Is Capitalism A Surplus?

Strangely, we find that banal utilitarian and “break-even” processes and events within capitalism continue to make capitalism attractive, that surplus pleasure is never the end objective of capitalism. This is strange to us because we usually wrongly think that the possibility of extra pleasure, the translation of profit into pleasure, is what lures workers and capitalists alike to production and business, and thereby drives capitalism forward. We have looked enough at why capitalism is attractive in the wealthy West, and instead we need to turn to look at its endurance and success in places like Nepal, the poor places in the world, places that more or less fail to profit from capitalism.

Surplus of pleasure is important and prior to surplus of the symbol in the early life of a capitalist subject. The capitalist child is a symbolizing machine, but fails to symbolize surplus pleasure because he/she considers surplus pleasure to be trivial and unimportant; some pleasure is surplus to requirements at that age in life, some of the signals coming from the big Other need not be interpreted, pleasure and leisure are secondary to “labor,” even for the child. Or rather, the child is occupied in symbolizing other objects and processes before turning his/her attention to surplus pleasure to symbolize it, and there is never the resources left to symbolize surplus pleasure, so that there is a surplus pleasure that remains unsymbolized. However as the child grows, his/her capacity to name and think about the objects and processes he/she finds becomes very strong and so he/she can turn to recognize and name the surplus pleasure that had always been ignored in early life. As a grown-up, his/her symbolization-machine has surplus potential.

Even so, surplus pleasure is always barred from our experience. The child who is growing up does not seek to obtain pleasure as such, but rather is limited to the symbolization of that pleasure, submitting surplus pleasure to a symbolizing gaze, but not concerned in trying to feel that pleasure which he/she had ignored earlier in life. For the grown-up, surplus pleasure gives way to surplus symbols, there is a surplus of symbols in the place of the surplus of pleasure, and so we see that capitalism is in a very fundamental way defined by a surplus. Indeed, the Lacanian Symbolic Order is itself a surplus, a surplus to requirements of socialization, as much as the Imaginary is necessary for socialization and the Real is natural and unavoidable. In the capitalism of the grown-up, the experience of pleasure as such continues to be ignored just as it was ignored by the child.

The proper anti-capitalist gesture arrives when the grown-up capitalist tendency to obtain a symbol from pleasure is replaced by the intentional and poetic gesture of obtaining pleasure from a symbol. Only with this flip, with this anti-capitalist turn, only with the obtainment of poetic pleasure from the symbol will the process of becoming anti-capitalist succeed in a way in which the poet continues to be very conscious of capitalism and its mechanisms as they are ingrained in, or wholly internalized by, the capitalist child and grown-up. This poetic pleasure from the symbol is a new pleasure, one that does not turn back to the pleasure that had been barred in childhood, but one which acts upon capitalism and the Symbolic Order without avoiding it or escaping from it, but by being actively engaged in it.