Circuits of Power, Labour and Desire: The Case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Abstract

Intimacy as a distinctly private affair is culturally mediated so as to contain what spills outside the borders of social decorum. Outcomes of this mediation present unexpected affects that clumsily collide and derail efforts to keep intimacies intact. Endeavours to contain the messy traces of unmediated desire fail because once there is an undoing, a loose thread begging to be pulled, there is very little that can halt a public’s craving to know; to observe; to judge; and to organize the emergent and anxious intersections of sex, class, race and power. The media inadvertently sell the failings of organized desire via the bodies of the apparently organized.¹ The moral appropriateness and behaviour of public figures are not only part of an illusive bourgeois domesticity in a capitalist system, they are also part of a logic whereby intimacy threatens to transgress into unexpected public milieus. This can be observed through failed representations of monogamy, evidenced in a public interest to follow the sex scandals of public figures. On the one hand, those with power and wealth tend to find refuge in their privilege and in their (not always intended) ability to jolt the public’s senses. On the other hand, abject bodies are objectified and rendered as bodies that do not matter; as bodies that are both out of place and in place to serve. In a postcolonial and post-9/11 context, the politics of labour are assemblages of affect that proliferate in fleeting media formations.