MARCUSE ON REPRESSIVE DESUBLIMATION

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.