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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.
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