The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed

If modern capitalism is so bad, why do people have such strong affective and moral attachments to the neoliberal order? If capitalism grinds all social relations into grist of atomized individuals, what are the attractors that compel people to continue to buy into the system? Progressives have explained this staying power of capitalism in various ways, typically employing variants of the three classical Marxist theoretical constructs false consciousness, alienation, and commodity fetishism, all of which are understood as symptoms of the corrosive effects of market forces. According to this narrative, individuals living in capitalism find themselves trapped in an emotionally vacant immediacy, a wholly disenchanted world characterized by one-dimensional instrumentality, affective flatness, and mindless consumerism.

Martijn Konings’ recent book, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed, challenges this view. Beginning with the observation that people embedded within modern capitalism are neither affectively empty nor passive victims, the author exhorts the reader to view modern subjects as active, willing participants in capitalism motivated by a spectrum of emotions that signal powerful desires and passions tied to that universal object of desire, money. Accordingly, money serves as the source of affective energy binding modern subjects to the immediacy of the experience of capitalism in ways that have been overlooked by progressives.

In this connection, Konings proposes a systematic rethinking of money not merely as a social relation or external idol-like power but rather as an icon. Money as icon operates semiotically as an affective sign that stands for a plurality of potential meanings that are in turn performatively actualized by actors. As with all icons, meaning is grasped in its immediacy such that emotive value is directly experienced without words or contextualizing information: it is something the subject “just gets.” But money is not just any icon. Rather, as the author seeks to demonstrate, money serves to emotionally bind individuals to capitalism by forming attachments to persons, places, and things that are in turn invested with emotional value through their connection with money.

Konings begins the book with a sharp critique of Polanyi, whose progressivist account of capitalism understands it in terms of the logic of impersonal market forces and actors guided by cold cash nexus rationality. He proceeds to an extended discussion on semiotics and affective signs, which builds anexplanatory frame for understanding howicons operate on the level of emotional meaning-making and specifically how certain signs provoke affective powers in the individual that are in no way reducible to either the physical embodiment of the sign or, in the case of money, its commercial functions as a medium of exchange. At the core of this discussion is the author’s strong rejection of the classical money-as-an-idol metaphor at the heart of Marxist-influenced progressive thought, according to which people worship, obey, and fear money as an alien power that compels them to earn, borrow, accumulate, and spend. In contrast, Konings’ approach stresses active participation of subjects in constituting the meaning of money and its relation to the emotional landscape of capitalist culture and individual affect.

This notion of money as icon is the core idea in the first half of Konings’ book and is developed through a wide-ranging and engaging discussion covering considerable theoretical and substantive territory. The resulting theoretical assemblage owes much to Latour’s actor network theory and Butler’s work on performativity. The intended result is an analytical framework for understanding capitalism as an economy of emotion that trades, so to speak, on affective rather than economic values. Put plainly, in an economy of emotion what something is worth to a person is not so much its market price orexchange value but rather its affective value—how it makes one feel.

In the second half of the book, Konings pivots from the detailed discussion of semiotics to an in-depth historical analysis of the American economy and economic thought, tracing the hundred-year arc of the rise and fall of the Keynesian state and emergence of the neoliberal master narrative. Here the reader finds a multi-layered examination of several strands of twentieth-century American progressivism, from pragmatists such as James, Peirce, and Dewey to critical theorists such as Fromm and Riesman. This intellectual history is concretely situated in changing economic institutions, practices, and policies in ways that allow the reader to draw a number of interesting insights relating to economy and affect.

One central theme of this analysis is the changing conceptualization of the universal capitalist subject over the course of the twentieth century. Portrayed in the interwar years by pragmatists as civically engaged, rational, and emotionally healthy, the modern individual subject is reduced to the civically disengaged, emotionally wounded, angst-ridden, narrowly self-absorbed individual as articulated by Fromm and Riesman during the 1950s and 1960s. Interesting as well is the author’s ability to filter these themes through the lens of emotional economy by applying the money-as-icon framework developed in the first half of the book. In particular, the discussion of the sadomasochistic rituals of earning, saving, and consuming as constituting the construction of wounded attachments of the individual to money and the role of these rituals in supporting the neoliberal order, both on affective and moral levels, is a pregnant insight into the deep human psychology that perpetuates the capitalistic status quo. The message is that social and cultural theorists should think long and hard about affective, emotional, and conative issues as they seek to understand the process by which people live as active and willing participants in and defenders of the existing capitalist order without necessarily adhering to any particular ideology or false consciousness.

In conclusion, there is much to recommend this book. It is no doubt a substantial contribution to discussions about how and why people are emotionally attached to capitalist culture. Those readers who share the poststructuralist sensibilities of the author will find the analysis and theoretical framework germane to their work. Readers, such as this reviewer, who have decidedly more traditional Marxist proclivities will find Konings’ semiotic reworking of money interesting and worthy of reflection but in no way an alternative or upgrade to the time-honored combination of false consciousness, alienation, and commodity fetishism. In this connection, I think Konings’ book has far more to offer professional academicians than movement-engaged progressive intellectuals. Having said this, I do see potential practical value in Konings’ affective economy framework. Ethnographers and other empirically grounded researchers interested in studying the connection between money and emotional meaning in the lives of actual persons could certainly profit from appropriation of Konings’ work. One can envision a variety of interesting studies that compare and contrast the emotional significance ofmoney among class and status groups such as minimum-wage workers, debt-ridden students, panhandlers, small-business owners, fixed-income retired seniors, venture capitalists, and so forth. The result would be a very interesting application and concretization of Konings’ ideas within the field of economic sociology that unites affective economy and class analysis.