The Multi-Dimensional Society: A Critique of Repressive Desublimation

Patriks Žilins

Introduction

Upon first inspection, Herbert Marcuse’s thesis on a one-dimensional society, stripped of the struggle to resolve its own contradictions, seems to ring true in the modern day. Our modern social imaginary is familiar with the image of the technology-addicted young adult, obsessed with instant gratification and unable to recognise the absurdity of his situation. The common thesis – even if we were to know that the core of our society is rotten, we would be too complacent to act. Such concepts are not new. Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man identifies within modern industrial society a sort of domination that eliminates any potential for a dialectic struggle – a one dimensional society, alienated from realising its own dire situation. 

Although the text covers various totalitarian mechanisms, Marcuse’s most persuasive (and likely most famous) argument is that of repressive desublimation. Repressive desublimation owes its theoretical basis to Freud’s concept of sublimation. In psychoanalysis, sublimation is the process through which libidinal energy is suppressed for redirection into other fields. This allows for “excessively strong excitations”, ones that would otherwise need to be repressed, to “find an outlet and use in other fields” – often the creative, academic, etc. (Freud 115). Urges that cannot be fulfilled through immediate instinctual gratification are nonetheless fulfilled secondarily; here the basic example would be of an artist fulfilling sexual urges that society deems “degenerate” through the creation of art that in one way or another satisfies this urge. Marcuse’s repressive desublimation is essentially a reversal of sublimation – it explains how modern society eliminates the process of sublimation by superficial, immediate satisfaction of the instinctual. Marcuse posits that although pre-contemporary society heavily repressed many forms of instinctual fulfillment, notably sexuality, through the process of sublimation, high-culture of the times contained a more conscious and absolute negation of the status-quo. He contrasts this with contemporary society, which is ostensibly more liberated (sexually, economically, etc.), but in a manner that eliminates the intellectual negation of the present regime. Instant gratifications, such as easily available sex, fulfill libidinal cravings, creating a happy consciousness that is “preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered” (Marcuse 77). Thus, Marcuse lays out the alienating condition of society – the inability to critique the parts of society one would instinctually deem corrupted. The alienated subject remains in a state of shallow satisfaction, “a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust” (Marcuse 80). In this way the alienation of One-Dimensional Man can be summed up as an alienation of the subject from negation and rejection of the status-quo.

This essay will critique Marcuse’s notion of repressive desublimation by arguing that Marcuse overstates the extent to which mechanisms of repressive desublimation have taken hold in society. The critique will be two parts. The first part will reconstruct Marcuse’s account of the culture industry and argue that it has not lost the negating potential as comprehensively as Marcuse sets out. The second part will build on the first, arguing that  the repressive desublimation is not wholly effective at eliminating the struggle for resolving society’s contradictions, and that “multi-dimensionality” is still pervasive. The ultimate goal of this essay is to explain why Marcuse’s account of alienation through repressive desublimation is, ultimately, unpersuasive. 

Part 1. The Culture Industry

Marcuse’s portrayal of today’s cultural industry is juxtaposed with the cultural landscape of the pre-industrial world. Two main aspects are discussed. Firstly, Marcuse identifies within the artistic works of the past an artistic alienation that aimed to transcend the brutal reality of the pre-industrial age, to portray it to its full extent. Here, he speaks of the works of that time, that existed in a dimension above the status-quo, the specific aim of which was ​​”revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality” (Marcuse 64). In this way high-culture was expressly negating – its aim was to highlight the true instincts of the subject, beyond the repressed surface. Marcuse illustrates it by bringing in the example of Madame Bovarie, where the protagonist’s story is ““tragic” because the society in which it occurred was a backward one, with a sexual morality not yet liberalized, and a psychology not yet institutionalized” (Marcuse 65). The logic of this negation also extends to the types of personalities contained within the artistic works – “the artist, the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool” (Marcuse 62). These characters stand completely opposite of the ethos of what was then considered civilized society. By contrast, Marcuse claims that mass media, by repressive desublimation, robs these portrayals of their negating power. Through the selective permissiveness towards previously repressed attitudes, subversive depictions become normalized. “The stories of Hollywood and New York orgies, and the adventures of suburban housewives” (Marcuse 81) are not subversive exactly because we accept them as normal and rampant. Thus we lose what Marcuse calls the “Great Refusal” – the negative aspect of art. 

Secondly, a spatial distinction that used to exist in high-culture is highlighted. The places of high-culture – the opera or the theater – were physically separate from that of the outer world, for which “attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience” (Marcuse 67). The cultural space is perceived as thoroughly separate from the outside world, where the true condition can be fully highlighted. When these spaces are liberalized, made accessible, or eliminated today, this transcendence is reduced to nothing. “Paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall” destroy the “transgression and indictment” (Marcuse 68) that was once contained in high-culture’s remoteness. The accessibility of mass culture jeopardizes its meaning. 

The state culture industry is essentially a symptom of repressive desublimation. A lack of negation within mass culture should be interpreted as proof that the mechanism underlying repressive desublimation is effective. However, the opposite must also be true. A refutation of Marcuse’s perception of mass culture is, thus, also proof that the concept of repressive desublimation might be problematic. It is important to examine whether the empirical reality of mass culture fits Marcuse’s expectations.

A key problem of the lines of argumentation presented previously is that Marcuse largely ignores the stratification of culture. What Marcuse simply describes as “mass culture” is clearly a more complex set of cultures and subcultures, among which, it can be argued, a sort of Marcusian high-culture still continues to exist. Even if one assumes that no negation and critique is present in mass culture (this is quite a dubious proposition, though criticisms against it will not be discussed in this essay), if higher culture still exists and continues the tradition of the “Great Refusal”, the state of the culture industry remains essentially unchanged. After all, this “Great Refusal” has belonged primarily to the privileged minority, a fact that Marcuse himself admits (Marcuse 60).

Firstly, a high culture in its traditional form is still pervasive. The exploration of pure, obscene, marginalized instinct that Marcuse so longs for can be found in modern classics, such as American Psycho, Fight Club, etc. One might argue that, due to their popularity, these works belong to mass culture. If one would claim this, then Anna Karenina (an example that Marcuse uses to describe high culture) might as well belong to mass culture too. The high culture distinction is contained within the way these works are intellectualized and  analysed; and above all in their negating qualities. Nothing embodies the spirit of the “Great Refusal” of the status quo more than the protagonist of American Psycho – deranged businessman Patrick Bateman. High culture also preserves its spatial segregation. Operas, theatres, cinemas,  literature analysis classes in universities – these are places where active, intellectual and critical engagement with the hidden themes of artworks continue today. One must only look to the regular controversies that arise from these spaces (the film Cuties comes to mind) to see that their character of “transgression” has been preserved. One might say that aspects of high culture are being supplanted by mass culture, or that it has lost some of its popularity, but the very fact that it has a very concrete and definite presence within the modern society refutes Marcuse’s notion of comprehensive one-dimensionality. Upon reflection this seems self-apparent, if, and only if, Marcuse is not taken at his word.

There is also the third way – avant-garde. Without delving too deeply into this subject, it is clear that the avant-garde is in its core a negating force. Cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen conceptualises a dialectic between the avant-garde and high culture, in which the role of the technological is a core component of negation. In movements, such as Dada “technology mainly functioned to ridicule and dismantle bourgeois high culture and its ideology” (Huyssen 11). Duchamp’s Fountain, an exhibition of a mass produced urinal, encapsulates the usage of technology (in this case mass industry) to trivialise high culture. Instead of the technological acting as a suppressant on negation, as Marcuse would insist, Dada shows that technology can be a tool for creating new negativities. Avant-garde artists of today often push boundaries in terms of exploring repressed instincts – Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 experiment, where a group of strangers were given essentially complete control over her body, is a great example of successfully “unearthing” repressed desires. Clearly, repressive desublimation has not been able to comprehensively obliterate the negative in art.

Part 2. Repressive desublimation

It is clear that Marcuse’s repressive desublimation has not succeeded in destroying the “Great Refusal” in culture. A dissection and critique of repressive sublimation, as put forward by Marcuse is, thus, warranted. As much of the logic of repressive desublimation is outlined in the introduction, a good place to begin would be by reconstructing the extent of repressive desublimation’s effect on the consciousness of the subject. 

Marcuse’s answer here, surprisingly, limits the extent to which repressive desublimation suppresses the instinctual drives. For Marcuse, the liberalization of the status-quo satisfies the drives enough to keep them satisfied with the advanced industrial society, but this is but a “thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust” (Marcuse 80) that lurks just below. What this means in concrete, psychoanalytic terms is unclear enough, however, it appears that Marcuse is claiming that desires, otherwise fulfilled through sublimation, appear as frustrations due to repressive sublimation offering incomplete fulfillment. Marcuse even highlights the possibility of such frustrations being exploited by a fascistic regime (Marcuse 80). Ultimately, however, these frustrations, in their mitigated form, tend to appear as mostly harmless neuroses, amenable to cure under modern medicine and psychology (Marcuse 80). The widespread usage of anti-depressants and ADHD drugs in modern society seems to lend credence to this argument. Here, however, the weak point of Marcuse’s theory presents itself to critique. Repressive desublimation’s effectiveness hinges on the assumption that the surface level fulfillment of instinctual desires is enough to outweigh the internal frustrations that still remain. This is the condition of conformity to the status-quo; of one-dimensionality. It seems that it is not fulfilled. It can be argued that the same mechanism through which these frustrations might empower a fascistic movement can be reappropriated to explain the continuation of the “Great Refusal” in the present day.

The protests of May 1968, only 4 years after Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, can absolutely be described as anti-status-quo in no uncertain terms. Their intensity, even compelling Charles De Gaulle to leave France for a short amount of time, was unprecedented since World War II. The dimension of negation is apparent. Issues central to the protests – conservative social attitudes, women’s rights, economic wellbeing, sexual liberation – these are the exact same frustrations that Marcuse claims to be desublimated. If such widespread discontents can arise over the very same issues that should be “eliminated” through desublimation, at a date so close to the publishing of Marcuse’s argument, it seems that repressive desublimation fails at quelling instinctual frustrations to the extent that they have the potential to erupt into a total contempt of the status-quo. Societal contradictions remain apparent, their negation perseveres in culture, and, thus, multi-dimensionality survives.

Jurgen Habermas, critical theorist and fellow colleague of Marcuse, raises another observation in his 1968 book Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Habermas identifies the source of the student protesters (most of which he claims are “bourgeois”) positions as various subcultures – critical education, similar parental attitudes, etc. A lack of understanding of  “why the institutionalized struggle for existence, the discipline of alienated labor, and the eradication of sensuality and aesthetic gratification are perpetuated” (Habermas 122) explodes into outright rejection during May 68 – here appears the negating aspect. What is interesting here is that, despite Marcuse’s arguments, and in support of previous conclusions in this essay, cultural spaces perpetuating the “Great Refusal” – in this case the home and the university of the student protestor – are alive and well. The very bourgeois, high culture that should be “killed” by repressive desublimation not only continues, but is able to elicit an almost revolutionary struggle.

This multi-dimensionality, not one-dimensionality, is preserved in the status-quo of today. BLM in the US, the Yellow vests in France, the Arab Spring – these are movements of rejection in one form or another, and thus contradiction and multi-dimensionality. Even dominant political power are no longer rationalistic, neo-liberal actors that one can blindly submit themselves to under the guise of pragmatic, uncomplicated rule – they raise difficult, ideological questions that often elicit conflict. One must only look towards Donald Trump’s rule to agree with this conclusion. Marcuse puts forward a society that is alienated from the possibility of rejection and revolt, a sort of smooth system, operating under totalitarian acceptance. This is not the reality of our world.

Conclusion

Marcuse’s theory of repressive desublimation is insightful and, if one believes in Freudian psychoanalysis, theoretically justified. The pitfall of One-Dimensional Man is the extent to which Marcuse positions his core concept as a totalizing force. Through the empirical analysis of the culture industry of the present day, it becomes immediately apparent that Marcuse has been selective, seemingly omitting the multitude of ways in which high culture continues to thrive today, under the specific conditions of negation and spatial alienation that Marcuse positions as ideal. The reason for this can be deduced when considering the extent to which repressive sublimation is actually effective. Its efficacy appears to be overstated in One-Dimensional Man, the reason for which this essay traces to the delicate equilibrium between the desublimated desire, and the leftover, repressed frustration. Too much frustration “awakens” the subject to the reality of his situation, creating conscious negation. This, in turn, explains why repressive desublimation has not comprehensively one-dimensionalised society, especially the culture industry. Perhaps, if significantly adjusted and localized, repressive desublimation can explain certain trends towards apathy in parts of society. This might be a possibility. For now, however, Marcuse’s mechanism of repressive desublimation remains an unconvincing account of alienation that fails to adhere to reality.

Bibliography

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington Indianapolis Indiana Univ. Press, 1986.

Jürgen Habermas. Toward a Rational Society. Student Protest, Science and Politics. By Juergen Habermas. London Heinemann, 1971.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 1964. 2nd ed., London, Routledge, 1991.

Sigmund Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London, Imago Pub. Co, 1949.