A paper I wrote for a philosophy class... it's not that insightful, but hey...
I. Introduction
The study of the intersections of sex and markets can be taken up from a wide variety of angles, yielding wildly different results. Always during the struggle for method, a heightened awareness of assumptions is important, for often it is the implicit entry point of a theory that goes without being adequately constructed or critiqued. For these reasons, methodological questions have a prominent place in the following analysis, and in our investigations, it will be found that questions of method are, for this specific topic, sites of unusually intense and contradictory claims and interactions. Emerging from the centrality of our to-be-specified method, a triple-movement takes place, one in which successive contextualization is carried out on previously-abstract concepts. Needless to say, the interconnections between our concepts must be paid special attention to, as it is upon them that the whole analysis rests. The legitimacy of the passage from the abstract to the concrete is one that, besides the special although highly important case of “real abstraction”, takes place in the first instance within the sphere of thought, although then it may react back upon the social relations from which it sprung. At every level, then, the form of our analysis must be that of the social, in the broad Marxian sense. This stipulation manifests itself initially at only a general (and almost laughably so) level—that of the Lyotardian theory of libido put forth in Libidinal Economy. That stage of analysis will at first appear to need more justification than is given. However, following Marx's example in the first several chapters of volume 1 of Capital, we shall develop the concept and take account of a great number of tensions that shape and transform our first rough sketch into a more substantial and relevant expression of the essence of Elles. After this, libido will be connected, grounded into the materiality of a body, a body that is influenced and indeed nearly determined by the social discourses which surround it. Finally, at the third and last conceptual move we shall encounter the intersection of our social bodies with the pure and dominant form of social synthesis existing in all societies based on commodity production—the act of commodity exchange. It is only at this developed stage that we shall be able to look back at the initial decision of having libido as our entry point with an informed eye.
In our analysis, the following ordering of presentation is adhered to, though this ordering may not be the same as the real dialectical movement which it seeks to model: method and interconnections; libido (abstract); sexuality (libido + materiality); sex work (sexuality + commodification); conclusion.
II. Method and Interconnections
A more in-depth discussion of method in general, and then of methods in particular, is in order. For an essentially hermaneutic activity such as social analysis, especially regarding a film, method, as mentioned above, plays an exceedingly important role. The various entry-points and focuses brought up in the course of differing methods of analysis testifies to this: are we to speak of the individual ethics of participation or non-participation in sex markets, and thus take the individual as a moral agent to be our entry-point? Or are we rather to take societal structure and the various roles inhabited by those individuals to be fundamental? The framework we choose will have a definite effect upon the types of things we can say, and it is perhaps superfluous to say that this has a definite influence on how we think about these problems. Staying in the dark, refusing to admit the existence of the frameworks and discourses we inhabit is a sure route to utter failure.
What criteria can there be for such an all-important decision as the selection of a method? The first few things to consider are what the alternatives are, what they are allowed to describe, the accuracy of those descriptions, and finally the conclusions wrought by those alternatives. It is in this spirit that I put forth two alternatives between which a decision ought to be (and will be) made: the liberal analysis of the market, with its corresponding focus on whether sex markets should be legal or illegal; and the Marxian analysis of objective economic relationships in production and distribution, with its corresponding focus on what the alternatives to markets are, and its systematic approach to the effects of particulars. Fundamentally, this is a methodological question, and it has spawned countless debates over nearly the last two centuries. So which one should we utilize for the current analysis?
I give this answer emphatically: Marxism. A number of critiques and studies are useful to reference here, relevant to why I believe Marxism to be the superior social and economic framework and methodology. I will deal with each of the following points briefly following their statement: Marx's Capital, and after it, the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel in Intellectual and Manual Labour and of I.I. Rubin in Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, correctly point out the existence and prominence of so-called real abstraction and reification, functioning on the level of social relations but nonetheless real; the power of dialectical analysis utilized as a way to connect abstract and concrete conditions, as found in the Uno-Sekine approach to Marxian political economy; and the power of dialectical analysis to dispel ideological abstractions based on hypostasis and false unities or oppositions, found most prominently in the work of Theodor Adorno. Additionally, Marx's Capital will be used as a methodological model of the presentation of our analysis.
The neoclassical framework, now commonly adopted without question for problems of economics, is perhaps the major alternative to Marxism (although it would probably be more accurate to say that Marxism must be the “alternative”, the one of which justification is demanded). This is of course not to say that it is incorrect, simply because it is adopted without question. However, I believe it to be inferior for a number of reasons, of which the “critical” attitude of Debra Satz will be used as a case study. Satz's claim that “...in order to understand and fully appreciate the diverse moral dimensions of markets, we need to focus on the specific nature of particular markets and not on the market system” is, I believe, central to the liberal analysis of markets (Satz 17). Satz apparently acknowledges Marx's contribution to the analyses of Smith and Ricardo, namely his theory of exploitation based on the commodification of labor-power: “...Marx singled out the distinctive nature of human labor power as a commodity whose purchase gives some people power and authority over others” (Satz 7). However, this “power and authority” is most certainly not the extent of the importance of labor-power within mature capitalism. Satz goes so far as to say that “Indeed Marx's normative condemnation of capitalism focuses on its degradation of human beings to animals and things, and not on its distribution of wages and profits” (Satz 56). I believe that these few quotes display a complete lack of understanding of Marx. First, labor-power has such a central role because it is an ubiquitous commodity, present within all capitalist industries and firms, and indeed according to Marx the exploitation of labor is the sole source of profits. This is why we must view markets systematically—sure, labor-power is a specific commodity, but it is also systematic in a way that Satz excludes from her analysis. This exploitation of labor cannot be solved by simply having workers who “are not deskilled automatons, enjoy more than subsistence wages, and identify with their jobs” (Satz 57). Even given this fantasy, within capitalism there is still exploitation of labor by capital, and thus there is still not egalitarianism, regardless of Satz's wishful thinking. Age-old accusations of the inconsistency of Marx's economics, starting soon after Marx's death with Bortkiewicz and Böhm-Bawerk, can no longer be given as reasons for the rejection and suppression thereof. Andrew Kliman has demonstrated decisively that Marx's economic theory is consistent and relevant, and thus I believe that much of the liberal egalitarian critique of Marxian economics is unfounded, especially from Satz's perspective (Kliman). Unfortunately, Marx is still rejected out of hand as an economist, quite apart from the (qualified) acceptance of his work in sociology and philosophy, though even that is so often distorted.
Returning to Elles, we can immediately see the effectiveness of viewing things from a Marxian and dialectical perspective than from a liberal or simply ethical perspective. Beginning with an abstract category, and successively adding in factors of reality, our analysis will pass from a caricature, a theoretical fiction, to a concrete analysis of sex markets as depicted in the film. Ours is similar to Marx's method in Capital, wherein the appearance of society is taken as a starting point: as he says at the very opening, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities'; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity” (Marx 125). Similarly, taking the film at face value and then working our way through the necessary movements of this idea, our analysis will start with the concept “libido”, because, as it were, the well-being of groups in which the capitalist organization of social relations prevails appears as an immense spreading-out of libido; the individual libidinal intensity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of libidinal intensity.
III. Libido
Taken at face value, the widening and expanding of libido seems to be the key to the problems presented to Anne in the film. Anne is, at the beginning of the film, a wholly sexually repressed bourgeois woman who has no intimacy with her husband, and no emotional intimacy with her children either. She rations her cigarettes and doesn't allow herself to drink except for a little wine. Compared to the sex workers in the film, she is unhappy and fundamentally estranged from life and from a meaningful sense of self. Why she is restricted is not important relative to how she lives her life within those all-too-common restrictions. Sexual repression exists, and the film, rather than looking into the reasons why, explores our possibilities for emancipation from within. More importantly, libido and its expansion is presented as the focal point of the film as a whole, due to the focus on Anne and her reactions to the apparent sexual liberation of the sex workers (something we will return to in the next section). All the way through to the end of the movie, when Anne attempts to have sexual relations with her husband in a bid for libidinal expansion, we see the focus on Anne's repression. Without yet exploring what the real problem is, it is clear that Anne's ideological (in the Marxian sense) take on the problem is based on the libido and its expansion. First, the pure libido will be examined with the help of Jean-Francois Lyotard's theory of libidinal economy; then its tendency to expand will be explored; finally its connections to Anne will be re-examined and its importance re-affirmed in light of the expanded investigation.
The theory of libido as it is understood today descends from Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. To better understand how classical libido theory was revised by Lyotard, it is useful to understand the death drive as well. Late in Freud's career, due to complications arising from the interpretive monism of libido theory, he put forth an opposing drive, the death drive. Of it he wrote, “Libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards...The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (Freud 418). The positive libido and the negative death drive form an opposition in this regard, and it is just this type of opposition that was questioned by the French post-structuralists, a group of which Lyotard may be considered a member at some points in his career. Specifically, his work Libidinal Economy put forth a purely positive theory of the libido, and by doing this it had to become wholly abstract, a so-called theoretical fiction. Libido, as Lyotard uses the term, is the pure affirmative impulse, intensity, or affectation (Lyotard 4). It exists on a primal level prior to consciousness but may manifest in and through consciousness. It is desire, abstract enjoyment, the positive, all in one. As Fredric Jameson wrote, “To be sure, nature (or being) is as full as an egg, there are no absences in it, and no oppositions either...” (Jameson 37). While Jameson takes this idea in a quite opposite direction, it is a good illustration of the motivation of Lyotard's libidinal philosophy: we do not perceive a lack. Rather than understanding desire as lack, as with Lacan, we should understand it as full or positive.
As pure positivity, libido has the tendency to expand—and it would not be far off even to say that libido's essence or nature is to expand over previously non-libidinal spaces. The expansion of pure positivity is akin to the formation of points of intensity, and if we simplify substantially, a phenomenological or psychological interpretation of intensity would be permissible. However, it is not only that; there is also a semiological significance to Lyotard's libido theory, which can be thought of as a kind of ground or argument upon which the previous statements might be based. In the place of the semiological sign, Lyotard proposes the theory of the tensor, a duplicitous sign: one side is the semiological sign; the other is that of the residual potentialities of other meanings, overflowing the system and running into others, covering the entire semiological plane with meanings or intensities. In modern bourgeois society, the sign negates or even annihilates the signified, and, in good post-structuralist fashion, all that remains is the so-called endless metonymy of meanings, the deferral of meaning to yet more signifiers. However, Lyotard's theory does not follow Derrida into the conclusion that “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida 158). Rather, Lyotard returns to the experience of positivity, of the libido, a pre-semiological escape that yet shows the same characteristics. Regardless of these differences and similarities with Derrida and with other post-structuralists, the expansion of libidinal activity remains.
Returning to the film, we can now apply Lyotard's theory of libido with more precision. Anne's repression stands in for the nigh-unexpanded libido, one that cannot create points of intensity where it wills. However, since our theory is at this point still in the abstract stage, the stage of pure affirmation and immediacy, we should focus on the expansions in the film that have significance. This phenomenon of libidinal expansion is present in the film in multiple locations. Anne participates in several scenes that are even presented similarly to the explicitly pornographic scenes, for example the foot massage she gives her father on his sickbed. The skin-to-skin contact, the oil, and even Anne's apparent attitude towards the act lend it a sexual quality. Other examples include Anne preparing the shellfish and cooking the same dish that was said to have been cooked by the Polish sex worker's first client. In Anne's opening-up to sexuality she begins to experience it everywhere, the repression finally losing its hegemonic hold over her. The connection seems obvious between the libidinal expansion in Anne's day-to-day activities and that in the sex workers' jobs. All here is positivity, points of intensity emerging in a wide variety of activities, most strikingly those mentioned above that are not “sexual” in the traditional sense of genital-to-genital intercourse. The upshot is that there are regions, such as the “sexual” in the traditional sense, that still deny access to her libido—her masturbation is an important part of her libidinal awakening, but even that is not the culmination of the libidinal spreading-out, as it effectively has no culmination. Thus, the inconsistencies in our theory of pure libido when applied to the concrete conditions in the film push us onward to a less abstract category: that of sexuality.
IV. Sexuality
In terms of our libido theory outlined in the previous section, sexuality can be understood as libido (or libidinal expansion) with the addition of materiality, or better yet, libido's intersection and interaction with materiality. Unlike Lyotard, we will not stay in the realm of theoretical fictions, but will move to a more concrete and more useful analysis of society through the lens of Elles. In this spirit, we must now outline the following problems and their solutions: the elaboration of the necessity of the conceptual passage from the abstract (libido) to the relatively concrete (sexuality); the question of space, objects, and their abstraction; the question of the material and the social as they relate to sexuality and finally the re-application of our newly expanded theory to the concrete examples of the film under analysis.
What is the nature of the change from our wholly abstract concept of libido as defined by Lyotard to the more concrete concept of sexuality? The tendency towards expansion of the libido is counteracted by the socially- or materially-imposed negativity of repression, which is then reinforced by the activity of the psyche in its development and in its socialization. In other words, the pressure of material reality, such as the constraints of the psychical economy (not having infinite libidinal energy), lack of biologically necessary resources, &c., causes the stoppage or even the contraction of the libido. Similarly, social impositions, such as the “No!” of the Father, can cause a libidinal contraction in one area, leaving the question of how and if this contraction is offset by reciprocal expansion for another time. Thus, there is at the very least a transfer of libido from one area or space to another, which, taking into account the pure expansionary striving of that libido, is bound to cause friction or contradiction, if not outright neurosis. Much like a post-structuralist version of Freud's theory of the raging Id, which is subsequently repressed by the superego, our theory now comes to the raging libido, this time repressed by reality itself. This point deserves further elaboration.
The nature of space itself requires the real and conceptual replacing of libido by sexuality. One libidinal “space” or intensity is always bound to be unequal by the existence of other points and areas of non-intensity. As libido could never truly be theorized statically, without the movement based upon inequality, really existing three-dimensional space is the ultimate repressor of libido, in the sense that it is lived space. Drawing on Heidegger's concept of the ready-to-hand world, filled with objects and directions and concern, as against the abstract empty present-at-hand space of science, the question of objects and of space finds its solution. The nature of the abstraction of objects from out of the mixed-together field of sensory perception is one that is based on the kind of beings we are (ignoring for the moment the real abstractions of a society based on commodity exchange; this will be dealt with in the next section on sex work). As Dietzgen correctly stated, “Where do we find any indivisible unit outside of our abstract conceptions? Two halves, four fourths, eight eighths, or an infinite number of separate parts form the raw material out of which the mind fashions the mathematical unit. This book, its leaves, its letters, or their parts, are they units? Where do I begin, where do I stop?” (Dietzgen 84). In other words, the lived reality of space is always already broken into pieces by the mental activity of abstraction. This is more fundamentally why we must pass from the Lyotardian theory of the pure, positive libido to the theory of sexuality, that of the really lived libido.
Our analysis now leads us to the question of the differing roles of the material and the social aspects of reality and of our abstractions, something which was briefly touched on in the preceding section. Put simply, what is the distinction between the material and the social in our chosen methodology? It was one of Marx's greatest achievements to outline the relation between social forms and their material content, and it would do us well to follow his distinction here. In the first place, there is certainly and undeniably a material substrate that resists absorption into the hegemonic symbolic order of signification, or social form. However, this material substrate is only that—the unnameable, the heterogeneous. All else is pressed into social form. This social form can be thought of as the “form of appearance” of some deeper dialectical concept or material. To give an example: In capitalism the concept of value takes on the “form of appearance”, the social form, of exchange-value, which is further the form of which socially necessary labor time is the content. There are thus multiple distinctions that can be made—one concept's form is another concept's content, as it were. To sum up, the social and the material are intimately bound up with each other, and one cannot be understood or even thought without the other. Thus, we were right to say earlier that sexuality is the libido's intersection and interaction with materiality, if we add the stipulation that it is a social or symbolic reality (which is the way Marxists understand the term anyway). Even within the concept of the material, the social permeates, and always within the social, the material permeates. A striking example of this is Marx's theory of the base and superstructure. The economic base contains within itself, alongside the material forces of production, the relations of production, social relations that are the connecting link to the superstructure.
Returning to the film, armed with our newly expanded theory of sexuality, we can analyze a good deal more of the situations contained therein, most especially Anne's sexual repression, which was incomprehensible from the standpoint of the pure libido (surely, one could begin with sexuality, but that was not the immediate presentation of resolution in the film). First, it is now apparent that Anne's lack of sexual freedom, expression and satisfaction is based in the spatially-oriented world of bourgeois society. Capitalism's latest postmodern phase of spatialization at the expense of temporality might be put forward here as a further catalyst to this phenomenon (Jameson, Postmodernism). However, the basic fact of materiality, as outlined above, creates an upper limit to the amount of liberation that can take place, concretizing the conditions of libidinal expansion and making a specifically sexual libido or expansion possible. To give an example, this time not about Anne: Charlotte (Lola) finds sexual liberation with her clients, while the sexual relationship with her boyfriend is one of tension and restraint. In a certain scene, we are sure that the person she is having sex with is her boyfriend because it is so passionate, but in the end he turns out to be a client. Later we see Lola's interactions with her boyfriend: she clearly does not want to have sexual relations with him, even though she'd been so passionate with the client beforehand. In this case, the materiality of different circumstances and different temporal or spatial arrangements of objects and abstractions (to speak abstractly) contributes to what is sexuality and sexual liberation are and what they are not. As it is sexual, this type of liberation or expansion must be connected also to the body, a more concrete libidinal apparatus than the pure subject. Although space is still sought to be filled with libido, it's activity is restricted socially and biologically to specific activities and to specific times and intensities.
With Anne, we see her libidinal expansion, as noted before, in the foot massage she gives her father and in the shellfish she prepares for dinner. However, the social and biological constraints—the relation between the two is fuzzy, but suffice it to say that the social triumphs over the biological, at least in the realm of consciousness—which are placed upon her by what we have above called materiality cause the outlets for these libidinal activities to be limited. Thus, the social ideology of libidinal expansion, its socially-imposted ideal, which we here consider almost a transhistorical phenomenon, is the sexual relationship. With the ascension of the socially-imposed norms and expectations that our concept of sexuality implies, Anne desires the specifically sexual, as the term is typically socially defined. Thus, our concept of sexuality, of sexualized libido, has something of specific content to it: it is not applicable to all libidinal subjects, and it is important to keep the abstract and the concrete methodologically separate, and not to over-abstract or too quickly universalize a given concept.
There still remains, however, a number of instances that we cannot understand at the level of simple sexuality. We must proceed to take account of the effects of markets on the lives of the people within the film, and then envision how these results might be universalized (a relative universalization, to be sure) or not. First, the impersonal self-abstracting effects of capitalist markets and the associated phenomenon of reification are not brought about through any meaningful or purposive psychological or subjective interaction (though these phenomena may have these types of interactions as prerequisites, it is not necessary to delve into them to understand the phenomena in question at the given level of abstraction). Second, we must ask the question of why Anne is not sexually liberated, while the sex workers appear to be, at least on this level. The obvious question arises: what are the conditions of sexual liberation in the bourgeois society portrayed in the film, and to what extent are the results to be found there applicable to our society today? Third, given the stated goal of normative market policy, and to answer the previous two points effectively, we must push onward to a third and final organizing category: that of sex work.
V. Sex Work
Sex work is here defined as the intersection or interaction of sexuality within the capitalist mode of production. In order to consider the interaction, a brief review of Marx's theory of capitalism is in order. Thus, the order of this section will be divided into: the capitalist mode of production in general; the theories of commodity fetishism and reification; the interaction or intersection of sexuality with capitalism on an economic level (sex work from an economic viewpoint); the interaction or intersection of sexuality with capitalism on a superstructural or ideological level (sex work from an ideological viewpoint); and the conclusions we can draw about the film from our finally-completed (at least provisionally) analysis of Elles.
The Marxian concept of “mode of production” is one that describes the dominant economic logic, typically of appropriation, of a given historical society. For example, the mode of production present in ancient Egypt involved the extraction of surplus from farmers around the Nile River. It is upon the combination of this direct surplus extraction and the farmers' subsistence farming that the Egyptian economy was based. Currently, we live in the capitalist mode of production, in which the dominant economic logic is one of commodities and commodification—it is fully matured only when labor, that most basic element of productive activity, has been turned into a commodity that is bought and sold by supposedly free and equal economic agents. Highlighting the logic of commodification and the production of commodities by means of commodities, the capitalist mode of production is one in which markets play a dominant role, whether the circulatory or distributory spheres allow more or less free competition between producing firms. Thus, not all markets are capitalistic, though capitalism requires markets for its functioning—that is, for its characteristic laws to assert themselves. The question of the commodification of sex, producing sex work that is put on the market for sale, must have its solution based on the real logic of capitalist production and appropriation, in which workers produce more value (as well as more physical output) than their labor-power was worth on the market. Even paid at full price for their labor-power, the workers are exploited by capitalist surplus-value appropriation in the form of surplus product.
Alongside the capitalist mode of production, the concept of base and superstructure will be exceedingly important to us here. The economic “base” is the combination of the forces and relations of production upon which the ideological “superstructure” is built. However, the relationship between the two is not one of pure determinism.* For now, we will assume a dialectical, multi-directional relationship as put forward by Mao Zedong in his brilliant work On Contradiction. In certain cases, the superstructure may be said to react back upon the base, such as in a revolutionary upheaval, when the relations of production restrict the growth and application of the forces of production. However, a much more general reading is warranted as well, in which a revolutionary situation is not required for the superstructure to become the “determining factor”, so to speak, but rather there is a two-way interaction between the two spheres at all times.
Building on the relation between base and superstructure, and applying the distinction to the capitalist mode of production, we arrive at the peculiar concepts of commodity fetishism and reification. Commodity fetishism is the concept used to describe the determining character of commodities on the division of social labor in a capitalist economy. In other words, it describes the fact that in a capitalist economy, it is commodities that play the socially-synthetic role, and it is to them that falls the task of apportioning and re-apportioning the total amount of social labor available to society into specific enterprises and industries. Through this action, commodities take on a mysterious and mystical power: “To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 166). The broader concept of reification builds upon this understanding of commodity fetishism to include a wider superstructural phenomenon of inverted relationships. The relationships which are typically called “reified” are those in which a process or motion is held to be constant, as if it were a thing. To give an example of the wide and powerful application of these ideas to the study of ideology: Alfred Sohn-Rethel has examined the relationship between reification and epistemology before, noting the connections between commodity fetishism as the social synthesis and classical models of epistemology.
Now we may ask what the interaction between sexuality and the capitalist system is on the economic level—this is the first part of the critique of sex work. Looked at purely economically, it must be said that sex work is not all that different from other kinds of work. The sale of sexual labor-power is no different from the sale of other types of labor-power, and given our strict definition of commodity fetishism above, services act as commodities too, contrary to the interpretations of, for example, the Uno-Sekine school of Marxian political economy. Sexual labor-power is either exploited or not, based on whether surplus-value is extracted by someone occupying a different class position than the worker who acts in production. Unfortunately, the film does not go into the alternative cases of self-employment or other-employment, so the dynamics of this interaction cannot be analyzed sufficiently in view of the film. It seems, then, that something other than a purely economic analysis is called for, and what better to use than the concept of reification, the natural extension of the concept of commodity fetishism to the so-called non-economic realm.
Viewing sex work from an ideological or superstructural viewpoint, it takes on a number of characteristics not analyzable from the purely economic perspective previously adopted. First, sex work plays an interesting and important part in the market society portrayed in the film. The outsourcing of sex from the home into the market is portrayed there by the sex workers' clients' demographic, which is almost exclusively married men. This phenomenon occurs for two reasons: first, it is simply another part of the imperializing effect of the value- and commodity-forms into yet another sphere; second, it is a manifestation of the expulsion of intensity to the outside of the self-identical family unit.
The ideological reaction to the imperialism of the value- and commodity-forms into sex work is quite important. People's lived relation to the reality of commodified sex is to normalize (that great imperative of the bourgeoisie) and defuse non-commodified sex, even to the point of complete elimination, as in the case of Anne and her husband. It is difficult to imagine why sex would be any different than other goods, which, as capitalism takes root in their production, in most cases cease to be otherwise produced. It is important to understand this as a systematic trend of the capitalist markets and their expansion into previously un-capitalized spheres. The effective outsourcing of sex from the home into the market is a particularly striking example, but certainly not the only one (one need only think of food or clothing production). The effects of this expansion will be explored in the final section below.
Real abstraction is a phenomenon that arises in capitalism due to the abstract nature of human labor within that system. Multifarious concrete labors are equated only insofar as they are treated abstractly by the capitalist mode of production and exchange. In the exchange of a commodity for money, the abstract labor contained in one is equated with that in the other (see Marx's labor theory of value). Other prominent real abstractions under capitalism are the Newtonian worldview and its corresponding Kantian epistemology (see Sohn-Rethel). Real abstraction also takes place, however, in the functioning of the family unit as a self-identical whole. This means that the family is treated by capitalism and by the legal superstructure as a single unit, a single unified decision-making firm. The unification of family members in this sense thus mirrors that of the firm, and the differences in libidinal and sexual intensities are effectively excluded and even, in extreme cases, eliminated from the family-firm as destructive. The reproductive aspect is taken as an important part of business, however the sexual relations between members must be regulated for the benefit of that unity.
So what is the base-superstructure relationship regarding sex work in the film? It must be understood on the basis of real abstraction, on the interaction between the logic of the market system, the base, and the ideological superstructure surrounding sex work, on which people order their organization, in this case in what we've been calling the family-firm.
VI. Conclusion
Finally, our triple-movement of libido, sexuality, and sex work has come to a momentary halt. Needless to say, the analysis could continue into more and more concrete conditions and come up with additional insightful statements. However, it is good to stop at a certain level and abstract once more what we can, in order to arrive at general or normative statements about the market economy in sex. With what we have done so far, we may begin to produce a normative prescription for market policies regarding sex work—although, in reality our analysis has led us to something quite different from typical market analysis, as will soon be made apparent.
First, the market system must be opposed as a system. The effects of the market are much deeper and more far-ranging than typical neoclassical efficiency-based arguments make apparent, as even Satz recognizes. It is true that we cannot judge the effects of markets if we only look at abstract homogeneous commodities, but if we start to look at concrete commodities we inevitably encounter labor-power, that most ubiquitous and problematic commodity the exploitation of which forms the necessary precondition for the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. We cannot understand capitalism without looking at it systematically, but this must be done in a concrete and not abstract way. Marx's analysis of labor-power and his theory of exploitation show this, and Andrew Kliman's recent work confirms it in light of its many historical criticisms.
As for sex markets as a specific kind of market, they should be opposed from a systematic point of view. The question “Should sex markets be legal?” is the wrong question. Capital incessantly seeks out new markets and new areas of the world to absorb into itself, and the fight against one “noxious” market is inevitably replaced by more. As technology develops, the struggle against the destruction wrought by markets (both due to capitalist crisis and due to the destruction of moral boundaries and the foundation of “noxious” markets) will not be halted. The inherent creativity of the capitalist system, its creative destruction of non-market units (as in our discussion of the family-firm), insist that a moral problem solved is but a temporary respite from a greater and endless creation of moral dilemmas. Thus, Elles provides a tiny and insufficient view of sex work, shown only from the individual's point of view. Always the sex scenes are particularly pornographic, which even projects agency onto the audience. In capitalism, the voice of the agent, of the holder of money or power, is privileged.
The agency of the worker, especially that of the sex worker, is really non-agency wearing the disguise of capitalist ideology. The freedom to sell oneself on the individual level becomes, through the imperializing tendency of global capitalism, the normalcy of sexual interaction. The phenomenon of a striving towards normalcy that is so typical of the bourgeois mentality finds its ultimate connection with patriarchy in the outsourcing of sex from the home. The already-disempowered female spouse is stripped of even her sexual role in this the latest stage of market expansion. We cannot speak of freedom only with a single market in mind, however, nor even with a summation of all markets, but only by taking into account the larger ordering of society through the all-pervading economic structure. Elles cannot answer this.
Libido is the pure affirmative impulse; sexuality is the libido's interaction and intersection with materiality, particularly with the body, made particular by the customs and methods of socialization in a given society; sex work is the integration of sexuality into the capitalist market system. The particularity of the market mechanism (of which bourgeois normalcy is an extension and expression), means that we cannot confront sexuality and the libido apart from the phenomenon of sex work, which is, or seeks to be, the dominant reality. Not even touching upon the shaping of our sexual desire by advertisements and other such exposures, the reality of sex work under capitalism is striking in its dissimulation of agency, power, freedom, and of sexuality itself.
Works Cited
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*Most Marxists agree on the determination of the superstructure by the economy “in the last instance” (the particular meaning of this phrase cannot be gone into in sufficient depth here, but suffice it to say that much has been made of it since the time of Louis Althusser especially).
