Discourse

The Image of Neutrality

In The Usual Suspects (directed by Bryan Singer, 1995), Roger “Verbal” Kint (played by Kevin Spacey) describes the mysterious villain Keyser Söze by comparing him to the devil and quoting, without citation, Baudelaire. Kint declares that “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”¹ By hiding his existence, the Devil can operate stealthily through seemingly self-motivated human actions. Although many on the Left equate capitalism with the Devil, capitalism operates in exactly the opposite fashion. Its basic trick consists not in hiding its existence but rather in proclaiming it. This trick proves so effective that it blinds not just the true believers but even some of the system’s most thoughtful detractors. Of course, capitalism really exists in the sense that it functions as today’s controlling economic system, but it does not exist as the substantial ground of our being and is not the default economic system that results from the failure to decide politically on some alternative. Capitalism is political through and through. Its existence depends on the collective decision that brought it into being and that continues to sustain its development. But this decision is difficult to see. Whereas a link can easily be made between the existence of communism and a revolutionary decision that [End Page 3] creates its rule, no such decision inaugurates capitalism. No one would mistake the communist system that arose in Russia in 1917 with the natural order of things. But capitalism appears as a neutral background that emerges out of being itself, as an economic system that simply develops on its own and continues unabated unless it encounters political interference.

Capitalism owes much of its strength as an economic system to its guise of neutrality, to its illusion of belonging to the order of existence. If it isn’t a system at all or even a way of life but just the way of life, then the idea of contesting it is nonsensical and doomed to failure. According to this way of thinking, the communist revolutions of the twentieth century ran aground not because of their own internal contradictions but because they attempted to violate the economic laws of nature. The idea of capitalism’s natural status or its correlation with human nature provides the fundamental obstacle to any attempt to contest capitalism’s dominance. Before capitalist relations of production can be challenged, people must believe that capitalism doesn’t exist, that it results from a break within the structure of being itself rather than simply deriving from that structure. The key to taking this step lies in an investigation of how the existence of capitalism becomes evident. It does so only at moments of crisis, which is what gives crisis its fecundity.

Although subjects within the capitalist universe experience themselves as free (free to make money, free to consume what they want, and so on), the system spares them the weight of the decision. We make numerous decisions every day concerning what to do, where to go, and what to buy, but none of these decisions occur outside the confines of the narrow limits of our given possibilities. The political decision, the decision concerning our way of life itself, disappears within the capitalist horizon. None of our everyday choices involve the risk of a radical transformation; instead, all offer the security of a well-known terrain. This security is the direct result of the belief in the substantial existence of capitalism, a belief that the system itself requires and sustains.

Belief in the existence of capitalism has become especially pronounced in the absence of any economic alternative. Political theorists today often lament the absence of political engagement among subjects within the capitalist economy. The problem is not just that few actively engage in political struggle but that it is difficult to conceptualize the world in political terms. Rather than seeing themselves as incessantly confronted by political questions, subjects today accept the given order as the natural state of things. This acceptance represents a retreat from politics, because politics necessarily involves a rupture with what is given. By conceiving [End Page 4] oneself as a political subject, one ipso facto loosens the grip of the given order. As Jacques Rancière points out, “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies’, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying.”² Taking oneself to be a political subject creates a disruption in what is given insofar as it reveals the political structure of the given. As political subjects, we see the given not as given but instead as the result of a political victory.

Although Rancière correctly sees the need for politicization, in his thought the marginalization of economy obscures how this politicization might occur.³ Today, politicization requires a disruption in the naturalness of the capitalist economy, but this economy works constantly to present itself as natural, which is why such a disruption is difficult to see. It is not enough simply to call for a return to politics. As long as capitalism persists in the guise of a natural system that simply exists, such calls will go unheeded. Grasping the vulnerability of the capitalist system requires taking stock of its strength.

Capitalism’s appeal as an economic system stems in part from its capacity to protect subjects from seeing their own role in constituting the system in which they participate. By keeping the awareness of this role at bay, by promulgating a sense that capitalism exists, the capitalist system produces the appearance of solid ground beneath the subject’s feet. Although in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels point out the deracinating form of capitalist relations of production, this uprooting of traditional guarantees and realities leads to the formation of an even more deeply imbued sense of solid ground that derives from the seeming emergence from being itself that inheres within the capitalist system. Capitalism’s form of appearance is that of the natural order of things. Because it commands us to follow our own self-interest rather than question where this interest lies, capitalism can present itself as the economic system most proximate to the givens of our biology.

Capitalism’s reliance on the idea of self-interest is the foundation of its claim to a connection with human nature. But it is this connection that Freud thoroughly demolishes. Although we often consider Freud the cynical thinker who discovers self-interest at the heart of every altruistic action, the basis of his thought—the discovery of psychoanalysis itself—derives from subjects acting contrary to their self-interest with maddening consistency. Acting according [End Page 5] to self-interest is not the default subjective position but instead, for Freud, actually represents a psychic impossibility (even under capitalism, a system that rewards such action). What characterizes the subject’s state of being is not self-interest but rather drive, a process that involves the inevitable subversion of self-interest. If I am to sustain myself as a subject of the drive, I must sacrifice my self-interest. Attaining some good, on the other hand, would require abandoning the drive.

Drive, as Freud conceives it, sustains itself as drive. Any achievement of a good or a fulfillment of self-interest would thus squelch drive by extinguishing the obstacle that serves as its condition of possibility. Drive is the enjoyment of the obstacle to desire’s realization. Freud tries to cure neurotics, but he has no illusions about rendering them happy by allowing them to pursue their self-interest. His melancholy statement at the end of Studies on Hysteria testifies directly to this conclusion. He defines therapeutic success not as allowing the realization of self-interest but instead as “transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”⁴ “Common unhappiness” is Freud’s term for the subject’s inability to simply pursue its self-interest. A system structured around the pursuit of self-interest is thus in no way suited to subjects of the drive but instead results from a political decision that they continue to make unconsciously through their participation in the capitalist system. But capitalism relies on disguising this decision through the appearance of naturalness.

Life under Capitalism

The power of capitalism’s link to biology and the natural world is most readily visible in social Darwinism and its echoes. Social Darwinists see direct parallels between class relations in the capitalist system and the relations among species in the natural world. But the very formation and success of Darwinism itself owes a foundational debt to capitalism and capitalist ideology.⁵ It is not just that social Darwinism brought biological ideas into its understanding of society; Darwinism proper relied on economic ideas that it borrowed from the capitalist system. As André Pichot points out, “Contrary to appearances, social Darwinism is not simply the importation of a biological doctrine into sociology. It was Darwinian biology that had previously imported into biology a sociological doctrine.”⁶ The laws of capitalism appealed to Darwin and his followers because those laws seem so closely related to the natural world. Capitalism seems natural, and nature comes to appear inherently capitalistic. [End Page 6]

The emergence of biopower and even biopolitical analysis in contemporary social relations is a symptom of the full acceptance of capitalism’s existence as a substance providing ground for our subjectivity. Biopower takes the living body as its object, which represents a radical departure for the way that social authority functions. Rather than threatening death, authority constitutes itself through preserving, regulating, and even producing life.⁷ The concern for life develops out of a sense that life is itself the source of all value and that nothing exists outside of life. The development of this valuation of life depends on the dominance of capitalism, an economic system that passes itself off as identical to the structure of natural life.⁸

It is no coincidence that the great ideologists of unrestrained capitalism base their support for capitalism as an economic system on the notion that it coincides with the nature of being itself. For such figures, capitalism is not so much an economic system as it is the way of the world. This is clearly the position of Ayn Rand, whose novel Atlas Shrugged represents perhaps the leading treatise of contemporary capitalist ideology. In the novel, Rand divides characters into the producers who actually create value and the moochers who merely appropriate the value created by the producers. Whereas Marx views the working class as the producers and the capitalist class as the appropriators of the value created by the working class, Rand views capitalists as the only true producers. In an explanation to a fellow producer, the character Francisco d’Anconia posits a natural world in which the production of money occurs outside of any societal structure that makes this production possible. He proclaims that “Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”⁹ As Rand sees it, the capitalist engages in a pure act of production that takes place outside of any system that would regulate it. Production is a natural act that relies solely on the effort of the productive few, people such as Francisco d’Anconia, Henry “Hank” Rearden, Dagny Taggart, and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.

In her novel, Rand envisions all the producers going on strike in order to protest the political system that interferes with their natural productivity. Her polemic becomes ideological insofar as it fails to account for the political structure of the capitalist economy in which these producers dominate. They succeed not simply by virtue of their own productivity or ingenuity but also through the systematic regulations that create the conditions of possibility in which this productivity can thrive. Capitalist production, in other [End Page 7] words, cannot exist except against the background of the capitalist political decision that produces an unnatural (despite its appearance) economic system. Without stable capitalist social relations, neither Hank Reardon’s new metal nor Dagny Taggart’s trains would be conceivable. Rand misses this important dimension of the producers’ success because she assumes that capitalist relations of production are the natural or neutral background against which all human activity transpires. For Rand, capitalist relations of production are ubiquitous, which is why capitalism has a substantial existence.

Rand’s philosophy of identity (which she wrongly claims to take from Aristotle) depends on this same misperception produced by capitalism’s form of appearance. She believes that identity simply is, that a = a. But the statement of identity—the claim that a = a—transfigures the fact of identity. It implies both a political decision to assert a claim about the world and a psychic investment in the claim about identity. This statement of identity distorts the world that it constitutes. The claim of identity becomes an inextricable part of the identity, and this is what Rand’s philosophy cannot accommodate. Her blindness to the distortion of subjectivity finds its crowning avowal in the name that she gives to her philosophy: “objectivism.” Objectivism is not just Rand’s personal way of thinking; it is also the philosophy that capitalism’s obfuscation of subjective distortion demands. The purported objectivity of the journalist under capitalism is the not-so-distant cousin of Rand, the objectivist thinker.

This error can be traced back to the founding theorists of capitalism. In the Wealth of Nations, although he doesn’t use the term “capitalism,” Adam Smith defines the capitalist economy as an economy based on the pursuit of self-interest, but self-interest remains a pure presupposition of Smith’s philosophy. He never attempts to argue for his conception of humans as self-interested beings, because he associates self-interest with nature itself. It is in this sense that capitalism is the natural economic system. Once Smith adopts this starting point, the justification for capitalism necessarily follows. The pursuit of individual self-interest, given the market logic of supply and demand, leads to the societal good. Although Smith avoids Rand’s absolute libertarianism, he does share her insistence on an identification of the pursuit of self-interest with the inherent structure of humanity.¹⁰

This is not, unfortunately, an error confined to champions of capitalism such as Rand and Smith. The error can even be found among communist philosophers in their attacks against capitalism. Throughout his writing, Marx is careful to stress just how unnatural [End Page 8] capitalism is, even though he doesn’t always say this in a critical way. But for someone like Alain Badiou, capitalism and reliance on self-interest equate with nature itself. Like other students of Louis Althusser (such as Rancière), Badiou’s communist philosophy represents a plea for a political intervention that would displace the priority that economy has in capitalist society. Economy has no place in Badiou’s political vision of revolution. But the emphasis that Badiou places on political as opposed to economic intervention causes him to grant capitalism a natural status, to presuppose its existence.

In Badiou’s thought, capitalism exists: it has the status of being the background of pure animality against which we might act. As he points out in his treatise on former French president Nicholas Sarkozy, “Whoever does not clarify the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, because the words have little importance—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporary, that is to say capitalist, name for this animality is: competition. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more.”¹¹ Although Badiou champions communism as the alternative to capitalism, what is significant about these lines is his characterization of capitalism. Here as elsewhere, Badiou equates the capitalist system with human animality and thereby takes the capitalist system at face value when it presents itself as a system emerging out of nature itself. According to Badiou, there was no event that occasioned capitalism, no capitalist event, and there can be no economic event or rupture within the realm of economy. In explicit contrast to politics, economy is definitely not a truth procedure. Any economic intervention in society plays into the hands of capitalism, according to Badiou, because economy itself is de facto capitalist. Capitalism is economy as such.

In contrast to Marx, Badiou sees economy as an alternative to politics rather than as a politicized form of economy. This gesture from one of capitalism’s most thoughtful opponents suggests just how widespread capitalism’s image of neutrality has become. Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism through its historical emergence represents perhaps his most significant achievement insofar as it provides a counterweight to the image of neutrality. This way of thinking about capitalism gives the lie to its alignment with natural being, but one need not be Marx or a Marxist to recognize this. [End Page 9]

The Unnatural Gaze

The difficulty of seeing the unnatural status of capitalism is akin to the problem that besets subjects confronted with the visual field. Although capitalism is a system that shapes the activities of subjects within it and not a field that captures their look, it does nonetheless share a key element with the field of vision. In both cases, the terrain appears natural and given to us as subjects irrespective of our engagement in it. That is to say, capitalism and the visual field seem to exist on their own in a neutral state with regard to the subjects who engage them. They present themselves as simply partaking in the order of things. Just as no political decision inaugurates the capitalist system, none constitutes the visual field.

This appearance of naturalness is more pronounced in the visual field than in any of the other sensory fields. While touch, taste, hearing, and smell often result from an evident and active decision—someone moves forward to embrace us or bakes us a cake to eat, for instance—sight most often makes use of what lies before our eyes apparently without any act that forges what we see. In the other sensory fields, it is easier to discern the subjective distortion or decision that constitutes the field. Perhaps this is clearest in the case of taste, where the subject’s own desire so evidently determines the status of the field. If I hate lettuce, this will shape how I experience the green leafy substance in my mouth. Although I may believe that lettuce simply tastes awful, I can grasp how it tastes awful for me and how my taste plays a role in its status as awful. I can even, through an act of radical imagination, consider the existence of someone who might take pleasure in eating lettuce.

With vision, the situation is much more difficult. What I see and how I see it appears to exist in front of my eyes, and the role that my desire plays in constituting this scene is not at all evident. The visual field, in other words, does not appear distorted by desire. I assume that others, standing where I stand, will see what I see in the way that I see it. Vision, in other words, does not seem to be just a question of taste. The illusion of naturalness renders the subjective distortion of the visual field—its reliance on our act of seeing to constitute it—almost impossible to detect. But it is not quite impossible. We see this distortion of desire primarily in works of art such as films or paintings, where the constitutive role of our subjectivity can become more prominent.

In his Seminar XI, Jacques Lacan names the distortion that desire produces in the visual field “le regard,” or “the gaze.” The introduction of this term immediately opens Lacan to a horrible misunderstanding that derailed Anglo-American film theory for [End Page 10] decades.¹² The gaze, as Lacan theorizes it, is not the simple act of looking and the mastery involved in that act (as the English-speaking interpreters of Lacan had it) but rather the point at which the distortion caused by the subject’s desire becomes visible as a disruption in the visual field. In other words, the gaze is nothing but the way that the subject’s desire deforms what it sees. It is the impossibility of a neutral or natural field of vision. At the point of the gaze, the subject is an absent presence in the visual field that is responsible for the field’s distorted character, its lack of neutrality. The gaze is political in the sense that it exposes the unnatural status of the apparently natural visible world.

When we see the gaze, we see that the visual field is not simply there to be seen but is constituted around our vision of it, distorted by our desire. This distortion then forces us to reexamine everything that we see. As Joan Copjec notes in her unparalleled account of the gaze, “At the moment the gaze is discerned, the image, the entire visual field, takes on a terrifying alterity.”¹³ We see that our desire has been taken into account by what appears to be a neutral visual field. The neutrality of this field vanishes, and the political decision that inaugurates it becomes apparent. The encounter with the gaze transforms the subject by creating an awareness in the subject of its role in producing what it sees.

The gaze exposes the tendentious nature of the apparently neutral visual field: what seems to be simply there to be seen becomes evident as a structure created around the subject’s desire. What appears in front of the subject thus loses its independent and external status for the subject. The distance that inheres in the act of looking collapses through the emergence of the gaze. In this sense, the trauma of encountering the gaze is nothing but the trauma of encountering the constitutive power of one’s own desire in shaping what one sees even before one sees it. The gaze as an object that causes our desire is most powerful in the visual field due to the apparent independence that this field has for us. Its manifestation always occasions a traumatic shock.¹⁴

We can see an instance of an encounter with the gaze in Nicolas Winding Refn’s small masterpiece Drive (2011). The film recounts the travails of an unnamed driver (played Ryan Gosling) who helps his neighbor, Standard (played by Oscar Isaac), commit a robbery in order to pay a debt that he incurred while in prison. Even though the driver sees the folly of the plan, he agrees to go along because he has fallen for Standard’s wife Irene (played by Carey Mulligan). During the robbery, Standard is killed by the same criminals who forced him into the crime, and after the driver escapes with the money, they come after him. The film’s key scene [End Page 11] occurs in an elevator at the driver’s apartment building, where a hit man rides with the driver and Irene.

Understanding that both his own life and Irene’s are at stake, the driver attacks the hit man with extreme violence and brutally kills him by beating him to a bloody pulp. Although Irene had begun to fall in love with the driver especially after the death of her husband, here she looks on with complete shock. She recognizes that the driver is saving her, but the violence that he displays reveals the impossibility of her having any life with him. He reveals that he is capable of a level of violence with which she could not simply coexist. The scene concludes in a striking fashion: Irene exits the elevator, and the shot focuses on the door as it closes in front of her disoriented look. This is the encounter with the gaze.

The shot of Irene’s shocked face does not itself represent the gaze. The horror of her look exposes the gaze or distortion within the elevator itself. Her exclusion from the scene as the elevator door shuts reveals the unnatural or distorted status of what we have just witnessed. The driver’s brutality—necessary as it might have been—was not simply a natural response to a threat but a horrible display of excess. Irene’s look shows that brutality to be unnatural, inadmissible within the bounds of social interaction—a gaze. In this sense, the film, despite its graphic violence, represents one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of such violence in contemporary cinema. Drive exposes this violence as the result of a political decision or a desire and associates both the film’s protagonist and the spectator with this decision. From this moment on, there is no possibility of any romantic bond between the driver and Irene. The driver exists in a position that the film exposes as excessive.

When the elevator door closes in Drive, the camera remains within the elevator and thus leaves the spectator with the driver rather than with Irene. The spectator is positioned within the distortion of the gaze itself. The possibility of a typical life within society lies on the other side of the elevator door. In this sense, the film alludes to a similar exclusion in one of the most famous scenes in American cinema, an exclusion that also involves an encounter with the gaze. At the end of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the door shuts on Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne), the violent war veteran who has finally returned his niece to her family after years of Indian captivity. Although both films facilitate an encounter with the gaze that reveals the distortion of the visual field, the position that each film takes relative to this encounter is completely opposed.

While Drive leaves the spectator with the driver to inhabit the distortion, The Searchers remains inside the house as it excludes [End Page 12] Edwards and the distorting gaze from the visual field. The film’s point here is that social normalcy depends on the exclusion of the gaze, which thus exposes the unnatural status of this normalcy. But Drive pushes this logic even further by locating the spectator within the distortion itself. With this gesture, it seems that the distortion is inescapable. We can shut the door on distortion, but we remain on this side of the barrier.¹⁵

The link between the cinematic gaze and capitalism becomes most evident in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a film most often seen as a straightforward capitalist fantasy. Although the big capitalist, Henry Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore), is the film’s villain, Capra nonetheless shows how the small capitalist can thrive and provide the backbone for the formation of a supportive community. When the community comes to the rescue of George Bailey (played by James Stewart) at the end of the film and supplies the money that he owes to Potter, it seems as if capitalism is compatible with the values that its insistence on self-interest would appear to thwart.

But the decisive section of It’s a Wonderful Life is the fantasy sequence in which the angel Clarence (played by Henry Travers) shows George what life would be like without him. We see the quaint small town of Bedford Falls transformed into the squalid Pottersville, a city where corruption and self-interest are ubiquitous. Other commentators have noted that this fantasy sequence simply provides Capra with the opportunity to present the capitalist reality of his time, but what we see is not simply the social reality. Instead, by subtracting George from the filmic universe, the film shows us the distortion of the capitalist gaze. George’s presence obscures the gaze, and his absence unleashes it. The excesses and horrors of the capitalist system become visible because George’s crisis leads to an encounter with the gaze. Clarence exposes him to the gaze not just in order to convince George to remain alive but also to reassure him about his investment in the capitalist system. It is this investment that renders Pottersville invisible, and when George accepts his former role at the end of the film, the image of Pottersville once again recedes from view. Bedford Falls tames the gaze.

In the cinema, the gaze emerges at moments of narrative crisis, at moments when the spectator’s sense of mastery and distance evaporates. When the gaze emerges, the visual field loses its illusion of neutrality, and the distortion produced by the spectator’s desire that stains the image becomes visible. This distortion most often remains hidden but manifests itself whenever we encounter the gaze, during any crisis when the cinema reveals how our investment as spectators skews what we see. In the same way, the [End Page 13] moment of crisis exposes the capitalist gaze—its status as one economic system among others that we must either accept or reject. The moment of crisis within capitalism makes the unnaturalness of capitalism evident. These moments represent political opportunities, or opportunities for politics, and stage what we might call an encounter with the gaze.

Occupying the Crisis

Capitalism functions through the same illusion of neutrality or naturalness as the visual field. The possibility for an encounter with the gaze or the subjective distortion that produces capitalism exists also within the field of capitalist economics. Here, the encounter is just as difficult to produce as it is within the field of vision. Most of the time, capitalist relations of production create enough prosperity that few people question the neutrality of these relations. But the gaze is ever-present within capitalism and is always ready to appear. When it does, the political decision undergirding the capitalist economic system becomes visible.

The tendentious status of capitalism—the gaze within capitalism—becomes most evident during an economic crisis. This is why it is not surprising that the clearest challenges to capitalism have occurred during times of economic tumult. We can see three clear instances in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Great Depression of the 1930s occasioned the emergence of a social safety net, a clear political intervention into the economic realm that was designed to modify the structure of capitalist relations of production. Even if President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to save capitalism from the threat of communism with the New Deal, this intervention nevertheless shifted the terrain of the discussion and exposed the unnatural nature of capitalism. The capitalist system left capital itself idle and unable to stimulate economic activity. There was no capitalist solution to this failure. The United States needed the New Deal because capitalism could not simply work on its own without destroying itself.

The American economy in the early 1970s was not in the same moribund condition that it was in during the 1930s, but President Richard Nixon’s decision to sever the link between the U.S. dollar and gold—the elimination of the gold standard—represents another instance where capitalism’s nonexistence becomes apparent. On August 15, 1971, Nixon tried to stem the tide of inflation and the massive foreign redemption of dollars for gold by freeing the dollar from its link to the American supply of gold. As a result, [End Page 14] the Federal Reserve could print dollars in response to impending or actual economic crises and thereby work to abate them. The turn away from gold ushered in a much more flexible and evidently political monetary policy. Although monetary policy has always been political, Nixon’s action exposed its tendentiousness—and the tendentiousness of capitalism as a whole.

Even more than Roosevelt, Nixon was attempting to save or harmonize capitalism rather than destroy it. But his response to the economic crisis that he confronted makes even clearer capitalism’s break from the natural world. The link to gold enables us to believe that capitalism functions on a solid foundation, that it is rooted in an element of the natural world. We can find gold on the periodic table and identify its atomic number, thereby assuring ourselves of its natural status. The dollar has no atomic number and doesn’t provide any reassuring link to the natural world. Instead, the dollar makes evident the act of faith on which all monetary systems rest. Nixon’s act eliminates the illusory connection to nature. During the crisis of 1971, the American economy would bear the mark of politics.

The financial crisis of 2008 produced an almost wholly converse phenomenon. Rather than exposing the politicized structure of the economy, the 2008 crisis ushered the capitalist economy onto the political scene. The question of the injustice inherent in capitalism emerged as the salient political question. This turn of events indicated a disruption in the usual order of American politics, which works to marginalize fundamental capitalist questions in favor of cultural ones or small economic ones. Even the widespread use of the signifier “capitalism” revealed an expansion of the political field to include the terrain of capitalist economy.

The birth of the Occupy Movement out of the 2008 financial crisis was the vehicle for this expansion. The crisis in which financial managers became even wealthier through the immiseration of others and the government intervention to save the banking system laid bare the interpenetration of politics and the capitalist economy. Operating according to its own logic, the system self-destructed, and an extraordinary political act was needed to avoid a complete collapse. Once this became evident, the Occupy Movement could make the case that the antagonism between the 1 percent and the 99 percent had a political status rather than a natural status.¹⁶

The specific nature of the capitalist crisis reveals capitalist relations of production as unnatural. Although denaturalizing capitalism is possible at other times, the moment of the capitalist crisis marks one of the few times that capitalism’s distance from nature manifests itself. The crisis acts on the capitalist system like the film [End Page 15] does on the visual field: the crisis facilitates an encounter with the distortion that constitutes the system and yet remains repressed within it.

Of course, crises do not begin with capitalism. Throughout its history, humanity has endured crisis after crisis. These crises have always been bouts of scarcity when natural conditions obstruct the production of goods necessary for human survival. Capitalism does not eliminate the crisis but radically transforms it from a crisis of scarcity into a crisis of overproduction. This transformation of the crisis reveals the wholly unnatural status or nonexistence of the capitalist system.

The natural world engages in a constant struggle with scarcity. Plants and animals must either fight with each other or cooperate—neither strategy is more natural than the other, despite what appears self-evident—in order to survive in a world that provides a limited number of available resources. A crisis comes about for animals, for instance, when they can no longer find enough food in their particular locality. Precapitalist humans suffer the same types of crises as animals and thus appear to be simply human animals, to be natural beings. But capitalism revolutionizes the crisis that humanity confronts and thereby exposes humanity’s fundamental break from the natural world.

The capitalist economy enters into crisis not through scarcity but through overproduction, the production of an excess of commodities with a paucity of consumers for those commodities. Capitalism transforms the nature of human crises from crises of scarcity to those of overproduction. All of the attempts to create a stable system reveal capitalism’s unnatural and inharmonious status. For instance, the Keynesian solution of excessive state spending shows that capitalism doesn’t properly function as a natural order. The immiseration that capitalism causes is not the result of its inability to produce enough commodities for consumers to purchase but is the by-product of the excess that it produces. Even on the most commonsensical level, the fact that an excess of production leads to a crisis can only seem bizarre.

The housing crisis of 2008 makes this logic perfectly clear. The crisis was not the result of a lack of houses for people who needed them but rather the result of an excess of houses with no one to pay for them. Vacant houses began to proliferate, which led to a drop in the value of existing houses and a near total collapse in the production of new ones. The term used to describe the precursor to the crisis—the “housing bubble”—testifies to the problem of overproduction. Whereas early humanity struggled to find enough shelter, subjects of capitalism suffer from having too much of it. [End Page 16]

The 2008 crisis didn’t just leave us with a surplus of housing, however. Surpluses were evident throughout the economic landscape. As Robert Harvey notes, the postcrisis world was “short on cash and awash with surplus houses, surplus offices and shopping malls, surplus productive capacity and even more surplus labor than before.”¹⁷ No one could mistake an excess of commodities and an excess of the capacity for producing more as a natural problem. All of a sudden with the crisis of overproduction, capitalism ceases to exist and becomes the product of a political decision. Overproduction renders the capitalist system as such visible.

But the crisis of overproduction creates an awareness that doesn’t exist at any other time. Marx explicitly recognizes this in the Grundrisse, where he notes that “capital has no awareness whatever of the nature of its process of realization, and has an interest in having an awareness of it only in times of crisis.”¹⁸ The crisis forces capitalism to take stock of how it realizes value and to control this process in a conscious way. But the problem with this awareness, from Marx’s perspective, is that it will always be fleeting: when the crisis passes, the awareness will pass as well. The crisis of capitalism will never facilitate a lasting consciousness of capitalist relations of production because such a consciousness would destroy these very relations. But for those not invested in the preservation of capitalist relations of production, the crisis represents an unparalleled opportunity. The crisis reveals the capitalist gaze, the unnatural status of capitalism, the decision that sustains its relations of production. Just as the subject can experience the gaze in its field of vision, it can also experience the gaze within the structure of capitalism even though this gaze is not visual.

Although the structure of capitalism is not homologous with the structure of the visual field, thinking about capitalism in terms of the gaze follows from the apparent neutrality that both structures share. When we look at a visual field, it appears not as a field constructed around our desire but rather as a field already there to be seen. No background lights fall from the sky as in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) in order to reveal to us that our look has informed what is visible to us. Visual reality successfully presents itself as a background against which and in which we desire rather than as a field thoroughly colored by our desire. In the same way, when we confront capitalism, it appears as a neutral economic system that simply exists in the absence of any political intervention. Capitalism passes itself off as the economic system given by being itself, just as the visual field does. It passes itself off as existing.

The traumatic encounter with the gaze, the moment of confronting one’s own desire as a distortion of the world in which [End Page 17] one exists, renders this world unnatural and foreign. The world ceases to be a habitual space in which one can dwell and becomes a groundless field based solely on the desire of the subjects who exist within it. The gaze exposes the world itself as nothing but a presupposition of the desiring subject, a structure lacking any independent existence or substantive weight. The world is not the background in which we desire but emerges only through the force of desire. This is what Hegel means when he says in the Phenomenology of Spirit that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”¹⁹ What appears as substantial and preexisting subjectivity depends for its substantiality on the subject’s role in its constitution. This is not to say that there is no objective material reality, that everything exists only in an ideal realm, but rather that this objective reality is inextricable from a subjective distortion, a gaze, that divides it from itself and on which it depends. The dependence of objectivity on this subjective distortion makes the world unheimlich, which is why we seek refuge from the gaze.

When the crisis occurs, capital ceases to flow smoothly, and the money necessary to buy commodities and restart this flow of capital remains dormant. The crisis causes capital to lose its productivity, and even Rand’s producers cannot rediscover it. We see that capitalism does not work like a neutral background but distorts social relations. The failure of capital itself to resolve the crisis—its reliance on state intervention—exposes its unnaturalness and the decision that permits its survival. The crisis confronts us with the possibility that capitalism might fail, with evidence that it exists only through our efforts to bring it into being. The danger of the crisis for capitalism is not that it will bring about an economic catastrophe from which the system cannot recover but rather that it will expose the system’s nonexistence and thus create an opportunity for the encounter with the gaze. And this encounter would make possible another form of economic decision: an economic event.

Two Responses to Crisis

Moments of crisis within capitalism facilitate an encounter with the gaze but are not necessarily always revolutionary. Oftentimes, the response to this encounter is a fascist reaction. The same economic crisis that occasioned the New Deal in the United States gave birth to Nazism in Germany. The moment of the gaze’s emergence makes the political dimension of the economy evident but does not point in any necessary political direction. The gaze presents [End Page 18] us with a political opening that can lead toward either a leftist or a rightist mobilization.

The key to the political valence of the encounter with the gaze lies in the interpretation of the gaze itself. If we interpret the gaze as the distortion of an otherwise balanced and neutral system, then we will respond with fascistic efforts to restore the capitalist system’s imaginary neutrality through the violent exclusion of the source of the distortion. In other words, fascism believes that the gaze, the distortion of the capitalist system, is not inherent in the system but represents an excess that corrupts the system from the outside. Fascism is the attempt to purify capitalism but necessarily fails because capitalism’s impurity inheres within the capitalist system itself. There is no such thing as a purified capitalism, which is why the fascist project of eliminating the impurities is always an unending one. The more Jews the Nazis sent to death camps, the greater the Jewish threat loomed.

Emancipatory politics, in contrast, interprets the gaze not as an external distortion of the neutral capitalist system but as the indication of its inherent imbalance and partiality. That is, the distortion of the crisis is nothing but capitalism’s own inherent imbalance. The point of emancipatory politics is not the elimination of the gaze but rather identification with it. The struggle between the forces of fascism and the forces of emancipation is one between two fundamentally opposed responses to the crises of capitalism. Fascism views the crisis as an anomaly that one might repair, while emancipatory politics sees the crisis as the moment at which capitalism reveals the truth of its distortion. The appeal of fascism is almost always stronger because it offers the assurance that a neutral background exists and enables us to avoid confronting the trauma of a political decision.

The difference between the logic of fascism and that of emancipatory politics is nicely captured by the opposition between Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the two shared a similar philosophy, their politics were wholly at odds. Perhaps the greatest insight of Sartrean existentialism lies in its recognition that we cannot elude taking up a position within a political struggle. Our act of simply looking at the world engages us in a specific project with that world, even if the project is one of withdrawal. Sartre’s rewriting of Heidegger’s Being and Time in Being and Nothingness abandons the idea of a neutral background—a Mitsein, or being-with—against which we would constitute ourselves. For Sartre, such a background emerges only through the transformative power of our project, an engagement that renders the background inevitably distorted. [End Page 19]

Despite the similarity in their philosophies and despite Sartre’s immense debt to Heidegger, the political divide between the two thinkers, seen in this light, appears easy to understand. Sartre joins the struggle for emancipation, and Heidegger sides with the forces of fascism not out of personal strength or weakness but rather for clear philosophical reasons. For all Heidegger’s opposition to capitalist modernity and technological being in the world, he nonetheless falls for capitalism’s fundamental deception, its image of neutrality, that Sartre successfully sees beyond. Heidegger never grasps that our engagement and desire shapes the background in which that desire appears. The gaze, for Heidegger, remains an external disruption that one must extirpate.

Of course, Heidegger is not Adolph Eichmann. Heidegger’s philosophy is not responsible for the death camps, no matter what his detractors such as Emmanuel Faye and others might claim.²⁰ But Heidegger’s error with regard to the gaze hampers his capacity to function as a genuine critic of capitalism, which is how he sees himself. Heidegger’s investment in the neutral background embodied in Mitsein bespeaks an affinity for the neutrality promised by the structure of capitalism. Sartre vehemently rejects any such pretension of neutrality. As he sees it, our freedom is inescapable because it constitutes its own background. The decision for a project shapes the very world in which this decision would be made. Capitalism’s neutral image remains unimaginable for Sartre, and it is only by moving beyond capitalism’s neutral image that one can begin to think beyond the confines of capitalism itself.

In The Usual Suspects, a moment of crisis occurs that occasions just the effect that a crisis in capitalism does. After hearing the testimony of Verbal Kint, customs investigator Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), along with the spectator, comes to the conclusion that he will not discover the identity of the criminal responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven people in a boat explosion at the harbor. But as Kint walks free, Kujan looks around his office and recognizes various terms that Kint used during his testimony on various items (a coffee cup, a poster on the wall, and so on). As the film cuts from item to item, the fictionality of Kint’s account of the incident becomes evident to both Kujan and the spectator. Through the juxtaposition of these images, director Bryan Singer creates an encounter with the gaze.

At this point in the film, we must revisit the entire experience of the film and reinterpret what we have seen. Rather than being a neutral account of the events that preceded the explosion, the film has depicted a fiction structured around the desire of Kint—who is, in fact, Keyser Söze. Whatever assurance we felt about the events [End Page 20] that we were seeing evaporates with this encounter with the gaze that the crisis within the narrative produces. Our investment as spectators in the desire of Söze himself becomes apparent during this encounter. The crises of capitalism create a similar opportunity for radical reinterpretation that the encounter with the gaze offers. Rather than viewing capitalism as the background for our actions, we might view it as the product of them. In this way, we lose the guarantee of a neutral playing field and gain responsibility for the very turf on which we exist.