior of a machine of misappropriation that functioned for the merchant or for the State. The grounds for condemnation were theft or minor offence—attacks on the order of the exploiting society. These acts were assessed according to their perpetrator and his relationship to established privileges. The thief, for example, commits an injustice outside the forms of injustice anticipated by law, within which theft is an inalienable right for the wealthy and their acolytes; a right that is only maintained if that class guards that exclusive right to injustice, while guaranteeing to the exploited that they will only suffer their part of it under certain forms and for their own good—a strange deal, may we add in passing. Thus, the delinquent from the exploited classes had accomplished a nonregulation act, which was both illegal and illegitimate: he was severely punished. The delinquent from the exploitive classes, on the other hand, had merely come from the context of a legal injustice to which he had a right: his punishment was light, if there was one. As you can see, things haven’t changed.
If, in a society, abuse is the only hope for prosperity and enjoyment, all men will devote themselves to it, each according to the powers he has at hand. And theft, fraud, exploitation of another by any means and through every disguise will be an inevitable temptation for the exploited themselves, using the maneuvers that have victimized both. In addition, the constant
loss
experienced by the exploited person leads him to take abusive advantage of his social function and the microexploitations over which the Stateallows him some power: exploitations of the servant, women, children, the family, animals, foreigners, etc. If these small powers represent a real way for him to make up for his losses, the exploited person will accept and support these institutional solutions and invest in them what he has left of his desire. He’ll become an owner of men and objects. And for this the family is a system that serves a double function: it offers the exploited a human reservoir for “recharging”—something to vampirize, as it were; and at the same time it serves as a reproductive cell of the outside order.
Apparently, a very long time ago, the exploitive order followed the dictates of a dangerous empiricism, which crudely revealed the abuses it perpetrated and the thrills of its beneficiaries. We would devour with our fangs bared, squander great floods of what we’d misappropriated, seek out new territories where blood would flow even more freely; we competed arbitrarily, with cruelty and at whim. Nowadays, this order tends to become “scientific”: it seals itself off, it buries its booty, it pinches its mouth and tightens its anus, it wears itself out and wastes away in order to rule ever more relentlessly, it’s excessive and small at the same time; it becomes aware of what it’s doing and learns—especially through the human and social sciences—how to do it better. Such scientific capitalism is aiming for a stability that would finally shelter it from revolts, reforms, changes and lock it into that permanent social crisis that amounts to man’s exploitation of man. It can achieve this by strict control of the actions and existences of everyone who is exploited, as is already done, for example, by Communist societies, and for the same reasons. But such control is difficult, and those who are exploited must maintain it themselves, by policing and spying on each other. To the extent that, for a subject, the pressures are personified into a detestable external power, a conflict is possible andthe structure of abuse is in danger. On the other hand, if the pressures are accepted by the subject, if he channels his impulses into them, if he appeases his needs in them, if he uses them to satisfy his own temptations for abusing others, if he closes the circle by bringing to bear all these repressions on himself while verifying that others are also doing it, a perfect, invisible and self-reproducing system of repression becomes available. The police and their medical equivalents must now control only the margins of the social system, where, as tradition has it, the failures in conditioning take refuge—the non-exploitable, those who have kept too much or too little of their brain and body, and are dangerous not because they represent a real power against the Power, but because they perpetuate, more or less despite themselves, the undesirable presence of freedom.
The modes of action of the extraordinary excess of order that characterizes contemporary society are above all indirect. Power only turns to physical force and armed violence as a last resort; it prefers recourse to a network of generalized conditioning that teaches useful social behavior, allowed desires, accepted pleasures, investments that are “fruitful”
—the Order of Expenditure,
thanks to which everything returns to the same machine of exploitation. The fellow who has a profession, a family, children, friendships, leisure, real estate, industrial consumer possessions, religious or political convictions, succeeds in misappropriating himself relentlessly, which makes him the victim, the accomplice and the beneficiary of the exploitive order all at the same time. The scientific society wants totalitarian direction of the acts and modes of expenditure of the exploited, while increasingly hiding from them why and how it does it. Using the countless faces of constant propaganda, the State imposes, directly or indirectly, the norms, codes and values that regulate this slavery. Since the adherence of each depends on his belief in the profitability of the personal investments recommended for him, its essentially under the form of objects of desire that the ideology is spread and assimilated; private property is that parody of pleasure, drawn from a product that is itself parodic, fabricated and sold for the profit of the misappropriationist. Having fallen deeply into the trap, the exploited-consumer compensates symbolically for what he lacks by collaborating with the order that keeps him in bondage, he lives and dies in the constant unreality of what he is doing, of what he desires, of what he has. Because the sole “reality” is external, it is in the hands of those who hold a power, it is this power itself. And it no longer matters that some “fanatics” preach revolution, or defection: because the majority who uphold the order definitely do not do it out of simple wickedness, out of interest or out of stupidity, but because they are irremediably adapted to it, like sardines are to their can; and when they find themselves with their heads cut off, grilled and drenched in oil, it’s a bit late to announce to them that their life is going to change.
Ideology defines which individuals we are supposed to be, to which objects our consciousness is entitled, which relationships to others we must have, which ideal we are to pursue, which feelings we are to cultivate, which values we are to respect, which reality we are to share, and which images of forbidden objects we must repress; it tells us who Mankind is, what Nature is, and why Industrial Society is our Salvation. It misappropriates our entire body, all our energy, harnesses and disposes of the remnants of our desire and freedom, and confines them in codes that will bend us to the limits, toward objects and forms of action useful to those who dominate us.
The ultimate goal of conditioning is to blind our mind as much as possible to these manipulations and keep us from foreseeing any of them. For most people, this result is achieved; sometimes they retain the vague impression of being “exploited” (it’s simply a word for a mood) when they’re working, but they honestly feel “free” (it’s purely a state of mind) when they aren’t working. However, each minute of their life, each gesture, each thought, each desire, each belief, or even each revolt is produced by the system and represents the fundamental condition of permanent exploitation that they are enduring, at work or not. This is why a subversion that doesn’t, above all, attack learned subjectivity (forms of self-awareness, perception, one’s relation to the other, desire, sexual expenditure…) only succeeds at making the old order reappear under a new aspect. Because the reproductive machines that the order has invented and distributed everywhere are not the rulers, the armies, the police, the powerful, the institutions, the laws: they are our own brains. Cut off the head of the order and save ours; the order grows back again.
But a lot of dissidents would be surprised to learn that their little mind drunk on anarchy is trapped. As for the honest Communist worker, who, returning from his militancy, rejoins his patriarchal, highly submissive family: he would be indignant if he was told that this Order-at-Home is working for the employers and guaranteeing their future. The menial chore of producing slaves is always slaves’ work: they are totally reliable
moulds
—even if from time to time, because of over-zealousness, they fabricate a boss.
In a more laughable order of ideas, we have people who, knowing that our food is toxic, buy natural foods at high prices; then they go gorge themselves on television, films, the radio, novels, newspapers or pop music. This is watching out for small poisonsso that you can better swallow the big ones; or, out of fear of the policeman in his cocked hat, only receiving plainclothes cops in your home.
Beyond work, social activities and private ownership that is more or less phantasmal, and on which he’ll have shed the main part of the energy that has been snatched from him, the exploited person will sometimes keep a small sexual surplus, a libidinal detritus that he’ll deem to be very precious but that obviously isn’t free either: it is to be spent on amorous behaviors that are profitable for the State and stipulated by it.
Permissible “orgasm” is an ultimate form of
goods
that you obtain through an infinity of obstacles and that you jealously guard. Because if pleasure remained without purpose, it would be the kind of squandering that thwarts the social order and the inner order of the subject. The
free
play of pleasure isn’t marketable, it isn’t invested to acquire, it wants neither ownership nor any permanent object, and it has no jurisdiction: it is gratuitous, and therefore irretrievable by the exploitive order.
Under such conditions, it remains prohibited. And the idea of the “sexual” that liberal propaganda, and the medicine that serves it, present to us as “spontaneous,” as “natural,” as the “animal” in us, is in reality that which is heavily influenced by the most rigid structures of abuse and the most subtle misappropriations. Our desire, our capacity for expenditure are what the system recuperates and exploits: our “sex” is that
conditioned vestige
it returns to us. These are the maneuvers hidden behind the ideology of the “natural.”
A well-socialized sexual relationship will be the
market
par excellence, whereby goalless expenditure is transformed into an exchange that has interest, into a
reciprocal return
, and into a
relation of power
between partners who have anxiously evaluated one another to be sure that the swap will be profitable.
The squandering of desire is stifled by a familial/conjugal machine of endless production-consumption—the child of which is by definition what is at stake and the victim. This is what I will now attempt to illustrate.
THE PRINCIPLE OF SEX EDUCATION