22 IV 2008
While reading Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, I find his use and reversal of Freudian theory of sublimation on art to be highly intriguing. Rather than Seeing the Freudian sublimation of sexual desires as a negative, repressive trait of preindustrial society, Marcuse sees it as a reservoir of ideas that allows the existence of a second dimension of cultural values especially important to works of art. The preindustrial novel contains within in an “antagonism between culture and social reality”—the culture reality being a collection of “oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements” against the social reality of everyday life (57). Hence, preindustrial art contains a twofold meaning of alienation and transcendence; but this alienation is a “conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a ‘higher level’ or mediated alienation” (60). The transcendental nature of preindustrial art lies in its ability to create an order, a dimension of life that can reject the unbearable social reality—it “contains the rationality of negation… in its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is” (64).
In a Freudian perspective of civilization, Marcuse recognizes that artistic alienation, in fact, is sublimation, as it “creates the images of conditions which are irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle but which, as cultural images, become tolerable, even edifying and useful” (72). The second dimension, then, is erotically charged by libido; even though it is not productive in any sense; the ideal that it creates allows one to find pleasure and joy against the social background of misery, toil, and filth. In this preindustrial world, because Pleasure Principle is separated from Reality Principle, it serves as a remedy and a point of rebellion against the scope of unbearable reality; through its repressed form, it is especially true to works of art. Marcuse observes, in examples such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, etc—
Sexuality consistently appears in a highly sublimated, ‘mediated,’ reflexive form—[in which] it is absolute, uncompromising, unconditional. The domination of Eros is, from the beginning, also that of Thanatos. Fulfillment is destruction, not in a moral or sociological but in an ontological sense. It is beyond good and evil, beyond social morality, and thus it remains beyond the reaches of the established Reality Principle, which this Eros refuses and explodes (77).
This function, however, ends with the advent of industrial society, in which the original two dimensional society merges to become an one dimensional society. Similar to Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse critiques the technological rationality of industrial society, which, on one hand, through commodity fetishism reduces art to a reified, quantifiable thing. For example, although Plato, Hegel, Marx and Freud are now recognized as “classics”, through such realization they “come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth” (64). On the other hand, through its sexual liberation and “desublimation”, one dimensional society lets the Pleasure Principle absorb the Reality Principle to create a single, de-eroticized dimension (72). Technological reality and affluence ensures revokes the individual’s need to reject reality; but along with this revocation an individual also loses his critical capacity to rebel and to create the sublime through sublimated eroticism. Instead, he is “being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered” (74). The society, then, undergoes an institutionalized desublimation that allows a shallow Happy Consciousness to prevail through technological rationality (79).
However, I am rather skeptical about Marcuse’s particular application of Freud to social criticism. It seems that he forgets an important aspect of technological rationality: even though it might be one dimensional and desublimated, it is acceptable and useful to all organisms of the society. Marcuse praises cultural heroes and their great works of sublimation in preindustrial society; but how many people truly had the ability and capacity to achieve such Great Refusal? Such an act was reserved only for the elite and the privileged, whom, through education or other means, had enough agency to reject the filth of social reality that haunted the lives of the majority of the people. It is true that in a one-dimensional society works of refusal are now reduced to “classics”; but at least “classics” allow access, and access can shape the initial response that may eventually be called critical. Thus, I find, at least the desublimation aspect of Marcuse’s work, too similar to related attempts by Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. It loses touch with the masses and survives based on an ideal of the few, critically capable elites and trained, disciplined artists. Despite its Marxist origin; it does not appeal to the general public.
