Ben Gook

The problem of libidinal economy can be summarised in two axioms: 1. Every economy is libidinal 2. Every libido is economic If both these axioms are accepted then we accept libidinal economy. In fact, as this essay traces, the tendency is to choose or modify one or other axiom to produce a less scandalous form of libidinal economy. In this case, we witness a moralism of libidinal economy, either for or against, rather than a thinking of libidinal economy. This is ironic as the thinking of libidinal economy often claims to be beyond moralism, beyond good and evil. By tracing the permutations of acceptance and rejection of either or both of these axioms we can reconstruct the history of libidinal economy as a mode of thought. This history is a history of resistance to the acceptance of both axioms, which gives us libidinal economy but also seems to collapse any critical distance as our libido is identified with the economy. Therefore, the axioms of libidinal economy allow us to grasp both the persistence of morality within this thinking and the difficulty of maintaining a position of critique in the wake of libidinal economy. This working through is aimed at reconstructing the possibility of an ethical culture of libidinal economy, which would engage with morality while not unconsciously reproducing a moralism.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon’s 1948 definition of noise as the enemy of communication became hegemonic basis of polities, economies, emergent network technologies and their mutual dependence. This cybernetic conjuncture was initially characterised by its exclusion of randomness from an external environment, but a series of developments expanding Shannon’s engineering paradigm to almost every human science also changed the relation between system and noise. In the twenty-first century, the cybernetic precept of control over probabilities and risks has been attenuated as an emergent conjuncture discovered ways to extract value – significance and profit – from previously excluded randomness. Analysing the history of cybernetic theory and practice since 1948, we propose that as defining technologies became distributed, the site of exploitation shifted from control to contingency. The interdisciplinary expansion of cybernetics and its powerful model of an immediately applicable technoscience capable of driving political, economic and cultural change has led to the assimilation of randomness, once the driver of radical aesthetic and political movements, into the core business of contemporary rule and finance.

What is a libidinal economy? How are we psychically hooked into the circuits of the capitalist economy? The contributors to this book question the relevance of a concept that began reappearing in critiques and analyses of capitalist societies since the financial crisis of 2007. The chapters stretch from its philosophical pre-history – including Marx, Spinoza, Cavendish and Ibn Sina – to the term's introduction with Freud and on, via Lyotard, to how online platforms put our psyches to work. _Libidinal Economies of Crisis Times_ is a collection of essays by leading scholars about the connections among economies, pleasures, and desires.

What do Germany’s memorials, films, artworks, memory debates and national commemorations tell us about the lives of Germans today? How did the Wall in the Head come to replace the Wall that fell in 1989? The old identities of East and West, which all but dissolved in joyous embraces as the Berlin Wall fell, emerged once more after formal re-unification a year later in 1990. 2015 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of that German re-unification. Yet Germany remains divided; a mutual distrust lingers, and national history remains contentious. The material, social, cultural and psychic effects of re-unification on the lives of eastern and western Germans since 1989 all demand again asking fundamental questions about history, social change and ideology. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders puts affective life at the centre of these questions, both in the role affect played in mobilizing East Germans to overthrow their regime and as a sign of disappointment after formal reunification. Using contemporary Germany as a lens the book explores broader debates about borders, memory and subjectivity. The book maps theories of fantasy and collective identity onto the post-transition period and the experience of eastern Germans, adding new dimensions to a burgeoning literature on post-unification identity in Germany. To this end, Gook disentangles complicated theoretical scholarship – from Freud to Zizek – in order to show how the imaginary and the symbolic help to anchor both collective (national) identities and a sense of (the individual) self.