Philosophy
The market doesn’t just sell products, it sorts whose desires count as “authentic” and whose are engineered into endless aspiration. From women’s “empowerment” shopping to caste-class respectability and disabled “normalcy,” desire is managed, unless it’s cultivated on your own terms.
The Mirror That Watches Back
In Part I, we traced how philosophy suppressed the desires of the marginalised while naturalising the desires of the powerful as reason. The market system performs the same operation from the other direction. It does not suppress the desires of the marginalised; it manufactures desires for them; specific, targeted desires that keep them consuming, aspiring, striving, purchasing, and not, crucially, organising. The powerful, meanwhile, get to have what is coded as authentic desire: cultivated taste, original experience, the boutique hotel, the farmer’s market and the artisanal everything. Authenticity, in the contemporary market system, is a luxury good. It costs what it costs to be the kind of person whose desires are understood to be genuinely their own.
Consider what the market system has done with women’s desires. The Victorian period pathologised women’s desire, naming it hysteria, confining it to the domestic, and refusing it a public voice. The contemporary moment looks dramatically different on the surface: women’s desire is everywhere, celebrated, catered to, and marketed at. But look more carefully. The desires that are manufactured for women by the beauty industry, the wellness industry, and the fashion industry are desires shaped around a particular economy of the self: the self as project, as surface, as aspiration toward an ideal of femininity that requires continuous purchase and continuous lack. The technology of control has changed. The logic has not. Victorian medicine told women their desire was pathological. Instagram influencer culture tells women their desire is empowerment, and then sells them the products through which that empowerment can be performed.
The question of caste and class is equally stark. Who gets to have what counts as authentic desire? In Indian contexts, the desires of upper-caste, upper-class consumers are legible as preference, as taste, as individuality. The desires of Dalit communities, working-class communities, communities in the margins of the economy, these are either not catered to at all (rendered invisible as a market), or they are catered to through the manufacture of aspirational desires: the desire to rise, to assimilate, to acquire the markers of a respectability defined by someone else’s standard. This is not freedom. It is the manufacture of desire in the service of a hierarchy that was already in place.
And then there is disability, perhaps the sharpest example of how the manufacture of desire has its own exclusions and violences. The market system largely renders disabled desire invisible. The market mostly does not see disabled people as desiring subjects worth manufacturing desire for, except in one very narrow register: the desire to recover, to normalise, to become functional in abled terms. The rehabilitation industrial complex sells this desire relentlessly: the right prosthetic, the right therapy, the right technology, and you can want what everyone else wants, because you can approximate who everyone else is. The desire that is manufactured here is the desire for normalcy. And underneath that manufacture, something far more fundamental has been suppressed: the question of what disabled people might actually want, in their own terms, on their own terms.
There is a deeper problem here, too: we do not have language for it. The erasure of desire often works through the absence of vocabulary; what cannot be named cannot be wanted, or at least cannot be clearly wanted. Nowhere is this truer than in the domain of disabled sexual desire. We have an expansive, if troubled, vocabulary for able-bodied sexual wanting. We have almost nothing; not in medicine, not in philosophy, not in popular culture, for the sexual desires of disabled people. What exists either medicalises (turning desire into a clinical problem of function) or goes simply silent. The silence is not neutral. It is a form of manufacture: by making certain desires linguistically unavailable, the system ensures that the only desires that get expressed are the ones it has a category for. The body that wants in ways the market cannot process is a body whose wanting has been, in effect, cancelled.
Audre Lorde knew something about this kind of cancellation. Her essay “Uses of the Erotic”, written from the position of a Black lesbian woman whose desire was refused legitimacy at every turn, describes the erotic as a deep internal knowledge, a kind of feeling-intelligence that grounds us in what we genuinely value. Lorde distinguishes the erotic from the pornographic: where the pornographic is the performance of desire for an external audience, the erotic is desire that flows from genuine inner life. What she is probably naming (without quite using these terms) is the difference between manufactured desire and cultivated desire. The erotic is what remains when you stop performing wanting for the machine and attend instead to the underground river of what actually matters to you. It is available, Lorde argues, to everyone, but it requires work to access, especially for those whose inner life has been most thoroughly managed by external systems of power.
The Indian kama tradition offers a parallel resource. Kama (desire) is one of the four purusharthas, the legitimate goals of human life in classical Indian thought. What is philosophically significant about this is not just that desire is affirmed rather than suppressed, but that it is placed within a framework of cultivation. Kama is not raw appetite; it is desire that has been developed, refined, and made artful. The Kama Sutra is less a manual of technique than a treatise on the cultivation of the desiring self — the development of sensibility, aesthetic discrimination, attentiveness to the desires of others. This stands in sharp contrast to the philosophical tradition that wanted to suppress desire and to the market system that wants to manufacture it. Cultivation is neither suppression nor manufacture. It is a third possibility: the possibility of tending desire as one tends a garden, which means both attending to what is already growing and deciding what to grow.