Repressive Desublimation

Chapter 3 of One-Dimensional Man (1964) is titled “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation”. Marcuse begins with “higher culture”. Artistic alienation is sublimation: it creates images of conditions irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle. But when that imagery is incorporated into the kitchen, the office and the shop and released commercially for business and fun, desublimation takes place, replacing mediated by immediate gratification. It is desublimation practised from a “position of strength”, he wrote, by a society that can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens. As mass communications blend art, politics, religion and philosophy with commercials, bringing them to the common denominator of the commodity form, “the music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship.”

The same happens in the sexual sphere. The Pleasure Principle absorbs the Reality Principle, and sexuality is liberated, or rather liberalized, in socially constructive forms. This, Marcuse argued, implies repressive modes of desublimation, compared with which sublimated drives and objectives contain more deviation, more freedom and more refusal to heed the social taboos. Sex is integrated into work and public relations and so made more susceptible to controlled satisfaction; technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into commodity production and exchange, a mobilization of instinctual energy that sometimes amounts to a “scientific management of libido”. A mechanized environment, he added, blocks the “nonrepressive sublimation” in which libido transcends the immediate erotogenic zones, and by permitting only localized sexuality it actually compresses erotic energy.

The point is the political effect of adjusted pleasure. The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through it the Pleasure Principle is deprived of the claims irreconcilable with the established society: “Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.” Sublimation, by contrast, preserves the consciousness of the renunciations the repressive society inflicts on the individual, and with it the need for liberation. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping contradictions and alternatives, and the prevalence of a “Happy Consciousness” that believes the real is rational and that the system “delivers the goods”. Institutionalized desublimation, Marcuse wrote, is an aspect of the “conquest of transcendence” achieved by one-dimensional society.

The Political Preface of 1966 to Eros and Civilization restated the diagnosis. The authorities of the affluent society satisfy the sexual and aggressive energy of their subjects; scientific management of instinctual needs has become a vital factor in the reproduction of the system, and merchandise that has to be bought is made into an object of the libido. It may seem to make no sense to talk about “surplus repression” when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before, he wrote, but this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the earth into hell.

The roots of the concept have been traced to earlier writings of Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno and to Freud’s idea of the involution of sublimation. But where Reich saw sexual liberation as a condition of social liberation, repressive desublimation holds that sexual liberalization itself can prop up domination. In German usage the term came to mean, in its narrow sense, a sexual liberalization that supports the existing structures of rule. In Sexualität und Klassenkampf (1968) Reimut Reiche used it to criticise Reichian Freudo-Marxism, arguing that sexuality as a commodity can be integrated into capitalism without difficulty. A decade later Ernest Mandel took up the theme in his analysis of how dreams of escape through sex or drugs were commodified in the growing leisure industry of late capitalism.