In a comment to my post "How It Looks From Over There" Jim writes insightfully and quite correctly, "I think the key line in your post is how "capitalism is quite flexibly open-minded when it comes to these culture wars." As I understand it, it was Herbert Marcuse who noted the "terrible but beautiful" way that capitalism has the ability to absorb and nullify threats to its existence."
This is a point of great importance, and I am going to expand on it by quoting a passage from my mini-tutorial on Marcuse's ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN.
The feeling Marcuse experienced when looking at that America
can, I think, accurately be characterized not as anger, but rather as
dismay. American seemed to him,
flattened, banal, seamlessly upbeat,
cheerful, and devoid of all fruitful negativity. This is the significance of the title he
chose for his "Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society," to quote the subtitle of the book. There was, he thought, no second dimension of
negative thinking in American society that could give rise to protest,
rebellion, or revolution. There were, of
course, many elements to this dismaying phenomenon, but one key, Marcuse
thought, was the paradoxical manner in which the ruling forces in American
society had managed to defuse potentially eruptive negative energies not by
repressing them --the response of an earlier stage in capitalist development
--but precisely by permitting their expression, embracing them, commodifying
them, and thus depriving them of their power.
He called this tactic "repressive desublimation."
To explain this puzzling phrase, I need to range a bit far
afield for a moment, reflecting both on the history of culture generally and
more particularly on what things were like in the fifties and early
sixties. For some of you, this will be a
stroll down Memory Lane, for others an excursus into ancient history.
It is always the case that protests against and dissent from
the ruling orthodoxy, especially by the young, have taken the form of
eroticized deviations from the norm in speech and bodily
self-presentation. In some eras, the
fleeting revelation of a naked female ankle is enough to scandalize polite
society. In other eras, women may bare a
breast without occasioning comment or disapproval. When the Beatles burst on the American scene,
their appearance shocked Middle America, despite the fact that they wore coats
and ties when they performed. It was the
outrageous length of their hair --almost, but not quite covering the napes of
their necks --that announced to everyone the depths of their rebellion. The young especially, who do not yet have the
means or the skills to challenge the established order politically or
economically, but who are desperate nonetheless to make visible their rejection
of the Reality Principle and their embrace of the Pleasure Principle, do the
only thing available to them, making minor alterations in their physical
appearance. Bare skin, long hair, spiked
hair, no hair, facial hair, tattoos, ear piercings, nose piercings, tongue
piercings --it really takes very little to produce hysteria in adults. This ability to drive grown-ups wild is a
manifestation of the power of negativity --of denial, rejection, refusal to
conform to whatever norms of behavior and self-presentation happen to rule at
the moment. The young frequently are
novices at ideological or socio-economic analysis, but they are natural
virtuosi at insolence. The merest
drawling of a word or slouching of a shoulder can terrify those charged with
policing the repression on which capitalist society depends.
It is not surprising that during the 1968 Columbia
University student protests, the distinguished political scientist David
Truman, then a senior member of the university administration, was quoted as
saying about the undergraduate protester, Mark Rudd, "It makes me
uncomfortable to be in the same room with him."
But with extraordinary prescience, Marcuse realized that
modern industrial society had found an entirely new way of containing and
defusing the forces of negativity and rebellion --by embracing them,
commodifying them, converting them into sources of profit. So long hair, piercings, tattoos, and the
insolence of the slouch became advertising devices, splashed across newspaper
and magazine pages to sell soft drinks, jeans, cars, and beer. This unblocking of the negative energies of
Eros and Thanatos robbed them of their power to challenge the existing
order. It was a desublimation whose
effect, against all expectation, was actually repressive, by depriving
previously buried wishes, fantasies, and thoughts of their power to destabilize
the dominant social and economic order.
24 comments:
If you don't mind, I'm going to try my hand at philosophy---absent flippancy. There are, you know, countries that practice styles of capitalism not so wholly devouring or exploitative of dissent as our own. Contingencies of culture carry the weight. Worthy philosophers, other than Hegel, Marx and Marcuse, have argued as much. "Trends" no doubt there are, in every aspect of human endeavor, but none so universally binding as you seem to suggest. "Human history is just one damn thing after another". That said, on the other hand, perhaps I'll just stick to flippancy.
I sympathize with Professor Truman. Mark Rudd in 1968 was insufferable.
About 5 years ago I listened to an interview online with Rudd and saw that he had grown, not only politically, but as a person. I wrote him, we exchanged a few emails and became friends.
In 1968 I was as insufferable as Rudd, but for slightly other reasons. I'm sure that my presence made some people uncomfortable too.
An insufferable culture, that of the U.S. in the 1950's and early 60's, produces insufferable human beings. When they try to liberate themselves from the culture they were formed in, they often merely reproduce that base culture with other masks and other symbols. There ain't no instant liberation, baby, it's a long tiring process.
This is great. Thank you. Helps explain the rise, cooptation, and fall of radical and one time revolutionary artists into Abstract Expressionism, a movement whose most important funders/promoters were the Rockefeller family-MOMA and the CIA (for more than a decade). In fact, AE was considered to be the necessary cultural component that would allow the US to "seize the moment" and become the post-WWII hegemon. The artists, many if not most were Trotskyist, Marxist, or anarchist adopted the "politically silent" abstraction as a means of best expressing their politics.
Jerry,
This series of videos might interest you. They appeared in Telesur (Venezuelan TV) in English about the politics of abstract expressionism. Here's part 1 of a 4 part series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MzQu-V7RXU
thank you SW,
Jerry,
Part 3 is specifically about CIA funding of abstract expressionism.
Memory lane indeed. Along with other California graduate students in the late 60s going ape over Marcuse, I was quite taken with his works, wading through his numerous and incisive ideas, as I thought them at the time. For many, mostly younger folks those days were laden with tuning in, turning on, dropping out, and boffing like bunnies, not to mention various exercises in radical political and social activity, all seemingly devoted to lessening the surplus repression of capitalism and promoting liberation. But with the passing of time such activities (while often fun for some) didn’t actually appear to promote very much freedom after all, certainly nothing that smacked of revolutionary change. They were then written off as the rebellion of youth and youth culture, not really transformative, not really promoting a true liberation. Marcuse’s depiction of this as a repressive de-sublimation attempted to account for these phenomena. In this he was of a cloth with other twentieth-century Marxists in exposing and analyzing various sorts of false consciousness and cooptation. (One thinks of Gramsci in prison, for example, trying to account for peasant support of the Catholic Church and Mussolini’s fascism, clearly inimical to their material interests and well-being.)
Growing out of those days too a question emerged, one that I still find quite troubling and which RPW’s post reawakens, another part of memory lane. In Marcuse’s way of thinking, what would count as genuine “forces of negativity and rebellion” (RPW’s words) in our own time? Otherwise phrased: how could “repressive de-sublimation” be falsified?
Michael Hobart's comment and questions prompt a response from me. The forces of negativity and rebellion RPW mentions as examples, e.g., "eroticized deviations from the norm in speech and bodily self-presentation" are merely symbolic behaviors, contrary to arbitrary conventions, that don't have significant material effects. The way to circumvent repressive desublimation, then, would be to attack targets more concrete than entrenched fashions. For example, propose heavy taxes against the wealthy. Capitalists will have a hard time making that trendy, though the very smart ones will be happy to sell bumper stickers and t-shirts advocating such a response at the same time as they oppose it.
This is something that distresses me a lot! How can I express my divergence in a world that absorbs it so completely? It feels like so much of alternative fashion is dictated. I feel like I haven't been given a chance at my own style.
I dunno. Abbie Hoffman and the gang managed to piss off a lot of the right people.
Give away your TV set, use your phone only to make phone calls, buy new stuff only when the old stuff that you have, your shoes, your pants, your phone, etc., breaks down or wears out completely, stop following the news so closely, read more poetry and philosophers in the wisdom tradition, hang out with people who seem to be going where you're going even if you're not entirely sure where you're going although you probably are sure where you don't want to go, etc.
Keep at that for a while and you'll find that you've diverged, you've diverged so patently that you no longer feel the need to express your divergence. You are your own style.
It's not a question of trying to piss off the right people. As long as you're trying to piss them off, you're playing the same game as they are and you're somehow prisoner of that game which probably isn't the game that deep down you seek to play.
I personally am not interested in pissing off anybody in particular, but if the goal, implied in the OP, is to revitalize "the forces of negativity and rebellion," then I can appreciate getting a rise out of Establishment figureheads.
I'm with your first paragraph 100%, s.w. My phone, an ancient flip phone, only makes calls. You don't know how often I have to tell people that I do not have a texting service. Half the time they don't even understand what it means not to be able to receive texts.
It seems to me that if one can turn one's back on the system as far as possible and try to find other like-minded people, one can begin to build an alternative in one's daily life through constructing non-competitive, sharing, non-greedy, non-dominating horizontal relationships with those around one. It's hard work, but it can be done. Not "done" in the sense of 100% finished and perfect, but "done" in the sense of getting the process going.
That in no way contradicts supporting and voting for more decent political candidates, for example, Sanders, but if Sanders's campaign fails, if one is building horizontal relationships, then in any case, one has at least created something worthwhile, something which isn't guided by the rules of the capitalist system.
Yeesh, no texting. That's terrifying.
Embrace the fear, Sonic!
Dean, et al., I take most of your points, but I think they miss the gist of Marcuse’s argument. (Please correct me if my memory errs; it’s been over 35 years since I read and taught this material.) As I recall, Marcuse based his analysis on two critical ideas (among many). The first was the Hegelian, Marxist tradition of unintended consequences, the notion from the latter that historical epochs (feudalism, capitalism) unintentionally created the seeds of their own destruction. The second was the complete intertwining of what used to be called base and superstructure, or material conditions and consciousness. (Thus, Dean, I think he probably would have rejected your distinction between symbolic behaviors and material effects.) The second idea provided the opening to bring in Freud, repression, sublimation, and related matters. Modern society provided a technological rationality that was both politically dominating and psychologically repressive (positive reason), but which was unintentionally creating the conditions for its eclipse. Those conditions (critical, negative reason) were initially manifest in an aesthetic imagination, in art, and in those artists who sublimated their erotic desires and fantasies into a sustained attack on entrenched realities and the existing order.
But with the cooptation and commodification of art works, of the sexual revolution, of counter-culture, of alternative life-styles, plus (Marcuse would have added) of imaginative youtube exercises, and even of protest and “woke” movements, sublimation’s repressed eroticism lost its negative thrust. Society’s repression of individual freedom (or, to use Sonic’s term, “divergence”) continued, indeed was reinforced. So what do do? Marcuse did call for somehow transcending technology through a “logos of technics,” as I recall his phrase. But I confess to abandoning him at that point, both for his retreat into Hegelian tropes and for his own inability to provide any practical alternatives. Reason (capital R), he wrote, is still to be discovered and realized. Thus, ex hypothesi, it cannot be falsified, either currently or in the future.
In the meantime, the various suggestions for coping, given in these posts, seem to fall within what Christopher Lasch termed in the 1970s “every day survival strategies.” As individuals, we all have them and need them, all the more so in the face of the dumpster fire politics in the nation’s capital. It also seems to me that our current survival strategies must not be restricted to various forms of retreat, with or without smart phones, but as many on this site have emphasized must also target the removal (through impeachment or election) of the biggest threat to our survival since World War II.
I read about 'unblocking of the negative energies of Eros and Thanatos robbed them of their power to challenge the existing order', and I don't believe in the existence of 'Eros', or of 'Thanatos', or, really, of 'the existing order', which I take to be, sure, a high-flown and evocative locution, such that perfume is evocative of spring, it has evocative power, but affective or valuative meaning strikes me as a game for poets. Maybe I like poetry, but I insist on calling it poetry. Someone else's national anthem has no evocative meaning for me, and Freud's locutions seem to me to have only the most desperate claim, I mean, 'Eros', 'Thanatos', only the most desperate claim to being anything fundamental or what, et cetera? What is even being posted here? I guess that my act of denial of falshoods, of the unsound or the fictional, might be a case of the 'Capitalist repression' that you talk about, but I find it really odd how you are content to come across like you want to demythologize and demystify something, though everything here that you offer, is a myth. Eros and Thanatos? Hell not even psychoanalyts can be counted upon to bring themselves to speak of 'Thanatos' with a straight face. the Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle, sure, but there isn't really any such thing, but just, these are plenty of rich symbols and .. even as symbols go, is this so very rich?
Whether or not eros and thanatos are myths or realities (the sex drive, aka eros, seems real to me), Professor Wolff's main point above, that capitalism has an incredible ability to co-opt and commodify most rebellious gestures, seems accurate.
I don't know how old you are, but those of us who lived through the 60's probably had the illusion or at least knew friends who maintained the illusion that long hair, a drop-out lifestyle, smoking weed or dropping acid, sexual liberation, were blows against the capitalist system.
Marcuse was the first thinker or one of the first thinkers to point out that such gestures or rebellion would be easily co-opt and commodified, that Che Guevara would sell more tee-shirts than Richard Nixon. Let's give Marcuse credit for that at least. Maybe he should be remembered as a acute observer of pop sociology rather than as a great philosopher.
How old am I? 50. I don't know if you were asking, but wth.
'Maybe he should be remembered as a acute observer of pop sociology rather than as a great philosopher.'
If so, then it's too bad we don't get to have his thoughts on the identity and origins of Korean pop music. I'll tarry for yours?
'Marcuse was the first thinker or one of the first thinkers to point out that such gestures or rebellion would be easily co-opt and commodified, that Che Guevara would sell more tee-shirts than Richard Nixon.'
I can grasp that somebody might have a take on punk's sociopolitical significance or such, but I cannot simply assume that there is no alternative take. And for example, you suggest that 'those of us who lived through the 60's probably had the illusion or at least knew friends who maintained the illusion that long hair, a drop-out lifestyle, smoking weed or dropping acid, sexual liberation, were blows against the capitalist system.' Fine, and how many people had no illusions, but were just trying to charm the pants off of some chick with lies? Call it a countercultural iconoclasm that is more symbolic than active. Call it 'modern' countercultural iconoclasm. It borrows the slogans and gestures of revolution and the language of war, because nothing else sells to silly chicks. That it sells to silly chicks is, like, a coincidence it being also serious business such as this blog. --that's sarcasm.
I am in no way equipped to discuss Marcuse's extrapolations from Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Keeping that substantial caveat in mind, I don't get what it means to reject a distinction between symbolic behaviors and material effects. Nor do I understand what a "complete intertwining" of base and superstructure would entail. If these are the products of Marcuse's analysis, then it almost seems as if he enlisted them to assure no way out. Perhaps this is the source of your frustration with Marcuse, too?
In any event, I'm grateful for the informative discussion contributed by others (than myself, I mean).
If I may, Marcuse basically is saying that we just want to have fun in America, and that our desires are sublimated and projected onto celebrities. Just as the Roman masses had their games, violent, to take pleasure, we have our celebrities our sports, our online personas, and our passions are sucked out, in Marcuse's day, to TV, movies, sports, etc.
Fun is the dominant American emotion, and it is the emotion of desublimation, I think.
Am I too far off?
Martin Heidegger, one of Marcuse’s mentors (at least until Heidegger embraced the Nazism that Marcuse fled) once wrote that philosophy is “conceptual poetry,” an observation that applies more to Continental philosophy that to its Anglo-American, analytical counterpart. I think it applies as well to Marcuse. Like a good poet, he gave us some brilliantly articulated insights into our contemporary world and we can read him with an aesthetic appreciation. But as a guide to action, the pragmatic tradition of instrumental reason – a very American tradition (and the bête noire of Marcuse, as well as of both Horkheimer and Adorno) – has offered more promise, thin though it may be, than the metaphysical entities and Reason of his conceptual poetry.
Your analysis of "Marcuse on Repressive Desublimation" was really profound, in my opinion. Your examination of the idea and its applicability to contemporary culture presents an interesting viewpoint. It's intriguing to see how Marcuse's concepts can be used to address modern problems. Have you ever considered how ideas like these in philosophy might relate to the market for Relax CBD products, by the way? A fascinating debate that clarifies the holistic approach to well-being might be had by examining the relationship between philosophical theories and wellness fads. Keep up the interesting writing.
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