Failing to grasp this crucial shift in capitalist strategy makes their politics useless

(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Let me make it clear that, if there is no question of my subscribing without discrimination to Gilder's apologetic discourse, on the other hand I take it quite seriously as a pointed ideological legitimation strategy of eighties-capitalism. Gilder's theory is exemplary as an attempt to formulate a morality of capitalism at odds with the heritage of the Enlightenment. If his theory is weak as political econ- omy, it is highly significant (although at times disquieting)4 as eco- nomic politics. Any social critic (to go back to a phrase that Bataille would not disavow) who overlooks this type of contemporary justifi- cation risks missing the true target and overlooking once more cap- italism's resources and metamorphoses. Furthermore, perhaps Mauss would not have disavowed Gilder's attempt in principle. The anthropologist does not hesitate to see in the skillful operations of potlatch on the part of the Iroquois (in whose simple disinterestedness he is careful not to believe) a pre- figuration of the operations of capitalism. And it is also his aim, at the end of The Gift to search for something in the contemporary world that could prolong the process of gift and countergift of primitive societies. It is not, however, in "the cold reason of the merchant, of the banker and of the capitalist" (The Gift, Chapter 4, Conclusion, vol. 2) that he detects that prolongation, but rather in the liberality of the industrialist who creates family insurance funds or, better still, in national health insurance, where the community gives to the work- ers something other than a simple salary. We are far from the insane squandering fantasized by Bataille, as well as from the innovator's generous risk invoked by Gilder. There still remains the question of why neither Mauss nor Bataille have pointed out, in some decisive mechanism of capital, a contemporary continuation of potlatch, while Gilder, in 1980, does not hesitate to resort to that ethnological reference, and to make it the guarantee of a moral basis. The reason is that a transformation (already at work but still concealed) has become manifest. In the capitalism of abundance the distinction between luxury and non- luxury has become indeterminable. Clearly, it is only in a regime of luxury, where everything is superfluous, that demand cannot be as- signed and becomes open to possibilities that are less and less predict- able. It is only in a regime of surplus consumption that the subject (the client who chooses) does not know his own desire, and that supply (founded on still unknown, still unimagined technological and aesthetic possibilities) must necessarily precede demand. The distinction is no longer between the necessary and the superfluous, but between several as yet unimagined possibilities. This is why seduction, the aesthetization of merchandise, plays a primordial role. It is vital for this supply economy to deny the naturalness of needs- including the very notion of need and utility (in the trivial sense). In this sense we are witnessing the aesthetization of political economy. (213-5)