According to such wisdom there
is an inherent, and irreconcilable conflict between the insistence of
the pleasure principle and that of overarching necessity defined and
circumscribed by reality; indeed the entire passage of civilisation
has, according to Freud, been marked by this inescapable fact. In Civilisation
and its Discontents, Freud contended that the basis of civilisation,
i.e. that which allows its very existence, is repression of the natural
instincts of human beings. According to Freud’s highly influential
later theory, there is a continual violent struggle between the Life
Instinct or Eros, which has as its goal the preservation and enrichment
of life and the Death Instinct or Thanatos, which manifests as the destructive-aggressive
impulse aiming for a return to the non-existence of death. This conflict
is itself a permanent determining factor within all individuals, as
for society, in which the absolute necessity of taming the Death Instinct
is its repressive internalisation. For Freud, Eros is no less of a socially
disruptive force, even if it does not have death as its ultimate end.
However, left untamed-that is without its affective sublimation by the
disciplinary force of culture, it would all but destroy civilization.
Freud was adamant to stress that Eros has no organic sociality but is
a violent, anarchic power continually seeking outlets for its own gratification.
Against this unfortunate but
widely held assumption on the origins of human development, Marcuse
sought to make a ‘philosophical inquiry into Freud’ that
would engage with the conceptual theoretical methods of his broad meta-psychology
with the purpose of critically evaluating its conclusions. As early
as 1938, twenty years before this would be fully explored in the monumental
Eros and Civilisation, Marcuse was already developing his analysis of
“the inner connection between happiness and freedom” in
works such as the essay On Hedonism. In his later philosophical ‘inquiry’
Marcuse set out to uncover what he called ‘the hidden trend in
psychoanalysis’, namely the hidden tensions in Freud’s theoretical
categories, and the ideological suppositions on which many of their
conclusions are based.
In giving a materialist grounding
to psychoanalytic categories, the task for Marcuse was to uncover the
“explosive contradiction” in Freud’s thought, in keeping
with the original aims of Critical Theory and its commitment to ideologiekritik,
he attempted a radical assault on the closed ideological discourse of
psychoanalysis. Its straightforwardly conservative nature was visible
not only in the famously defensive disciplinary orthodoxies, but in
the fixedly determined narrative it assumed over the social world, and
human history; Marcuse was also quick to recognise the obvious political
conclusions to be drawn from such a position.
In Freud we find a sustained
assault on the idea of human reason as the defining force of history,
and indeed civilisation. There is a certain affinity here with other
‘founding’ thinkers in the social sciences where the foundational
claims of theory are based in large part on what may be called a ‘mythology’
of human history. This is most obvious in Hobbes (Political Theory)
in which ‘reason’ is merely the violent trajectory of the
will seeking ‘felicity’: accordingly, his hypothetical ‘state
of nature’ is barbarism, and can be avoided only by the operation
of an aggregate of calculating self-interest that results in the establishment
of an-all powerful ‘sovereign’, Leviathan. This is a view
of ‘human nature’ that is closely paralleled in Smith (Economics),
where its ‘unalterable’ certainty is recognised as the basis
for the competitive struggle for existence embodied in the market. The
point of these comparisons with Freud is to illustrate the similarities
they share in their belief that human beings have an ‘unchanging’
apparently invariant character; whatever insights can be gained from
such theories are not in question here, but the completely fallacious
ideology that they form. Just as Darwin’s discoveries would be
regularly warped into a pernicious often invisible influence on the
twentieth century, Freud’s own science makes the same unintentional
and deliberate errors: by situating human beings in an a-social, a-historical
vacuum, at the same time it uncritically embraces as ‘given’
that form of society of which it is itself part.
In his analysis of Freud’s
account of the unhappy course of civilisation, Marcuse set out to investigate
the grounds on which a non-repressive society might be based; crucial
to this is Freud’s distinction between the ‘reality principle’
and the ‘pleasure principle’. The pleasure principle is
only concerned with gratification, however this runs up against the
harshness of its immediate social environment, and the accompanying
difficulty of fulfilling the pleasure-impulse. The initial realisation
that unlimited gratification of needs is not possible, results in the
reality principle shaping behaviour in accordance with its demands:
“Under the reality principle,
the human being develops the function
of reason: it learns to “test” the reality, to distinguish
between good
and bad, true and false, useful and harmful. Man acquires the
faculties for attention, memory and judgement. He becomes a
conscious thinking subject, geared to a rationality which is imposed
on him from outside” (Marcuse, EC 1969).
Accordingly, the individual develops
a highly tuned rationality and moral sensibility, in which the ‘external’
demands of reality become introjected as ‘second nature’;
therefore Freud’s theory is in every sense an historical and social
theory, in spite of his apparent belief that it occupied the realm of
‘pure science’. For Marcuse, the repressive hold of the
reality principle is historically specific, just as there is a crucial
distinction to be made between what he famously identified as ‘basic’
and ‘surplus’ forms of repression. Put simply, this distinction
is a critical ‘drawing out’ of the historical and social
implications of Freud’s theory: basic-repression is that socialising
and developmental form which represses blindly instinctual gratification-
necessary for the preservation and reproduction of human society; whilst
surplus-repression can be defined as the social imperative of hierarchical
domination. In keeping with this unnecessary form of repression, advanced
capitalist societies function according to Marcuse’s theory, under
a historically specific form of the reality principle, which he identifies
as the performance principle.
One of the most important features
of Marcuse’s Marxian rendering of Freud, is his recognition that
capitalism demands an imposed logic of scarcity in order to successfully
reproduce itself. This can be elaborated with an example, by employing
a later concept from the Essay on Liberation that of ‘obscenity’.
In the global economy overproduction of food results in the destruction
of the surplus, whilst a modest estimate puts the numbers of those on
the brink of starvation in the third world at 800 million, with a further
500 million chronically malnourished. An example of human suffering
on such a scale as this seems so obvious as to be self-evident but the
political dimension, the fact that such a condition remains unnecessary
and imposed is continually absent from even the most heartfelt effort
to comprehend it, in this sense ideology successfully reproduces an
identification with the ‘reality principle’ of the present
order.
As Marcuse argues in Eros and
Civilisation the imposition of scarcity, is historically rooted in capitalism,
it is not the eternal struggle for existence Freud believed in typical
fashion to be ‘inescapable’, but rather “a specific
organization of scarcity, and of a specific existential attitude enforced
by this organization”. As Marcuse explains, there remains a ‘realm
of necessity’, but this diminishes quantitively, to the point
where its qualitative super session becomes a real possibility. Such
‘progressive alienation’ i.e. the overcoming of scarcity,
marks the historical limits of the need for toil and in fact labour
itself -the dream of all utopias. It is such an historical disjuncture
between the actual and the possible that Marx himself obviously had
in mind, when he talked about the ‘abolition of labour’.
There can be little doubt that the initial conflict with the elemental
forces of nature, and against hunger, poverty, and disease that have
so apparently determined the conditions of human existence, were a protracted
historical struggle with necessity; but it is just this ‘progressive
alienation’ that creates the possibility for an entirely different
world, in which freedom-in its fullest sense becomes the determining
force.
Marx of course, sketched the
possibility of the historical convergence of freedom and necessity in
the recognition that only through the overcoming of material scarcity,
and the elimination of toil, is humanity really free. Marcuse took this
proposition into previously uncharted realms, beyond the mere ‘economic’
diagnoses of Marx whilst obviously sharing many of the same foundational
premises. In his analysis of the possibility of life beyond the established
reality principle Marcuse outlines the concept of a ‘really free’
humanity, far beyond Marx’s original formulations. In Marx it
is not always clear whether socialism would bring about the inauguration
of ‘complete’ freedom, in which the totality of existence
would become the continual unfolding of creative human essence; or whether
their would remain an ‘inescapable’ ‘realm of necessity’;
before freedom could truly begin. There seems a parallel here with Marcuse’s
notion of ‘surplus repression’ which is necessary for the
overcoming of scarcity, and as such, may be an historically ‘painful’
necessity, but one that is only temporary in order to move toward a
qualitatively high, freer existence. In The German Ideology Marx talks
about ‘sensuous’ and ‘practical’ activity, by
which he means the realm of human freedom, but as far as can be guessed
this can hardly be taken to mean emptying bins or manning a production
line, rather it would imply the human knowledge to devise some way of
eliminating these activities, or at least the capability to rationally
co-ordinate them so a minimum amount of energy and time is wasted. The
ability to overcome the struggle for existence, to go beyond the imperatives
of mere survival, and live beyond the ‘realm of necessity’
is a defining feature of Marcuse’s historical critique of Freud,
what Marx meant by ‘labour’ that has “created the
subjective and objective conditions for itself”. Such a distinction
can be further observed in Marx, in the third volume of Capital when
he uses the composing of music as an example of “really free work”,
but nevertheless describes it as “at the same time the most damned
seriousness, the most intense exertion”; added to which, he no
doubt had in mind the writing of Capital. This description has a definite
echo in Marcuse’s contention that a free humanity would no longer
have its existence shaped according to material imperatives, but would
be able to live a life that was characterised by the full development
of all human faculties- intellectual, aesthetic, and sensual.
It is in this ontology of freedom,
that Freud necessarily believed to be at fault, that we find the capacity
in Marx’s phrase for ‘practical-sensuous activity’:
the ability to recreate ourselves in the world, remaking it according
to our needs; consequently, it is the capacity and force of reason-
manifested in earliest form as ‘basic’ repression in Marcuse’s
rendering of Freud, which in the course of its historical development
“creates the material means and the nucleus for relations that
permit this surplus labour to be combined, in a higher form of society,
with a reduction of the overall time devoted to material labour”
(Marx, Capital Vol. III, available at www.marxist.org).
***
In the course of Eros and Civilisation
Marcuse is careful to explain that the rule of the reality principle
based on the capitalist performance principle is not simply a ‘material’
or ‘economic’ problem. Indeed across the entire breadth
of his work and in keeping with the best traditions of Critical Theory
he displays a relentless hostility to vulgarly deterministic Marxism.
The question of domination, and the extent to which individuals are
made apparently complicit in their oppression are key elements in Marcuse’s
Freudian Critical Theory. Likewise this is not a simple matter of the
straightforward rule of force, but a complex relation of social processes
that together reproduce ‘advanced servitude’: coercion with
a smile. As Marcuse maintained in his later Aggressiveness in Advanced
Industrial Society, what constitutes ‘normality’ in advanced
capitalist society is essentially destructive to the mental and emotional
well-being of its members, even if they do not immediately recognise
this as such. The perpetuation of domination is made in accordance with
a ‘rational’ order-but rational only in the sense of its
own functional reproduction. Under such instrumental prerequisites,
human beings are subsumed by forces beyond their control in which the
world remains external to their own lives: Freedom in this sense is
defined as the extent to which they can retreat from it. As Marcuse
further notes in the same work, life under such a system is characterised
by the manipulation and reproduction of anxiety in accordance with submission,
just as this is demanded as necessary for survival. From ‘Reality
TV’ to the use of psychometric testing for recruitment purposes,
the necessity of “continuing the struggle for existence in painful,
costly, and obsolete forms” (Marcuse, 1968, pg. 256) finds its
functionally representative form in an individual and social mindset
that is in Marcuse’s words, characterised by a feeling of “being
ready for anything at the expense of everyone else”(Ibid, pg.
262).
Such a society remains structured
by class divisions based on exploitation for profit, in which a majority
of the population must engage in wage labour in order to survive, this
‘material’ alienation can be viewed on a more universal
scale as the permanent alienation of human beings from their own essential
‘being’; in that their ‘life-activity’ as the
process by which they recreate themselves in the world, is estranged
by the social relations of capital as a power against them. It is the
extent to which the antagonism between historical possibilities and
reality is exacerbated by the frustrations and miseries of living in
advanced capitalist societies, that for Marcuse could signal the emerging
development of a consciousness radically opposed to the existing social
order, that is felt with all the urgency of a ‘biological’
need. Marcuse’s use of this term in his 1969 Essay on Liberation,
designates the sum total of human functions in relation to the social
world: feelings, inclinations, personal behaviour, hopes, etc. It is
the extent to which these needs are frustrated and blocked, or manipulated
into coercive ends that holds definite possibilities for catalysing
revolt. This proposition goes beyond the immediate New Left context
of the time, as a particularly incisive, and explicitly political continuation
of the themes developed in Eros and Civilisation. Marcuse further contends
that:
“Prior
to all ethical behaviour in accordance with specific social
standards, prior to all ideological expression, morality is a
“disposition” of the organism, perhaps rooted in the erotic
drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve “ever
greater unities of life” (Marcuse, 1969, pg. 10)..
This quote illustrates well Marcuse’s
conviction that Freud’s theory has an emancipatory moment, that
is, the possibility for the development of the human ‘organism’
into a state whereby a non-aggressive, non-repressive reality principle
is the norm; in the sense that ‘biological’ means the very
depths of being-intellectual, emotional and physical- this would tend
to become ‘instinctual’. The Freudian equation of civilization
equals repression, conflates the historical specificity of those ‘basic’
developmental and socialising forms of repression, with repression per
se as the eternalising and unquestionable feature of civilisation. For
Freud, the impossibility of a non-repressive reality principle was the
only alternative to barbarism, indeed his work is textured by the same
mixture of forbidding pessimism and steely moral resolve, he believed
were the hallmarks of theoretical integrity.
For Marcuse, the recovery of
real needs for themselves would necessarily bring them into conflict
with the existing reality principle, since this reality principle in
spite of its cosmetic appearance, remains one that is based on domination
and hierarchy, fear, ignorance, dependency and aggression. Such features
are not of course unique to advanced capitalism and pre-date both it
and Freud, but they are not inescapable. When Marcuse published Eros
and Civilisation in 1958, the emerging technological-consumer society
was in its very early stages, but the features he identified, no less
than the contradictions and tensions they uncovered have only further
been proven correct in the intervening four decades, albeit in many
directions that could not have been anticipated.
One of the most theoretically
sophisticated, and indeed subversive of Marcuse’s concepts is
his notion of Eros as an “eternalising” force, demanding
permanently expanding, and intensified fulfilment in a self-sublimated
order. As he makes clear, this would imply sexuality “growing
into Eros”, and would demand non-repressive conditions to successfully
emerge: that is, it retains such a possibility within its negative relation
to existing reality, as the need to alter it. In the subversive power
of sexuality there is an obvious affinity with the early work of Wilhelm
Reich we find the first concerted radical assault on accepted-indeed
undisputed- Freudian wisdom. His early theories, which cannot be underestimated,
still retain a certain revolutionary import in their reversal of the
Freudian concepts of repression and neurosis, with the idea that sexual
fulfilment must form one of the functional bases of any given society,
in his own words: “To define freedom is to define sexual health”.
The significance of his discovery that sexual repression is-in some
sense at least-a cause, rather than merely a symptom of neurosis, offers
a striking theoretical proposition, namely that it is the inherited
feelings of guilt and shame, that haunt individuals, no less than the
socially determined forms that the reproduction of this repression may
take. Reich’s theory suffers however from several major deficiencies,
firstly the apparent bio-determinism of his belief that all human happiness
is predicated on genital sexuality if this could only be properly freed
from mentally and socially repressive forms.
Against such a reductive, and
ultimately conservative theory, Marcuse posited the notion of a ‘polymorphous’
sexuality that finds its fulfilment in a myriad of erotic possibilities.
In spite of the emancipatory content, Reich’s theory remains fundamentally
at odds with the notion of a creative Erotic life-instinct that would
remake the whole of reality in accordance with human happiness, and
not merely as Reich supposed, within a moderately liberalised sexual
sphere. It should be made clear here, that the lasting importance of
Reich’s concerted efforts during the 20’s-whilst still a
Marxist- to give an explicitly political momentum to his theories, cannot
be ignored: both his recognition of the repressive function of monogamic
marriage, and the patriarchal-nuclear family, in reproducing the repressed
individuals that in turn reproduce a repressive society, remain essential
to any critical attempt to construct a theory of emancipation, using
Freudian conceptual categories. During the relatively brief early period,
in which his revolutionary works were produced, Reich was committed,
for a time at least, to a position similar to Marcuse’s: the idea
that any revolution would inevitably fail if it did not recognise the
primacy of the individual’s life-experience as a foundation for
socialism: that is the necessity of developing a liberatory practice
in accordance with this end. As he rightly noted, in works such as The
Sexual Revolution, The Mass Psychology of Fascism and the infamous Sexual
Struggle of Youth, any given social order creates those corresponding
character forms it requires for preservation, consequently a hierarchical
society such as capitalism, requires a majority of the population to
exist in a state of dependency and conformity in accordance with is
successful reproduction; inculcated as generic character traits at the
earliest possible stage. In spite of his obvious theoretical shortcomings
Reich is notable for making one of the first serious attempts to recognise
the political in the everyday, bringing him into immediate and bitter
conflict with an uncomprehending and hostile Communist Party. Therefore
it is in his early radical use of psychoanalytic categories, and recognition
of the emancipatory potential they hold, that he retains historical
significance, even if many of his theoretical conclusions were somewhat
mistaken.
.
Under repressive conditions,
the ‘Erotic’ remains narrowly confined to the sexual, as
a repository of limited gratification, a temporary reward for the endurance
of reality; beyond this repressive containment, Eros must remain permanently
absent. The apparent rationality on which this is based is, according
to Marcuse, in fact a form of irrationality, since it remains in historical
stasis, unable to recognise the possibilities it has unleashed, to the
point where civilisation appears to be locked in the circumnavigation
of its own past. It is the incompatibility of happiness with existing
reality that Marcuse identifies as the explosive dynamic of Eros. A
new rationality would recognise itself in the transformation of reality
in accordance with human happiness
Similarly it is in the aesthetic
dimension of human experience that we find a further critical and disruptive
potential that is fundamentally at odds with reality-although one that
must leave the merely ‘aesthetic’ sphere for that of the
political. Marcuse makes effective use of this proposition, in both
Eros and Civilisation, and the chapter in One Dimensional Man, in which
he explores late capitalism’s channelling of this negative energy
into forms of repressive de-sublimation. The radical possibility that
is contained in the aesthetic realm is, in Marcuse’s words, “
a “cultural repression” of contents and truths that are
inimical to the performance principle”- that is, a sphere separated
by its opposition from reality. Marcuse traces the definite contemporary
meaning ascribed to ‘the aesthetic’ back to Kant’s
division of human reason into ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’
forms. According to such a division, ‘practical reason’
is the realm of morality, whilst ‘theoretical reason’ can
be defined as ‘descriptive’ knowledge of the laws of nature
under causality. Consequently, as Marcuse notes, in this framework there
must be a third ‘faculty’ in which the basically antagonistic
categories of practical and theoretical reason- in which are included
the same dichotomies of sensuousness and intellect, desire and cognition-
can be mediated. For Kant then: “the faculty of judgement mediates
between these two by virtue of the feeling of pain and pleasure. Combined
with the feeling of pleasure, judgement is aesthetic, and its field
of application is art”. In effect the ‘lower’ faculties
of sensuousness are linked to the higher faculties of morality via such
mediation. Since the aesthetic dimension is the realm of imagination
and creation it follows that such faculties have the power to remake
the world with universal and objective principles, in so far as “pleasure
is constituted by the pure form of the object itself” It is the
essential qualities of beauty and freedom that hold “the essence
of a truly non-repressive order”. In the sense that the object
is ‘without purpose’ i.e. it has no instrumental utility,
it represents a freedom incompatible with given reality:
“Imagination comes into
accord with the cognitive notions of understanding,
and this accord establishes a harmony of the mental faculties which
is the
pleasurable response to the free harmony of the aesthetic object.
The order
of beauty results from the order which governs the play of imagination
This double order is in conformity with laws, but laws that are themselves
free:
they are not superimposed and they do not enforce the attainment of
specific
ends and purposes; they are the pure form of existence itself”(Marcuse,
1969, pg. 178).
As the Western conception of
reason became recognisably established, the aesthetic was relegated
to a subordinate role beneath ‘rationalistic epistemology’.
Marcuse is keen to point out that it is the separation of the aesthetic
from reality, and its containment as an acceptable adjunct transcendent
of reality, which is the strength of its truth. To “establish
it as an existential category” is to set it against the existential
reality from which it is banished. Art and culture insist on a logic,
which is radically at odds with the existing reality principle, that
of sensuousness and pleasure, the possibility of happiness and the refusal
of suffering. As Marcuse points out, the origins of art lie in sensuous
gratification, and are forever returning to this creative source for
their inspiration; but according to the imperatives of the reality principle,
such original purpose must be repressed; gratification appears only
in “the pure form of the object”. As such art and the critical-imaginative
freedom it invokes is ‘beyond’ reality, effectively becoming
‘unreal’. When this relation is brought into the open, it
assumes a political urgency: it indicts human suffering as unnecessary
and unbearable and makes human liberation its primary task: such is
the field of Critical Theory. Against Freud’s diagnoses of the
inescapable necessity of repression and the unalterable nature of a
society based on hierarchy, conformity and fear, Marcuse posits the
necessity of breaking this continuum, of re-establishing the idea of
human freedom and happiness as the determining forces of existence.
Such a project cannot be conceived as Marcuse notes, by recourse to
a “transcendental” or “inner” intellectual freedom
but as “freedom in reality”: In the extent to which a transformation
of reality is possible according to these principles, justification
of the existing reality principle becomes redundant. It becomes apparent
in Marcuse’s conception of freedom, that this must be a ‘universal’
principle capable of recognising itself ‘in the world’,
that is, as the transformation of reality according to its logic: the
elimination of want, toil-labour as such- the end of a society based
on anxiety and fear, and hierarchy domination, and conformity. Marcuse
set himself the task of sharpening the antagonism between such possibilities
and existing society, what Adorno defined as ‘displacement’
or estrangement. The purpose of theory in such a situation is to maintain
the possibility of a different order in its negative relation to that
which is ‘given’:
“It is the task and
duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve
historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian
possibilities –(it is) his task to break the concreteness of
oppression in order to open the mental space in which this
society can be recognised as what it is and what it does” (Marcuse,
1965, pg. 95).
The aesthetic dimension shares
with sexuality the potential to transform the world according to a non-repressive
reality principle, in which the free play of human faculties comes into
its own. For Marcuse, there is no inherent contradiction in the concept
of freedom, which he sees as having a dialectical quality: it does not
divide into irreconcilably hostile forms that only exist separately
from each other, but has a dynamic interplay of qualities.
Taking as his model, the isolated bourgeois subject, Freud constructed
his theory of the individual on the same foundational premises. The
apparent a-historicity of such a theory is apparent throughout all of
his work, in which the ‘essential’ character of human beings
is apparently already set in early childhood, to be followed by the
same process of mental and social development that is identified with
the functional necessities of civilised society; accordingly in Freud’s
wisdom, the individual must carry the accumulated burden of a human
history defined by domination and submission, socially mediated by repression.
It is the task of the psychoanalyst to recognise and explain the difficulties
of individual adaptation and reconciliation to this schema, and to explore
their possible resolution in therapy. As Marcuse rightly noted, it is
in fact Freud’s “metapsychology”, that is, the theoretical
and foundational assumptions which his science is constructed on-rather
than the clinical prescriptions- that necessarily enter the field of
theory, and as such, contestation; consequently it is the “social
character” of Freudian categories that hold a critically explosive
potential. Against Freud’s especially bleak diagnoses of the limits
of humanity to overcome aggression and violence-made in the long shadows
of the First World War-as much as the “moralistic philosophy of
progress” of the later Neo-Freudians; Marcuse refused both the
former’s a-historical fatalism, and the latter’s fatuous
optimism, in his formulation of a Critical Theory that gave a crucial
historical depth dimension to the work of Freud. Marcuse maintained
that repression and domination may persist, but that they are not physical
laws, the potential for a world radically and qualitatively different
from that of the present is, however remote, a real historical possibility.
The continuum of domination and repression may temporarily endure, but
in Marcuse’s words as long as they do, “in and against this
continuum the fight will continue” (Marcuse, 1969, pg. xx).
