User:Jacobisq/Repressive desublimation

Repressive desublimation is a term brought into prominence by Herbert Marcuse in the Sixties to highlight the way whereby - in his words - in advanced capitalism “sexuality is liberated (or rather liberalized) in socially constructive forms” so as to serve, rather than to challenge, forms of social control. Rather than acting against the social order (as the repressive hypothesis would suggest), sexual liberation was thus co-opted to support the repressive order, through the undoing of sublimations and the release of pleasure in socially approved forms.

By offering instantaneous, rather than mediated gratifications,, repressive desublimation was considered by Marcuse to remove the energies otherwise available for a social critique; and thus to function as a conservative force under the guise of liberation.

Origins and influence
The roots of Marcuse's concept have been traced to the earlier writings of Reich and Adorno,, as well as to a shared knowledge of the Freudian idea of the involution of sublimation.

Marcuse's idea fed into the student activism of the Sixties,, as well as being debated at a more formal level by figures such as Hannah Arendt and Norman O. Brown. A decade later, Ernest Mandel took up Marcuse's theme in his analysis of how dreams of escape through sex (or drugs) were commodified as part of the growing commercialisation of leisure in late capitalism.

Subsequent developments
Repressive desublimation has been considered in some postmodernist thought as an accurate description of many latter-day social developments, though with these now re-valorised in a celebration, not condemnation, of the contented depthlessness of one-dimensional global man. Thus for example the post-political, media-friendly sexuality of the Nineties has been considered as a conservative construct within the neoliberal order, supporting a advertisement-based system of mass sexualised commodification, exactly as Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation predicted.

Figures like Slavoj Zizek however have taken up Marcuse's idea in a more critical sense, to explore the short-circuiting of desire and the effacement of the psychological dimension within 21C psycho-sexuality. Here the socialisation of the unconscious into mass form of pleasure-drills, and the social control of the drive exercised through the command to transgress, rather than repress, can be seen as practical examples of repressive desublimation pervading much of global culture.

Critical exploration of contemporary Raunch culture has also been usefully linked to the notion of repressive desublimation.

Criticism
Marcuse's idea can be criticised for utopianism in seeking to envisage an alternative to the happy consciousness of repressive desublimation that permeates postmodern culture, as well as for modernist elitism in his appeal for critical leverage to an 'autonomous' sphere of high culture.

Foucault expanded the concept into 'hyper-repressive desublimation', and simultaneously criticised it for ignoring the plurality and extent of competing sexual discourses that emerged from the sexual revolution.