Against the Aesthetics of Scarcity

This discussion will explore the ways that dominant aesthetic regimes (in fashion, industrial design, art, architecture, beauty standards, etc.) produce scarcity. We will discuss the unjust exclusivity of luxury; the wastefulness of planned obsolescence; the myriad issues with the sexual exaltation of youthfulness; the obstacles that prevailing architectural tastes pose to the proliferation of affordable housing; and the ways that our culture’s cultivation of “good taste” in art and self-expression saps joy and experimentation from our daily lives.

This conversation is informed by recent conversations about abundance and post-scarcity, and also seeks to intervene into those conversations. Most left-wing political figures today seek to secure abundance for less-privileged people without deconstructing (or, better yet, reconstructing) the aesthetic coordinates that inform how we define what is desirable. In other words, they seek to give everybody access to the flawed, mainstream markers of success, and those markers are based upon aesthetic paradigms that are inherently about creating artificial scarcity.

The meaning and origins of abundance

Before we get to scarcity, I think we need to talk about abundance, and why it is a big topic in many different discourse communities right now. There has been a recent surge in interest in post-scarcity and/or “abundance”: How can society break away from the baggage of operating within a scarcity mindset? If most of civilization has been predicated on resources being scarce and there being a ton of work to do, all of a sudden, it’s within our grasp to break free of this paradigm. The people writing and thinking about this come from a variety of different worlds, so I thought I might share a bit about where post-scarcity thinking is coming from.

Cryptocurrency world: Especially in the wake of cryptocurrency hyper-valuation and recent innovations in artificial intelligence, a variety of writers have advocated for new political and economic commitments to abundance. In other words, a bunch of nerds got rich really quickly off of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in the past 10 years, and started imagining a society where everyone could be set free from financial constraints and the dictates of work. If we can temporarily ignore the fact that pyramid schemes like crypto cannot scale infinitely (in other words, someone loses money for you to gain money with speculative assets like this), a bunch of people got a taste of abundance, and whole scenes came into existence where people felt freed from the conventional logic of scarcity.

Artificial intelligence: Artificial Intelligence clearly has a lot of problems—especially in the way that we seem to be implementing it. But it also is an innovation that is likely to drastically increase productivity and that will make it even more desirable and obvious that we need to rethink how value is produced and distributed in our society. This, alongside other innovations in robotics and information technologies holds out the possibility of getting us closer to what Jeremy Rifkin calls the “Zero Marginal Cost Society”—a world where the price of most goods and services is zero, because they will require so little human labor to create. We can debate the extent to which this is true, but the overarching point is that Rifkin and other thinkers are increasingly theorizing what he calls an “Economy of Abundance.”

These discourses and visions challenge conventional approaches to economics that operate entirely on the basis of scarcity. In conventional economics, scarcity is foundational. Economic value emerges when goods or services are scarce relative to demand. According to this mindset, we only value the things that are scarce. Price, in turn, reflects scarcity—how much people are willing to pay given the item’s limited availability. This is why many neoclassical economists see their job as being about thinking through the problems associated with the movement of scarce resources. And the whole economy is dependent upon certain things being scarce. If things were just freely and abundantly available, then people would not work in order to afford them. The prospect of existing in abundance is a radically new possibility, and it is one that completely breaks the prevailing economic paradigm.

In Pleasure Activism, adrienne marie brown distinguishes between abundance (which she says is a good thing) and excess (which she insists is a bad thing). Excess is the unhealthy hoarding of pleasures, benefits, and indulgences available. Many people, she says, are tempted by excess because we are still operating with a scarcity mindset. We hoard, accumulate and binge because we are compensating for deficiencies in the social fabric of our lives and our society. Often, we do so to signal our status in a culture of scarcity and impoverished social and material opportunities. We indulge performatively, or within cycles of addiction—stuck on the so-called “hedonistic treadmill” that a growing chorus of thinkers has demonstrated cannot make us any happier. So abundance refers to the genuine possibility of meeting human needs with dignity, care, and sustainability—a life beyond survival. Excess, on the other hand, signals pathological overconsumption, driven not by need but by manipulation, status-seeking, and compulsion—often to the detriment of social cohesion and ecological stability. Both adrienne maree brown and Jeremy Rifkin share this distinction: abundance should be liberatory, but excess can be destructive. The goal of abundance is not excess; it is enough.

Artificial Scarcity

We talked about this distinction between abundance and excess. Now I think we should talk about the distinction between artificial and legitimate scarcity.

Some forms of scarcity are real (ecological limits, planetary boundaries), while others are manufactured (poverty amidst plenty, planned obsolescence, wage labor dependence). This distinction is central to critical theory, and, of course, to Critical Hedonism(s). As Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed.”

In his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse drew upon Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to explore how societies regulate human desire. Marcuse, drawing on Freud, agreed that all civilizations require some repression of instinct in order to function—e.g., deferring gratification, obeying rules. We can think of this as legitimate scarcity. But, usually in addition to this, there is extra repression, above and beyond what is genuinely necessary for social cohesion. It exists to maintain specific power structures, particularly those of capitalist domination and labor exploitation. He called this “surplus repression.” And as societies become increasingly technologically advanced, he argued, they required less  repression, and a greater proportion of their remaining repression (or imposition of scarcity) becomes illigitimate.

Marcuse’s claim is that modern industrial societies, even after achieving enormous gains in productivity and material wealth, maintain unnecessary forms of repression to keep people productive, obedient, and alienated. Our society, according to him, is saturated with artificial forms of scarcity. In a world of potential abundance, why do we still experience compulsion, overwork, anxiety, alienation, and destructive excess? Marcuse would argue: because of surplus repression. Even when material needs could be easily met, people are kept in unfreedom—compelled to consume, to perform, to compete, to work more than is needed. This is not about survival—it’s about maintaining domination and hierarchies. While abundance is well within our reach, desire is manipulated to produce excess (endless wants, hyper-consumption). Scarcity is maintained artificially (through inequality, intellectual property, planned obsolescence, etc.), and pleasure is commodified, not liberated (sex sells, but Eros is policed). Marcuse insists that liberation is not just about obtaining more stuff, but about reorienting desire—freeing it from structures of domination.

Aesthetics of scarcity

So zooming in now on the aesthetics of scarcity: While consumer societies have always claimed to be defined by abundance and prosperity, it’s clear that like these same societies have also been plagued by many kinds of “artificial” scarcities. Consumer societies operate in excess, but they still also create a ton of felt/unnecessary scarcity for those living in them. This is something that Guy Debord argues in Society of the Spectacle: that capitalist society goes to great lengths to keep us separate from each other socially, even though it brings us into dense conurbations spatially in order to produce and consume.

The cultivation of aesthetic preferences—what is seen as beautiful, tasteful, valuable—is central to how consumer societies structure desire and reinforce normative ideals about class, gender, race, and morality. Ultimately, many of the things we like and dislike are shaped by cultural institutions, the education system, religious institutions, entertainment, our families, our peers, and a variety of other sources. While not all of these sources are 100% determined by our economic system and the state, it is the case that most of these things are conditioned overall by capital and the state. Aesthetic preferences are taught, not chosen, and serve to reproduce social hierarchies and to serve economic interests.

And, as we talked about earlier, an important precondition for a consumer capitalist economy is that there be a prevailing sense of scarcity and lack—something that our aesthetic conditioning is clearly designed to perpetuate, by making us desire things that are costly, rare, effortful, symbolically-regulated, and status-coded.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated how what we consider “tasteful” or “refined” is not an individual, innate sensibility—it’s a socially conditioned marker of class. Our aesthetic preferences are cultivated, and we often use them to distinguish ourselves as belonging to certain groups and to distinguish ourselves from other groups. Often, our tastes are meant to signal that we have superior judgment compared to members of other social classes.

There are a bunch of areas where artificial scarcities are clearly operative within our society. Here are a few notes on some of them:

Beauty standards: Do you ever think about how weird it is that most people only find a slim minority of people beautiful? This, I’d argue, is about maintaining motivation under industrial capitalism. If people were satisfied with their bodies and living in sexual and romantic satiation, it would be much harder to sell them things or to motivate them to work. (We talked a bunch about this in our session on Consuming the Romantic Utopia, and it is a major theme in Eva Illouz’s work)

We expect women to be slim and men to be curvy (with muscles). We expect Black women to have straight hair and White women to have curls. Fashion trends are short-lived, and it takes a ton of resources to be “beautiful” and/or “fashionable” in the normative ways.

Sexual racism plays a major part here. We’re conditioned to find certain ethnic characteristics beautiful. This is something that bell hooks writes about in her book Black Looks: Race and Representation. There, bell hooks asks who is seen as beautiful and desirable? She critiques eurocentric and racist beauty ideals that devalue Black and Brown bodies, cultural expression, and beauty practices.

Sexual classism is related to this, but essentially, we tend to be attracted to people either of our same class, or someone in a higher class position to ourselves. This can be different for men, who might be willing to have sex with lower-class women or men, but usually wouldn’t enter into a prolonged or committed romantic relationship with them.

Sexual ageism: this arguably works differently for men and women, but we essentially tend to rule out younger men and older women within normative sexual desirability standards.

Herbert Marcuse also raises the point that our society has “de-erotocized” most of the body, most space, and most time. In other words, we focus on faces and body shape for visual sexual aesthetics, while neglecting the many aspects of a person that can be beautiful. And we concentrate the times and places when sex is “sexy” to a few very specific contexts. It is as if there is a conspiracy, not only to make sure as few people as possible are sexy, but also to ensure that there are also as few opportunities as possible to actually enjoy sex.

Luxury: Another area in which artificial scarcity is clearly operative is in the arena of status consumption. Many people consume luxury goods in order to perform status. At the same time, in a historical moment in which very little public, affordable housing is being produced, the real estate industry seems either incapable or unwilling to produce anything except what it bills as “luxury” housing. What should be a fundamental right in an advanced civilization is being treated as a luxury good.

This isn’t only the case for housing. Everything nice is being converted into a luxury. There are countless things in our society that have, in recent years, quietly reinvented themselves as luxury goods. As an anecdotal example, I was recently shocked to discover how expensive take-out Chinese food has become. Increasingly—particularly in expensive cities like San Francisco and New York—grocery stores like Whole Foods and other supposedly “ethical” retailers have been seeking to gentrify our very diets, charging eye-watering prices for their food products.

Fashion and industrial design also create a tremendous amount of artificial scarcity. Both fields deliberately seek to make people feel a sense of lack—through planned obsolescence. Fashion trends expire way before clothes wear out, and the manufacturers of consumer goods like electronics and even basic household tools are constantly changing their designs to make the previous versions feel old and clunky. At the same time, companies use marketing to make people feel insufficient about what they already own. In all of these ways, companies deliberately create a sense of lack in consumers—relying heavily on aesthetics to accomplish this. Often, is not the functionality of the goods that becomes obsolete first; it is the aesthetics of them. Often, industrial designers and fashion designers deliberately design goods and clothing to be aesthetically unique, so that it will be obvious that it no longer has the correct look when the newer version comes out.

Aesthetics of abundance: what is it? Or what could it be?

If we really want to liberate ourselves through abundance, we need to reconfigure our entire relationship to desire, labor, and pleasure. It's not enough to produce more—we have to desire differently—we have to desire better. And aesthetics is a major aspect of this.

Queer communities have, for a long time, been rejecting conventional beauty standards and experimenting with new forms of aesthetics. Part of the reason that this has been effective is that queer communities are often already rejecting conventional, or “normative” models of the good life, like marriage, nuclear family life, and traditional life paths regarding careers and property acquisition.

One major area that is still ripe for exploration is what the aesthetics of degrowth and environmental sustainability could ultimately look like, if they were no longer treated as being about individual personal sacrifice and ethical consumption choices. The work of Jason Hickel is instructive about how we might live better lives while using far less resources and energy—not as individuals, but as a society. If we lean into what he and others call “public luxury,” and do a better job of distributing the value that our industrial economy generates, then society could drastically increase its quality of life while reducing its ecological footprint. A big part of this is about sharing goods and having more public facilities—not just for functional purposes, but also for joy. His work is part of an emerging literature sketching out what might be called “hedonistic degrowth”: a vision of society in which we all liver much better lives, despite using less resources and energy. As Steven Shaviro argues in his book on accelerationism No Speed Limit, “Ecology should not be confused with austerity. We must learn to live with less but to partake fully of the Sun’s overabundant bounty and to dissipate its gifts more widely.”

I think that the “public luxury” ideal of hedonistic degrowth requires its own aesthetic conventions and language—perhaps its own “genre” of visual aesthetics. This is because our desires are rarely free-floating, but they belong to broader aspirational visions of the good life. We want things because they fit into a vision of a happy life that we hold in our heads. What we need now is a kind of vision of the good life that a series of better desires can slot into.

I think that we need a word for taking aesthetic pleasure in living in a damaged world—not a misanthropic joy in destroying the world; more like a form of appreciation for the possibilities of living a good life in dense environments, together, and mitigating the consequences of our civilization’s past and present mistakes. When I try to imagine this, it appears in my mind’s eye as a kind of blend between solarpunk, cyberpunk, salvagepunk, utopian neodecadence, and queer aesthetics. A relentlessly futuristic and artificial visual aesthetics combined with an appreciation for damaged, aged, and fraying materials. It honors repair, upcycling, and reuse, as well as efficiency and thrift. But it is not austere; it is rich with details and stuff. It embraces abundance but rejects excess—especially expressions of status through luxury goods. It exalts social togetherness and social harmony, but also has a great tolerance for the complexity and messiness of convivial lives together and in common.

At the same time, we should be attuned to the fact that whatever aesthetics we create may ultimately be appropriated by marketing and dominant cultures and used—either against us, or against others. So there needs to be a certain flexibility and aesthetic “nomadism” in innovative, marginalized, and progressive cultural circles.

The Politics of Sexual Desire

In the era of “born this way” rhetoric, the suggestion that people question what they want sexually can, understandably, feel oppressive and abusive. And yet, a lot of pain, harm and dissatisfaction emanates from the way that our culture practices sexual and amorous relationships, and these practices are oppressive and abusive in their own right. What’s more, they certainly don’t need to be!

A great jumping-off point for critically interrogating sexual desires with the requisite nuance and sensitivity is Amia Srinivasan’s article for the London Review of Books entitled “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” Srinivasan—a social and political theory professor at Oxford—politicizes the way that sexual desire plays out in contemporary culture. Her starting point is the conflict that has erupted between so-called “incels”—or people who are celibate, against their wishes—and the sort of mainstream liberal feminist community, with its embrace of consent as a compass for navigating the difficult dynamics of sex and harm in the twenty-first century. Here, the involuntarily celibate—who are usually, but not always men—insist that in the dating market, less attractive people are systematically denied sexual opportunity, while more attractive people enjoy all of the sexual opportunity. Incels claim that men—and again, men are much more commonly represented under the heading of “incel”—are especially disadvantaged by this situation, since through cosmetics and men’s relative non-pickyness, the “top 80%” of women have access to the top 20% of men, leaving the bottom 80% of men in competition for the bottom 20% of women. In the face of this, some incels have called for a redistribution of sex, through, for example, compulsory monogamy and other more nefarious means. 

This position runs headlong into the consent-oriented worldview of mainstream, sex-positive liberal feminists and their allies, who are reluctant to politicize people’s—and especially women’s—sexual choices. To them, the incel grievance is nothing but an expression of male entitlement to women’s bodies—women who owe them less than nothing. Nothing could be more anathema to the consent-oriented ethos of sex-positive feminism than a “redistribution of sex”—and the questioning of one’s desires is deemed to be an insidious step in that direction. Who one chooses to have consensual sex with, in this view, is a matter of personal choice, not political economy.

Yet, Srinivasan reminds, the personal is political. “It used to be,” she argues, “that if you wanted a political critique of desire, feminism was where you would turn”—a tendency that has been largely abandoned by sex-positive feminism in the twenty-first century. In their haste to liberate women from the burden of puritanical sexual norms, sex-positive feminism has strayed away from the more cautious insistence of radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon, who insisted that under asymmetrical power dynamics, women could never fully consent to heterosexual sex, because the circumstances in which they made their decisions were never truly free of coercion.

Srinivasan points to the “convergence . . . between sex positivity and liberalism in their shared reluctance to interrogate the formation of our desires.” The result has been major progress in the realm of freeing some people sexually, but it has come at a cost. “When we see consent as the sole constraint on OK sex,” she explains, “we are pushed towards a naturalisation of sexual preference in which the rape fantasy becomes a primordial rather than a political fact. But not only the rape fantasy. Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies. These too are political facts, which a truly intersectional feminism should demand that we take seriously. But the sex-positive gaze . . . threatens to neutralise these facts, treating them as pre-political givens. In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’.”

Srinivasan returns to the problem of sexual scarcity pointed out by incels, but radically expands it, to include the many ways in which sex and sexual preference exclude and reproduce hierarchy and rigid boundaries and power differentials. “The question,” Srinivasan insists, “is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.” And this applies to incels as much as to anyone else—as the vast accumulation of resentful Reddit posts about “hot women” reveal, many self-identifying incels remain attached to rigid, normative beauty standards and therefore play an active part in upholding sexual stratification and hierarchy. The tragedy of it is the general lack of recognition that they are contributing to the very dynamics that have created their own predicament.

Srinivasan politicizes sexual desire—problematizing it not as a purely personal choice, but as a political and ethical choice. Yet the question remains: if sexual desire is acknowledged to be political, yet nobody is obligated to desire or have sex with anyone else, what might a politics of sexual desire look like? How can a politics of sexual desire be universally emancipatory, rather than simply reinforcing existing desires and hierarchies?

The first thing we need to do, in my view, is to stop trying to assess and address the problem of desire at the individual, or psychological level. The main problem with liberal approaches to social problems is the insistence on framing collective problems in terms of individual ethics. The solution is not to call individuals out for being racist or classist in their desires, but to analyze how institutions produced these collectively-held views, and to try to produce new cultural and social institutions that generate better people. This is the cultural variation of what Eliezer Yudkowsky has termed “Coherent Extrapolated Volition”—the idea that artificial intelligence systems should be built to serve not what we currently want, but what we would want if we were in a better position to understand and articulate those desires. Operating with the realization that the things we want are often flawed and bound to make us unhappy (if not lead to our own extinction), it is better to build for what we, were we wiser, smarter, and kinder, would want, rather than what we do want.

As mentioned, the first step in this direction is to recognize the highly political and cultural ways in which desires are formed. Turning away from merely psychological (and especially evolutionary psychological) explanations for desire, we ought to look at the social production of sentiment.

In her book Why Love Hurts, the critical sociologist of romance Eva Illouz analyzes the social construction of desire. “[M]y objection to the current dominant psychological ethos is three-fold:”

1) “that what we take to be individual aspiration and experience have in fact much social and collective content to them;”
2) “that psychic differences are often—though not always—nothing but differences in social positions and social aspirations;”
3) “that the impact of modernity on the formation of the self and identity is precisely to lay bare individuals’ psychic attributes and to grant them a crucial role in determining their destinies, both romantic and social.” {14.2.M}

Rather than focusing on the individual, psychological origins of desire, Illouz looks at “the structures which organize [romantic] actions and sentiments,” focusing especially on “[h]ow the will is structured, how recognition is constituted, and how desire is activated.” {7, 6.1.E} Attached to each of these is one of the following questions: 

1) How is romantic will structured to shape what we want and how we come to implement what we want with a sexual partner?
2) What makes the self feel vulnerable and/or unworthy of love?
3) how is our thinking and evaluation of desire structured—specifically the content of the thoughts and emotions which activate our erotic and romantic desires? {6.1.ME}

These lines of inquiry seek to reject both the illusion of unbridled free will and dogmatic notion of biological determinism, in favor of an emphasis on the social and cultural organization of desire. I am not going to spend a long time talking about human nature, or biological determinism—not because it’s irrelevant, but because I’m more interested in the social construction of ideals and expectations. (I should say, at this point, in case there is confusion or suspicion: I am not some totally unmoored relativist who thinks that humans are blank slates. However, whatever human nature is [and it’s probably varied and inconsistent across the population], the way in which it gets expressed clearly varies across time and space. It is important for me to emphasize: “human nature” and “social construction” are not mutually exclusive.) As an historian, I look a lot at how things have changed over time, in order to get a sense of the fact that things have not always been this way, and also to tell the story of the effort and conspiring that went into building up the status quo—one that we have subsequently taken to be natural and immutable. It took a lot of effort to make people want what they want, and if desire were just some raw expression of biological instinct, this would not be necessary. What’s more likely is that biological instincts or drives are channeled and shaped in terms of the ways that they get expressed.

Perhaps a rather shallow example of how desires and ideals have changed over time is illustrated in this silly video, which shows how different attributes have been seen as attractive in different time periods, as culture has shifted and changed through the centuries.

Besides physical attributes, another highly variable aspect of desire is the idealized form of sexual relationship, or the relational context in which sex is deemed as desirable and permissible. In contemporary culture, our romantic lives have tended to be seen as central to how we understand ourselves and how we live our lives. Just think about how much people’s identities are pinned around their “relationship status,” the people they date, their sexual orientation, and their families. In contemporary culture, we tend, as well, to bundle sex, romance, commitment and emotional intimacy—all into one relationship. As historians have shown, this is a relatively recent phenomenon to have been adopted as mainstream. In the early twentieth century, marriages became reimagined as being built around a romantic relationship—this is the middle-class “companionate marriage” that continues to be the normative template for love and marriage in our own time.

This centering of identity, reproduction and intimate life around sexual, amorous relationships would be difficult in a society where there wasn’t a strong cultural cultivation of tastes and preferences—both for certain kinds of partners, and certain kinds of relationships. In fact, the two reinforce each other. If sex is culturally conceptualized as being a precursor to a potentially lifelong, exclusive commitment, then one had better be extremely picky in their choice of mate (and this is especially true when your social status and material welfare are on the line). Eva Illouz points out that sex and love are strongly tied to a series of what she calls “modes of self-consultation,” or “ways in which a person consults his or her emotions, knowledge, and formal reasoning to reach a decision” about whether and how to proceed with a sexual connection. {20.1.M} In this way, sex and love are continually problematized and routed through complex criteria of inspection and evaluation—a process that Illouz calls the “architecture of choice.” (This is part of what is subverted by glory holes and anonymous and semi-anonymous sexual encounters (online, blind relationships; experimental “dating in the dark” events [where you remove the visual dimension from a date with a stranger, thereby removing a fraction of the signal to be processed in the so-called “architecture of choice”]), etc.).

This becomes evident in the way that people approach “swiping” or—perhaps more tellingly—when making a choice about whether to go on a second date with someone (since the second date is often understood as truly opting in with both eyes wide-open). In contemporary culture, sexual decisions have tended to be treated (or are meant to appear to be treated) as big, meaningful decisions.

This architecture of choice has a very clear history, as social reformers, governmental agencies, advertisers and cultural figures shaped romantic expectations and gender norms to make sex artificially scarce. Especially in the early 20th century, during the Progressive era, World War I, and the 1920s (a period in which the United States settled, in many ways, into its modern form), sexual meanings and expectations became increasingly codified. The 1920s are generally seen as an era in which sex “liberalized,” as we shifted out of a Victorian purity-based culture into a modern consumer culture. However, this period also witnessed the rise of modern advertising, Hollywood, and other mass media platforms—all of which were used by elite representatives of the upper and upper-middle classes to try to shape culture in the interest of social stability and commercial prosperity. While these two things were sometimes in tension, there was generally a massive effort to channel human ambition, taste, and aspiration into both consumer goods and family life, to drive commerce and secure social values and social reproduction.

How did this affect sex and love?

During World War I, American military leaders were extremely worried about two conditions “diminishing” the efficiency of their troops: venereal disease, and sexual “dissipation.” In short, military planners thought that both disease and sexual satiation threatened to make troops less efficient and motivated to fight in the war, and generally believed that troops who were denied sex would be more susceptible to sentimental wartime propaganda that pleaded them to go overseas and fight for their mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts. It was therefore imperative to control the sexual conditions of military training camps and war camps. To do this, the military set up the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), and through this organization, effectively took iron control of the conditions of the military training camps, closing nearly all red light districts and brothels in the United States, and arresting and imprisoning 30,000 women accused of engaging in prostitution or even promiscuous, non-commercial sex with soldiers. In addition to this, the CTCA policed the moral environment of the camps and nearby cities, providing “wholesome” leisure activities and entertainment, while intentionally bringing soldiers into regular contact with vetted-to-be-attractive female nurses, canteen workers and posters and illustrations, yet always in conditions that would preclude or prevent sex (camp-sponsored dances would be chaperoned; female canteen workers and nurses, besides needing to be considered attractive, also needed to be devoutly religious and to have their sexual morals vouched for, so that they would not have sex with soldiers in the camps; female visitors to camps were only permitted to make contact with soldiers in “Hostess Houses,” which were open-plan and staffed by watchful older Christian matrons, etc.). The idea was for these women—and the thought of the women at home—to serve as motivation for the young men to fight harder and to demonstrate their bravery on the battlefield. Yet this motivation (or morale) would be wasted if the men actually had sex—a belief based on the ideology that a “strenuous life” is necessary for maximum vigor, and that vitality or energy would be wasted in sexual indulgence.

This pairing of sexual repression/frustration and stimulation would inform postwar cultural representations of sexuality. This is perhaps most evident in the sex education campaigns of the 1920s, which were a direct continuation of wartime social hygiene campaigns designed to keep soldiers in line. Unlike earlier “social purity” campaigns, these campaigns sexualized self-restraint, and openly advocated the sublimation of thwarted sexual energy into work. Just like wartime campaigns that stigmatized “slackers” who did not fight or support the war effort, and idealized brave, heroic men, post-war advertisements idealized striving, accomplished men. As for women, chaste, “unspoiled,” and “beautiful” doting women were exalted, and sex education literature overtly sexualized women who possessed poise and self-control.

Likewise, Hollywood employed these same tropes—and there, the portrayal of desirability would eventually be codified by the “Hayes Code,” which explicitly prescribed that good outcomes could not befall promiscuous characters. Like in the war camps, women were to be both alluring and chaste—the prize that the hero gets at the end, when he properly proves his worth. Similarly, romance novels reinforced the idea that men compete for “beautiful” and “deserving” women, and affixed women’s desirability to their ability to maintain and protect their “dignity. Moreover, sexuality was increasingly used by advertising to sell products, while social regulations remained in-effect for preventing truly free sexuality from undermining sex’s motivational power.

All-in-all, what these dynamics created was a form of sexuality that was not really “free” or “liberated,” but which had a high social price. The underlying logic behind this regime of desirability was a mode of desiring that attaches value to scarcity. It is an extension of a competitive economic logic that attaches a higher value to rare and scarce resources, and devalues anything that is in abundance. Such an attitude thwarts post-scarcity social and political programs, since once a material, social and/or economic good ceases to be scarce, it loses its value. Likewise with sex.

Sex education campaigns, Hollywood movies, romance novels, and advertisements—like the canteen workers in World War I—deployed what has been called, in other contexts, “parasexuality”—a dynamic in which a person (or persons) commands the sexual desire of many without reciprocating that desire. And this parasexuality has persisted in our culture ever since, even surviving so-called “sexual revolutions.” The way we attract sexual attention has tended to model itself on the way we sell products: BLAST your alluring image at a crowd, and filter whatever swims into your net until you land a buyer you want. This is neither a puritan society, with its nervous avoidance of stimulation, nor a liberated society, where we all share in abundance. It is, in some ways, the worst of both worlds: the taunt of abundance and the lived experience of scarcity.

With this history in mind, we might return to thinking about the question of what a politics of sexual desire might look like. What strikes me—especially as a social and cultural historian—is how unwilling anyone is, especially in the era of #MeToo, to consider that perhaps sexual frustration could be understood as a human-created phenomenon, with historical—and not just biological—origins. What’s more, it has had a clear set of external beneficiaries: essentially anyone who can exploit or sublimate sexuality to boost motivation, to drive work and/or consumption.

The answer to Srinivasan’s question: does anyone have a right to sex? is, from this angle: no, but they do have a right to live in a society that doesn’t make sex artificially scarce. And it’s not just incels, but all of us who are affected by such artificial scarcity—a scarcity that has been produced through the shaping of desires. The infrastructure of these institutions exists in our very desires an expectations—of others; of our life trajectories; of our ideal relationship arrangements and ideal partners, etc.

These are the concrete forms that a so-called “architecture of choice” takes, and they are formed in a competitive, high-stakes social environment, where, as previously mentioned, a lot is potentially at stake as we make sexual choices. What these conditions demand of us is that we choose wisely, and choose carefully, to protect our reputations, plans for the future, access to material resources, etc. This choosiness, especially in a world where desirability criteria have been explicitly defined by mass culture, demands discrimination. Theodore Gracyk claims that “taste requires preference,” and “preference involves discrimination.” This is because “preference for one thing involves a conscious rejection of some other;” and therefore “discrimination must occur, where one thing is chosen over another based on objective qualities or features known by the person to be present and to be more enjoyable than alternatives.” {118.1} “Good taste is developed by learning consciously to make the discrimination necessary to specify what aspects make an object [or experience] aesthetically good or bad, where one’s enjoyment is grounded in the process of identifying the good and bad features of one’s preference. . . . In other words, education refines one’s experience and so one’s natural likings become preferences for specific objects [and experiences].” {121.1.M} In Gracyk’s schema, enjoyment is not merely derived from the object of one’s affection, but from the self-recognition of choosing wisely, and in good taste. In our culture, social worth and status are often tied to the people we date, love, marry, etc. Who hasn’t feared “what their friends will think” if they showed up to a party with their new Tinder date, or how exes or future partners might rank their desirability status based upon who they’ve dated in the past? Conversely, who hasn’t met someone who had that too-perfect boyfriend or girlfriend; who seemed like more of an accessory than a companion?

What’s more, preferences have a momentum and tend to self-reinforce. The more time and energy one invests in one path of desirability, the more, in Gracyk’s words, this “creates a specialization in which one’s pleasures are so dependent upon the specific features of that style that it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve a comparable richness of experience further afield.” {125.1.E} This is really important to remember in a world where the self-consciousness of the institutions that continue to circulate desirability criteria has diminished. The reform organizations and government agencies that pioneered our desirability criteria have long crumbled, but some version of these criteria persists; endlessly re-produced and re-performed.

One of the most persistent forms that this self-reinforcing fetishization takes is gendered presentation. As Judith Butler has argued, in our society, we tend to constrain our behavior to be palatable and legible within gender identities, which are themselves conditioned by heterosexuality. Heterosexuality—and here, I’m referring less to the fact of there being sexual relations been males and females than the cultural institutions that mediate the relationship between normative men and normative women—therefore plays a major role in shaping social behaviors (and, by the way, this affects homosexual relationships too: gendered legibility—deriving from a heterosexually-conditioned gender binary—continues to organize the identities and conditions for legibility among homosexual gendered beings) this is the cunning power of what Butler calls the “heterosexual matrix.” Here, we might step back and look upon heterosexuality through new eyes—not as a primordial, “baked-in,” fundamentally human activity, but as a sexual culture. As one scholar puts it, “[h]eterosexuality, has, until relatively recently, remained an invisible, unexamined and taken-for-granted norm. Its naturalization has often meant that it is rarely acknowledged as a sexuality.” And here, what’s meant by “sexuality” is a series of social behaviors that are conditioned by participation in a culturally-constructed sexual identity position. For Butler, this position is performed in a myriad of everyday, pedestrian actions—many of which seemingly have nothing to do with sex.

The point of all of this is to say that sex—and our relationship to it—has tended to structure much of how we view ourselves and relate to the world and to the rest of society. It is important to consider is that, in a culture where we tend to bundle sex, romance, commitment and emotional intimacy, sexual prowess not only becomes a passport to many other things; it becomes a condition of social legibility. This tells us a great deal about not only the condition of so-called incels, but also, probably, about some of the motivations that likely stir and animate everyone. If you are “poor” in the sexual economy, you also lose your access to love, companionship, material security and, according to many people’s evaluation, the very purpose of existence: to love, be loved, and to feel secure among kin.

I use this term “sexual economy” advisedly. Desires generally develop in “economies,” wherein aggregations of choices constrain and enable opportunities for others. {16.1.E} Illouz speaks of “marriage markets,” and “the ecology of choice, or the social environment that compels one to make choices in a certain direction,” which “might be the outcome either of an intended and consciously designed policy or of unplanned social dynamics and processes.” {19.3.BM, 19.3.E}

To give a concrete example, if you live in a place where monogamous marriage is common, then there will be competition to secure a mate, and a real scramble not to miss out on your opportunity. To not marry would not only mean to miss out on marriage, but sex, access to intimacy, companionship, and maybe even housing, if the housing stock is designed for that specific social arrangement. The “environment”—be it social or physical—conditions your choices by presenting incentives for behaving in certain ways and obstacles to behaving in others.

And, if you pay attention, polyamorous folks are not immune. If you live in a sex-positive city, unless the desirability criteria are critically examined—by you, or by your prospective partners—then you still might find yourself out in the cold, or else bouncing from precarious relationship to precarious relationship. This can be especially jarring if you, or your partners, still have a head full of Disney.

One of the questions I have recently been asking is, if sex and love exist in an “economy,” is there such a thing as a “bad economy”? The recently coined phenomenon of “heteropessimism,” like the whole incel issue, seems to to suggest so. According to, Indiana Seresin—the term’s originator—many people—and especially women—are embarrassed by their heterosexuality. As Seresin explains, “During the media storm surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing . . . the comedian Solomon Georgio tweeted (to the tune of over 23,000 retweets and 142,000 likes): ‘Today is a reminder that if homosexuality was a choice, there would be 2, maybe 3, straight women left after today.’” There is, she claims, in the world of men, a “particular awfulness of the present.”

It’s clear that cis men are in the doghouse with woke women, and, if the so-called “Man-o-sphere,” with its outbursts against feminism and women’s empowerment is any indication, there is some mutuality in the frustrations between men and women.

Seresin points to both the recent blast of activism and awareness-raising around sexual assault as a potential cause of heteropessimism, and also implicates dating apps like Tinder, with their individualizing tendencies. But I can’t help wondering whether the more important cause is the decline of conditions that would enable would-be partners—and especially men—to be eligible. If desirability criteria are linked to economic performance, education, shows of bravery and vitality, then might today’s world, with its lack of traditional “male” roles and jobs, alongside women’s comparative advance into the economy, and the all-too-easy-to-fall-into traps of online porn and video games serving as analogues of real relationships and material achievement—all of this—might it be setting us up for failure in a world of high relationship expectations? In short, aren’t we in a “bad economy”?

The only way out of this, I think, is to design institutions that cultivate our desires differently. As Lauren Berlant insists, “It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.” What could be a better goal, in the era of heteropessimism? And, as I hope I’ve successfully alluded to, this could get us part of the way toward solving some of the motivational bases for people’s participation in other, seemingly unrelated institutions and hierarchies. I don’t see this work as being divorced from addressing war, climate, or other existential threats, even if it obviously cannot solve these on its own. Let me be explicit here: I do not believe we can build the politics that we need for addressing climate, war, etc., without fundamentally changing how we allocate and engage in sex and care.

But what is to be done?

The first step would be to develop a method for critically assessing how desire in our communities works—and I have been calling this project “Critical Hedonism(s)”—the guiding questions of which I have been using to structure this talk.

So, just to enumerate those:

-how are these desires harmful to the desirer?
-how are these desires harmful to others?
-what institutional forces shape these desires?
-who benefits from the pursuit of these desires?
-how do these desires aggregate into a “social totality” or world?

Critical Hedonism(s) has sought to be a project that investigates and eventually propounds ways of desiring, without relying on existing norms.

In the 1960s and 70s, feminist and gay liberation organizations used “consciousness-raising” groups to both raise awareness of power structures, and to attempt to remake themselves and their communities along less oppressive lines. What was so powerful about these groups was that they sought to theorize the problem and to take action on it at the same time.

Today, just as then, self-knowledge alone is not sufficient for escaping. As Theodore Gracyk insists, “Even knowing [what we know about desire formation], it is no small feat to keep it in mind in everyday life.” {125.2.E} It takes much experimentation and exploration.

Perhaps what we need are new institutions. But, because institutions have shaped what we want in ways that are incoherent, discriminatory and destructive, we cannot trust our current version of ourselves to design these institutions based upon our current wants. Recent critics of neoliberal feminism have leveled versions of this charge against the way that normative and exploitative desires have been justified as feminism—just because they are held by women. Much of the “empowerment” discourse fails to critically evaluate the structural environment in which empowerment occurs, or how this empowerment merely reinforces oppressive power dynamics. The same can obviously be said of many of our recent desperate attempts to “empower” ourselves within a zero-sum politics, culture and economy. Taking this as a cautionary tale, perhaps what are needed are institutions designed according to a cultural version of Yudkowsky’s “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” (an approach to AI ethics)—that encourage us to want in ways that we want to want, and which do not merely exacerbate and deepen the glaring scarcities of zero-sum dynamics.

Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist William Ogburn described what he called “cultural lag”—the phenomenon of people’s personal sensibilities and social relations lagging behind the potentialities of technology and change. The result was a dizzying sensation as people failed to adapt to the realities or to live up to the potentials presented by modernity. Perhaps we are in a similar situation with respect to our desires, and the way that these butt up against our politics. Here, the “cruel optimist” would try to re-bend reality to meet the expectations of their desires—a tendency that has infected, to varying degrees, all sides of the “culture war” (as evidenced by the resentment and confusion of the gender war and heteropessimism, which may be understood as symptoms of our own dizzying cultural lag). We therefore need a framework that extrapolates our wish to be better/different people, and that does not lock us into brittle norms that will fail when conditions change.

Anyway, I hope I’ve convinced you that sexual desire is political, and that it is also worth our time and attention to seek to transform the things we desire. I’ve done my best to theorize how we might approach the remaking of our desire, and I suppose the last thing I’ll do is to invite you to experiment with how desire works in your own communities, and to build institutions that shift collectively-held expectations and aspirations.

The Politics of Interrogating What You Want

This post is composed from the (slightly altered) lecture notes from a talk given at the Red Victorian in San Francisco on January 7, 2020. This is the first of two sections (part two is coming soon)—a general consideration of desire—its social production and exploitation, and the problems this poses for us—whereas the second section deals more specifically with questions of sex and love, which I intend to claim are especially important as primary drivers of many other behaviors.

The main edits are in the form, rather than the content. I’ve added hyperlinks, footnotes, and adjusted the structure of sentences and wording to make it more appropriate for reading instead of listening. I’ve also added text to fill in for slides.

This post is fundamentally about the way that power operates through our preferences and choices. In short, I’m going to argue in favor of critically re-evaluating our desires, and I’m going to attempt to develop a methodology for doing so.

The basic argument I intend to make is that people tend to desire (and do) things that are both harmful to themselves, and to others. Often, these desires are not random, but influenced by social and cultural institutions.

Sometimes, the things we want are directly harmful to us personally. A very obvious example of this is addictive behavior. Here, you desperately want a thing, but that thing is deleterious to your health and happiness. Sometimes, there are no clear beneficiaries of this kind of desire; you optimize for short-term pleasure (or absence of pain), but end up undermining long-term happiness. Often, these kinds of wants are sanctioned or stigmatized in some way (many addictive drugs, for example), but other times, they’re socially-encouraged (toxic forms of romance come to mind).

This touches on the cultural dimensions of desires. Desires—whether harmful or not—are often cultural. What’s more, they may even be shared by whole demographics or populations—even if they’re harmful. The widespread adoption of an ideal or desire does not make it positive, constructive, or harmless. The literary theorist Lauren Berlant uses the term “cruel optimism” to describe an attachment to ambitions and modes of living that are harmful. (1) An example of this that Berlant offers is the desire for the American Dream. The desire for the house in the suburbs, the picturesque family life, and the various fixtures of mid-20th century success are meant to bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment. But, Berlant points out, they are liable to disappoint. We are less likely to attain them in the economy of the 21st century, and even if we do, all kinds of isolation and alienation are likely to await us. Here, the thing that promised to make us happy made us miserable in the end. Unlike most desire-behavior loops that we think of as addictions, the “American Dream” is a collective fantasy. It has been shared in by millions of people, and has been produced by a vast nexus of commercial, cultural, political and social institutions. It has been shaped and sold to us by advertising. (2) It has been reinforced by TV shows. It has been the ecosystem into which many other things we may want fit—family, love, sanctuary, gadgets, the feeling of authority or domain (in this sense, it is a powerful “meta-context” for other desires and aspirations).

These last points border on another important dimension of desires—especially those that are cultural: there are clear external beneficiaries of the pursuit of these desires. The Federal Government planned Suburbia as a proper setting for the American Dream, and the economy of postwar America was dependent upon the growth of this inefficient type of conurbation. (3) Consumer goods, construction, automobile sales—suburbia generated massive demand for all of these, and the desire for the American Dream drove its expansion. Here we can see that economic pressures, governmental institutions, commercial institutions, and other social forces can shape desires—as they did in the case of suburbia.

The point is not to pick on the American Dream in particular (though it certainly has a lot to answer for), but to show how desires can be extremely political, and central to the political and economic organization of a society and/or culture. By considering this example, we are already given several basic prompts for interrogating personally- or culturally-held desires: Does it cause harm to those who hold a desire? Does it cause harm to others? Is it shared by many? Is it culturally encouraged? Are there external beneficiaries?

Perhaps part of the reason that desires are not thought of in terms of political power is that questions of power tend to rotate more frequently around coercion and violence. Yet, as Michel Foucault has shown, coercion is only the most rudimentary, crude and ineffective mode of power. Much more effective than this kind of crude power (which he calls “sovereign power”) is what he calls “disciplinary power,” where the surveillance of political subjects eventually causes to surveil themselves, and to self-police, even when they are not being watched by others. Yet an even more effective mode of power is a regime in which people are made, through the careful manipulation of environmental conditions (whether social or spatial), to want certain things. Here, you manipulate the environment so that, a subject, behaving in their own best interest, will predictably behave in ways that the regime’s authorities want them to behave. Here, there is no feeling of coercion; only desire. This is what makes this type of power so effective: the source of control feels as if it wells up from within the subjects themselves, and there is no dis-identification with the desires that drive their control. Rather than forcing a specific way, these kinds of regimes shape the sentiments of subjects, and then manipulate them through these sentiments. (4)

This shaping of sentiments has proven to be central within democracies. Alexis de Tocqueville—a French aristocrat who visited the young United States in the 1830s to assess the condition of the modern world’s first political democracy—observed that morals (and the institutions that shape them) were of the utmost importance for the health and sustainability of a democracy. Crucially, citizens within a democracy must truly buy into their morals, and see them as good and true. (5) Unlike authoritarian states, where authorities need not control people’s sentiments in the same way, in democratic societies, the thoughts and feelings of the population are liable to shape the outcome of elections and civil society, and therefore society—its cohesive practices, resources, institutions and, importantly, elite interests—are more vulnerable to the sentiments of the population.

Of course, the sustainability of a democracy is not the only goal of government or social institutions in a capitalist democracy. Another major one is the maintenance of social and class power. Wealthy and powerful people organize to defend their interests. From a control standpoint, it is urgent that the sentiments of the population be shaped in ways that preserve class power.

In democratic societies, this necessity has driven a variety of sentiment-shaping institutions. As Noam Chomsky has famously argued in his book Manufacturing Consent, mass media companies especially have served as “effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.” (6) If the powerful in authoritarian states use force, in democracies they tend to use manipulation (unless you’re poor, that is).

So what does this mean for desire? A likely consequence is that the things we want may not only be bad for us, but keeping them that way may be structurally advantageous to an elite element within society. Enormous resources are poured into shaping what the population wants, thinks and feels, and this fact alone should disabuse anyone of the idea that our desires are just these immanent things that well up—like some mighty spring—from within.

For over a century, critical theorists have claimed that human behavior and outlooks within capitalist democracies have been shaped by ideology, or false consciousness—a secularized way of saying that people “know not what they do.” According to Georg Lukacks—the Hungarian social theorist and philosopher—under these conditions, “social truths” are nearly impossible to ascertain—the only possibility for doing so is to analyze the totality of social relations in a society. That is: to really understand humanity’s condition and possibilities, one needs to look at the overall dynamics between social classes, powerful and subjugated interests, and how these accumulate into a broader world or environment. (7)

We might complicate the idea that people “know not what they do.” Foucault famously proclaimed that “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what their doing does.”

In other words, you know that you upgrade your iPhone every year; you know why you upgrade it every year (“Have you seen the friggin’ camera on the iPhone 11 Pro?!”); but what you don’t know is that coltan miners in the Congo, using their bare hands to extract the mineral, die when poorly-built mines collapse, or that arsenic from the batteries of discarded smart phones makes its way into the ecosystem in India where the phone is disposed of; or that conflicts are fueled by the demand for tin, tungsten and gold; or that children are employed in the cobalt mines that feed global supply chains.

You know that you drive a large car and live in a large house; you know why you do this (“Can you even imagine trying to raise a family in the center of town?!”); but what you don’t know is that your house was built on threatened wetlands, by a construction company that engages in lobbying and corruption; that your mortgage is being leveraged to fuel enormous financial speculation whose losses will be paid for by the taxpayer, and that your neighborhood banned black residents until the 1970s Fair Housing Act, at which time few African Americans could afford it, because they were unable to build equity or savings due to redlining practices and discriminatory employment practices.

Effectively, the pursuit of your wants—even if they do make you happy—has secondary consequences—if not for you, then for others. To you, it may very well be in your best interest to have new clothes twice per season, to travel the world having meaningful, self-actualizing experiences, and to have a high-powered career to fund this, but the aggregate effect of billions of people optimizing their lives this way looks like climate change, economic exploitation and ecological catastrophe. Desires have externalities, and externalities, as we are becoming increasingly aware in the claustrophobic conditions of 21st-century “spaceship earth,” accumulate into a world—usually a very dystopian one, when desires go un-interrogated.

This problem has actually been at the heart of institution-building for a long time, and it has become crystal clear in the field of AI ethics. One of the major ethical/existential problems facing those who hope to create a benign Artificial Intelligence is: how can we build a super-intelligent servant/guardian/apparatus that doesn’t merely exacerbate or reinforce our current problems? That is: if we build an extremely powerful apparatus, how do we ensure that it does not merely accelerate the accumulation of externalities from the desires that we program into it?

To address this issue, the AI ethicist Eliezer Yudkowsky has introduced the term “Coherent Extrapolated Volition.” The core of the concept is that AI should act in our best interests, rather than being programmed to serve our desires and wants. “It would not be sufficient to explicitly program our desires and motivations into an AI,” Yudkowsky insists. “Instead, we should find a way to program it in a way that it would act in our best interests – what we want it to do and not what we tell it to.’ According to Nick Tarleton (2010), “rather than attempt to explicitly program in any specific normative theory (a project which would face numerous philosophical and immediate ethical difficulties), we should implement a system to discover what goals we would, upon reflection, want such agents to have.” This is what is meant by ‘Coherent Extrapolated Volition. “coherent extrapolated volition [represents] our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were.” He expands on this: “We may want things we don’t want to want. We may want things we wouldn’t want to want if we knew more, thought faster. We may prefer not to have our extrapolated volition do things, in our name, which our future selves will predictably regret. The volitional dynamic takes this into account in multiple ways, including extrapolating our wish to be better people.” (8)

Artificial intelligence certainly magnifies these problems, and raises their stakes. But, as I have been suggesting, we already live in an institutional situation in which meta-agencies act upon us and act through us. One of the things that Yudkowsky’s Coherent Extrapolated Volition attempts to get around is the short-sightedness of individuals’ perceptions of their own interests. A “friendly AI” equipped with Coherent Extrapolated Volition would be able to spot the problems with suburban development, financial speculation, and planned obsolescence. Even better, it would be able to offer alternatives. Is this impossible for collective human intelligence? Certainly in the past, efforts have been made to program cultures and institutions to address societal problems that individual people and organizations pursuing their own narrow interests created. One of the problems with these institutions and cultures has been their reliance on norms. Norms are like brittle glass restraints that have hardened from fluid conditions, which presents a problem when those conditions change and the norms don’t keep up. This is the problem of “values lock-in.” What you want here, according to Yudkowsky, is a moral, rather than a normative system. Norms are dumb; morals are smart.

Perhaps, well before we tackle the problem of AI development, what we need is a method—if not a moral system—for interrogating wants.

Such a method would have to ask:
Does a desire cause harm to those who hold a desire?
Does a desire cause harm to others?
Is a desire shared by many?
Is a desire culturally encouraged?
Are there external beneficiaries? Who benefits from the pursuit of these desires?
What institutional forces shape these desires?
How do these desires aggregate into a “social totality” or world?

These questions must be at the heart of any “critical hedonist” approach to redesigning desirability criteria, shifting economies of care and pleasure, and remaking culturally-held aspirations and ambitions.

Notes:

  1. See Lauren Berlant’s interview on the book Cruel Optimism.

  2. See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream.

  3. See this article on the Federal Housing Administration.

  4. Foucault’s theory of governmentality

  5. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  6. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

  7. See György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.

  8. See Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” (2004), and Nick Tarleton, “Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics” (2010). Note that Yudkowsky has recently turned away from his original endorsement of CEV, favoring other principles instead.

“Normative Doubt,” and the Comforts of Normality

We’re in a bit of a pickle. Breaking from norms is often incredibly uncomfortable, and produces a myriad of doubts. This “normative doubt” is one of the more effective ways that the status quo is enforced, and therefore deserves some attention.

Lauren Berlant has commented on the comforts of being in the vicinity of normality. There is, first and foremost, the comfort of a feeling of belonging. {The Female Complaint, 10.} This feeling derives from what Berlant calls “strong publics”—spaces of emotional identification that “organize [a] sense of belonging in a conventionally political register,” where there is “a fantasy of a sense of continuity, a sense of being generally okay.” These publics are effective because they capitalize on “a desire to be in proximity to okayness, without passing some test to prove it.” This, Berlant explains, is “the affective fantasy of the normal.” {The Female Complaint, 8, 9.}

One of the major comforts offered by participation in normality, Berlant explains, is that it shelters you from the frictions and uncertainties of political controversy. It offers a “relief from the political.” {The Female Complaint, 10.} This relief grants a kind of ignorant confidence—one rooted in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “privilege of unknowing.” {} It’s relatively easy to be confident when you make middle-of-the-road choices. Just as there is a comfort in knowing that you’re engaging in sanctioned and approved-of activities—those that is bolstered by social encouragement and peer acceptance—there is likewise a confidence in ignorance of alternative ways and interpretations. The person privileged with ignorance looks around at everyone struggling to make it and wonders: why can’t they get their shit together? Likely, this person doesn’t know the challenges of being undocumented, or living with the trauma of abuse, or being disowned on account of one’s sexuality, or even the complexities of choosing to live against the grain of a social and political order that generates these harms.

It’s easy to be confident when you’re privileged with ignorance, and partaking in normative culture. But as soon as you start questioning and moving against mainstream sentiments, much of this confidence tends to evaporate, and frequently, a related anxiety sets in. Anxiety, in its extreme form, is typically a sense of dread associated with an anticipation of some terrible outcome, and is usually triggered by a sense of contingency and/or uncertainty about the future. It therefore makes sense that one would experience anxiety when they stray from norms, since contemporary norms tend to be fundamentally associated with aspirations. To abandon norms is to walk away from the confidence of a guaranteed vision of future comfort. As mentioned, anxiety tends to be triggered by a sense of contingency or indetermination, and these are fundamentally linked to freedom. When we realize our freedom and embrace the contingency of action, we are thrust into what Søren Kierkegaard calls the “dizziness of freedom.” This is the feeling one gets when looking over the edge of a cliff or a tall building, and one realizes that they possess the freedom to launch themselves off. The very fact that one has freedom can induce this kind of dizzying anxiety. Anxious worries are usually accompanied by a repetitive rumination of possibilities. This is the other half of anxiety: repetitive, unwanted intrusive thoughts. And it is here that normative doubt lives: “what if X happens?” “can I really cope if I don’t X?” “If I do X, what will I do when I’m old?” When we engage in alternative relationships, forego celebrated carers, elect not to invest in marriage or property ownership, etc., we are bound to feel some version of normative doubt (though we’ll call it jealousy, FOMO, “opportunity cost,” or just straight-up “instinct”). These are the contingencies that freedom delivers. When one hides from their freedom, and embraces the normative, there is a template that has mapped out many of the complex problems that the anxious deviator ruminates upon. For many, abandoning freedom is a small price to pay for the comfort and confidence that they get when they embrace the normative.

In effect, then, there are internal rewards for abandoning freedom and embracing the normative. In addition to this, there is, in our culture, an attractiveness to confidence. Some would say that confidence is the most attractive quality a person can have. So there are both internal and external rewards for being confident (and, often by extension, privileged with ignorance).

Needless to say, these conditions present a major hurdle for implementing social and cultural changes. If there are such strong sanctions (both internal and external) on deviation, what do we do in a moment such as ours, when we need to shift behaviors and change our culture? Is there a way to counteract this phenomenon? Perhaps the first step is to build new templates and to offer new guarantees on a communal scale: making better, more realistic commitments that are more flexible and resilient, yet offer positive visions for the future. Perhaps we can start rewarding members of our communities for deviating from norms in ways that move toward the kind of world we want to see. Perhaps we can affirm and uplift qualities we want to see, and the people who exhibit these, and stop lending support and affirmation to those qualities and behaviors that remain rooted in harmful dynamics. The advantage of this strategy is that it does not require everyone to face the pure desolation of absolute freedom forever, but instead carves out new coves and shelters for those who are able to move in new directions. Here, there is still always comfort and pleasure to be had, but it is mediated by a new, critically-informed framework (as opposed to a conservative, patriotic, religious, or economic one), which is collectively produced and defined.

"A Place Where Winning Doesn't Depend on Losing," or, Glamor without Opulence

The trans, leftist YouTuber Natalie Wyn (also known as ContraPoints) recently released a video on the topic of opulence. One of the most compelling aspects of this video is the way that Wyn attempts to wrestle the concept of glamor away from its elitist and exploitative incarnation, in which glamor merges with the concept of opulence, and is used to reinforce upper-class power by merging wealth, status and aesthetic appeal. This opulent version of glamor, by combining the flaunting of wealth, status and fashion, produces an aesthetic standard that is unattainable for most people. Wyn cites Terre Thaemlitz, who insists that glamor in its present form “is suspect as a critical-minded political forum because it is about social distance, not social integration. The promise of the pop-glam diva is not the promise of social transformation, but individual transformation in which the exploited becomes the exploiter. It is a promise of an individual's class mobility, not social betterment or class critique.” Wyn follows this up by citing John Berger, who, in Ways of Seeing, claimed that “[t]he happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable.”

This kind of individualistic, opulent glamor is structurally dependent on exclusion and exclusivity. The underlying logic behind this type of glamor is a mode of desiring that attaches value to scarcity. It is an extension of a competitive economic logic that attaches a higher value to rare and scarce resources, and devalues anything that is in abundance. Such an attitude thwarts post-scarcity social and political programs, since once a material, social and/or economic good ceases to be scarce, it loses its value. Such a logic places individuals and communities on a perpetual, competitive treadmill of chasing ever-evolving needs and wants, never fulfilling its promises to satisfy or satiate, but instead changing the desirability criteria as soon as a good or service becomes attainable.

What Wyn doesn’t mention is the degree to which sexuality in our culture operates according to the same logic as opulent glamor—that is to say, according to the scarcity-valuation model. In our cultural moment, sexual attractiveness goes hand-in-hand with social distance and non-reciprocation. Peter Bailey sketches out the rules and mechanics of this mode of sexuality in his brilliant (and somehow little-known) essay “Parasexuality and Glamour.” There, Bailey coins the term parasexuality to describe a dynamic in which a person (or persons) commands the sexual desire of many without reciprocating that desire—a practice which he insists is a “familiar but largely unexamined phenomenon of glamour.” Central to this conception is the enforcement of social distance—a distance that tends to be produced and maintained by some form of mechanism: a stage or bar top; a shop window; a screen, etc. “Distance not only sustains and protects the magical property that is commonly recognised in glamour, but also heightens desire through the tension generated by the separation of the glamour object and the beholder, a separation that also functions to limit the expression or consummation of desire.” The result, according to Bailey, is a type of “managed arousal” that uses an “enhanced public visibility” to entice and then channel sexual desire—a “sexuality that is deployed but contained, carefully channelled rather than fully discharged; in vulgar terms it might be represented as ‘everything but.’” For Bailey, the exemplary parasexual figure is the nineteenth century barmaid, but it would be difficult to over-emphasize the centrality of this tendency in contemporary culture. This is the very rationale behind the “follower-to-following ratio” on Instagram—a platform where “influencers” build narcissistic empires where millions of users will follow a single, self(ie)-objectifying star, without the star following them back. The more you like them, the further it puts them out of your league. The logic of “everything but” informs the way that sexually provocative content on social media and on television and in advertisements is able to “work up” sexual desire without ever dissipating it—not only because the featured object of desire remains distant (inaccessible through a screen) and does not reciprocate the desire of their viewers, but also because the platforms themselves prohibit material that would “get you off.” In this sense, one might call many of the social media platforms “parapornographic.” They are designed to expand and channel desire using parasexual glamor, and content restrictions further facilitate the process.

This is a mode of desire production and management that is endemic to consumer capitalism. “Glamor sells things,” the advertiser Richard Surrey insisted in a 1920s trade journal in which the modern foundations of the profession of marketing were forged. Glamor, Surrey thought, was “the very core of our art of advertising—Selling By Imagery, as I like to call it—this task of making things seem fairer than they are.” The advertiser who failed to use glamor to his advantage “fails to use a deep and easily navigated channel into the harbors of human consciousness.”  Marketing rouses desire and entices engagement, while simultaneously associating that desire with products and services. Advertisements have exploited the media of film, television, print, radio, web, etc., and they have often done so using glamorous figures such as fashion models, actors/actresses, celebrity musicians and athletes, and, increasingly, “influencers.” In her book on fashion models and sexuality, Elspeth H. Brown traces the evolution of the model as a parasexual figure of “commodified sexual appeal that has emerged as a central aspect of modern marketing,” a figure that has been “central to the accelerated circulation of commodities in advanced capitalist societies.” According to Brown, “[m]odels sell commodities by using their bodies to produce commercialized affect in relationship to specific goods,” and this use depends upon the simultaneous flaunting of those bodies and the disciplined enforcement of distance and unattainability on the part of the model. A lot of effort went into the process of “both draw[ing] on and contain[ing] the implicitly explosive sexuality of bodies on public display,” and this containment depended upon the “cordon sanitaire of the runway, the stage, [and] the printed page.” In “[t]his production of managed sexuality,” as Biley describes it, models “are available to the scrutinizing gaze while eluding its implied denouement—that is, sex. The implied sexuality of the model, the film star, or the pinup is contained . . . through distance.”

It’s clear that for Brown and for Natalie Wyn (or Contrapoints), queer cultural practices have both defied and propped up this exploitative mode of desiring. Brown demonstrates how queer glamor helped to forge the modeling industry, which, in turn, lorded the resulting desirability over its audiences. Brown shows that there is a complex dynamic at work, in which queer aesthetics can perpetuate capitalist regimes of desire exploitation and social, sexual and emotional distance. There is a Deleuzian process at work here, where queer aesthetics and desiring break away from the normative, restrictive and stale mainstream, only to be re-incorporated or appropriated back into the mainstream. In this sense, queer aesthetic practices can help to sustain normative exploitation of desire by constantly supplying the mainstream with new, fresh material and expanding frontiers.

Yet not all queer aesthetics necessarily reproduce this dynamic. At their worst, queer aesthetics reproduce an opulent version of glamor that maintains a link between value and scarcity. At their best, however, queer aesthetics shatter this link, and hitch value to uniqueness instead. Another queer aesthetics takes pleasure in transitioning—not (necessarily) in the transgender sense (though I am extremely curious about the extent to which transitioning between genders, just like role-playing, carries with it the pleasure of experiencing and provoking new kinds of desires), but in the experience of contrast and/or threshold from one program (or aesthetic regime) to another. The very act of queering carries with it the pleasure of subverting an object or experience or a behavior’s relationship to its context and surrounding. What’s radical here is a mode of desirability that takes pleasure not in status-based scarcity, but contrast and differentiation. Desire, rather than always reaching upwards on a unilinear, aspirational scale, and desiring those at the top and seeking to attain a higher and higher place within the hierarchy, a queer aesthetics of differentiation privileges the horizontal mobility of drifting from one desire to another. Spiraling outwards and skating across, rather than climbing upwards and building a status-affirming following beneath you. An appropriate metaphor here is the tangled spaghetti knot depicted in Alicia McCarthy’s painting a place where winning doesn't depend on losing, where a complex, closed-loop knot ostensibly replaces the linear, hierarchical, inflow/outflow, input/waste, winning/losing paradigm of the straight, vertical line.

Unmediated Pleasure

IF you’re a person who desires, you’ll notice that there are probably many obstacles between you and the fulfillment of those desires. Too often, these obstacles are strategically placed in your way in order to make your exploitable. It’s an interesting exercise to ask yourself: who benefits from me pursuing my desires? Critical Hedonism(s) as a project is committed to critically examining the ways that “our very tastes and desires [are] constituted and ‘taxed’ by a regime of perpetual scarcity and narrow distribution of pleasure/care,” often to the detriment of our long-term happiness, social cohesion, and sustainable futures. In addition to this (and this is where it ceases to be merely academic), it aims to transcend these mediated, stratified and exploitative relations through desire—not by rejecting desire, but by rerouting desires in more direct and equitable ways. this has made us allies, in some senses (we will post in the future about the limitations of uncritical polyamory), with some practitioners of polyamory and open relationships, but it also necessarily means examining and reconfiguring our non-sexual desires and ambitions.

In the first volume of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault pointed out that in the developed capitalist world, one does not witness a mere repression of desire (as Freud and many others had postulated), but an affirmative development of desire that aligns it with the interests of power. According to Foucault, the very ways that we (even sexually “liberated” people) speak about and think about sex tends to reinforce the power that it exerts over us. Consistent with his larger schema of the three basic modes of power (sovereign, disciplinary and governmental), Foucault explores the ways that power operates affirmatively—that is: how power compels us to move in exploitable/useful ways without threatening or forcing us to do so, by simultaneously structuring our desires/subjectivities and shaping the environment in which we make decisions as subjects.

One incredibly powerful critical voice producing commentary on the ways that we tend to be exploited by our desires is the Northwest-based anarchist collective Crimethinc., who succinctly and clearly state the matter thus:

“Growing up in this society, not even our passions are our own; they are cultivated by advertising and other forms of propaganda to keep us running on the treadmills of the marketplace. Thanks to indoctrination, people can be quite pleased with themselves for doing things that are bound to make them miserable in the long run. We are locked into our suffering and our pleasures are the seal. To be truly free, we need leverage over the processes that produce our desires. Liberation doesn’t just mean fulfilling the desires we have today, but expanding our sense of what is possible, so our desires can shift along with the realities they drive us to create. It means turning away from the pleasure we take in enforcing, dominating, and possessing, to seek pleasures that wrench us free of the machinery of obedience and competition. If you’ve ever broken an addiction, you have a taste of what it means to transform your desires.” [1]

Elsewhere, the collective describes the way that predefined and commodified options tend to be the only way to achieve desirability or accomplishment. “Without our chewing gum, no one will want to kiss you. Without our deodorant, no one will want to touch you. . . . We play on your insecurities, on your fears and anxieties. There are products for every human activity.” As we know, monetized consumption necessitates monetized production, and so if we can be compelled into consumerism, the flip side of that is that we will be forced into working. because “you must pay to eat, pay to sleep, pay to keep warm, pay for a space just to exist,” you must also engage in capitalist relations of production, either as a waged laborer or as an employer or investor.

Crimethinc. poster on the dependency of desire.

Crimethinc. poster on the dependency of desire.

The collective makes special space for leisure, urging its readers to “[c]onsider all your leisure-time activities,” in order to realize that “you’re not having fun unless you’re paying for it.”

Such a project has led some of us working on the project of Critical Hedonism(s) to explore the exciting niche literature of Critical Leisure Studies, which theorizes the role of leisure under capitalism. Authors such as Chris Rojek explore how sanctioned modes of leisure tend to discipline and exploit us. 

Yet, leisure also provides a potential space of resistance. Communes, subcultures and various “deviant” activities offer avenues of leisure as modes of desiring. Like these, alternative aesthetics can, temporarily (until they are inevitably appropriated by profit-seeking entrepreneurs) generate ripples and dissensus in our desiring capacities, such that we pursue pleasure in non-commodified ways. In the parlance of Gilles Deleuze, we might maintain a “nomadic” relationship to aesthetics that generates space for yet-untapped schemes for enjoyment and desiring.
 


Notes:

[1] Crimethinc (group), To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal, <https://crimethinc.com/tce>