Amy V. Rubin:The erotic economy: it’s not what you think
If we
stopped imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers,
desire could become an engine of social transformation.
At a recent event
featuring my son’s choir in Indianapolis, I was dismayed when the director
urged the audience to fill out a national “economic
impact of the arts” survey that had been inserted into our concert
programs. Are we still making the arts and humanities justify their existence
like this? It’s a trend that emerged 20 years ago when I worked at my first
arts organization at a time when Bill Clinton was elected President on the back
of his famous slogan, “It’s the
economy, stupid.”
In the intervening
years I’ve seen the business model take over more and more arts groups,
universities, NGOs and even cities (aka the “city
as start-up” or “CEOS for Cities”),
a process that’s been accompanied by increasing poverty and inequality, failing
infrastructures and social safety nets, and systems that perpetuate war and
austerity. Yet despite these failures we still cling to business-as-usual
economic icons.
I turned my back on
these icons long ago. Not only do I balk at creativity born in service to
pragmatism (because it’s illogical as well as uninspired), but I also fear the
loss of the ‘poetic’ in society—something I’ve since learned to be a gender-coded
word for ‘not us,’ its power diminished to second-class status under all things
feasible, fundable, scalable and profit-making.
As a social
entrepreneur and a consultant to others who are trying to push the economy
further in the direction of caring, equality and sharing, I’ve found it
impossible to conform to what has been expected of me. Rather than sales tools,
the advice I offer is purposely thoughtful and philosophical, but rejected as
“too pink” by one tech incubator, so “stick
to your knitting.”
Even the
urban-creative Maker’s
Movement, awash with bearded transcendentals heralding a much needed return
to craft, is over-masculinized in its bias for doing and making things by
artisans, tech- and tool-makers and ‘men of action.’ Meanwhile, no one is
talking about the more complex, relational, change-centered, feminine
equivalent called poiesis or
the craft of the imagination. No concrete outputs or return on investment?
You’re fired!
All of which has made
me lean
out still further in my attempts to prepare for a radically different
economy, but what language should I be using to describe it? ‘Poetic’ sounds
fine to me but seems ‘too feminine’ to others, but then I listened to
American author and activist Audre Lorde and that’s when it hit me: the erotic
economy is really what we need.
“The very word erotic comes
from the Greek word eros,” she
writes, “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and
personifying creative power and harmony…it has become fashionable to
separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them
as contradictory or antithetical. What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a
meditating gunrunner?”
Of course, well
trained by mainstream economy’s consumer and capitalist underpinnings, a phrase
like erotic economy is bound to turn our thoughts
to the sex industry, pornography and adult entertainment or, perhaps even
worse, to the dreary notion of sexual
capital - a dark, asset-based perspective on erotic power.
We are inundated daily
with images of balloonishly inflated boobs, untemptingly taut torsos and
artificially outsized arses or the opposite—skeletal legs and faces. This isn’t
erotic, it’s neurotic, cartoonish and grotesque. These cultural fetishes are
junk food, offering a momentary mirage of satisfaction but in the longer term
sexually malnourishing. If you’re like me, you are sick of these dehumanizing
cultural phenomena: tired Kardashian tropes
about what is sexy and the constant application of the word capital to
human beings who are used, exchanged and depleted in the process.
But we don’t have to
think this way. Here’s
Lorde again:
“Once we begin to feel
deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from
our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know
ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens
through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate
those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And
this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle
for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely
safe.”
Unfortunately,
conventional economics does just that—settling for the convenient, shoddy and
expected by focusing on private profits and the financial bottom line. What’s
missing is creative tension, a vital and free interplay between forces, people,
ideas, exchanges, colors, genders, sexualities and intellects, brimming with
hopeful and authentic purpose and satisfaction.
Perhaps it’s no
coincidence that the depths of economic reductionism parallel the heights of
capitalism’s hubris. After all, a recent Presidential ‘debate’ between
Republican contenders in the USA featured
Donald Trump comparing his genitals with those of a group of fellow
frat boys. Definitely not erotic.
What Lorde is saying,
it seems to me, is that “erotic knowledge” in the deeper and richer sense
provides a radically different foundation for politics and the economy, and one
that has some strong historical precedents. For example, less than a year after
the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in which more than 100 young women perished in
New York, the Bread and Roses textile
strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts galvanized the international labor movement
by refusing “an
economistic approach that reduced the question of justice to the fulfillment of
bare needs.”
Instead, their
campaign slogan—“We need bread, but we need roses, too”—challenged the
prevailing notion of a ‘hierarchy of
needs’ by placing human dignity and creativity at the same level as
physiology. As a sustainable
apparel entrepreneur, I’m keenly aware that just over a century later in
2013, more than 1,100 people died in the Rana Plaza garment
factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where many American clothing companies
manufactured cheap, fast fashion. In the process, people of relative privilege
in one part of the world made themselves look sexy in exchange for the blood,
trauma and lives that were lost elsewhere. This is the opposite of a true,
erotic economy.
In the existing scheme
of things, people are objectified in a system that’s invested in making sure
that we dress, act, perform and compete in the public arena as economic units,
while keeping our erotic power silenced in private isolation. The conventional
economy manipulates and manufactures our desires; it doesn’t liberate them to
be used in processes of transformation as Lorde demands.
That sort of
transformation starts with the moral and aesthetic desire to design a better
system that reflects our highest ideals. Then it provides a structural platform
made up from a basic income, fair labor and wealth distribution, and
social-safety nets on which people can be free to learn, contribute, care and
create rather than to compete, leverage and destroy. An erotic economy like
this would underwrite and unleash everyone’s creativity and capacity for
living, re-imagining economics not as a manipulative and mechanistic game but
as a humanly crafted means to liberation.
In my own work I’m
trying to put these ideals into practice by creating a radically different
incubator called the Imaginarium,
which aims to honor and nurture the value of poetic, creative and erotic
elements in new start-ups. I envision a free, local community platform for
discussion, engagement, and the development of ideas, which will help to
reclaim the human capacity for free thinking and imagination.
The erotic economy is
a yin economy,
a full inversion of everything we currently believe about economics, driven not
by unsexy abstract dollars and cardboard men in suits but by human beings who
fulfill their unique capacities for inquiry, inventiveness, experimentation,
emotion, love, empathy and free expression. If these things can be made into
our common currency instead of money and shareholder value, then true wealth
might be available to all, even to those who are already financially well-off.
If we stopped
imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers and let
them permeate our entire human enterprise, desire will be ours again. The
erotic economy could be a supremely renewable form of energy and an engine of
social transformation.
see also
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