Chaosophy - autonomous learning

desire, have led capitalism to take possession of cinema, and to use
it as a privileged instrument of social control.
It is interesting, in this respect, to consider the extent to which
television has not only not absorbed cinema, but has even subjected
itself to the formula of commercial film, whose power, for this very
reason, has never been so strong. In these conditions, the stakes of
liberalizing pornographic film seem secondary to me. One remains
here at the level of a sort of "negotiation" with the contents that do
not really threaten the established powers. On the contrary, these
powers find it expedient to release the ballast on a terrain that does
not threaten the fo undations of established order. It would be completely
different if the masses were at liberty to make the kind of
film they wanted, whether pornographic or not. The miniaturization
of material could become a determining factor in such an evolution.5
The creation of private television channels by cable should be
a decisive test; in fact, nothing guarantees us that what will develop,
from the standpoint of the economy of desire, will not be even more
reactionary than what is broadcast by national television. Whatever
it is, it seems to me that all that tends toward limiting micropolitical
struggles of desire to an eros cut off from all context is a trap. And
this doesn't just hold true for the cinema.
The capitalist eros, we said, is always invested on the limit
between a licit pleasure and a codified interdiction. It proliferates
alongside the law; it makes itself the accomplice of what is forbidden;
it channels the libido to the forbidden object that it only touches
on superficially. This economy of transgression polarizes the desiring-production
in a game of mirrors that cut it from all access to
the real and catches it in phantasmic representations. In this way,
desiring-production never ceases to be separated from social production.
Fantasized desire and the capitalist real which convert
desire to "useful" work involve, apparently, two different types of
arrangements. In fact, they involve two politics of desire that
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