5 July David Bennett

CCS presents:

A TALK by David Bennett

venue 1pm, BPLT Goldsmiths

TITLE: Libidinal Economy and the Prostitute as Prototypical Consumer

Is desire something quantifiable that we can save, spend, squander orprofitably invest in productive activities and relationships? Caneconomic tropes make sense of psycho-sexual energy? This paperre-examines the history of libidinal economy as a tradition ofexplaining sexual psychology in terms of monetary models and metaphors, by tracking how the figure of the prostitute has featured in discoursesof libidinal economy ranging from nineteenth-century medicine, anthropology and pornography, through Freudian psychoanalysis, WilhelmReich’s ‘sex-economic revolution’, Georges Bataille’s ‘general theory ofexpenditure’, to Jean-François Lyotard’s 'libidinal-economic' re-readingof Marx. It will show how early Victorian constructions of the prostitute as both a compulsive shopper and capitalism’s ‘drain’ and outlaw were taken up by anti-capitalist radicals such as Reich, Marcuseand Bataille and deployed as images of libidinal subversion of capitalism — but also how the arguments of these radicals uncannily parallel those of capitalist economists who advocated a shift from a productivist to a consumerist paradigm, or a saving to a spending mindset. The paper will also suggest how the figure of the (female)prostitute, traditionally treated as an exemplary site of libidinal-economic exchange, has been symbolically rehabilitated in postmodern shopping culture through the so-called prostitute-chic andthe 'hooker look'.

David Bennett teaches literary and cultural studies at MelbourneUniversity, where he was the founding director of the Interdepartmental Cultural Studies Programme. His paper comes from a book-in-progress (provisionally entitled ‘Sexual Spending in Consumer Culture’) on the historical nexus between the discourses of economics and sexualpsychology since the 18th century. Previous parts of this project haveappeared in _Public Culture_ 16, 2 (2005): 1—25; _Journal for thePsychoanalysis of Culture and Society_ 6, 1 (2001): 123-38; and _NewLiterary History_ 30, 2 (1999): 269—94
.