Ayn Rand’s Vibrator: Masochism as Conservative Style Russ Castronovo When Lionel Trilling sat down to write a book on a subject as capacious as the imagination, he began by narrowing the field of investigation to the conflict between the “conscious and unconscious life of liberalism” (1950: ix). Shunted to the sidelines was conservatism, a rather easy move in light of what Trilling viewed as liberalism’s lock on US thought. “It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation,” he wrote in the first pages of The Liberal Imagination (ix). “Ideas” are the sticking point: while there may be an abundance of conservative doctrines and right-wing beliefs circulating in US culture, these expressions amounted to little more than “irritable mental gestures” in Trilling’s estimation (ix), falling short of coherent or consistent intellectual thought. Still, complaints about government taxes, aversion to healthcare reform or any other programs that smack of collectivism, and the nonstop barrage on public education make clear enough that conservatism Gordon Hutner provided sage editorial advice about this essay. It has also benefitted from anonymous readers’ reports at boundary 2 and from spirited discussion at the 2015 Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. boundary 2 46:4 (2019) DOI 10.1215/01903659-7859117 © 2019 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 2 boundary 2 / November 2019 has hardly been marginalized in American social and political life. Heading into the 2016 election, Republicans enjoyed trifectas in twenty-three states where they controlled the governor’s mansion, state senate, and state assembly. Despite this dominance, conservatism has not been one of the main currents of US thought in no small part because its dispositions and beliefs have not been treated as part of a serious or sustained intellectual tradition. Whatever the very real differences that distinguish movement conservatives, nativists, libertarians, and anticommunists from one another, conservatism endures as a banner that attracts fitful allegiances across the landscape of the Right. Just as surely it elicits the pity and contempt of partisans on the other side who often go so far as to question whether conservatism is conducive to thinking at all. US conservatives react and respond, plan and publicize, and strategize and organize often to great success, as the gerrymandered legislative map of congressional districts shows. But the enduring question for liberal observers (and detractors), from at least Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s pronouncement that conservatism lacks a “coherent or vital political philosophy” (1953: 61) to Clinton Rossiter’s portrait of a stillborn ideology in Conservatism in America ([1962] 1982), and from Thomas Frank’s intimate account (2004) of the heartland’s descent into conservative unreality to E. J. Dionne’s contention (2016) that conservatism breeds ideologues but not thinkers, is whether conservatives philosophize, reflect, theorize—in short, whether they think. If conservatism has not succeeded in carving out a revered intellectual niche for its ideas, it nevertheless “has persisted in America as an essentially literary phenomenon” (Guttmann 1967: 11), according to a Goldwater-era work of literary criticism that turned to James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other authors for evidence of this thesis. More recently, George F. Will explained that he felt more confident defining conservatism as part of an American aesthetic tradition since “it has often been in the custody of literary rather than political persons” (1982: vii) and went on to produce a puzzling list that places Herman Melville alongside Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. For better or worse, this essay is not a continuation of that project. What’s better is avoiding the appearance of any endeavor that smacks of a political litmus test for literature. What’s worse is that this essay will be about Ayn Rand. This decision, one that is likely more embarrassing than fatal for the academic literary critic, runs up against the judgment that conservatism survives mainly as a “literary phenomenon.” Rand’s heavy- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 3 handed style so readily occasions satire and ridicule that even those who would otherwise be quick to declaim the “literary” as a problematic category might balk at an aesthetic that would include Rand’s work as literature. Then again, Rossiter’s allusion to Walt Whitman in calling The Fountainhead “a great favorite among young men who seek to soar on pinions free” effectively ([1962] 1982: 169), if not ironically, sutures Rand to an august tradition of American literature. Rand exercises a unique psychic hold on the conservative imagination. She at once uniquely and typically manifests the confluence of literature and conservatism: no other author’s works have marshaled plot, characterization, and language to a free-market ideology as thoroughly as Rand’s novels have, making her the most celebrated muse of conservative thought—and the most cited. “For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right,” writes Jennifer Burns (2009: 4). This dosage proves so intoxicating because it is laced with a sexual pleasure that cathects being conservative to a delight in abuse and victimization. In contrast to a niche novel such as Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window (2010), which goes to great lengths to show that its heroine remains chaste despite possessing an “effortless hotness that almost double-dared you to bring it up” (8), Rand’s narrative of reaction is fused to repeated scenes of masochism, attracting hundreds of thousands of new readers each year. In “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (“Das ökonomische Problem des Masochismus” [1924]), Freud translates fin-de-siècle ideas about political economy to an investigation of the libidinal satisfaction derived from suffering.1 The conversion of pain into pleasure is driven by fantasies of castration and violation that feminize the masochist. That part of Freud’s theory is familiar enough; more noteworthy are the social implications that come from the use of political economy to frame his investigation. By finding pleasure in pain, the masochist also finds satisfaction by internalizing suffering. As “sadism . . . turned inwards,” erotogenic masochism sets the pattern for what Freud calls “moral masochism” by cutting the subject off from external social relations (1995: 279). The “cultural suppression of the instincts” at the heart of masochism resounds with social consequences, as guilt and other feelings become bottled up to the extent that powerful emotions are kept “from being exercised in life” (283). Competition and aggressiveness, for instance, remain unexpressed, and the result is that 1. For the influence of political economy on Freud, see Birken 1999. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 4 boundary 2 / November 2019 destructive impulses normally directed at others are redirected back onto the subject itself. The masochist, like the fiscal conservative, refuses to waste the intensity of his passion on others. Still, there is always a debt to pay in the libidinal economy, namely, the cost of unconscious guilt, in which the ego, ignorant of its own psychosis, “seeks punishment” (282). Such punishment secures pleasure for the Randian conservative, however, by facilitating the fantasy of one’s own victimhood. For the conservative who feels abused by the social welfare schemes of the liberal state, masochism restores autonomy by making the individual the sole author of his or her pain. As a pathology both private and privatizing, masochism allegorizes how citizens cathect to the state. “Masochistic political desire,” to cite Wendy Brown, induces people to transmute their humiliation and stigmatization into the satisfaction of being recognized by the state—even if such acknowledgment primarily takes shape as abuse (2001: 46). For Brown, this affective condition characterizes the liberal who yearns for recognition from the very state that doles out unequal and discriminatory treatment. Racial and sexual minorities, in particular, desire recognition from the state that so routinely denies and denigrates their longing for full citizenship. As political masochists, they set themselves up as victims, their identification with the state that punishes them becoming a source of humiliation and guilt. This need for injury, in Brown’s account, typifies bleeding-heart liberals who have an unappeasable need for the state that they critique. “What would The Nation be without the political scandals, intrigues, and atrocities it moralizes against each week and for which it advances no real remedy?” asks Brown (60). As citizens who delight in their vulnerability, liberals rely on political masochism to clarify their relationship to the state, the stigma it produces, and its empty promises of protection and security. This identification with a disapproving state, one that expresses “punishment as love,” becomes especially acute for people who are “pejoratively marked along lines of gender, sexuality, or race” (51–52). Yet still in question is why people who are clearly empowered by social hierarchies—i.e., white people and, above all, white men—take pleasure in fantasizing their own victimhood. The answer is not so much about doctrine, ideology, or even psychosis. Instead, by treating conservatism as a style of thought, this essay examines how a flair for abjuring the social contract, social welfare, socialism, indeed, society itself characterizes the conservative subject who wrests pleasure from the pain of feeling their independence compromised and their autonomy violated. Rand’s innovation is to make this victimization sexy. Of course, the liberal imagi- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 5 nation also has great regard for sex, as Trilling reminds us in his reading of the Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). “The therapy lies in the large permissive effect the Report is likely to have, the long way it goes toward establishing the community of sexuality,” writes Trilling (1951: 223). By contrast, the conservative imagination discovers in sex the ecstasy of self-interest. 1. Conservative Style Never an uncomplicated topic to study, conservatism is “one of the most confusing words in the glossary of political thought and oratory” (Rossiter [1962] 1982: 5). No less an authority than Milton Friedman complained that the term liberalism, long suggestive of free-market ideas and individualism, has become confused with conservatism.2 Shifting in reaction to changing socioeconomic conditions and political crises, definitions of conservatism are as variable as the range of practices and attitudes that they encompass. Right-wing populists, libertarians, squares, reactionaries, white nationalists, religious traditionalists, country club Republicans, evangelicals, and devotees of free-market liberalism are separated by enough ideological and practical differences that lumping these positions together under the single label of “conservative” drains the concept of explanatory power. Arguably, terms like libertarian, extremist, or reactionary better describe Rand’s position with respect to mainstream conservatism. For Corey Robin, the long arc of conservatism since the French Revolution adheres to a reactionary trajectory and constitutes “an activist doctrine for an activist time” (2011: 28) that is fiercely committed to antidemocratic hierarchy. True to form, Rand rejected suggestions that she and acolytes such as Alan Greenspan fit traditional categories: “[We] are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism” (1966: vii). Her detractors on the right, most prominently William F. Buckley Jr. and Whittaker Chambers, were just as quick to distance movement conservatism from Rand’s orthodoxy. Yet given the extent to which Rand’s ideas since the 1970s have moved from the fringe to the center stage of economic policy and governance, it seems worth the risk to consider how her writing about pain and pleasure has influenced conservatism. We ignore these links at our peril, according to 2. See Friedman 2002: 6. For more on the problems of defining conservatism, see Cain 1963: 21–22; Schlesinger 1953: 68–69; Zelizer 2010: 367–92. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 6 boundary 2 / November 2019 Adam Wiener’s How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (2016). So while it once would have been fatuous to associate Rand with establishment Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, today when Senator Ron Johnson cites Atlas Shrugged as his “foundational book” (Will 2010), when former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan fondly recalls that he “grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are” (Reeve 2012), and when several members of Trump’s cabinet have expressed admiration for her ideas (Castronovo 2017), deciphering Rand’s sexualized politics is not without current import. The vogue for Ayn Rand has done nothing to dispel the sway of Trilling’s initial observation about the lack of a conservative intellectual tradition. As the title of Rick Perlstein’s regular blog for The Nation puts it, there is “nothing new under the wingnut sun” (2012). Mainstream political analysts share a common script when it comes to conservatism, exposing its inconsistencies as a prelude to expressing disbelief that anyone could fool themselves into believing that such a jumble amounts to a coherent ideology. How can people profess faith in limited government yet not complain about government intervention in matters of women’s reproductive health, champion free-market capitalism while calling for tax breaks for the wealthy, or stress the importance of individual achievement and success but not see the structural advantages that favor those who already enjoy economic and racial privilege? Academics on the left have contributed their fair share of narratives in this vein, and I would be quick to count myself among their number. Victims of their own “tangled reasoning” and other “species of derangement,” conservatives, in the eyes of Thomas Frank and other observers, come across as benighted, incapable of figuring their way out of the contradictions and illogic into which they have trapped themselves (2004: 9, 24). The formative expression of this pathological treatment of conservatism is, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s notion of a “paranoid style” that explains the appetite for conspiracy theory among right-wing reactionaries as an enduring feature of US politics. With their talent for suspicion, coupled with their zeal for finding murderous Indians, body-snatching communists, and other enemies hiding under the bed, American conservatives do not exhibit the measured demeanor associated with the European tradition of Edmund Burke. Echoing Trilling, who saw little in the way of a conservative imagination, Hofstadter concludes, “The United States has not provided a receptive home for formal conservative thought or clas- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 7 sically conservative modes of behavior” (1963: 84). Instead, “pseudoconservatism” better describes for Hofstadter the psychosocial character of US reaction. This “paranoid” diagnosis flourishes even now, although “paranoid,” we might say, receives all the attention, and left unremarked is “style,” which is a significant oversight, since it is the concept of style that promises a methodology for unpacking conservatism. Indeed, American conservatism involves a complex affective dimension that is expressed as style. In his search for a “different conceptual framework” to push beyond obvious historical causes to consider the psychic coordinates of American reaction, Hofstadter drew on his reading of the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, who approached conservatism as a “style of thought” (1953: 81, 83). As opposed to divorcing thought from social forces or treating it purely as a matter of individual choice, Mannheim sought to account for the creative adaptations that people make to established patterns of thinking. Conservative thought is hardly an individual matter, yet it just as surely is more than a set of abstract ideas. Far from a parade of beliefs that people snap up automatically, conservative consciousness takes shape in patterns that are subject to embellishment, adornment, even exaggeration. And the word that Mannheim used to describe always-evolving thought that takes on new shadings and adapts to changing sensibilities is “style.” When Mannheim developed style as a point of sociological analysis, he borrowed from art history and aesthetics to describe how such an emphasis allows us to detect the adjustments and alterations that the conservative makes to thought. In place of a more mechanistic notion of ideology that sees people merely acting in accord with preestablished patterns, style suggests how people reshape those patterns. Like the notion of style associated with schools of painting, a style of thought acknowledges that people add their own creative touches to an otherwise “objective mental structure” (Mannheim 1953: 95). Although people do not create the categories that shape perception, they do improvise and invent distinctive expressions that amount to more than the “‘subjectivity’ of an isolated individual” (96) but also something less than a fully articulated doctrine. “Art does in fact develop in ‘styles’” (75), and so does a sociology of knowledge, which, according to Mannheim, makes conservatism a dynamic engagement with historical structure. Much as visual inspection of brushstrokes can enable specialists to identify an artwork as belonging to a certain phase, a sociology of knowledge posits that “human thought also develops in ‘styles’” (75) made distinct by any number of differences in Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 8 boundary 2 / November 2019 tone or form. When Hofstadter set out to describe “a style of mind” habituated to paranoia, he picked up on these cues by comparing his method to that of the art historian who speaks of “the baroque or mannerist style” (1964: 3–4). Accounts of conservative style have grown only more vivid and phantasmagoric: in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank views a landscape that once proved so fertile for Progressivism as having become “a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymus Bosch” (Frank 2004: 10). Whether conservatism exaggerates reality (as with the baroque) or distorts it (as with Bosch), its style registers a history of engagement, possibly deliberate and also “possibly in unconscious fashion,” as Mannheim suggests (1953: 96), which characterizes a school of thought. Style, in short, offers an interpretative perspective for taking conservatism seriously on its own terms. Rather than taking a condescending view of the movement’s adherents who have gobbled up “the ideological con” so thoroughly as to efface the distinction between “true believers” and “fleeceable multitudes” (Perlstein 2012), a sociology of conservative thought avoids the implicit moralizing that Mannheim sees as the legacy of Marxist readings. Says the critic of ideology: “I detect the contradictions and self-deceptions that you conservatives cannot see in your own thinking. You conservatives are unknown to yourselves.” The sociologist of knowledge drops this smug attitude by conceding that conservatism, because it so often emerges as a counterstroke or reaction, “is conscious and reflective from the first” (Mannheim 1953: 98). Far from simply reproducing culture in knee-jerk fashion, conservatives make stylistic modifications to ideas. As Mannheim contends, “Conservatism did not merely want to think ‘something different’ from its liberal opponents; it wanted to think it differently ” (116). In the world of late twentieth- and now twenty-first-century US conservatism, this style of thinking is laden with punishing sexual overtones. As the substrate of conservative style, masochism offers a way of thinking differently about the consensual relations that fuse individuals to the state. 2. The Pain of Consent If conservatism has a primal scene, it would be staged in the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, often taken as the foundational text of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke places female sexuality and the threat of rape at the emotional center of his extended diatribe against momentous social upheaval. As lawlessness pre- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 9 vails, the mob descends on Versailles. In the nick of time, the young queen, “almost naked,” escapes her bed before it is “pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards” (Burke 1966: 84). The phallic assault on intimate spaces leaves the queen with no choice but to take to the secret passageways that lead out of the palace. This scene of vulnerable female sexuality has been something of an obsession for the conservative literary imagination, as Richard Chase recognized long ago: “Like most of the great conservatives Burke has at the back of his moral imagination the image of a woman insulted, in this case Marie Antoinette” (1957: 257). But if flight from violation and near death were all that conservatism had to offer, it would hardly amount to a lifestyle or worldview. Political pleasure must be wrapped up in the experience of being conservative. Masochism allows conservatives to wring intense satisfaction from the feelings of pain and vulnerability that notions of collectivity and public welfare force on individuals. In this respect, the blood-soaked scene at Versailles satisfies more than a reactionary urge to portray popular politics as chaotic and savage. The spectacle of the royal grounds “polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses” speaks to conservative visions about the loss of sovereignty. The horrors of disintegration are simply the most visible evidence that the French’s king’s ill-advised consent to the “nonsense” about shared rule brewed by demagogues at “licentious and giddy coffee-houses” amounts to a type of violation (Burke 1966: 81, 84). The delight in viewing the self as hounded, defenseless, at the mercy of “the people” become murderers is all about the deliciousness of power, not popular power, but the power that the masochist exercises over his or her torturer. Abuse and punish me with your insistence on the social contract and other forms of consent, says the true conservative, so that I may take possession of this agony, convert it into pleasure, and love it. Instead of trying to avoid the suffering of Marie Antoinette, the conservative individual demands that collective entities—whether it is the Jacobin rabble or the social welfare state—dole out punishment. And punishment, according to Gilles Deleuze (1989) in his book on masochism, presupposes a notion of law that ties pleasure to the price that one pays for breaking the law. The kittenish admission “I’ve been a bad girl,” like the rebuke “You’ve been a naughty boy,” anticipates the penalty that has been agreed on in advance. This structure explains why, for Deleuze, the masochist craves contracts to ensure that the breaking of the contract elicits a punishment that has been stipulated by mutual agreement. This contrac- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 10 boundary 2 / November 2019 tual relation is still more intense for the conservative, since consent itself is experienced as so keenly painful. The distinction is subtle but crucial: partners in S/M, at least according to a publishing sensation as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey, jointly agree to limits that circumscribe their interactions; for conservatives, the joint agreement necessary to contract and consent is itself the source of physical and, as we will see in the case of the “literary phenomenon” that is Rand’s oeuvre, psychic pain. No archive of conservatism better captures the eruption of pathology as style than Ayn Rand, who in her novels, essays, and public lectures cultivated the image of a free-market messiah. With the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (1943) weighing in at 704 pages and Atlas Shrugged (1957) surpassing 1,000 pages in one of the smallest font sizes imaginable, Rand’s contribution to conservative thought is voluminous. The formidable length alone of these novels would seem to make her fiction resistant to close reading, but, even if that were not the case, her prose style has been so roundly derided by readers, both lay and academic, as to discourage interpretations devoted to linguistic ambiguity or textual nuance. Nonetheless, the aesthetic style of her novels exemplifies a style of thinking. Where Hofstadter, following Mannheim, invoked “baroque or mannerist style” as an analogy to explain the place of a “paranoid style” within a sociology of American political attitudes (1964: 4), Rand’s stylistic excesses, I believe, constitute a pathology of conservative thought. Slavoj Žižek dismisses Rand’s style—“artistically, [Rand] is of course worthless”—as immaterial to the power of her ideology (2012), but her heavyhanded love affair with capitalism is an essential component of the popular success that her novels have enjoyed for more than a half century. Not all conservatives exhibit the same style of thought, and Rand’s penchant for imagining a literally libidinal economy hardly defines the tastes of conservatism tout court. Nevertheless, the masochistic erotic formations in her novels constitute a defining feature of an ideology that views government as a pain. To appreciate the secret allure of Rand’s sexual politics, Žižek invokes Sylvia Plath’s famous line that “every woman adores a Fascist” with a twist, to argue that it is the men in Rand’s novels, not the women, who best exemplify “the ultimate feminist insight” by treating the objectifying gaze of the other with sublime indifference (2012). Only when they renounce a hysterical need for approval from the state, the public, or other manifestations of Žižek’s “big Other” do Rand’s men attain independence, in effect, finding liberation in the rejection of any contractual relations that Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 11 presuppose the shared nature of social agreements. Their stoic heroism is really “a barely concealed presentation of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session” in which the subject overcomes her hysteria of worrying what men desire from her. So, too, hysterics like Howard Roark in The Fountainhead or Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged have to learn not to care what other men want and need from them. The lesson is often learned the hard way. In The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon strikes Roark with a whip, but her outburst is really the plea of the masochist. Žižek calls it “an act of despair, an awareness of HIS hold over her, of her inability to resist him—as such, it’s already an invitation to brutal rape” (2012). In light of this condemnation, as well as Žižek’s evaluation of Rand’s work as “literary trash,” it is stunning that Rand employed similar language in calling the scene “rape by engraved invitation” (Burns 2009: 86). Her words seek to blunt criticism by shifting the conversation from content to style, making an act of violence seem refined and genteel. Style can be hard to resist. In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller vividly recalls coming across the infamous rape scene in The Fountainhead as a teenager. Although Brownmiller’s adult self judges Rand “a traitor to her own sex,” she remembers that on first reading, she was not immune to an erotic charge when Roark forces Dominique without her consent: “So this was grand passion! The Fountainhead heated my virgin blood more than twenty years ago and may still be performing that service for schoolgirls today” (1993: 64–65). The real question is not how Roark seduces Dominique, since rape is never a seduction, but how Rand seduces readers. If her writing is as atrocious as Žižek says, why should it exercise such effective sway, not only over adolescent readers but also over legislators and policymakers on the right like Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan? For Ms. magazine in 1978, it is precisely Rand’s campy, pretentious style that explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of The Fountainhead. Her writing is not simply bad but rather a particularly potent example of “fun-bad,” provided that “one lobotomizes the political-feminist part of one’s brain” (Harrison 1999: 70, 73). When ice princess Dominique experiences “the kind of rapture she had wanted” in Roark’s “contemptuous possession” of her body (Rand 1993: 217) or Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged enters draped in a black evening dress sparkling with such “elegance that it could afford to be scornfully casual” (Rand 1996: 865), the extravagance of a style dubbed as “fun-bad” invites mockery, but not without exuding a whiff of the eroticized violence that speaks volumes about conservative understandings of masochism as an anguished response to the weakness Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 12 boundary 2 / November 2019 foisted on individuals by consent. Ms. observed that Rand’s “sex scenes reek with sadomasochism” (Harrison 1999: 70), an aura also detected by Brownmiller, who sees the ultimate takeaway in Rand as the “masochistic wish by a superior woman for humiliation at the hands of superior man” (Brownmiller 1993: 315). The same might be said for the experience of reading Rand’s work, which assaults readers with an unending stream of adjectives and diatribes that go on for pages, yet ever since The Fountainhead appeared in 1943 and was followed by Atlas Shrugged in 1957, readers keep coming back for more. No one seems to be heeding Flannery O’Connor’s recommendation to take Rand’s work and throw “it in the nearest garbage pail” (1979: 398). Trash, perhaps, but nevertheless it is also the case that such style embodies a pathological expression of conservative value. Her overblown portraits of hardened heroes and angular heroines battling a pack of whiny parasites and government dependents are affective icons of a worldview that pits an unsentimental individualism against the flabby, simpering proponents of collectivism. Particularly when it comes to describing sex, Rand’s conservatism upsets the delicate balance between selfsovereignty and all agreements based on consent. By decisively tilting the scales toward inequality as a necessary and natural fact, Atlas Shrugged re-creates individualism as a radical credo that neither seeks nor accepts social accords in the first place. This extreme position is the substance of her style. The challenge of reading Rand is not unlike the one that Fredric Jameson confronts in Fables of Aggression, a study of the convergence of modernism and fascism in the work of Wyndham Lewis. Style is at the center of Jameson’s project, as the “brutal foregrounding of politics and sex” (1979: 1) in Lewis’s corpus spills over, in particularly messy ways, into aesthetic matters. Specifically, the “ostentatious practice of style” (1) discomfits readers trying to square their appreciation of Lewis’s linguistic textures with their abhorrence of his unapologetic misogyny and racism. “The most urgent and visceral issue for any reader,” writes Jameson, is “why he or she should be expected to find aesthetic pleasure in a work whose impulses are often so ugly or ideologically offensive” (20).3 Rand presents something of a reverse case. If her work exerts “stylistic violence upon the reader” (Weiner 2016: 212), why then do people keep coming back for more? Why 3. Rand registered a similar disconnect between style and content in her reading of Vladimir Nabokov. Although she admitted that Nabokov was “a brilliant stylist” (Toffler 1964), she told Playboy that she was so disgusted by the immorality of Lolita that she gave up reading the novel. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 13 do readers, especially ones sympathetic to conservative thinking, find ideological satisfaction in work whose aesthetic impulses are so misshapen, turgid, jumbled, in a word (used by more than one critic), bad? The ideological pleasure that is wrung from Rand is all about consent, specifically the drag that it exerts on individual freedom. The emphasis in Atlas Shrugged on sexual encounters without consent, like rape in The Fountainhead, provides an orgasmic experience of rejecting the social trust that lies at the heart of all agreements and accords. Even though consent fosters human connection—Michael Walzer calls it a “conveyance” (1970: xi) between self and other—it obligates us in ways that diminish autonomy. Consent depends on the subject’s free will to accept laws and other limits, even as it also represents the moment when individuals surrender a bit of their sovereignty in the interest of overall collective harmony. So, while consent surely provides the necessary glue for a governmental society based on softer forms of power than sheer domination and continual violence, consent, as Don Herzog puts it in Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory, can also “seem like a way not of maintaining my autonomy, but of forfeiting it wholesale” (1989: 184). The freedom from brute force and rapine that Locke’s social contract provides nonetheless necessitates the sacrifice of autonomous desires. Walzer captures this tension in describing consent as the decisive moment when we give people “rights against us” (1970: xi). What seems like “the preeminent act of individual authorization” actually rests on a broader condition of social subjection that is freely chosen, to be sure, but subjection nonetheless (G. Brown 2001: 18). Conservatives in the mold of Rand forever chafe against this antagonism, treating consent with all the suspicion due an arrangement that compromises absolute freedom. Conservative style takes this injury, a sort of philosophical abrasion that never heals, and savors it as a source of political enjoyment. In this context, masochism appears as an overwrought response to the pain of being an individual in a social world. Rand’s heroes excel at taking ownership of this pain, effectively—and affectively—scaling back the promise of sociality that is bound up with the idea of consent. It is an intellectual conflict viscerally experienced as sexual combat that in Atlas Shrugged takes the form of sex without consent. Dagny Taggart, the fashionable railroad heiress and novel’s heroine, attracts three different lovers, who all treat her the same. The first, the scion of a South American copper dynasty, appropriates her body with “a proprietor’s intimacy, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission” because both parties have already silently acknowledged that “she had given him permis- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 14 boundary 2 / November 2019 sion long ago” (Rand 1996: 105). The next, the self-made inventor of a new metal, seizes her in a “gesture [that] tell[s] her that he needed no consent or resistance” (276). The last, a brilliant physicist posing as a lowly railroad worker, follows her into a darkened train tunnel so that he can come to the climactic realization of why it seems as if “her flesh were his possession” (875). Each encounter leaves behind bite marks, bruised flesh, and the lingering pain of kisses bestowed “as if . . . inflicting a wound” (236). In these tempestuous exchanges, Dagny gives as good as she gets, “her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm” in response to “his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers” (876). Only where consent is absent, no matter whether it is the bedroom or boardroom, can men and women engage equally in economic and sexual practices because there are no restrictions on individual freedom. Consent, in contrast, acknowledges vulnerability. That consent is often viewed as voluntary only makes matters worse, since who would willingly admit to the need for collective agreements? In Rand’s world, secondhanders, moochers, and other weaklings gladly consent to government intervention because there would be no way for them to survive economically without it. For those who look around tremulously and see others who want to make off with the fruits of their labor, consent offers protection. For Gillian Brown, consent “registers conflict even as it redresses it through the establishment of accord” (2001: 26), a tension palpable in Locke: “force and violence” remain in the background of even the most peaceful accords that people adopt to safeguard their persons and property from injury (1980: 7). Consent is not about agreement but trepidation—or, at least, that is the view of Alan Greenspan, who, in his contribution to Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, declared that people agree to intrusive government regulations out of “force and fear” (1966: 114). From this perspective, consent is a nice story that we tell ourselves to mask the fact that we have no choice but to consent. The tonic of Rand’s take on conservative style does more than expose the compulsion that shadows consent; it goes further by rejecting social accords altogether. 3. The Erotics of Pain Sex à la Rand has been the charged background for a tortured style of thinking about American views on government, individualism, and consent. Even dispassionate numbers support this assertion. The salient fact is not just that Atlas Shrugged held its place on the New York Times best Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 15 seller list for almost two years after its debut. The more stunning figure is that the novel even now continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies year after year. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged outperformed Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, but there should be no surprise that the president whose name had become synonymous with federal handouts and government excess should be bested by this champion of the free market when the only metric that truly matters—units sold—is assessed. After each new phase of federal stimulus, sales of Atlas Shrugged crested higher, reaching number 30 overall on the Amazon Best Sellers Rank with close to 5000 customer reviews and an average ranking of four out of five stars. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Atlas Shrugged has been selling an average of 303,253 copies per year, and in 2012, sales of this novel and The Fountainhead combined at over one million copies sold. If sheer sales seem too crude a benchmark, the Ayn Rand Institute, not typically known for its charitable work, donates 400,000 copies each year for use in Advanced Placement courses in US high schools (see Rubin 2007). The promotion of Rand does not stop there: presumably former Speaker of the House Ryan gave congressional staffers copies of Atlas Shrugged as Christmas gifts because of its central preoccupation that government cannibalism represents the gravest threat to the free enterprise system. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” Ryan said in 2009, and then expounded that Rand’s work helps “build a moral case for capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault” (Rainey 2012). The economic stimulus enacted by the Obama administration, like its use of government funds to prop up crumbling sectors of the financial and automobile industries, was only the latest sign of the steady creep of socialism that had begun with FDR’s New Deal. “Who’s Shrugging Now?” asked The Economist in 2012, as it explicitly tied the resurgence of the book’s popularity to the announcement that TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was shelling out $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to rescue failing banks and investment firms. Similar connections prompted the senior economics writer at the Wall Street Journal to opine in all seriousness, “If only ‘Atlas’ were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster” (Moore 2009). Buzz about a planned movie version of the novel picked up when Angelina Jolie expressed interest in playing the role of Dagny Taggart, but, as the president of the Atlas Society commented, “We don’t need to make a movie out of the book. We are living it right now” (Moore 2009). Even though Rand never hid her athe- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 16 boundary 2 / November 2019 ism, her novels have achieved something like doctrinal status among the Tea Party faithful. As one mover and shaker in this Astroturf movement reflected on the government bailouts of financial institutions, “Many of us felt in 2009 that Atlas really was shrugging” (Weiss 2012: 179). Years before the subprime housing bubble burst in 2007, American readers were smitten with Rand. According to a 1991 joint survey of the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Atlas Shrugged enjoyed the distinction of being the most influential book in readers’ minds, second only to the Bible (Robin 2011: 76). More recent data suggest that Rand’s influence remains as strong as ever. A 2010 Zogby poll revealed that nearly one-third of Americans had slogged through Atlas Shrugged, and of that number, almost half reported that the novel impacted their thinking (Weiss 2012: 209). William Buckley once commented that Atlas Shrugged is “the biggest selling novel in the history of the world.” Never a devotee, he followed up by calling the book “a thousand pages of ideological fabulism” and observed, “I had to flog myself to read it” (Buckley 2003). Although figurative, the quip about self-flagellation reveals how, in the experience of some of Rand’s readers, style matches content. It takes a determined reader indeed to wade through the punishing world of Atlas Shrugged, where consent is withheld in economic as well as sexual relations. Better yet, it takes a masochist to enjoy it. Snide comments about the puerile nature of Rand’s fiction, her fondness for dogmatism, her shallow philosophizing, basically, what many perceive as her overall lack of aesthetic and intellectual merit have done nothing to diminish her influence. Atlas Shrugged may be “a thousand pages of rough sex and bonkers,” as the New Republic put it (Bacharach 2016), but its ideological force persists, not in spite of but because of its wooden characterizations, speechifying, and other excesses. Liberals, academics, and especially liberal academics have often been driven to distraction by her unflagging popularity. And what such condescension distracts them from is gauging the political significance of conservative style. “Critics who dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker appealing only to adolescents miss her significance altogether,” contends Burns in her study of twentieth-century US conservatism (2009: 4).4 Yet this view treats Rand’s contribution to social and economic thought as a separate matter from awkward scenes of erotic titillation. The cavalcade of sexual repression, simultaneous orgasms, and 4. Burns stipulates that Rand was often at odds with mainstream conservatism, which in part accounts for why she has been taken up so readily in libertarian circles. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 17 the pleasures of “rough sex”—that is, the sort of adolescent style that the intellectual historian passes over—fuses the absence of consent to masochism in ways fundamental to conservatism. Rand freely held that conservative ideas needed to be packaged with sexual allure. Watching the triumph of liberal publicity in swaying Americans to rally around the collectivist promises of the New Deal, she turned to fiction as a type of counterpropaganda, which, in the end, is of course still propaganda. The success of FDR and his cabinet of looters, in her view, relied on a calculated strategy of instilling socialist messages at a level “much deeper than mere politics” (quoted in Burns 2009: 93). Her response was to launch a war of ideas by deploying the novel form as a finely tuned instrument for shaping public opinion, though her detractors have long complained that her fiction is more of a bludgeon for delivering the blunt force of right-wing extremism. What cannot be denied is that her sex-addled style, by going deeper than measured critiques about the reach of government and social welfare, conducts politics by other, more seductive means. The pedagogy of #MeToo reminds us, however, that sexual assault is never alluring, seductive, nor sexy, and that to read nonconsensual contact as foreplay, as metaphor for economic competition, or anything other than violence is a willful and gross misreading. The erotics of pain elevate capitalism to the highest human value. As an expression of conservative style, Rand’s presentation of slapped women, their wrists yanked, their bodies thrown onto beds by men who appraise them with looks of “unsmiling violence” (1996: 395), provides instruction about how subjects should love modern capitalism so intensely that they consent to its abuses at every opportunity. Like Rand’s heroes and heroines who are unable to deny the so-called integrity of their sex drives, the perfect citizen cannot get enough of economic competition. The market obviates the need for consent because everyone already agrees to its logic. The mixture of pain and delight that Rand’s lovers find in sex without consent serves as a model for enjoying capitalism. George Saunders recalls his adolescent fascination with Rand’s ideas as an encounter with a writer who would deliver “a two-hour lecture on the power-grabbers and throw me down on the couch and rape me until it became consensual” (2012). His satire gets at how Randian sex sets a primal code for the pleasures of the free market. When Atlas Shrugged makes consent nugatory to the height of sexual ecstasy, it provides an affective script for truly satisfying market relations. Guided solely by rational self-interest, the champions of freemarket capitalism view consent as a drag, an impediment to getting things Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 18 boundary 2 / November 2019 done. “The fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society,” Milton Friedman argues ([1962] 2002: 27). Friedman more or less takes this idea verbatim from F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which celebrates economic liberalism for having “reduced the range of subjects on which agreement was necessary” ([1944] 1994: 77). In other words, consent is most effective when it is without consequence. All too often when consent does matter, it slows development and stymies innovation. “If things are to get done,” writes Hayek, “the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure” (75). What sounds like a note of caution is not: instead, the point is that consent and other mainstays of democracy are unnecessary constraints on the relations of exchange. In the end, the Randian approach to sex and the market echo one another because of this drive to consummate desire and get things done. In the process, somebody usually gets fucked. Just as lovers in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged display indifference to their sex partners, so too the impersonal system of market exchange does not care whom it screws over. Only in a man’s contemptuous regard can Dominique Francon or Dagny Taggart experience the pleasures of submission since beseeching a lover for recognition is tantamount to an admission of need and weakness. Competitive capitalism is erotic because it wastes no time dithering about “collectivist economic planning” (Friedman [1962] 2002: 11) that gets in the way of those with the desire to succeed. Which is to say that conservative style has about as much patience for securing consent as Howard Roark, Hank Rearden, or any of Rand’s heroes has for running a factory by committee or getting a woman’s permission to strike her across the face so that she will be aroused enough to strip the tailored shirt off his chest. As Rand explained in a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine, sex is about value since love, like money, has to be earned (Toffler 1964). Consent is a compromise for weaklings to excuse the individual from having to do the hard work of creating this value and recognizing it in another.5 Conservative style, in contrast, presents nonconsensual sex as an economic exchange among equally matched competitors. Sex is not about 5. Thus Rand: “A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important” (Toffler 1964). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 19 sharing. No wonder kissing appears as “a demanding gesture of ownership” (Rand 1996: 257) or that the moment when Dagny is shoved “down on the couch” in a bit of foreplay, it registers as an “act of ownership brought to unendurable violence” (591). Rough foreplay equals fair play: Dagny takes pride and pleasure “in her ownership of [her lover’s] body” (105–6) while later the movement of her partner’s hands across her breasts is an act “stressing his ownership” of her (395). Even though these sex scenes are separated by hundreds of pages involving train wrecks, deflector shields, and weapons of mass destruction that rely on sound waves, a consistent economic idiom supplies a common thread across the novel’s expanse. Dagny feels “an impatient need” for Galt’s body (876). She approaches sex with “radiant greed,” experiencing “the motion of his body” and thrusting as “driving greed” (876). She incites in a previous lover “greed for every evidence of her desire” (236). Greed replaces consent, priming an erotic charge that enlivens the marketplace as well. As Rand acolyte and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan explained, the pursuit of self-interest and profit—as opposed to collectivist policies or an oldfashioned sense of caritas—equips citizen-consumers with all the protection they need. “It is precisely the ‘greed’ of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer,” writes Greenspan (1966: 112). From this perspective, such government regulatory agencies as the Securities Exchange Commission or the Food and Drug Administration are both unnecessary and ineffective in comparison to the internal drive for profit that encourages stock traders and big pharma alike to design and promote the best products that they can. Simply put, there is no need to bother with consent when the social fabric is produced by each person pursuing individual desires. In Rand’s erotic economy, any self-respecting lover would take offense at the idea that a sexual partner should dole out charity by considering what the other wants from an intimate encounter. And so would any self-respecting worker. When the government nationalizes a coal mine and brings in new bosses, the workers protest, not because the superintendents are too harsh but because they are too lenient. The men prefer “the old slave drivers” to the “more liberal” policies of worker management (Rand 1996: 459). It seems that “harsh discipline” (459) better pleased these working stiffs, who now feel mollycoddled by a combination of shorter workdays and higher wages. At more than one factory in Atlas Shrugged, workers quit and morale falls off when companies are organized as cooperatives and employees treated with gentleness. Employer/employee relations are at the heart of sadomas- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 20 boundary 2 / November 2019 ochism.6 The recognizable leather garments and riding crop reminds the sadist that he or she is merely an employee wearing a uniform, tasked with tending to the masochist’s delight. Pleasure comes not only from pain but also from the knowledge that the sadist is a both a function and functionary of the masochist’s desire. As feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin puts it, “A good sadist is hard to find: he has to intuit his victim’s hidden desires, protect the illusion of oneness and mastery that stem from his knowing what she wants” (1988: 64). Employers, like good sexual partners, pursue their own interests and please their workers in the bargain; lovers, like good workers, understand that they can best satisfy others by first satisfying themselves. 4. Ayn Rand’s Vibrator Yet the balance sheet of sex and competitive capitalism no longer adds up when government regulation enters the picture. Consent becomes the sticking point for Rand’s conservative style when the state manhandles economic freedom by insisting that private corporations consider the public good. The owner of Rearden Metal protests that his property has been seized “without my consent” (441) once the government enacts measures to safeguard less fortunate companies from what it regards as unfair economic competition. To expose the state’s case against him as a show trial, Rearden refuses to cooperate with the tribunal and demands instead that the state seize his factory and nationalize it. He invites force; he encourages punitive judgment. Like any good masochist, he begs for punishment, insisting that the government levy its fines, collectivize his private property, and use its “guns openly” (444) to exact obedience. This defiant attitude strikes a chord with Greenspan, who asserted that behind all government regulation “lies a gun” (1966: 113). Whether fictional hero or real-life policymaker, Rand’s men do not disguise their view that any meddling by the state into the affairs of business is coercive and nonconsensual. State bureaucrats delude themselves—and do incalculable harm to the economy—with the sadistic pretense that people invite government regulation and restrictions. 6. For more on the contractual nature of masochism, see Deleuze 1989; Michaels 1988; Smirnoff 1969. Viewed as a labor agreement, the masochistic contract “tends to harness the victim’s delight, not to be simply defined as the agonizing pain of the masochist, but to define, and refine, the respective positions of the two parties. But we must not forget that it is the victim who lays down the rules” (Smirnoff 1969: 666). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 21 In this worldview, capitalists are the true sufferers, but rather than accept the coercion known as consent, the truly independent businessman takes the state out of the equation and inflicts punishment on himself. You collectivists want my factory? I will blow it up myself. So say the industrialists who go on strike against the state in Atlas Shrugged. You government regulators want to burden innovation with tiresome rules made by the FDA? Fine, but know that once you take self-interest off the table, you have removed all incentive for pharmaceutical manufacturers to strive for anything beyond a socialist minimum in pioneering new drug therapies. So say Greenspan and other proponents of unfettered capitalism who bridle against state intrusions in the open relationships of free exchange.7 Although Atlas Shrugged presents consent as decidedly unerotic, go-it-alone capitalists raise a fuss whenever the state, acting in the name of social welfare, compels people to participate in anything other than a system of free exchange. Far from revealing an embarrassing contradiction within conservatism, this incommensurability reflects a core tenet of its style. Consent is undesirable because it violates the independence and autonomy that are fundamental to conservative subjectivity. Any individual needing consent has already signed up for public welfare, since only a moocher, a parasite, a sponger, to use Rand’s terminology, is so weak and lacking in sovereignty as to clamor for the protections of the social contract. Unlike queer readings that view sex as an opportunity “to encounter ourselves as nonsovereign” (Berlant and Edelman 2014: viii), conservative style turns to masochism precisely to consolidate and preserve autonomy by making the individual the author of one’s own distress. Masochism allows conservatives to read agonizing contact with the social sphere as an injury that the self has invited all along. In his commentary on Freud’s account of masochism, Deleuze rejects the notion that masochism is simply sadism turned inward. The erotic charge associated with punishment does not require the presence of the sadist; the masochist instead is capable of sexualizing such aggression all on their own. In effect, the subject in this scenario liberates masochism from its necessary partnership with sadism. “The ego,” says Deleuze, “asserts its autonomy in pain” (1989: 126). Sex in Atlas Shrugged creates hard-edged icons of complete self-sufficiency for both men and women. Although queer readings have adduced from masochism a politics that contests familiar borders of 7. For Greenspan’s criticism of the FDA, SEC, not to mention safe building codes, see Greenspan 1966. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 22 boundary 2 / November 2019 identity and “dislocates the subject and its claims to agency” (Musser 2014: 17)—a sort of progressive style, if you will—the sexual pathology of conservatism proves indifferent to the niceties of consent because it intuitively understands that the masochist is in charge all along. When the steel owner Rearden removes Dagny’s clothes “in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required” (Rand 1996: 441), he recognizes only the supremacy of his own desire, caring nothing for his partner because she is nothing. As lovers, Rand’s men and women care only about satisfying their own desires; were they to do anything less, say, by trying to give pleasure to another person, they would diminish the satisfaction of everyone involved. “Just try to think of performing [sex] in a spirit of selfless charity!” exclaims Francisco d’Anconia in a four-page speech on the value of sex to the soul (451). There is no need to obtain consent before or after the fact. If the capitalist in Rand’s world were to ask the clichéd postcoital question “Was it good for you?” he or she would merely be begging for some sort of shared agreement that makes one individual dependent on the second-hand experience of another. “Violent fury” that it is, sex erupts from “sudden, violent longing”; it kindles “as violent a pleasure” as pain itself; it converts an embrace into a “violent answer”; its intensity only subsides when spent lovers lie next to each other “after hours of a violence which they could not name now”; it leaves behind “dark beads that had been blood” (99, 105, 237). As the affective style of conservatism, S/M is hardly vanilla, but its energies are directed against the accords and agreements that simpering human beings require as the basis for civil society. Instead of “displacing sex from its normative function as the mechanism of emotional cohesion that sustains aggressive heteronormativity” (Berlant and Edelman 2014: 13), the conservative passion for masochism is inseparable from such aggression and, indeed, harnesses it as political justification for abusing the social itself. Perhaps in a nod to Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, in Sex, or the Unbearable, invoke a libidinal economy characterized by “an ongoing effect of divesture” that is “without investment in the stability of the self in relation to its objects” (19, 30). Whereas Berlant and Edelman imagine a subject without solid backing, Rand presents sex as an encounter that creates the most intense self-possession. By placing her railroad heiress in bed first with a copper tycoon, next a self-made industrialist, and then an electrical engineering whiz, Rand doubles down on the individual. In this succession, Dagny finances her autonomy just as she uses the resources they provide to shore up the infrastructure of her crum- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 23 bling transcontinental railroad. In these moments of passion, conservative style achieves its most vivid enunciation. Neither respect for marriage vows nor other social feelings are equal to the “secret torture” of Dagny’s lover “letting her lips bring blood to his” (Rand 1996: 591). The takeaway can be perhaps expressed best in a form that is as stylized as Rand’s idiom: in the throes of conservative sex, the world melts away so completely that only naked selves remain. This voluptuous contention takes philosophical expression as the clipped phrase “A is A,” which serves as the title for the final section of Atlas Shrugged. The dictum achieves its purest realization deep in the canyons of the Colorado Rockies, where an assortment of daring industrialists, rogue scientists, and artistic visionaries—the prime movers in the world of Atlas Shrugged—have secretly withdrawn after they resolve to go on strike against the American commonwealth. Imagined as a capitalist Shangri-La, Rand’s countercommunity abides only one principle: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine” (671). Just as lovers in Atlas Shrugged conclude that the most intense sexual satisfaction consists in worrying solely about one’s own pleasure, the most intensely conservative society requires this double negation (“I will never . . . nor”) of social attachments. To become a member of Galt’s Gulch, as this utopia of greed is called, individuals have to agree to this basic principle that they will never consent to being made to feel guilty about their rejection of fellow feeling. In this valley, undetectable to the outside world of freeloaders and dependents, the pleasures of success are a private affair. As the autotelic “formula defining the concept of existence” (929– 30), “A is A” neither seeks nor requires consensus as to what constitutes the nature of reality. Galt explains this idea in a pirate radio address that goes on for fifty-six uninterrupted pages. A is not what B thinks of A. Instead, A is independent of the state, the public, a lover’s wants. Building outward from sex without consent, this style of conservative thought takes the Lockean foundation of all collective agreement, “Every man has property in his own person,” and transforms it into an economic dictum of metaphysical proportion so that “Every man is a property of his own person.” The distinction hinges on the Aristotelian law of identity, which makes each thing unique to itself and not something other than what it is. The self becomes its own property. In the fable that Locke tells about the transition from the state of nature to commonwealth, consent rests on the shared recognition that the security for property, from the nuts we gather on the forest floor Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 24 boundary 2 / November 2019 to the lands we cultivate with our labor, is simultaneously threatened and guaranteed by everyone around us. Consent therefore acknowledges the radical contingency that it sets out to stabilize; it documents the competition and aggression that we negotiate in order to live a social existence. In rewriting the foundation story of liberalism, Galt does not reject consent out of hand, however. His innovation is to propose a theory of consent that requires no compromise, no back and forth, no agreement among individuals, be they lovers, competitors, or capitalists. What sort of consent emanates from such impossibility? How could there be consent without accord? The answer lies in masochism. The beauty of this solution becomes painfully clear when the state tortures John Galt—as if the US government were in the habit of carrying out extreme rendition against successful capitalists. Stripped naked and strapped to a “leather mattress” located deep in a subterranean government lab, Galt is hooked up to a machine designed “to inflict the maximum intensity of pain” (1045). Atlas Shrugged calls this device “the vibrator” (1047). In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines offers a history of the vibrator that shows how automated solutions to the “problem” of women’s sexual gratification are bound up with male anxieties about inadequacy and obsolescence. As first employed by medical men, the electric vibrator provided a “capital-labor substitution” that “reduced the time it took physicians to produce results from up to an hour to about ten minutes. Like many husbands, doctors were reluctant to inconvenience themselves in performing what was, after all, a routine chore” (Maines 1999: 3). Although the government vibrator racks his body with pain, Galt exults in the experience as a source of pleasure because he converts the pain into his property and his alone. In contrast to traditional views that locate the origins of consent in the shared desire for each man to protect his property, Galt uses the vibrator to remove himself from this collective arena altogether. Ayn Rand’s vibrator is the material embodiment of a conservative style of consent that never requires input from another man nor asks a man to act on behalf of another. The overwrought alignment of masochism and property culminates in self-ownership. “The masochist loves what the capitalist loves: the freedom to buy and sell, the inalienable right to alienate,” argues Walter Benn Michaels (1988: 133). And what the masochist seeks to buy, sell, and alienate, above all, is the self. By alienating the property of his own being, Galt demonstrates how completely he owns himself. He repeats the lesson of Dagny’s ecstatic loss of personhood: these perfectly matched lovers are Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user Castronovo / Ayn Rand’s Vibrator 25 disposing of the self as they wish, without any regard for their partner in the transaction. As Rand told Playboy, “Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values” (Toffler 1964). Laissezfaire is deeply erotic because it enables an ownership so total that “the desire to own cannot be separated from the desire to be owned” (Michaels 1988: 133). Like any good masochist, Galt owns his torture, “not attempting to fight the pain” and “not attempting to negate it” (Rand 1996: 1045), instead taking possession of the experience as a property of his private enjoyment. For the masochist, the thrill is to lay claim to the fruits of one’s suffering. Likewise, for the Randian conservative, the most intense sovereignty is found, not in the penalties that government imposes but by removing the state altogether and torturing oneself instead. Instead of loving the state, the conservative rejects it altogether. In a losing battle to manage Galt’s capacity for pain, the government technicians crank up the vibrator so much that it short-circuits. Weirdly enough, the man overseeing the torture is Dagny’s brother, who drops “down to his knees, grasping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator” (1047–48) in an effort to repair it and prolong the ordeal. This moment in which a corporate apologist for collectivized state industry fumbles for a way to inflict pain on an individual businessman confirms how any position other than the truly conservative one is incoherent. Quite literally so: Dagny’s brother becomes hysterical, suffering a nervous breakdown in his involuntary recognition that Galt not only absorbs pain but achieves ownership of it. The masochist, according to Deleuze, is “rebellious in his submission” (1989: 89), and Galt is no exception since his acceptance of pain constitutes an outright rejection of the government policies that require men and women to help one another. As rapidly as the state can dish out pain, Galt absorbs it as pleasure, not unlike his invention of an ingenious motor that converts static electricity in the atmosphere into an inexhaustible energy supply. When the sadistic technology overheats, Galt, from his exposed position on the mattress, diagnoses the problem: “It’s the vibrator that’s out of order. . . . Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You’ll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work” (Rand 1996: 1047). Galt then consents to agony because, from his position, he will have been the author of it; he will be consenting to an exchange, one of pain for pleasure, that he himself has freely established. The conservative redefinition of consent as mastery provides Galt Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/4/1/692670/0460001.pdf by UNIV OF WISCONSIN MADISON user 26 boundary 2 / November 2019 with confirmation of his identity as a self-sufficient genius by repairing the very machine that dominates him. In effect, Galt completes the sadomasochistic circuit on his own, and so shocking is his conservative auto da fé that the vibrator technician drops his tools and flees the room. Even though masochism would seem to confirm mastery only for the dominant, Galt’s rendering of consent makes him both sadist and masochist. A is A, after all, if A beats A and A likes it. As a social formula, “A is A” represents Rand’s application of the Aristotelian minimalist law of identity to consensual arrangements, but it more readily suggests Deleuze’s conclusion that masochism represents “the consequent birth of the new man” (1989: 101), one who is liberated from paternal regulation and by extension the law of the father that underwrites social order. As a matter of style, this severe formula proves satisfying because it distills sovereignty so pure that it denies any need for external validation or dependency. If, as Jessica Benjamin deduces from her classic reading of The Story of O, “the secret of love is to be known as oneself” (1988: 60), then this scene answers the famous question that is the very first sentence of Atlas Shrugged: “Who is John Galt?” After the disheartened torturers flee, abandoning the room to the sadist who recuperates all his spent energy as masochistic pleasure, Galt is left alone to answer the question of identity on his own. References Bacharach, Jacob. 2016. “Ayn Rand Made Me a Communist: How an Adolescent Love Affair with ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Opened Up the World of Radical Politics.” New Republic, January 27, 2016. Beck, Glenn. 2010. The Overton Window. With contributions from Kevin Balfe, Emily Bestler, and Jack Henderson. New York: Threshold Editions/Mercury Radio Arts. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. 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