Thinking through examples

Yuran has a gift for observation. He carefully observes things most of us would not grant a second thought and then delivers paradoxical, provocative verdicts that almost always point at something true: something easy to miss but impossible to unsee once it has been named. This is not merely a personal style. It is a method, and understanding it is the key to understanding what is the philosophical core of his latest book.

My contention is that in Yuran’s work, sociology and philosophy are the same thing – or rather, that in his best moments, there is no gap between them. This is not a trivial claim. The conventional division of labour between the two disciplines runs roughly as follows: philosophy is responsible for concepts, clarifying what things, objects, and persons fundamentally are, with the greatest prestige going to descriptions that are general, timeless, and invariant. Sociology tends to take certain concepts as given and measures its success by explanatory power: the ability to illuminate social structures, to distinguish between types of societies, and to account for observable patterns. A philosophically curious reader of sociology keeps a certain distance from it – treating it as an empirical field that leaves the fundamental conceptual questions open. The philosophically informed sociologist, in turn, notes with some discomfort the blind spots that come with philosophical abstraction: what is lost when one speaks of ‘the human’ or ‘society’ in the abstract.

Yuran belongs to both traditions and fits comfortably in neither. In his work, fundamental conceptual questions are inseparable from an engagement with embarrassing, often comic particulars. The methodological choice to think through such particulars – not around them, not despite them – is itself a philosophical commitment of the first order, and it links him to a tradition one might trace from Hegel through Marx: the intuition that concepts exist only through their concrete instantiation, and that reality is always conceptually mediated, never simply given. And further, that one can, and indeed should, develop a sensitivity to symptomatic points, to embarrassing particulars that disclose, in the very embarrassment they arouse, something structural that is otherwise unapproachable.

This is also why Yuran’s choice of examples is not incidental. His examples are not chosen to illustrate a pre-formed theory. They are chosen because they are symptomatic, because pointing to them does not merely reveal a blind spot but illuminates the entire field.

Mandeville’s revenge

This methodological commitment becomes explicit in Yuran’s account of the history of economic thought, structured around the contrast between Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville. For Smith, the paradigmatic economic actors are the baker, the brewer, and the butcher – abstract figures illustrating abstract principles about exchange, division of labour, and the invisible hand. Their examples may seem innocent, but in truth their very neutrality covers up a neutering of the social field: a field populated by beings who operate beyond shame and honour, purely self-interested in a way that is also purely impersonal. The Smithian economic agent inhabits a world without notions of the honourable, the shameful, and the obscene – or rather, a world in which those categories have been philosophically quarantined from the domain of economic analysis.

Mandeville’s world is different. His Fable of the Bees teems with prostitutes, mistresses, husbands, and wives alongside the traders and craftsmen (Mandeville, Reference Mandeville1962). And it is not merely that Mandeville includes sex where Smith excludes it – the inclusion produces an entirely different economic ontology. For Mandeville, what drives the economy is not the neutral aggregation of private interests but the excess generated by vice, by the distinctively social nature of desire. We want things not simply because they are useful but because others want them, because possessing them positions us in a social field structured by envy, display, concealment, and aspiration. There are no Smithian economic agents in Mandeville because there are no desires that are not already shaped by an imagined social gaze, envious or contemptuous, passing judgement on what drives us.

Yuran’s reading of this contrast is not merely a contribution to the history of ideas. It raises a question about the conditions of theoretical adequacy. What does it mean for a theory to take its examples seriously? The Smithian tradition, by choosing examples already laundered of their social complexity, forecloses from the outset the questions it most needs to ask. Mandeville’s examples – obscene, embarrassing, unsuitable for polite company – are theoretically necessary. The provocation is not rhetorical; it is methodological. To think from such examples requires a particular kind of intellectual courage: the willingness to see in what is shameful and obscene not something foreign and inferior but something intimate, something that – when examined properly – forces in us a recognition where we would much rather turn away our gaze.

Indeed, it is the vulgarity of economic thought that seems to attract Yuran to it. Yuran opens the book with a puzzle raised by contemporary economists: why do rich men not indulge in the pursuit of multiple wives, as they do with other items of luxury? The standard, humanist reproach against economic thought – that women, being persons, should not be treated as items of exchange – is far from Yuran’s agenda. Indeed, in the vulgarity of the puzzle raised, Yuran finds in the economists closer allies than he would in the moralist reproach. Or rather, he doesn’t allow us to stand outside this vulgar question, with judging disapproval. For the puzzle to even be raised in our times, it seems, one needs the abstracted homo economicus. But if approached with care, the puzzle can not only help to account for his inglorious rise but also to pinpoint what generates such economic obscenities.

This connects to a deeper philosophical point about the structure of the obscene. The obscene, as a social category, is not simply a moral designation – a label we apply to what transgresses a current norm. It belongs to the realm of unwritten law: rules we normally obey transparently, and whose presence we only feel when they are transgressed. We note we have said something we shouldn’t, stared a bit too long where only a glance was warranted, though we cannot formulate the rule we have just found ourselves breaking. It is this feature of the unwritten law – the fact that our knowledge of it resists formalization, that this knowledge belongs to the very life-form we inhabit – which discloses its profound sociality. A member of a given social group will normally not be able to draw, in advance, the line between the decent and the obscene, but she will recognize the obscene when she stumbles upon it. Such boundaries, as a rule, cannot be drawn, cannot be reached by formulas – but they can be transgressed and thereby made palpable. Like the Heideggerian hammer that reveals itself as an object only when it breaks – when it ceases to function as the transparent medium of a task – the unwritten law governing the obscene is only visible at the moment of its violation. We cannot approach it directly; we can only cross it. We know, immediately and bodily, that a rule has been transgressed, but we cannot always say in advance what the rule was. This is the mark of the genuinely unwritten: not the absence of a law, but the presence of a law that resists formulation, that functions precisely as ground, as the background against which action and propriety become legible. Yuran’s intervention is remarkable, in part, because he manages to pinpoint, on this primal, elusive level, profound historical transformation and continuity.

Mandeville’s theoretical choice is, among other things, the willingness to trigger this experience of transgression deliberately – to use the discomfort of the obscene as a cognitive instrument. His examples work because they produce an involuntary recognition: the reader recoils, and in recoiling, sees something about herself that she had not seen before. This is more than provocation. It is a technique of philosophical disclosure. The obscene, in other words, is not only Yuran’s object of study but also his method – inherited from Mandeville, who understood that certain truths about social life can only be seen by those willing to look at what polite company prefers not to examine. But Yuran raises a question that requires theoretical finesse alongside the joys and lessons of transgression – namely, what, precisely, is obscene about sexual exchange? We know it is obscene, by belonging to our societies. But it seems that our reasoning, our attempt at formulating the obscene core of sexual exchange, has shifted with capitalism.

What money cannot buy

The deepest implication of Yuran’s argument about the obscene in economic thought requires a historical framing. The question is not why sex and exchange are entangled – in Lévi-Strauss’ (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969) account, the exchange of women is the originary form of exchange itself, the act by which nature becomes culture. The incest taboo does not simply prohibit; it makes possible, by transforming some women from kin into potential wives and thereby creating the conditions for alliances between groups.

In precapitalist societies this entanglement was, as Yuran emphasizes, unremarkable. When Lévi-Strauss formulates the unsettling claim that woman is ‘the supreme gift’ – that which can only be obtained in the form of reciprocal gifts – what strikes us is not the exchange but its candour. Lévi-Strauss lingers on an anecdote reported by Margaret Mead: her Arapesh informants had difficulty at first even understanding her questions about possible infringements of the marriage prohibitions. When she pressed one informant on what he would think if a man were to marry his own sister, he replied with incredulity:

Lévi-Strauss draws the lesson with characteristic precision: ‘Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable’ (485). The prohibition is not experienced as a prohibition at all – only as the reverse side of a positive obligation, the obligation to exchange. As Lévi-Strauss puts it elsewhere in the same chapter, drawing on a native Arapesh aphorism Mead collected: ‘So you do not want to have a brother-in-law?’ is ‘the veritable golden rule for the state of society’ (Lévi-Strauss, Reference Lévi-Strauss1969: 484–85). From within that world, the economic meaning of sexual exchange is entirely candid, even unremarkable.

I know from friendship with Yuran how central this moment in Lévi-Strauss is to his thinking – how much of his argument about capitalism’s peculiar obscenity depends on the contrast with a world in which the same exchange was simply the grammar of social life. What Marshall Sahlins (Reference Sahlins2017) calls the ‘non-economic’ conditions of economy – the web of loyalty, honour, and reciprocity through which the circulation of things and people was made possible – was not outside the economy. It was the economy. We are accustomed to view traditional societies as more innocent somehow, and modernity as a process of cynical, sober rationalization. But it seems to be rather the reverse: the rise of modern economics has made the entanglement of sex and exchange more mysterious, forging a new kind of obscenity. We no longer shun sex, at least not formally. And so it is not in the nature of the thing exchanged that must seek the obscene, but in the nature of exchange itself. What is it that makes exchange, once a venerable social activity, so obscene? In capitalism, Yuran shows, it is money that debases exchange.

The question Yuran forces us to ask is therefore not why sex and exchange are connected, but why their connection has become, for us, so scandalous. What happened? The answer, as he tells it, is capitalism – not as a simple expansion of the market into new domains, as the common wisdom goes, but as a transformation that constituted the non-economic as a category for the first time. In capitalism, the exchange of women did not simply come to an end; it became obscene. And this obscenity – this felt impossibility of making the connection explicit – is not merely a moral development. It is an economic fact of the first order.

This is the central argument of The Sexual Economy of Capitalism, building on Yuran’s earlier What Money Wants (Reference Yuran2014). Money is defined not by what it can purchase but by what exceeds it; the desire money articulates is always, at its core, a desire for what money cannot reach. The new book develops this intuition into a historical thesis: capitalism is defined, as a distinctive economic form, by the exclusion of women from the sphere of exchange, and this exclusion is not a limit imposed on the economy from without but its generative motor. It is as if the second book became necessary when Yuran realized that women were not a mere example, or metaphor, for what money cannot buy. That the official, formal ban on the exchange of women, far from simply dissolving the old bonds of patriarchy, has effectively created a double bind, an unstable limit between the market proper and the wider, cultural-symbolic economy.

The standard critical description of capitalism as an economy where everything has a price is therefore not so much wrong as systematically misleading. Everything does not have a price. It is not, as we commonly assume, that in capitalism everything belongs to the market, that everything is exchangeable, but rather, that capitalism draws a limit to the market, excluding from the market those most precious things which, if you will, the market itself cannot help but desire (hence its inherently transgressive dynamic). And what is more, capitalism finds a way to make us pay extra, a shame tax if you will, for buying and selling what shouldn’t be on sale. This is most outrageously obscene in the context of paid sex, but Yuran links this glaring outrage to something more mundane and seemingly respectable. It is Smith, as Yuran points out, who explains why we pay so much for the talents of an opera singer. We pay more because we are buying something that should not be on sale – talent. Prostitution is not taken by Yuran as a mere metaphor, but his analysis of it as a crucial symptomatic point helps us to understand how it so readily became such a prevalent metaphor for ordinary people, urged to sell their talents, their innermost core. The category of ‘what money cannot buy’ – love, intimacy, the singular person – is constitutive of economic life in capitalism, not external to it. Or rather, what is excluded from the market is included in it as excluded: it shapes the market from within, eroticizing its objects and giving money its peculiar restlessness. When Yuran writes that ‘what money cannot buy’ describes not only the precious and the unique but money itself – what money structurally lacks and therefore relentlessly pursues – he is identifying the paradoxical motor at the heart of capitalist economy.

The undefinable and the obscene

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche (Reference Nietzsche1989: 80) offers a methodological principle with implications well beyond his immediate argument about punishment: ‘Only that which has no history is definable’. His point is that the phenomena most worth understanding – punishment, morality, conscience – resist definition precisely because they have a history, because they persist through radical changes of meaning. The form endures while the content is transformed beyond recognition: what was once retribution becomes deterrence, becomes rehabilitation, and the same institution carries all these meanings in succession. The undefinability of such phenomena, their resistance to fixed conceptual capture, is the mark of their historical depth.

This structure is directly relevant to what Yuran shows happening to the obscene in capitalism. The obscene is among the least definable of social facts: we recognize it before we can articulate it, we feel its pressure before we can name its principle. And what it has is exactly the kind of history Nietzsche describes: a history of persistence through transformation, in which the content changes while something in the form endures.

Consider the trajectory Yuran traces from marriage as property to marriage as love. The shift is genuine and far-reaching: wives are no longer property, formal patriarchal authority has dissolved, the language of love and romantic choice has replaced the language of arrangement and acquisition. And yet what Yuran, following Stephanie Coontz’s (Reference Coontz2006) account of ‘the love revolution’, calls the patriarchal residue in modern marriage is not a simple retention of the old form. It is a transformation that simultaneously disavows and preserves what it replaces: love disavows the patriarchal notion of monogamy as ownership while investing it with emotional attachment, making the bind more intimate, more personally felt, and more difficult to name as a bind at all.

This is the Hegelian moment in Yuran’s argument. The contradiction internal to a social form reveals itself most fully at the moment of its apparent transformation. The institution of marriage in its modern form carries within it the ghost of the property relation it replaced – not as an archaic remnant that will eventually be shed, but as a structural feature of what the institution has become. The obscene, in capitalism, is not the memory of what was once transgressed. It is the shadow cast by the thing capitalism most insistently declares is no longer for sale.

The ghost transaction

Nowhere is this clearer than in Yuran’s treatment of prostitution. Catharine MacKinnon (Reference MacKinnon2011) offers a formulation that Yuran deploys with precision: in prostitution, the client pays for paid sex. The circularity names what is structurally obscene about the transaction in capitalism: not the sex, but the payment – the fact of having made an equivalence where equivalence was ruled out.

In this sense, the obscenity of prostitution in contemporary capitalism has nothing to do with the transgression of sexual taboos, which have largely dissolved. It has everything to do with the transgression of economic taboos: the making-explicit of a transaction that is supposed to remain implicit, the writing-out of what was supposed to function only as unwritten. This is what makes prostitution symptomatically important for the whole economy rather than merely a marginal or aberrant case. It is an exception that, as Yuran shows, stands for the whole.

The most striking illustration comes at the book’s close, drawn from Ashley Mears’ (Reference Mears2020) ethnography of high-end nightlife. At certain exclusive club parties, extraordinarily wealthy men (‘whales’) spend vast sums to be in the company of models who dance unpaid – for their own pleasure, not as employees, and certainly not as prostitutes. No sexual transaction occurs; that is precisely the point. The entire economy of the event is organized around a deal that does not take place. The forbidden exchange – sex for money – is present precisely in its absence. It is the ghost transaction that gives the scene its charge, its eroticism, its particular character of excess.

Yuran’s account leaves the reader with the impression that we live in a much less glamorous version of this party. The structure is not exotic or exceptional. It is the structure of ordinary consumer life, in which the eroticization of goods – their appeal beyond utility, their phantom promise of the singular and the irreplaceable – depends on the same logic: the presence of the forbidden transaction as an organizing absence. We pay more, always, in order to repudiate the notion of payment. We buy more, always, in search of something that cannot in principle be bought. This is not a failure of the economy. It is its mode of operation. Yuran’s exposition of the whale party shows us that even in our explicitly obscene times, where we take it for granted that everything is for sale, it is precisely the intricate social exchange which avoids an explicit transaction that is the ultimate luxury commodity. How much we are willing to pay for what money cannot buy.

The puzzle we are left with

The Sexual Economy of Capitalism is illuminating, but it is also, as its author would be the first to acknowledge, disturbing. The disturbance is worth naming precisely because it is not a byproduct of the argument’s conclusions – it is internal to its logic.

Yuran shows, persuasively and with great precision, that what we take to be outside the economy – the singular, the intimate, what money cannot buy – is constitutively inside it, included by its very exclusion. The structure of the economy depends on the existence of a domain formally excluded from exchange, and that formal exclusion is what gives goods their erotic charge and money its restlessness. This means that the standard recourse to the valuable-as-non-exchangeable – friendship, love, and the relationship of genuine intellectual debt with which this essay began – is not straightforwardly available as a standpoint from which to view the economy externally. These things are not outside the economy. They are what the economy most wants, the economic sublime.

The puzzle this leaves us with is not whether to resist this structure – that option seems foreclosed by the very analysis that reveals it. The question is whether we possess any resources for relating to what is most valuable in our lives in a way that does not simply reproduce the economy’s own logic of the forbidden and the priceless.

To put it bluntly – is Yuran a conservative, a reactionary even, in disguise? Is the book’s implicit message a nostalgic yearning for the ‘good old days’ of patriarchy, when the exchange of women was unremarkable? Indeed, one could argue that tradition, precisely, once offered such a resource for singling out as precious what lies beyond exchange – heritage. Tradition, from this standpoint, is a technique of sacralization, a way of marking certain things as beyond exchange not by declaration but by the slow accumulation of practice, ritual, and shared form – a technique that worked precisely insofar as it was transparent, as it disappeared into the background as second nature. What Yuran allows us to see, with uncomfortable clarity, is that this technique is no longer simply available. Not because of moral failure or cultural decline, but because the economy has learned to metabolize the structure of the sacred into its own operations, to generate the aura of the priceless as one of its most powerful drivers. The ‘love revolution’ is also, in Yuran’s reading, the story of capitalism learning to internalize its outside.

Yuran’s account of historical transformation leaves the sober reader with no recourse to nostalgia of any kind. The comparison between precapitalist and capitalist exchange is not meant to celebrate one at the expense of the other but rather to shed light on their entanglement under modern conditions. We are left, then, with the obscene on one side and the priceless on the other, and Yuran’s book makes it very difficult to sustain the usual consolation that these are simply opposed. What we gain from his analysis is not a solution but a more exact formulation of the problem – which, as Sahlins might have put it, is already something like a gift. Yuran, we might say, urges us to take up a radically feminist position, for the same reasons Marx urged his middle-class, bourgeois readers to identify with the proletariat. It is at the extreme point of pressure in the exchange system that we encounter the exploitation common to us all. Marx taught us to see in the factory worker the truth of our wage-earning existence. The working poor, in Marx, are not subjects for our pity, our generous superiority. They are where the truth of our conditions is more apparent, providing we are willing to recognize it. Yuran does the same for The Sexual Economy of Capitalism. To understand our common plight as erotic subjects of capitalist markets, pressured to buy and sell what cannot be exchanged – the singular – we must recognize in prostitution, the most obscene form of exchange, the symptom of capitalist exchange in general.