Libidinal Economy

Discussion

Simon Licelles, explaining Bernard Stiegler's thought:

(translated by ChatGPT)

"The term libidinal economy will designate the fact that an individual or a group of individuals diverts part of their instinctual energy (sexual desire, hunger, aggressiveness, etc.). That is, they delay the satisfaction of the drive and use this biological energy to carry out non-sexual, non-aggressive tasks and socially acceptable activities.

Stiegler perhaps considered only sexual drives, which is why he spoke of libidinal economy. If hunger and aggressiveness are included, it might be more accurate to speak of an economy of drives rather than an economy that is merely “libidinal.”

Freud designated this social valorization of the drive with the concept of sublimation of drives.

For Freud, a drive can have different destinies. It can be satisfied directly, by making love, masturbating, or having a good meal. One can repress the pressure of the drive into the unconscious—that is, make efforts to forget it—which creates many problems, leading to neuroses, psychoses, and processes of self-destruction. Or finally, a third destiny: one can sublimate the drive, make use of its energy, and the individual will act for themselves or for the community—by working, articulating elements, developing knowledge, and producing works. These works and practices can then be shared with peers.

The drive would therefore be the basic biological energy, and the economy of drives the transformation of the drive into socio-technical habits.

Knowledge—particularly know-how and ways of living—would thus imply, according to this thesis, that all human individuation is the result of a certain form of drive economy. The way in which one diverts one’s drives toward shareable acts characterizes the quality of one’s individuation.

By definition, drive economy is both individual and collective, since drives are economized in order to socialize works. But this must be learned and requires a socio-technical context that provides the individual with an education, habits, and a milieu, which will constitute the possible channels for the production and publication of works. In other words, in the short term, the socio-technical milieu stimulates and supports the libidinal economy of individuals.

It therefore appears that the way in which one learns to economize one’s libido depends entirely on the socio-technical milieu into which one is born. There is a social over-determination, or even a social determination, such that individuals from the lower classes cannot, except in a very marginal way, adopt the behaviors and situations of individuals from the upper classes.

In return, the products enrich this socio-technical milieu (the milieu is enriched by the contributions that are each person’s attempts to sublimate their drives). This becomes self-reinforcing: the contributions of some become examples or foundations for the contributions of others. This is what Bernard Stiegler called circuits of transindividuation: the sharing of individual works that become social.

One could say that in the short term, at the scale of the individual, society allows drives to be economized. But in the medium and long term, it is the economy of drives that makes society—that is, it is drive economy that provides a certain stability to social systems. In other words: only social systems that allow the economy of drives are durable and preserve themselves.

Pre-Columbian empires, China, India, the great monotheistic religions—history undoubtedly offers many examples of societies that are also stable systems of drive economy.

Conversely, there have also been periods or moments of drive disintegration, or de-economization of libido. Stiegler cited at least Nazi Germany, which he described as a drive regime, opposing those who claimed that this regime was desired by the population. Hitler would have led Germans to unleash their death drives.

Closer to us, the consumerism of the late twentieth century can be characterized as a de-economization of drives: marketing, aided by centralized cultural industries such as radio and television channels, loosened individuals’ sexual drives in order to generate waves of compulsive purchasing, instituting—or celebrating—the consumer at the expense of the citizen.

Capitalist enterprises in fact spent trillions to loosen individuals’ drives and orient them toward consumer goods, for example by eroticizing advertising to the maximum. Marketing used television to transform individuals’ existence, modify their ways of living, and orient their desires toward goods and purchases.

But by exploiting the love or desire—normally infinite—that one directs toward an object of devotion, and redirecting it toward mediocre consumer objects, marketing may have captured market share, but it also provoked immense disappointment and the mass disindividuation characteristic of the late twentieth century.

According to Stiegler, marketing ruined desire, provoking immense malaise and disindividuation — phenomena extensively documented by the work of the association Ars Industrialis.

In both cases—Nazi Germany and consumer society—the society produced is unstable. Nazi Germany self-destructed in total war, and consumerism is becoming psychologically unbearable for the populations of industrialized societies; we see the multiplication of behavioral addictions and mass killings.

That is to say that, in addition to exhausting earthly resources, consumer society would also destroy psychological resources, the capacities of the mind, and the possibility of forming society.

By contrast, by economizing their libido in social works rather than in consumption, individuals invest a feeling of love in the objects of their practices. They take care of these objects, of themselves, and of the world. Libidinal economy is at the origin of self-love and love of others. It allows the pacification of mores and the emergence of peaceful and durable—or metastable—societies."

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