Herbert Marcuse and Repressive Desublimation

Also called "institutional desublimation," Marcuse first expounded at length on this idea in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. It seems influenced by his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno and the quasi-Frankfurter, Wilhelm Reich. Though Marcuse studied under Heidegger - who dressed in Nazi regalia and gave the fascist salute at the end of each lecture, making Marcuse wonder WTF had gone wrong with German culture - he still wanted to unite Existentialism with Marxism. Certain events led him to flee Germany, where he worked for the Unistat Government's OSS (forerunner to the CIA) as an expert in explaining fascism to US government officials. Eventually Marcuse taught at UC San Diego.

                                         Herbert Marcuse (say "Mar KOO-zuh")

With the Vietnam war going on, Marcuse tried to tell his white, affluent students at UC San Diego that their surfing, drinking beer and listening to rock and roll, and increasingly promiscuous sexual forays were not "real" freedom. It seems few of those students understood him. Which brings me to "repressive desublimation."

Marcuse thought that society had become so technologically advanced that it could meet basic needs and give its citizenry a feeling (a simulacra?) of democratic participation in the processes of their lives, but this was a ruse.

Why was/is it a "ruse"? In taking Freud's ideas about artists sublimating their erotic impulses and producing High Culture, Marcuse noted that by 1964 technological society/capitalism had evolved by which the owners/Authoritarian class (recently renamed the 1%) could distract the masses that an ever-growing chasm between themselves and workers was underway by allowing free reign for everyone to "desublimate," whether as artists (probably not) or consumers (oh, most definitely this).

Music can not only move the soul, it can sell shoes.

So: I've seen this idea of Marcuse's presented as a sort of very erudite, High Concept conspiracy theory by Wall St. and the Pentagon and other fascists against The People. I find the idea too highfalutin' and would rather consider repressive desublimation along the lines of an idea to think with and not "believe", at other times as fitting under Chomsky's term "intellectual self-defense."

Rather than send out secret police to knock off dissidents, let there be dissidents, to foster the illusion that there's "freedom." (Who actually reads Chomsky anyway? Exactly.) What freedom do we non-One-Percenters have? We can buy stuff! And invest our emotional energies in games, and games played by professional athletes. We can get very involved in shows, especially TV. We can follow the relentless idiocy of corporate non-news (Nuzak) 24-7, which drum-up soap opera stories for all of us to yell and scream at each other about. We should always feel free to "vote" about which story was the best of the week. See? We're participating in the process!

Above all, we need to constantly internalize the values (but where did they come from?) of "personal responsibility" and "individualism." Express yourself! Have an opinion on everything!

Even if you have no real idea of what's going on and haven't read anything of substance about the issue.

Repressive desublimation is a "happy consciousness" in the midst of runaway gangster capitalism and institutions that don't work anymore. You don't identify with love and knowledge and a vision of better worlds for your fellow humans. You identify with what you consume. What you own. What you can display to others about your "self."

But making an effort towards finding out what's really going on? It's not sexy. And worse: acting on what you've found out and trying to do something about it? You're just going to piss off guardians of the One Percent, and they will marginalize your ass. Did you fill out your bracket? Did you see what happened in the Season Finale? Wasn't that just wild?

Happy consciousness: the safe way.

It seems like a brilliant move by the Owners: get everyone free to express themselves sexually, but with no rhetoric about liberation and beauty. Having known about Marcuse's repressive desublimation for years now, I'm a tad surprised They didn't make a move to legalize cannabis sooner.

But there I go again: They. The Owners. The One Percent. I reiterate: I don't think there's a conspiracy here to massively divert attention from a structural understanding of our lives. I think it's extremely complicated. But the irony here is: too much Irony among the quasi-educated. And what were "liberal values" in a dumb-game "Culture War" turned out, in tandem with a default philosophy of Consumerism, to have inscribed the mass consciousness we see in this particular moment, this Epoch.

Or: Well, yes. That's one way to look at it. <cough> (Back to my idiosyncratic interpretation of this high abstraction...)

So: we celebrate our Free Society even while knowing we're under a Panopticon. The Unistat government spends $700 billion a year on "defense" and almost no citizen likes that idea. There's over $1 trillion owed in student loans and no jobs for those graduates, and what jobs there are kinda suck. And escalating technological unemployment seems inevitable. There is almost zero talk about a Basic Income in Unistat, as of the date this blogpost is written. The political process is evermore transparently bought and paid for by the Owners.

And just about everyone knows (most of ) this, while celebrating our Free Society and all our fancy gizmos, which some people camp out in front of the store for, overnight, on pavement. They will do this also to see Part VI of the latest film extravaganza. They will stampede to death each other at 6AM the day after Thanksgiving, at Wal-Mart, in order to get the Best Deals. They will text while driving. (Which reminds me: please watch the best PSA ever, by another filmmaker of German descent.)

Let us consider "repressive desublimation" as a mere model for describing present mass culture. As Marcuse scholar Charles Peitz paraphrased this unwieldy term: "Alienation in the midst of affluence, repression through gratification, and the overstimulation and paralysis of mind."

OR: what the hell: it's one of the greatest high-concept conspiracy theories out there. And I mean "out there."

Finally, when I recently re-read Marcuse on this topic (see here?) I marveled at how intellectually inventive and fecund the idea was, but it gnawed at me for a few days. It struck me (in the shower, as usual), that he was not only fairly accurate but that we may have moved beyond this, to something closer to Mass Cluelessness or Baudrillardian/Philip K Dick-like simulacra. This idea bummed me out, but I found this passage in a book from 1998 (O! The humanity!), by Frankfurt School scholar Martin Jay:

Now ironic reflection, camp parody, and awareness of manipulation have themselves become part of mass culture, which is no longer predominately grounded in seductive immediacy and the deliberate fostering of what Herbert Marcuse ironically dubbed the "happy consciousness" of "repressive desublimation." What seems to prevail today instead is what the German theorist Peter Sloterdijk has called "cynical reason," which he defines as "enlightened false consciousness," a "hard-boiled, shadowy cleverness that has split courage off from itself, holds anything positive to be a fraud, and is intent only on somehow getting through life." - from "Educating the Educators," p.107 in Cultural Semantics: Keywords For Our Time

The preceding quoted passage reminded me of a passage from Woody Allen's "My Speech To The Graduates":

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
-from Side Effects

Which is to say: whatever is going on, let's try to keep our sense of humor.

Here's a 51 minute documentary on Marcuse and his role in 1960s New Left politics at UC San Diego:

More Ruminations on the So-Called Free-Floating Intellectuals

I have an overweening interest in the history and thought of the Frankfurt School thinkers, that broad interdisciplinary project of mostly Germanic thinkers, chased out of their homeland by Nazis, and which included such wonderful intellects and personalities as Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer. There were many, many more... Leo Lowenthal. All of 'em: scarily erudite mo-fos. It wasn't a "school" under one roof, but something stronger than an "affinity group," to my eyes. And it carries on to this date, above.

These guys were tremendously well-trained academics, staggeringly well-educated, but all made the crucial mistake of having (or being suspected of having) "jewish blood" in them.

(Yes, those of you who are saying they were known Leftists too, and that was enough to make them potential lampshades: you're right. This bit relates to my "dangerous intellectuals" blog-spiels of last week.)

The Frankfurt dudes wondered: Germany was the country most steeped in High Culture before 1914, rich, the flower of Enlightenment, well-governed...and by 1933 most of them had fled a few steps ahead of Nazi thugs. (Walter Benjamin, tragically, never quite made it out, as you probably know. He was my personal fave.) What the bloody hell happened to Germany? They spent the rest of their careers (mostly in the US, then after the part of the war that lasted 1939-45, back to Germany for some of them) trying to psychoanalyze Germany and then Western culture to discern: what went wrong?

And what a Project! All those books!

They combined Marx with Freud with Hegel with Kant with Max Weber with Georgy Lukacs. A potent stew, aye: and when it simmered: Critical Theory. What does Critical Theory have to do with "free-floating intellectuals" as theorized by Karl Mannheim (who was a sort of para-Frankfurter, having partied with some of the main Frankfurt guys, or their affiliates, but ended up at the London School of Economics and not New York or Los Angeles)?

Horkheimer had admired Mannheim's work, but in exile and with Critical Theory coalescing, Horkheimer had a problem with Mannheim's "free-floating unattached intellectuals" (FFUIs). By 1933, just before they realized they needed to pack their bags pronto, Mannheim had "unmasked" Marxism as yet another ideology. Now, with Critical  Theory as a well-honed tool, it rested on many of Marx's assumptions about alienation, false consciousness, and other aspects. Both Critical Theory and Mannheim's sociology of knowledge sought to reject all claims to Absolute Truth...but it seems that Horkheimer wasn't ready to go as far as Mannheim had. Mannheim's rejection of Truth was a tad more "Absolutier"? I think so. (A very prominent American once talked about a "more perfect nation," but I digress.)

Further, Horkheimer thought the need to reject the "free-floating" idea because: they (Mannheim's posited relatively classless stratum of free-floating intellectuals) were caught up in the whole web of assumptions about Western thought, but were as hopelessly unaware as anyone else, which I think seems kind of overweening, as Horkheimer and the Frankfurters seemed to imply they were somehow, by contrast, able to climb outside it all and see, Truly. Unfettered and Clearly. True Being, etc. (pfffft!)

As Martin Jay writes in his (in my estimation) so-far-still-definitive book on the Frankfurt School:

"By claiming that all knowledge was rooted in its social context (Seinsgebunden), Mannheim seemed to be undermining the basic Marxist distinction between true and false consciousness, to which Critical Theory adhered." (The Dialectical Imagination, p.63, and if you know of a better book on the Frankfurters, please lemme know. Their books and thought make a cottage industry for academics, and it's possible I've missed a cracking good read that's even better than Jay's.)

What interests me here - and maybe you see it as sorta "funny" too - is that the Frankfurt School guys seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming a sort of Archimedean privileged vantage point. Mannheim's view of knowledge more or less Einstein-ized the social sciences: there is no absolute privileged spot when it comes down to social beings and knowledge. To me, this is the crucial social-epistemological difference between Critical Theory and the sociology of knowledge.

[Let us all pause and take note of our own lives - and friends, family and acquaintances (let's leave out pundits for now, shall we?) - and how overwhelmingly seductive is seems to adopt the Archimedean view...Sobering, innit?]

Mannheim did not use "relativity," he used "relationism."(All partial truths are perspectives on the whole, but the FFUIs could conceivably, given their situatedness in the scheme of society, know more of the truth than any other thinkers attached to a "class"or the imperatives of an institution.)

This is socially isomorphic to Einstein's physics, it seems to me.

The Frankfurt School thinkers had fallen - via the Archimedean assumption - for that old Platonic Philosopher King trap, to joyously mix Greek metaphors. (Why did they assume only THEY could discern what was true and false consciousness and not Mannheim's FFUI grand flaneur class?)

[Now here's the trick, kiddies]:

However, if I adhere to some version of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge (and I do, but it's closer to the phenomenological version developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann as influenced by Alfred Schutz via Edmund Husserl, not that you'd asked), then I must be at least suspect or unsure to some degree of what I have written here and everything else in my blogging, and to go on a spell more, a lot of what I have personally said in the company of some of you, and let's not pretend: I do know some of you, and I do get in my cups. I do like the cannabis indica. I am a bit of a nutball. I think at least one of you have seen me on psilocybin. I get into fits of whining, let's be honest here. Some of you have endured my pangs of hypochondria. I could go on, but won't. It's downright embarrassing. Suffice: You have heard me say some dippy things...

To all this I say: it's "relational." But how many people do you know who are more FFUI than me?

And again and back to it: I am suspect. My utterances, jottings, my ideation: it's by definition suspect. It's just that I'm not sure to what degree I should suspect, and where. My own ideas, my own picture of myself, even being brutally honest: there's gotta be some lacunae in my total schmeer. There's just gotta, if I go with Mannheim's idea. I just don't know where and to what degree. (Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong in the comments! I need straightening-out, I'm just not sure WHERE.)

But I'll fer damned sure be glad to tell you how things look from my non-absolutely privileged vantage point! (Perhaps the main boon blogging confers?)

Thanks for hanging with this one. I hope it made some sense!

P.S: If you have a non-relative, non-relational privileged/Archimedean view on all social reality, please share it in the comment box below. I've been looking for you for a looooooong-assed time!