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I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):
TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."
The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.
It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??
Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.
Mercuse is such a fascinating figure to me. I can never tell whether he's so brilliant that I can't understand him, or deliberately obfuscating with his crazy word choices and meandering sentences. It's like every sentence from him is some sort of motte and bailey.
Still, even though he frustrates me, I do often get a feeling from his words that I find myself agreeing with. In this case I think he's onto something. It's sort of like going to a "punk rock" concert, where the band is all middle-aged millionaires, performing in a stadium with corporate sponsors, and the audience is also middle-aged begging to hear the same songs they've heard their entire lives. Or a "school of rock" where adults teach teenagers exactly how to pose, dress, and perform. Technically there's nothing with these things, and people seem to enjoy them, but still you get the sense that something ineffable has been lost. The traditional music scenes where young people made up stuff themselves and performed live in front of other youth with no rules seems to be disappearing.
Maybe an analogy would be a "soft" martial art, like Judo. As I understand it, Judo works by trying to redirect the opponents force, instead of directly opposing it. So while an old-school oppressive society would say "don't have sex outside of marriage! sex is bad and evil and illegal!" and that leads to young people directly opposing it, with crazy chaotic energy. A modern liberal society says "yes, have sex, it's perfectly fine, we won't stop you. But here are the recommended, socially-approved ways to do it." it channels you into just a few specific venues and styles, which have long sense been mined out of any sort of new ideas. "Go on tinder, then go to get coffee, then go for a walk in a public park, then get affirmative consent, then engage in at least 1 hour of female-centric foreplay, then wash and use a condom, then discuss what happened." It turns sex into some sort of bizarre job-hunting process, and manages to make sex unsexy.
Meanwhile internet porn just gets wilder and wilder, because it's one of the few places left that's explicitly outside the control of mainstream American media, and young people feel free to do and ask for whatever they want. I wonder how much longer that will last.
I think on a word-by-word level, Marcuse is pretty clear and straightforward. He's more straightforward than Adorno, at any rate. Can you provide an example of a sentence or paragraph that you thought was deliberately obfuscated? It's possible that you're just missing some necessary context for what he's saying.
Everyone wants to think that they're more punk than they actually are.
One time I was at a concert to see Slipknot and their singer said "this is a big fuck you to all the corporate suits who want to keep this music down!" And I'm like, dude. You are literally a corporate and mainstream band. Your songs are in Guitar Hero. Chill dude.
Phrases like "desublimated higher culture", "the pleasure principle," "the institution of the reality principle," or "demonstration against the herd instinct" are not part of my normal vocabulary. Maybe they're common in marxist/freudian writings, and maybe people who have spent enough time reading that stuff know exactly what he means. But for me, I have to guess, and I'm never quite sure if I really know what he's talking about.
But yeah, fell you 100% about going to a modern day big-budget "punk" concert. It's still fun but it's weird. I assume the band is in on the joke though and it's all kayfabe.
Ah, I see. These are all common terms in psychoanalytic theory and they have relatively straightforward definitions.
It's easy to forget how much of this stuff you start taking for granted after you've been immersed in it for so long!
Just another way of saying "not being a conformist".
Man, screw you. This started with you posting something you had just read and apparently you've devoted a huge chunk of your life to reading this nonsense. I admitted in good faith that it was hard to understand, as I think any normal person would, and you just look down on me with this obvious snobbishness. That's exactly the same feeling I get from Mercuse and all of his ilk. Go enjoy immersing yourself in Freudian pseudoscience, I'm sure that will get you a tenured humanities position.
Wow. That wasn't my intention at all. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I didn't mean any of that.
At a basic level I just wanted to reaffirm what you already guessed: you were right that they were common phrases in philosophical circles. When I said that they had "relatively straightforward definitions", what I was trying to convey was that they're nothing to be intimidated by. People aren't smart just because they use those words. You too could look up the words and learn what they mean (if you wanted to! you don't have to, of course!), and then you'd understand them just as well as the "experts". The words are no big deal. That's all I meant. There was certainly no snobbishness intended.
I didn't actually go into the definitions of the terms myself because I wasn't sure if you would actually be interested, but I'm happy to do that if you or anyone else is.
I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and
Trying Bing.com
Typing
into Google gets me various autocompletions
The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series
The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan
Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.
It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
Pleasure principle and reality principle are very simple concepts, yes. Which is exactly what I said in the post you replied to.
Freud's concept of sublimation is that unacceptable impulses (especially sexual ones) get redirected towards socially acceptable ends (especially art and science), thereby instilling the target of the redirection with a sort of elevated aura of importance. "Desublimated" higher culture would then be higher culture demystified, stripped of its aura so its material reality could be laid bare, and deprived of the underlying psychic intensity that had been redirected from the sexual drive.
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