Books: One-dimensional man: chapter three

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 [[!meta title="One-Dimensional Man"]]
 
 * Author: Hebert Marcuse
+* Terms: institutionalized, adjusted sublimation
 
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     A vicious circle seems indeed the proper image of a society which is
     self-expanding and self-perpetuating in its own preestablished direction—driven
     by the growing needs which it generates and, at the same time, contains.
+
+### Culture
+
+    The greatness of a free literature and art, the ideals of humanism, the sorrows
+    and joys of the individual, the fulfillment of the personality are important
+    items in the competitive struggle between East and West. They speak heavily
+    against the present forms of communism, and they are daily administered and
+    sold. The fact that they contradict the society which sells them does not
+    count. Just as people know or feel that advertisements and political platforms
+    must not be necessarily true or right, and yet hear and read them and even let
+    themselves be guided by them, so they accept the traditional values and make
+    them part of their mental equipment. If mass communications blend together
+    harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy
+    with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common
+    denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of
+    salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the
+    rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.
+
+    As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning
+    leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into
+    meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda,
+    business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with
+    reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is
+    brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner
+    man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the
+    progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact
+    that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a
+    materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively
+    reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented,
+    idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture.
+    In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic
+    aesthetics. It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his
+    fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into his
+    drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine
+    which remakes their content.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Obviously, the physical transformation of the world entails the mental
+    transformation of its symbols, images, and ideas. Obviously, when cities and
+    highways and National Parks replace the villages, valleys, and forests; when
+    motorboats race over the lakes and planes cut through the skies—then these
+    areas lose their character as a qualitatively different reality, as areas of
+    contradiction.
+
+    And since contradiction is the work of the Logos—rational confrontation of
+    “that which is not” with “that which is”—it must have a medium of
+    communication. The struggle for this medium, or rather the struggle against its
+    absorption into the predominant one-dimensionality, shows forth in the
+    avant-garde efforts to create an estrangement which would make the artistic
+    truth again communicable.
+
+    Bertolt Brecht has sketched the theoretical foundations for these efforts. The
+    total character of the established society confronts the playwright with the
+    question of whether it is still possible to “represent the contemporary world
+    in the theater”—that is, represent it in such a manner that the spectator
+    recognizes the truth which the play is to convey. Brecht answers that the
+    contemporary world can be thus represented only if it is represented as subject
+    to change3—as the state of negativity which is to be negated. This is doctrine
+    which has to be learned, comprehended, and acted upon; but the theater is and
+    ought to be entertainment, pleasure. However, entertainment and learning are
+    not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning. To
+    teach what the contemporary world really is behind the ideological and material
+    veil, and how it can be changed, the theater must break the spectator’s
+    identification with the events on the stage.
+    Not empathy and feeling, but distance and reflection are required. The
+    “estrangement-effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) is to produce this dissociation in
+    which the world can be recognized as what it is. “The things of everyday life
+    are lifted out of the realm of the self-evident.…”4 “That which is ‘natural’
+    must assume the features of the extraordinary. Only in this manner can the laws
+    of cause and effect reveal themselves.”5
+
+    [...]
+
+    The efforts to recapture the Great Refusal in the language of literature suffer
+    the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. As modern classics, the
+    avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without
+    endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is
+    justified by technical progress; the refusal is refuted by the alleviation of
+    misery in the advanced industrial society. The liquidation of high culture is a
+    byproduct of the conquest of nature, and of the progressing conquest of
+    scarcity.
+
+    Invalidating the cherished images of transcendence by incorporating them into
+    its omnipresent daily reality, this society testifies to the extent to which
+    insoluble conflicts are becoming manageable—to which tragedy and romance,
+    archetypal dreams and anxieties are being made susceptible to technical
+    solution and dissolution. The psychiatrist takes care of the Don Juans, Romeos,
+    Hamlets, Fausts, as he takes care of Oedipus—he cures them. The rulers of the
+    world are losing their metaphysical features. Their appearance on television,
+    at press conferences, in parliament, and at public hearings is hardly suitable
+    for drama beyond that of the advertisement,14 while the consequences of their
+    actions surpass the scope of the drama.
+
+### Adjusted desublimation
+
+    In contrast to the pleasures of adjusted desublimation, sublimation preserves
+    the consciousness of the renunciations which the repressive society inflicts
+    upon the individual, and thereby preserves the need for liberation. To be sure,
+    all sublimation is enforced by the power of society, but the unhappy
+    consciousness of this power already breaks through alienation. To be sure, all
+    sublimation accepts the social barrier to instinctual gratification, but it
+    also transgresses this barrier.
+
+    The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also
+    censors the censor because the developed conscience registers the forbidden
+    evil act not only in the individual but also in his society. Conversely, loss
+    of conscience due to the satisfactory liberties granted by an unfree society
+    makes for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of
+    this society. It is the token of declining autonomy and comprehension.
+    Sublimation demands a high degree of autonomy and comprehension; it is
+    mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, between the primary and
+    secondary processes, between the intellect and instinct, renunciation and
+    rebellion. In its most accomplished modes, such as in the artistic oeuvre,
+    sublimation becomes the cognitive power which defeats suppression while bowing
+    to it.
+
+    In the light of the cognitive function of this mode of sublimation, the
+    desublimation rampant in advanced industrial society reveals its truly
+    conformist function. This liberation of sexuality (and of aggressiveness) frees
+    the instinctual drives from much of the unhappiness and discontent that
+    elucidate the repressive power of the established universe of satisfaction. To
+    be sure, there is pervasive unhappiness, and the happy consciousness is shaky
+    enough—a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust. This unhappiness
+    lends itself easily to political mobilization; without room for conscious
+    development, it may become the instinctual reservoir for a new fascist way of
+    life and death. But there are many ways in which the unhappiness beneath the
+    happy consciousness may be turned into a source of strength and cohesion for
+    the social order. The conflicts of the unhappy individual now seem far more
+    amenable to cure than those which made for Freud’s “discontent in
+    civilization,” and they seem more adequately defined in terms of the “neurotic
+    personality of our time” than in terms of the eternal struggle between Eros and
+    Thanatos.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In accordance with the terminology used in the later works of Freud: sexuality
+    as “specialized” partial drive; Eros as that of the entire organism.
+
+### Crust
+
+    In this general necessity, guilt has no place. One man can give the signal that
+    liquidates hundreds and thousands of people, then declare himself free from all
+    pangs of conscience, and live happily ever after. The antifascist powers who
+    beat fascism on the battlefields reap the benefits of the Nazi scientists,
+    generals, and engineers; they have the historical advantage of the late-comer.
+    What begins as the horror of the concentration camps turns into the practice of
+    training people for abnormal conditions—a subterranean human existence and the
+    daily intake of radioactive nourishment. A Christian minister declares that it
+    does not contradict Christian principles to prevent with all available means
+    your neighbor from entering your bomb shelter. Another Christian minister
+    contradicts his colleague and says it does. Who is right? Again, the neutrality
+    of technological rationality shows forth over and above politics, and again it
+    shows forth as spurious, for in both cases, it serves the politics of
+    domination.
+
+    [...]
+
+    It seems that even the most hideous transgressions can be repressed in such a
+    manner that, for all practical purposes, they have ceased to be a danger for
+    society. Or, if their eruption leads to functional disturbances in the
+    individual (as in the case of one Hiroshima pilot), it does not disturb the
+    functioning of society. A mental hospital manages the disturbance.
+
+### Game
+
+    The Happy Consciousness has no limits—it arranges games with death and
+    disfiguration in which fun, team work, and strategic importance mix in
+    rewarding social harmony. The Rand Corporation, which unites scholarship,
+    research, the military, the climate, and the good life, reports such games in a
+    style of absolving cuteness, in its “RANDom News,” volume 9, number 1, under
+    the heading BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY. The rockets are rattling, the H-bomb is
+    waiting, and the space-flights are flying, and the problem is “how to guard the
+    nation and the free world.” In all this, the military planners are worried, for
+    “the cost of taking chances, of experimenting and making a mistake, may be
+    fearfully high.” But here RAND comes in; RAND relieves, and “devices like
+    RAND’S SAFE come into the picture.” The picture into which they come is
+    unclassified. It is a picture in which “the world becomes a map, missiles
+    merely symbols [long live the soothing power of symbolism!], and wars just
+    [just] plans and calculations written down on paper …” In this picture, RAND
+    has transfigured the world into an interesting technological game, and one can
+    relax—the “military planners can gain valuable ‘synthetic’ experience without
+    risk.”
+
+    PLAYING THE GAME
+
+    To understand the game one should participate, for understanding is “in the
+    experience.”
+
+    Because SAFE players have come from almost every department at RAND as well as
+    the Air Force, we might find a physicist, an engineer, and an economist on the
+    Blue team. The Red team will represent a similar cross-section.
+
+    The first day is taken up by a joint briefing on what the game is all about and
+    a study of the rules. When the teams are finally seated around the maps in
+    their respective rooms the game begins. Each team receives its policy statement
+    from the Game Director. These statements, usually prepared by a member of the
+    Control Group, give an estimate of the world situation at the time of playing,
+    some information on the policy of the opposing team, the objectives to be met
+    by the team, and the team’s budget. (The policies are changed for each game to
+    explore a wide range of strategic possibilities.)
+
+### Guilt
+
+    Obviously, in the realm of the Happy Consciousness, guilt feeling has no place,
+    and the calculus takes care of conscience. When the whole is at stake, there is
+    no crime except that of rejecting the whole, or not defending it. Crime, guilt,
+    and guilt feeling become a private affair. Freud revealed in the psyche of the
+    individual the crimes of mankind, in the individual case history the history of
+    the whole. This fatal link is successfully suppressed. Those who identify
+    themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of
+    the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong—they are not guilty. They
+    may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are
+    gone.
+
+### The Happy Conciousness
+
+    The Happy Consciousness—the belief that the real is rational and that the
+    system delivers the goods—reflects the new conformism which is a facet of
+    technological rationality translated into social behavior.
+
+### Language, memory and history
+
+    The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and
+    anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality
+    absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.
+
+    I shall discuss17 these elements in terms of the tension between the “is” and
+    the “ought,” between essence and appearance, potentiality and
+    actuality—ingression of the negative in the positive determinations of logic.
+    This sustained tension permeates the two-dimensional universe of discourse
+    which is the universe of critical, abstract thought. The two dimensions are
+    antagonistic to each other; the reality partakes of both of them, and the
+    dialectical concepts develop the real contradictions. In its own development,
+    dialectical thought came to comprehend the historical character of the
+    contradictions and the process of their mediation as historical process. Thus
+    the “other” dimension of thought appeared to be historical dimension—the
+    potentiality as historical possibility, its realization as historical event.
+
+    The suppresssion of this dimension in the societal universe of operational
+    rationality is a suppression of history, and this is not an academic but a
+    political affair. It is suppression of the society’s own past—and of its
+    future, inasmuch as this future invokes the qualitative change, the negation of
+    the present. A universe of discourse in which the categories of freedom
+    have become interchangeable and even identical with their opposites is not only
+    practicing Orwellian or Aesopian language but is repulsing and forgetting the
+    historical reality—the horror of fascism; the idea of socialism; the
+    preconditions of democracy; the content of freedom. If a bureaucratic
+    dictatorship rules and defines communist society, if fascist regimes are
+    functioning as partners of the Free World, if the welfare program of
+    enlightened capitalism is successfully defeated by labeling it “socialism,” if
+    the foundations of democracy are harmoniously abrogated in democracy, then the
+    old historical concepts are invalidated by up-to-date operational
+    redefinitions. The redefinitions are falsifications which, imposed by the
+    powers that be and the powers of fact, serve to transform falsehood into truth.
+
+    The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational
+    rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.18 Is this
+    fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of the mind in
+    which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop—faculties and forces that
+    might hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society?
+    Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the
+    established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of
+    memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of
+    “mediation” which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given
+    facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life
+    again, but whereas in reality, the former recurs in ever new forms, the latter
+    remains hope. And in the personal events which reappear in the individual
+    memory, the fears and aspirations of mankind assert themselves—the universal in
+    the particular. It is history which memory preserves. It succumbs to the
+    totalitarian power of the behavioral universe
+
+    [...]
+
+    The closed language does not demonstrate and explain—it communicates decision,
+    dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes “separation of good
+    from evil”; it establishes unquestionable rights and wrongs, and one value as
+    justification of another value. It moves in tautologies, but the tautologies
+    are terribly effective “sentences.” They pass judgment in a “prejudged form”;
+    they pronounce condemnation. For example, the “objective content,” that is, the
+    definition of such terms as “deviationist,” “revisionist,” is that of the penal
+    code, and this sort of validation promotes a consciousness for which the
+    language of the powers that be is the language of truth.24
+
+    [...]
+
+    As the substance of the various regimes no longer appears in alternative modes
+    of life, it comes to rest in alternative techniques of manipulation and
+    control. Language not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an
+    instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information;
+    where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom.