Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblockos to you!

Rating: Null/10 (6 May 2010)

"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average man." – Frank Barron.
"Repressive desublimation" was the term German philosopher Herbert Marcuse employed to describe the process whereby people unwittingly give over their liberties to tyrants in favour of material or sensual satisfactions. At first glance the term seems oxymoronic. Why? Because in Freudian psychology, "sublimation" refers to the process whereby a natural human drive (eg sex) is transferred or "sublimated" into a more socially acceptable form (eg film or music). "Desublimation", however, posits the reverse. Here the subject's allowed unrestricted, direct access to their desires (eg porn, rape).
By attaching the seemingly contradictory modifier of "repressive", Marcuse thus challenges common sense to come to terms with the potentially repressive effects of desublimation. In other words, when the gratification of immediate material and sensual needs becomes the prevailing concern of men, then the ideals of freedom or even democracy have no chance.
Marcuse's analysis of this problem is of course relevant to our own political culture today, in which policy decisions are increasingly founded upon an economic logic rather than that of freedom or the preservation of liberty. But this was the case even 50 years ago, when Marcuse travelled to the US, then the wealthiest, supposedly the most "open" society in the world, and tried to warn people about what he called the "encroaching totalitarianism of the capitalist Establishment" - the very regime under which the US had achieved its enviable position in the world.
Marcuse believed that postmodern capitalism had "internalised" Marxism (at least in its Stalinist deformation) and would increasingly resemble a perverse hybrid of Soviet-style totalitarianism and US-style consumerism. In this world, commodities, art and objects are not just a means of distraction, but the "Ideology" itself.
Of course no one took Marcuse seriously, but he expected this. "Where is the repression in a society in which copies of the works of Plato, Hegel, Marx and Freud are available in the drugstore for anyone who cares to read them?" Marcuse asks in his book, "One-Dimensional Man". In other words, given that the resources of principled rational opposition are everywhere available, must one not presume that the absence of such opposition is indicative of the absence of any reason to question or oppose the status quo, even indeed of the actuality of freedom in the West?
Marcuse's answer is that one must not so presume; to do so would be to confuse happiness with freedom, contentment with emancipation. The logic of repressive desublimation was then supposed to be Marcuse's critical response to this presumption. By allowing – even encouraging - certain forms of desublimation (freedom), Marcuse argues, systems actually distract attention from their oppressive and authoritarian character. On a more subtle and dangerous level, the availability of "Plato in the drugstore" actually works to undermine the possibility of taking a critical stand against the repressive aspects of the society, firstly, because one simply becomes too comfortable to rock the boat, the logic of one's wallet overcoming one's rational judgement, and secondly, because the very availability of Plato in the drugstore operates as a vehicle for the retrenchment of the Establishment. Not only because the Establishment can say to its critics, "You are free; could you get Plato in the drugstore elsewhere?", but more subtly and perversely, because in the mind of the subject, the fact of his immediate contentment precludes the possibility of taking Plato seriously.
And this is what Marcuse means by his "Clockwork" sounding "One-Dimensional Society". Any society that has not reached a state of perfection - and no society has - must necessarily be at least a "two dimensional" society - a society in which the status quo and the ideal stand in conflict with each other. It is that conflict which generates change for the better. But in this clockwork society of ours, that second dimension – the utopian dimension - is increasingly vanishing.
Art and philosophy (ie "high culture") have traditionally been the guardians of this second, utopian dimension. In art, desire for utopia is sublimated into representations of utopia – either "positively" (Bach, Mozart, Hegel), as more or less direct expressions of perfection or beauty, or "negatively" (Brecht, Swift, Kubrick, Marx), as representations of the distance or difference or dissonance between the way things are and the way they ought to be.
Today the "aim" of "philosophy" is not the sublimation of the utopian desire, but rather its desublimation - not art, but action; not philosophy, but revolution. But apart from the effective existence of this second dimension of thought, there is no basis in consciousness for a critical stand toward society, and therefore no basis for practical action. That is the problem of the one-dimensional or clockwork society. And you see that in this film: in Alex's postmodern world of rampant commodification, in which art and objects are now thoroughly impotent, Alex believes the only to be truly free is to transcend into ultra violence; freedom is equated with a specific creativity, a destructive re-energising of objects, performance and art. Or to quote Albert Camus: "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".
And this is the dark irony of Marcuse's analysis of repressive desublimation. Today desublimation (rampant, unrestricted desires) is the norm and is indeed the practical result of our economic order; capitalism is devoted to the creation of desire (and the illusion of satiation). We might expect that this would be just what is wanted. But, as Marcuse shows, not all forms of desublimation are emancipatory. Some preclude the possibility of emancipation in subtle ways.
10/10 – Worth multiple viewings.