CAPITALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE CAPITALIST MODE OF

EXCHANGE AND THE OBJECT A IN THE PRODUCTION OF NON-SENSE

INTRODICTION

There is a thesis in Marx already made a vulgate of Marxism, namely: “The mode
of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and
intellectual life” (Marx, 1999: 4), that is, the basis determine the superstructure. Although
this basis is commonly associated with the relations of production, in Capital, Marx
begins his exposition by the mode of exchange, that is, by the commodity to its most
evolved form, the money form. Thus, we have two axes that condition the process of
social life, the mode of exchange and the mode of production. To each of these modes we
can associate a social effect. From money-form we will have an a-historicity – both, due
to the rupture of the causal nexus when the commodity is transformed into money (M-D),
and the transfer of possession. Form the mode of production we have the surplus-value,
the surplus produced by the circulation of Money (D-M-D’) – the surplus value as the
driving force of caputalism, the impersonal impulse (Trieb).

Lacan makes use of the term jouissance to refer to the result of the encounter with
the Freudian lost object; after the mythical moment of the first satisfaction, the object
leaves behind itself an "archaic trait" – whose equivalent in Lacan will be the object a –
and the subject enjoys when encountering this archaic trait. However, Lacan will still find
another function for object a, instead of functioning as an object of enjoyment, this object
can operate as a loss of enjoyment; the subject repeats a symptom no longer seeking the
lost object, but seeking the enjoyment that has been lost. For this second case Lacan will
make it homologous to the Marxist surplus-value, designating the object arising from the
loss of enjoyment by surplus enjoying. Such a homology occurs because the two concepts
have refer to a repetitive and surplus process (as opposed to the metaphor of enjoyment,
which refers to thermodynamics, whose process, in the end, generates a loss) - but, Lacan
will say:

This surplus enjoying appeared, in my last talk, in function of a

homology with respect to the Marxism surplus value. Homology, cleary
means – and I underlined it – that the relation is noto ne of analogy. It
is indeed the same thing that is at stake (Lacan, 1968/69: 31).
There is already an exposition of how a structure - the capitalist mode of production -
reflects in the superstructure - the psyche.

However, if we find a clear reference in Lacan to the relation between the mode
of production and the psyche, it seems to be less explicit about the way in which the
capitalist mode of exchange – the exchange of goods mediated by the Money-form –
reflects in subjectivity. In a sense, to this question have been dedicated several theorists
whose research seems to point in this direction – to name a few exemples, Kehl (2015) in
his theorizing on depression, Sloterdjck (1988) on cynicism, Pfaller (2012) and the
treatment of the concept of interpassivity, Jameson (1996) with postmodernism as the
cultural logic of late capitalism. Thus, it is intended, in the doctorate, to be inserted in this
field in the following sense: what would be the function of nonsense for contemporary
subjectivity?

A formation of meaning seems to emerge when there are conditions that make
possible a narrative, a concatenation of signifiers with a buttoning point (Lacan, 1957/58)
– named by Lacan in his fifth seminar for Name-of-Father (Lacan, 1957/58) –, in short, a
formation with nexus. In capitalism, as already mentioned, the exchange of commodities
is an historical exchange, where the causal nexus is broken. In such a formation,
phenomena that refuse interpretation, without "interpretability", begin to be part of the
culture. This is the case of Kafka in literature – “the first (naive) reading is often the most
adequate one, and the second reading is the one which tries to ‘sublate’ the first reading’s
raw impact by forcing him into the frame of a given interpretation” (Zizek, 2009: 114) –
; David Sale’s paintings – a “Surrealism without uncounscious” that “ensures the
incapacity of any hermeneutic or interpretive system to domesticate these juxtapositions
and turn them into usable meanings” (Jameson, 1991, p. 175) –; the Auschiwitz read by
Adorno – for whom “All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage”
(Adorno, 1973: 367). To more prosaic exemples, we have the Movie Slaker (1990), where
disconnected and unfinished narratives meet themselves without any apparent sense
mediation; we can also mention the "Harlem Shake" (Wikipedia, no date), something not
interpretable and repeated ad infitnitum on the internet.

Lacan explicitly associates nonsense with structure – be it topological (Lacan,

2005) or grammatical (Lacan, 2001) – that commands the signifier chain and the
jouissense (for exemple, the desire graph and the four discourses). And, to “residual
formations”, which gravitate around the concept of object a – the metonimical object;
Thig (Ding); the different forms of object a; surplus enjoying, the enjoyment that is of no
use; the Sinthome – a residue that polarizes with the meaning. In a first moment, the object
a operates as a generator of meaning (jouis-sense), whose sub-return effect is itself as
enjoyment; in a second moment, the object seems to be undressed as an ever-present
residue, surplus enjoying ou Sinthome.

Thereby, are the Harlem Shake, the concentration camps, Kafka or the postmodern
painting residual formations or structural reflexes of non-sense arising from the
breakdown of the capitalist causal nexus? While the sphere of art seems to operate as a
structural reflex (Jameson, 1991), the Harlem Shake looks more like the undressed drive
in its repetitive automatism. On the other hand, what allows and how does the subject
deal with the residual phenomena stripped down in contemporary culture? And yet, what
of the interpretive bankruptcy derives from the base (Capital) of the present society?

THE SPIRIT AND THE BIG OTHER – THE HISTORICAL NEXUS

There is a patent proximity between the concept of big Other in Lacan and the
concept of Spirit in Hegel. Both are instances of mediation of human relations and both
are subjectivated constructions. The subjective here is understood, from Fichte, as a
category whose determinations involve: a) representing itself and b) the activity of
denying this same representation, transforming itself, but nevertheless remaining the
same – the subjective category in Fichte it is the “I”: the “I” represents itself (whether in
a portrait or in a diary), the “I” remains the same and different from itself (thus an identity,
tastes, personal characteristics are forming throughout a life), besides, it is the Self in its
in-itself that produces this movement (Fichte). Taking this into account, the Other and the
Spirit will be categories that are enriched and transformed, while maintaining their
identity, and, added to this, this dynamic is given by an internal movement (Trieb)
(Campos, 2018). For Lacan, a rearrangement of significant products of a wit (or freudian
slip), if it is the fruit of the agency of the subject, is not a minority of the agency of the
big Other, which first provides these signifiers (the metonymic treasure), and secondly,
authenticating a message as a new meaning, a new meaning, which is now part of the
Other - which led Lacan to say that in a wit "the dimension of the other (...) extends
however little" (Lacan, 1957/58: 132). If in Lacan we are led to do this construction,
Hegel says it explicitly:
 This it is because it runs through the three elements of its nature; the
movement through its own phases constitutes its actuality. What moves
itself, that is Spirit; it is the Subject of the movement and is equally the
moving itself, or the substance through which the Subject moves
(Hegel, 2004: 476-7).
Thus, Other and Spirit are as personified as the I, both reflect upon themselves –
representing themselves, acting upon their representations and transforming themselves,
without, however, losing their form.

We must, however, be parsimonious in this juncture Other and Spirit; we will now
establish the field of employment of these terms in regards of the scale of application.
While Lacan makes a more embracing use of the concept of Other – using it as a set of
symbolic rules (code), source of signification (metonymic treasure), Law and the
authentication of meaning in the symbolic order (the Name of father), God etc., serving
both to evidence a scale of the neighborhood of subject, and a global scale – in Hegel, the
Spirit is always a macrostructure. In referring to a individual level, Hegel will say that
“The single individual is incomplete Spirit” (Hegel, 2004: 16). By this way, the Spirit is
an idea or a concept that mediate the relations through a narrative that mobilize
(consciously or unconsciously) the social body, we can say, na Ideal inscript in the Other
– this narrative is, for Hegel, the Freedom (Hegel, 2012) ou the History (Arantes, 1981).
Making this differentiation in the level of scale, we can, so, read Hegel’s Spirit as an
specification of one of the functions of Lacan’s Other.

In spite of differences, subjectivating the structure of mediation of relationships

(ability to represent itself and to deny conserving itself), what is allowed is to give history
to the structure, because “The representation of the past, which can only be provoked by
a modification undergoned by the object, in turn, affects the object, exerting on it a
counter-effect that provokes the emergence of a new objectivity of the object” (Arantes,
1981: 150). In this way, just as Hegel traces the progress of the Spirit throughout its
phenomenology, evidencing the logic of qualitative leaps by undertaking the historical
nexus of Western thought towards the present, Lacan also confers historicity to the Other,
for example, when he says that the discourse of the master is the first and oldest, as well
as situating the appearance of the discourse of the university, hysterical and later
psychoanalysis (Lacan).
THE CAPITAL: MEDIATION WITHOUT HISTORY
There is a latent resemblance between Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and
Marx's Capital. Both begin their exposition with a category that appears in the world in
its most rudimentary and circumstantial form and ends with this form occupying the place
of mediation of human relations, that is, they end in their universal form. The category
for Hegel is consciousness, whose course goes from the sensible to the self-consciousness
and Spirit; in Marx, we have the commodity in its form of occasional value, passing
through the form of money, and finally we have the universal form, Capital. However, if
in Hegel the final phase of the Spirit is a remembrance, the narrative of his "effective
history" (HEGEL, §802), in the Marx of Capital, the case is another.

Capital is a-historical from birth, it inherits this trait of money-form: a) due to the
rupture of the causal nexus produced by the transformation of the commodity into money
(MD): “It is not perceived in the money of what quality is the commodity that was
transformed into it. In its money form, one commodity looks the same as the other” (Marx,
2013: 248); b) by the transfer of possession of the values exchanged in capitalism: “The
seller has his merchandise replaced by gold, and the buyer has his gold replaced by a
commodity. The phenomenon that is evidenced here is the change of hands or place
between the commodity and the gold” (246); and c) the fetishistic character of the
commodity, which alienates human labor impregnated in commodity: “Because they
equate their products of different types in exchange, as values, they equate their different
works as human labor. They do not know this, but they do (208).

1) Since we are equipped with the universal grammar of capital, the commodity, we
can establish intercourse with culturally very disparate peoples. Such a factor
makes the market easily universalizable: “The commodity itself is superior to any
religious, political and linguistic barrier. Their universal language is price and
their community, Money” (Marx, 2008: 192-3).
2) Unlike the logic of gift and countergift, in which the offer of gift carries with it
the obligation to return it as a countergift, for the market, Derrida described the
exchange of commodities by: "A Gift without Present" (Derrida, 1992). This
means that in the act of exchange mediated by the market, the vehicle of the social
bond of the alliance, which is the very act of giving, is excluded; the actors could
trade things and soon after they are disconnected. Karatani tells us that, contrary
to the logic of gift and countergift, in which the ownership of the gift is not
 transferred, and the receiver of gift is having obligations (countergift), in the
market, ownership is totally transferred, both actors being desobligated (Karatani,
2014): “the cosmopolitanism of traders develops as a dogma of practical reason,
opposed to hereditary, religious, national, and all other prejudices that create
obstacles to the circulation of the matter of mankind” (Marx, 2008: 193).
3) While in the system based on the social bond the actors matter by their value –
identity, titles, etc. – in the market, magnitude in exchange is measured by the
value of the thing in relation to something else, so it is the things that have
magnitude, not men (which are all the same) and “men are finally forced to face
without illusions their social position and their relations with other men” (Marx
& Engels, 2007: 43). It is thus passed from fetishism between people to fetishism
between things (Zizek, 1996: 310).
4) Freed from the fetishist social bond, social relations acquire the character of a
relation between things – “the commodification of people” (Marx, 2013: 254) –
because entities once devoid of value, since they are put into the grammar of the
commodity, they acquire value of exchange:

things which in themselves are not commodities, such as conscience,

honor, and so on. can be bought from their possessors with money and,
by their price, take the commodity form, so that a thing can formally
have a price even without value (239).
We can see, according to the above, social relations once mediated by the Spirit,
producer of history, narrative, social bond or alliance, be replaced by Capital, an a-
historical category, without causal nexus.

THE SPIRIT’S PROGRESS DOWNFALL

For now, we will left beside the Capital and turn to Spirit.

Spirit as an enterprise to a universal narrative, the maximum product of an epoch,

establishes itself with a logic. This logic, of course, is the dialectic. In Hegel, the central
concept for understanding the passages from one form of consciousness to another, or
from one formation of Spirit to another is the concept of Afhebung, or determinate
negation. The Aufhebung occurs when the Spirit (as well as the conscience) undergoes a
counter-coup circumscribed by its own perspective towards the world, finds something
contingent, but this counter-coup is re-attached to the Spirit, rationally, as a necessary
event1; for this reason: "speculative dialectics has never ceased to remind us that
philosophical thought has no other goal than to eliminate chance, making contingency
intelligible" (ARANTES, 1981, p.294). Thus, the Spirit must be able to understand
contingency, otherwise it is incomplete Spirit, that is, it is not universal.

In this parameter, with the Aufhebung, the Spirit progresses towards Freedom,
since "the essence of Spirit - its matter - is Freedom" (HEGEL, 2012: 67). The following
quotation expresses well this "spirit" of Romanticism, the time of Hegel:

The revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God is the elastic

point of progressive formation and the beginning of modern history. In
it, what has no reference to the kingdom of God is only accessory
(Schlegel, 1997: 85).
However, the twentieth century is marked by harsh criticism of the Hegelian
theodicy, a theodicy that replaces God with history.

Walter Benjamin denounces in 1940 that the incessant march of history does not
go to progress, but rather sees it as something obscure and untimely, at the same time it
draws us to itself. In his Theses on the Concept of History, he writes:

There is a Klee painting titled 'Angelus Novus'. In it is represented an

angel, who seems to be about to depart from something in which he
stares his gaze. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open and his wings are
drawn. The angel of history has to look like this. He has his face turned
to the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single
catastrophe, which continually heaps debris over rubble and throws it
at his feet. He would like to linger, to wake up the dead and gather the
wreckage. But from heaven blows a storm that has entangled itself in
its wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm impels him irresistibly into the future, to which he turns his back,
while the heap of debris before him grows into the sky. What we call
progress is this storm (BENJAMIN & LÖWI, 2005: 87).
At that time Benjamin still had no event to condense his thesis – though he already
announced what was to come. Years later (circa 1961), Adorno launches its attack on the
idea of progress inscribed in the Hegelian dialectic (and in all philosophy of progress);

1
In order to clarify, we mention two examples of Aufhebung: 1) the passage of certainty sensitive to
perception, when consciousness, intending to explain its world by the most immediate and singular, the
present in the sensibility, ends up reaching the most universal and mediated, then it points out the "this"
and the "here" before it, but the "this" and the "here" are the most universal way of designating any and
most mediated entity, since there is no indication without consciousness accomplishing this action
(HEGEL, 1992); 2) when the historical hero, driven by his passion (contingency), has his acts inscribed in
the rational nexus of history (necessity) (HEGEL, 2012).
drawing attention to the fantastical aspect emanating from the core of Hegelian
philosophy. Auschwitz is the contradiction and truth not assimilable calved by the Spirit2:

The metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because what happened has

destroyed for speculative metaphysical thinking the basis of its
unification with experience. Once again, the dialectical theme of the
conversion of quantity to quality triumphs unspeakably. With the
administration of the massacre of millions, death became something
that had never before been necessary to fear in this way. There is no
longer any possibility of it inserting itself into the lived experience of
the individual as something in any harmony with the course of his life.
The individual is that he is expropriated of the last thing left to him and
of what is most miserable. The fact that they were no longer the
individuals who died in the concentration camps, but also specimens,
must also affect the way of dying of those who escaped these measures.
Genocide is the absolute integration that is prepared everywhere where
men are equaled, upright, as they say in military language, until people
literally exterminate them, deviations from the concept of their perfect
nullity. Auschwitz confirms the philosophical nature of pure identity as
death (ADORNO, 2009: 299-300).
In 1960, Lacan made a communication about the dialectic, where, by way of
psychoanalysis, but, in a similar vein to the Frankfurtians, he undertakes his criticism of
the Aufhebung immanent to determined negation. Given its structuralist influence,
Lacan's operation will consist in formalizing this defect of the Hegelian dialectic already
deposited in the history of the twentieth century. Lacan writes:

(...) the Hegelian statements, even when we stick to their text, are
propitious to always say Another-thing. Another thing that corrects its
link of phantasy synthesis, while preserving its effect of denouncing the
identifications in its deceptions.

This is our own Aufhebung, which turns that of Hegel, his decoy, into
an opportunity to highlight, instead of the leaps of ideal progress, the
avatars of lack (LACAN, 1998: 851).
Thus, although the link between a signifier and its chain that underlies it are articulated in
Hegel's synthesis, fantasy (like the cogwheel of desire) is not explicitly articulated, since its
synthesis masks its own Ideal, Freedom as the fantasy of the system. Thus, the psychoanalytic
Aufhebung reveals what the Hegelian elide, Liberty as faith, or the call of an age as
circumstanticized by the time and the Spirit itself as a circumstance.

2
Although Adorno and Benjamin perform a direct criticism of Hegel, we can not disregard here that the
Lacanian formalization has as its central source the Freud of the texts The Question of a Weltanschauug
(FREUD, 1996), Civilization and its discontens (IBID) and The Future of an Illusion (IBID), which can
function as an indirect criticism of Hegel.
 The curtain of Hegelian theodicy is raised. What the Hegelian fantasy of progress
reveals is that the encounter of the Thing with itself, with its determined negation rather than
necessarily leading to progress, produces the inevitable encounter with the trauma. Once the
link between narrative and Aufhebung has been unleashed, what remains is the avatars of
lack, the object a in its non-attachable residuality and as its motor, that which is pure motion,
the Trieb.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: BETWEEN NARRATIVE AND CONTINGENCY

Hegel uses the term Trieb as the blind force, "a form of an immediate will, or a natural
impulse [Trieb] that reaches its satisfaction; this, in turn, is the content of a new impulse
"(HEGEL, 1992, §357), however, out of the immediate world, the Trieb "is the
instrument, or organ, of pure consciousness for its realization "(§ 622) – read for the
establishment of nexus, or the contingent become necessity, that is, the Spirit in his
"effective history." Already Marx, uses the Trieb to refer to the driving force of Capital,
the surplus-value, an impersonal force, however incarnated in the subject:

As a capitalist, he is just capital personified. Your soul is the soul of

Capital. But Capital has a single vital impulse, the impulse [Trieb] to
self-value, to create more value, to absorb, with its constant part, which
are the means of production, the greatest possible quantity of more labor
(Marx, 2013: 391-2).
It seems to us that the surplus-value as Trieb is more akin to immediate will, than to the
actualization of consciousness as an effective history.

It is a fact that in Freud we find this double strand of Trieb; the drive is both a
producer of symbolization, as of narrative – "making the unconscious material
conscious", the "constructions under analysis" –, as a pure repetition, "extraneous to
meaning" (VIDAL, 2008) – the "compulsion to repetition." According to the two
mediation instances discussed above – Spirit and Capital –, symptoms (contingencies)
traced back to symbolization would thus be symptoms mediated by a symbolic Other –
by an instance of mediation in which the social bond is regulated "by collective ideals,
customs, traditions and affiliations "(Coelho dos Santos, 2012). Symptoms without
"interpretability" would be traceable to an instance of mediation in which symbolization,
the possibility of narration, is dispensable or even impossible, that is, the market or the
Capital.
 In an arrangement in which we have the Other of the Name-of-Father – which
inhibits, repress and encrypts the symptom, allowing the drive representant to cross
preconscious censorship – Freudian displeasure, as a rule, refers to an unconscious
fantasy symbolized, that is, the subject repeats a symptom and it is addressed to an
unconscious desire structured by a fantasmatic context, in accordance with the pleasure
principle. The fantasy, in this case, functions as a means of enjoyment, it is the frame in
another scene that promote the encounter with the object a.

But, how would the symptom occur through the mediation of Capital?

CAPITALISM AND NON-SENSE

We have seen above how the Hegelian Spirit suffered criticism throughout the
twentieth century; the criticisms we are discussing focus on the inability, if guided by the
concept of Spirit, to absorb a residual formation, in the impossibility of transforming the
contingency into necessity – exemplified there by the concentration camp and Lacanian
"avatars of lack". It seems to us that the kind of symptom proper to our time revolves
around some non-sense, of some non-sense conformed to capitalism, understood as a
formation where its impulse is not a producer of history, or of nexus.

Subtly, we find in Lacanian psychoanalysis two ways of embracing this non-sense

thing. Lacan will associate non-sense with formalizations, either with mathemas, in which
the signifier will come to lodge "the relation of saying with the said (LACAN, 2003,
p.482), or to the grammar, propositional structure where the truth is situated (Id, 1992).
And, what we call residual formations, which are phenomena that gravitate around the
concept of object a. This double meaning seems to us useful for two reasons. First, the
question of non-sense at the level of structure seems to give us a good measure of the
concept of Capital here exposed, a structure does not have to make sense, nor does it have
to be subjectivated, we don’t need to subjectivate it for it operates – a structure must create
and respond to conditions of self-perpetuation, for that, we will have enjoyment and its
denudation in surplus enjoyment (surplus-value) as the master spring of Capital. Second,
the residual formations seem to have a relation not yet fully clarified with this structural
non-sense.

We will list some examples of these formations that will serve as an indication for
study.
 The drive – whether it comes from the "automatic subject" (Marx, 2013: 297) of
capitalism, whether it comes from the "machine of the psyche" (Vidal, 2008) – associated
with the disconnected market environment, generates a trauma not assimilable like
Auschwitz; of works of art that seem to simulate the high entropy of late capitalism, such
as contemporary art installations (Jameson, 1996); of narratives in which estrangement is
an end in itself, as Kafka; of non-sense humor that makes us laugh at the purely unusual
element, like the Monty Pyton sketches; of the unpropose repetition of memes like
Harlem Shake; of the song made with computer-generated random point distribution by
Xenakis; in short, occurrences that are not assimilable by any structure of meaning, non-
interpretable formations, or because they are an end in themselves or because they are a
mimic of the high entropy of the market. We would thus like to clarify the relation of
non-sense to capitalism, why Capital creates such meaningless formations and why of
interpretive bankruptcy in Capital.