One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Marcuse demonstrates his admiration for, and reliance on, Freud in thinking about repression, drawing heavily on Freud’s theory of sublimation. This reliance on Freud and psychology is one of the hallmarks of Marcuse’s revision of Marxism: while he is interested in the distribution of power among human relations, he is also interested in the ways humans psychologically process the world. In these chapters, Marcuse explores Repressive Desublimation as False Liberation.

This theory of desublimation—or the refusal to repress (or sublimate) desire—can be considered through the lens of profanity. Marcuse is arguing that both art and sex have been profaned in advanced industrial society. In the case of sexuality, a Playboy centerfold might be considered profane in advanced industrial society because of its graphic revelation of that which is not to be displayed publicly (genitalia) within a highly sexualized context. For Marcuse, however, what might make this image profane or pornographic is not just the graphic and sexualized focus on the genitals but the very reason why this focus is considered so erotic in the first place: The profanity of the image lies in its assumption that the erotic is so entirely located in the act of sex and, specifically, within sexual organs. In showing such a narrow view of the erotic, the image demonstrates the loss of the erotic energy of the natural world and refuses that panoramic energy. We encounter the pornographic because the world has been profaned, robbed of its energy, resulting in a concentration of energy that profanes the world, creating a world in which the concentrated nature of pornography makes sense.

Not only, of course, is libidinal energy contracted and compressed; sex is commercialized. As a result, sexuality is rendered down into pornography, which functions both as techne (a tool enabling sexual gratification) and also as a product that is branded, always with the same “type” of person as part of the product: young and attractive. These sexualized products that depend on concentration and restriction are, like the products of “higher culture,” nonetheless distributed everywhere. Like art, sexuality has been removed from the context in which it was imbued with truth. Sexual “objectification,” then, is a symptom of the repressive desublimation of sexuality. Pornography is a reflection of a world robbed of its energy.

Similarly, the arts, as they existed within “higher culture,” were contextualized so that they were “alienated” from everyday life. This alienation was, in fact, sublimation. The incorporation of visual art by way of technological reproduction can be seen everywhere. For example, in dorm rooms, where posters of “high” artists like Leonardo DaVinci, Paul Gauguin, and Mary Cassatt are everywhere. Even easier is printing an online image or buying a postcard that reproduces whatever image you want to own. The reproduction of music (just plug your earbuds in and listen to Mozart), and literature (buy Marx’s Das Kapital through Amazon and have it tomorrow) allows for immediate gratification without any mediation. The experience and consumption of art can be private where it once required a public setting: e.g., you had go to the chapel to view Leonardo DaVinci’s fresco or go to the concert hall to hear Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

In the case of literature, Marcuse remains interested in human psychology and how that psychology is represented in literature. While the texts themselves have not been revised, the radical meaning of higher literature has been diluted. Whereas the characters of those who had no place in society in the past (the criminal, the sex worker, the fool, the beggar, etc.) remain represented in this literature and continue in modern literature, they no longer are part of another dimension but have been incorporated into the one-dimensionality of society. In the past, these characters were alienated, in large part, because they did not “work” within mainstream capitalism and thus their very existence was graphically in opposition to capitalism. Now, however, this alienation and resistance is incorporated into advanced industrial society, which easily accommodates it by way of “embracing” these characters within its one-dimensionality.

Marcuse, however, is also interested in the ways alienation can still be created in the present. He cites the work of playwright Bertolt Brecht as modern art that finds a new way to create the necessary alienation between social reality and higher culture. Brecht, through his “estrangement effect,” aims to create distance and reflection in the audience rather than identification and relatability with the characters the audience is watching. The audience, then, is always aware that they are watching someone play a character, always aware of the various dimensions of representation.

Similarly, the works of surrealism attempt a “break with communication” (68), subverting assumed ways of knowing and creating a second dimension in the process. Surrealism insists on a unification of contradiction that is startling rather than mollifying, such as Man Ray’s image of an iron with nails, where the smoothness of the iron—and its purpose of smoothing—contrast with the nails that protrude out of it and refuse its supposed purpose. Unlike the tyranny of the “smooth” discourse of advanced industrial society, these artists draw attention to tension and contradiction.