Repressive Desublimation

September 29, 2017 8:12 AM

Someone on Metafilter used the term "repressive desublimation" in a thread I was reading the other day and I want to make sure I understand it.

I hadn't heard this term before so I read the Wikipedia article and a couple of other things and it is a very intriguing concept but I am not completely sure I'm conceptualizing it properly. It seems like it might be a fancy academic term for what I've mentally referred to as "MLKing" where, for certain people or ideas, they are rejected until they force their way into the mainstream and then basically coopted and sanitized and then celebrated but what is celebrated is a much more palatable version with all the radical ideas stripped away (so it's repressive in that it elevates a safe version of the dangerous idea to keep people from engaging with the thing itself). Is this accurate? If so, it is an incredibly useful term! If not, what IS repressive desublimation? Examples? I have no philosophy background so I would be very grateful if you could frame your replies with that in mind. Any more information you can provide on this term so I don't use it inaccurately would be very much appreciated. Thank you!

posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl to Religion & Philosophy (5 answers total)

what a fascinating concept! I did a quick search and it looks like this phrase has come up a few, but only a few, times in the past on Metafilter.
posted by rebent at 9:57 AM on September 29, 2017

For the benefit of others who might be interested, here's a link to the Wikipedia article and the first paragraph, which gives the history and gist:

Repressive desublimation is a term first coined by philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, that refers to the way in which, in advanced industrial society (capitalism), "the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.” In other words, where art was previously a way to represent "that which is" from "that which is not," capitalist society causes the "flattening out" of art into a commodity incorporated into society itself. As Marcuse put it in One-Dimensional Man, "The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship."

It sounds as if your MLK example is on point.
posted by languagehat at 11:54 AM on September 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

Marx thought that modern society was founded on oppression and that class conflict was therefore inevitable. Freud thought that social order was founded on repressing basic drives like sexuality and sublimating their energy into useful forms; this makes us basically unhappy, but it's necessary in order for civilization to exist. But for Marcuse, modern society was oppressive, yet permissive (contra Freud) and lacking in social conflict (contra Marx). How was that possible? Marcuse's theory was that, rather than sublimating the libido into other forms, modern society provides outlets for satisfying the libido without getting rid of repression. So the overt and implied use of sex in advertising, mass media, etc., is a kind of desublimation of sexuality -- but one that is controlled and administered by the forces of domination, rather than being an expression of human liberation. The false or partial satisfaction that we get from this, combined with the satisfaction of basic material needs that modern society provides, keeps us feeling more or less content, so no social conflict arises and social order (i.e. oppression) is maintained.

Hugh Hefner is a fantastic example of repressive desublimation because his life was all about an apparent permissiveness that actually just perpetuates domination. The watering-down and assimilation of radical ideas is very similar, but I think not quite the same. Maybe two special cases of a more general process?
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:37 PM on September 29, 2017 [11 favorites]

Not answering the question, but related: Guy Debord's concepts of The Society of the Spectacle are not the same as Repressive Desublimation, but address similar critiques of consumer culture and related issues.
posted by ovvl at 4:58 PM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

Have you seen the second episode of Black Mirror? I think it's a pretty good example for (how I understand) the concept. Toward the end of the episode, the protagonist finds himself in a state of despair and rage with the system he lives in, and threatens to commit suicide (with a glass shard held to his jugular) on the set of a reality talent contest show. He makes an impassioned rant against the system and all its flaws--and the show's judges love his "performance." He subsequently gets his own tv show, in which his rants (delivered while holding the same shard to his neck) become no more than a schtick.

His dissent is easily taken up and made a part of the very thing it tries to revolt against. The violent, desperate critique doesn't even have to be changed to be "tv friendly"--it's not that a "sanitized" version is more palatable, so much as that his original call for revolution can't function as a revolutionary act in a system that already has a place for / interpretation of it.

It's not that the mainstream strips out all the radical ideas, so much as that we no longer have the capacity to be moved by them--ideas can't radically disturb us because we have mental boxes to put them in. A wealthy banker can buy an artwork that intends to be fervently anti-capitalist, without it challenging his economic views in the slightest, because he can put it in the box "art." We also have convenient boxes labelled "crazy," "only for out-there philosophers," and "angry radical dissident," and we already know how to relate to anything we relegate to each box. There's no radical position or act that we can't fit into our comfy pre-existing view of society.

Marcuse's own example:
"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."
posted by Edna Million at 2:35 PM on October 2, 2017 [1 favorite]