In the past few days we have had several posts of housekeeping by Housekeeping. The housekeeping department now feels that it might be time to have a post on housekeeping – reticular, domestic and other.
As is widely known, the greek word for housekeeping is oikonomos. In the wild currents of time this word swirled and bobbed until it multiplied and transformed into the English word economy, the French Ă©conomie, the German Ă–konomie, the Danish økonomi and many others (Greek words are strumpets and have bastard children everywhere). As such, a housekeeping crisis might be waitin’ ’round the bend, my Huckleberry friend, if the financial rugrats do not get their house in order in the near future.
As implied by the historical and geographical transformation of the term oikonomos, there are many different forms of economy. One among them is, as suggested above, related to money and their less than evenhanded distribution between what we might call agents. These could be nations, companies, the man on the street, the person writing this, or even actual secret agents with surprising gadgetry and a license to kill. A very different and in many ways more interesting type of economy is what a long dead Austrian psychoanalyst dubbed libidinal economy. Libido is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the largely unconscious structure of the psyche. Sometimes libido is perceived as mere sexual energy but we’ll try not to mount that old hobby horse or, indeed, to mount anything or anyone – at least for the duration of this post.
Libidinal economy is thus the restrictions on pure libidinal flow imposed by the super ego. Restricted libido can be good and bad, the good one being sublimation, i.e. the productive usage of libidinal energy or the channeling thereof towards productive instead of destructive outlets. This type of economy, of course, is the housekeeping of the ego. Bear with us, we are within smelling distance of something like a point…
To be continued…
Tags: advertising, Branding, desire, Housekeeping, it, libidinal economy, subject
