Re: repressive desublimation

[Christopher Pedersen <cped@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all
else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things:
bread and circuses!"
  (Juvenal)

"Repressive desublimation" is, in fine, the term Marcuse employs to
describe his witness of the phenomena observed by Juvenal, by which the
people give over their sovereignty, their liberty, to tyrants in favor of
vulgar material and sensual satisfactions.  The term is oxymoronic, on its
face: in Freudian psychology, desublimation betokens the absence or end of
repression: the free and unrestricted flow of desire.  By attaching to it
the modifier of "repressive", Marcuse challenges common sense to come to
terms with the potentially repressive - read: antidemocratic - effects of
desublimation.  To wit:  when the gratification of immediate material and
sensual needs becomes the prevailing concern of men, then the ideals of
freedom and democracy have no chance.  A happy rabble does not a republic
make.

Marcuse's analysis of this problem is very relevent to our own political
culture today.  Consider how pervasive economics has become within our
political culture: few policy decisions are made, that are not founded
upon an economic logic - a logic of profit.  Men do not ask, will it make
me free/ preserve my liberty, but instead, will I profit by it?  Thus, for
example, the nation trades away its sovereignty, in treaties like the
NAFTA, the GATT, and the MAI, for the chance at economic and financial
gains.  Local (state) governments, similarly, are eager to construct
policies that will attract corporate dollars to their localities, heedless
of the effects of those policies on the real political and social life of
their populations.  And so on.

But when Marcuse 'wrote the book' on repressive desublimation (see
*One-Dimensional Man*, Chapter Three: "The Conquest of the Unhappy
Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation"), this problem was not so
obvious.  Also, Marcuse was not content merely with pointing it out, but -
like a good sociologist - wanted to provide an analysis of the phenomena
*in depth*, in keeping with the larger goal of the construction of a
critical theory of society, which might be used as a lever for its
transformation.

Consider: here is Marcuse, this German Marxist philosopher, transplanted
into the America of the 1950's and 60's - the wealthiest, most democratic,
and most open society in the world - trying to warn people about the
encroaching totalitarianism of the capitalist Establishment - the very
regime under which, by all accounts,the US had achieved its enviable
position in the world.  You must admit that the assertion that this Great
Society was really a totalitarian one, is at the very least profoundly
counterintuitive.  Marcuse was well aware of this problem.  Where is the
repression in a society in which copies of the works of "Plato and Hegel,
Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud" are available "in the drugstore",
for anyone who cares to read them? (*One-Dimensional Man*, p.64)  In other
words: given that the resources of principled rational opposition to the
status quo are everywhere available, must one not presume that the absence
of such opposition - read: the absence of a socialist revolution - is
indicative of the absence of any *reason* to rebel against the
Establishment, even indeed of the *actuality* of freedom in the West?

Marcuse's answer is that one must not so presume: to do so would be to
confuse happiness with freedom, contentment with emancipation.  The logic
of repressive desublimation is Marcuse's critical response to this
presumption.  By allowing - even encouraging - certain forms of
desublimation (freedom), Marcuse argues, the Establishment actually
distracts attention from the oppressive and authoritarian character of the
society.  But Marcuse goes farther than this.  On a more subtle and
dangerous level, the availability of "Plato in the drugstore" actually
works to *undermine* the possibility of taking a critical stand against
the repressive aspects of the society.  Consider:  Babbit, on some strange
whim, picks up and actually reads a copy of Plato's *Republic* - or better
still, of the new anniversary edition of Marx's *Communist Manifesto*.
What does he conclude upon reading it?  Does he run off and join the local
chapter of the communist Party?  Not a bit of it.  For he is fat and
happy, on the whole - the logic of his wallet overcomes his rational
judgment.  Maybe he even said to himself, at some moment or other, while
reading, "yes, I see that: it's true", giving rational assent to the
analysis there before him; or "yes, that would be nice", investing the
image of an ideal society with the affirmation of his own desire.  But as
he closes the book and returns fully to the comfortable envelope of his
own world, these minor revelations vanish like a puff of smoke.  The
immediate reality of his satisfaction and contentment (courtesy of bread
and circuses) overwhelms his own capacity for rational judgment.  "these
are pretty pipe dreams", he concludes; "but this is the best of all the
worlds that are; so it must be the best of all possible worlds".  Now the
very availability of Plato in the drugstore can operate as a vehicle for
the retrenchment of the Establishment.  Not only because the Establishment
can say, to its critics, "Look, we are a free society; could you get Plato
in the drugstore in Russia?"  But more subtly and perversely, because in
the mind of Babbit himself, the fact of his immediate contentment precludes
the possibility of taking Plato (or Marx or Shelley) seriously.

And this is what Marcuse means by the "One-Dimensional Society".  Any
society that has not reached a state of perfection - and no society has -
must necessarily be a "two dimensional" society - a society in which the
status quo and the ideal stand in conlict with each other.  It is that
conflict, in Marcuse's view, which generates change for the better.  But
in this society of ours, Marcuse argues, that second dimension - the
utopian dimension - is increasingly vanishing, for all intents and
purposes.  Art and philosophy (Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire,
Marx and Freud) - what Marcuse refers to as "high culture" -  have
traditionally been the guardians of this second, utopian dimension.  Now
art *is* sublimation - the very model of sublimation in Freud.  In art,
desire for utopia is sublimated into representations of utopia - either
"positively" (Bach, Mozart, Hegel), as more or less direct expressions of
perfection or beauty, or "negatively" (Brecht, Schoenberg, Marx), as
representations of the distance or difference or dissonance (Schoenberg!)
between the way things are and the way they ought to be.  Now what we are
really after, as a matter of practice, is not the sublimation of the
desire for the utopia, but rather its *desublimation* - not art, but
action; not philosophy, but revolution.  But apart from the effective
existence of this second dimension of thought, there is no basis in
consciousness for a critical stand toward society; and therefore no basis
for practical action.  That is the problem of the one-dimensional society.

And now I think you can see the dark irony of Marcuse's analysis of
repressive desublimation.  Here in the West we have a society in which
desublimation is a fact, is occuring.  Indeed: one might say that
desublimation is a practical result of a capitalist order - capitalism
encourages the growth of a consumer society, of a society devoted to the
satisfactions of desire.  We might expect that this would be just what is
wanted.  But, as Marcuse tries to show, not all forms of desublimation are
emancipatory.  Some, indeed, actually preclude the possibility of
emancipation in subtle ways.  Bread and circuses.

Hope this helps ;-)

Yours,

christopher pedersen
cped@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx