The Extraction of Relational Value in the Cultural Domain: A Lacanian-Psychoanalytic Deconstruction of Political Economy

Under the symbolic crisis, as the reproduction of signifiers cheapens the sign, value migrates toward relation, which the sign cannot reproduce. A prior work stated the general theory of this migration and of capital's capture of relational value. This paper addresses that capture in the cultural domain. It distinguishes the symbolically guaranteed domain, whose value rests on the scarcity of a sign, from the relational domain, whose value is relational at its root and whose sign is an outer shell, and it argues that the cultural domain, as a relational domain, is reached by the crisis through the stripping of the shell and the exposure of the relational core. It develops the guarantee mechanism, and divinity as the site to which what exceeds the individual is attributed, at the level of a general definition distinguished from its Lacanian and other realizations. As its theoretical center it states the alienation of the structure of desire: capital, unable to reach the drive that circles das Ding, seizes the mediation through which drive is structured, which is culture, and reroutes that structuring toward a commodified object, so that drive is demoted to desire, a movement that is at once, in the register drawn from Marx, alienation. It follows the exclusion this works from an economic into an ontological register, draws out the dialectical point that capital profits because the relation is real, and reaches the ontological claim that capital, having arisen from relation, cannot become a relational subject and can only hold relation as an owner. The paper advances no proposal, and leaves to the reader the recognition of where a given cultural circuit stands and to whom its value returns.