Re-Reading Eros and CivilizationIn
Eros and Civilization, Marcuse draws on Freud to depict the social construction of subjectivity in the dramatic clash between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. For Freud, the instincts are originally governed by the pleasure principle: they aim solely at "gaining pleasure; from any operation which might arouse unpleasantness ("pain") mental activity draws back" (E&C 13). From early on, however, the pleasure principle comes into conflict with a harsh environment and after a series of disciplinary experiences, "the individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible" (E&C 13). Under the tutelage of the reality principle, the person learns what is useful and approved behavior, and what is harmful and forbidden. In this way, one develops one's rational faculties, becoming "a conscious, thinking subject, geared to a rationality which is imposed on him from outside" (E&C 14).
For Marcuse, then, rationality is a social construct and subjectivity is a product of social experience. Thus, like Foucault, Marcuse sees subjectivity not as a natural and metaphysical substance, pre-existing its social gestation, but as a product of societal normalization, whereby the individual is subjected to rationalizing forms of thought and behavior. According to Marcuse's conception, the reality principle enforces the totality of society's requirements, norms and prohibitions which are imposed upon the individual from "outside." This process constitutes for him a domination of the individual by society which shapes thought and behavior, desires and needs, language and consciousness. In Marcuse's words: "neither his desires nor his alteration of reality are henceforth his own: they are now 'organized' by his society. And this 'organization' represses and transsubstantiates his original instinctual needs" (E&C 14-15).
Marcuse employs Freud's theory to produce an account of how society comes to dominate the individual, how social control is internalized, and how conformity ensues. He concludes that "Freud's individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology" (E&C 16), and he repeatedly emphasizes that Freud's psychological categories are historical and political in nature. Hence, Marcuse boldly fleshes out the "political and sociological substance of Freud's theory" to develop what I call a critical theory of socialization. Whereas most theories of socialization stress its humanizing aspects by claiming that socialization makes individuals more "human"-- and thus legitimate dominant social institutions and practices --, Freud exposes the repressive content of Western civilization and the heavy price paid for its "progress." Although industrialization has resulted in material progress, Freud's analysis of the instinctual renunciations and unhappiness it has produced raises the question of whether our form of civilization is worth the suffering and misery (E&C 3ff). In Marcuse's view, Freud's account of civilization and its discontents puts in question the whole ideology of progress, productivity and the work ethic, as well as religion and morality, by "showing up the repressive content of the highest values and achievements of culture" (E&C 17).
Thus, Marcuse, like Foucault, stresses the social construction of subjectivity and the ways that subjectification (i.e. the ways of producing a socially submissive subject) are involved in a process of domination. But whereas Foucault and many poststructuralists call for resistance to domination, they often have no theoretical resources to construct a notion of agency that would efficaciously resist repression and domination. For Marcuse, however, there is a "hidden trend in psychoanalysis" which discloses those aspects of human nature that oppose the dominant ethic of labor and renunciation, while upholding "the tabooed aspirations of humanity": the demands of the pleasure principle for gratification and absence of restraint (E&C 18). He argues that Freud's instinct theory contains a "depth dimension" which suggests that our instincts strive for a condition in which freedom and happiness converge, in which we fulfill our needs, and strive to overcome repression and domination. For Marcuse, memory contains images of gratification and can play a cognitive and therapeutic role in mental life: "Its' truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which had once been fulfilled in the dim past and which are never entirely forgotten" (E&C 18-19).
Marcuse subtly reformulates the therapeutic role of memory stressed in psychoanalysis. In Freud's theory, the suppression of memory takes place through the repression of unpleasant or traumatic experiences, which are usually concerned with sexuality or aggression; the task of psychoanalysis is to free the patient from the burden or repressed, traumatic memories -- whose repression often produces neurosis -- by providing understanding and insight that would enable the individual to work through painful experiences of the past and to dissolve neurotic behavior. Although Marcuse preserves the psychoanalytic linkage between forgetting and repression, he stresses the liberating potentialities of memory and recollection of pleasurable or euphoric experiences, as well as the unpleasant or traumatic experiences stressed by Freud.
In his reconstruction of Freud, Marcuse suggests that remembrance of past experiences of freedom and happiness could put into question the painful performances of alienated labor and manifold oppressions of everyday life. These memories are embedded in individual experiences of a happier past and historical conditions that offered more and better freedom, gratification, and happiness. Marcuse will link these emancipatory dimensions of memory with phantasy and will argue that both human beings and their cultural tradition contain resources that can be mobilized against suffering and oppression in the present.
Memory for Marcuse thus re-members, reconstructs, experience, going to the past to construct future images of freedom and happiness. Whereas romanticism is past-oriented, remembering the joys of nature and the past in the face of the onslaught of industrialization, Marcuse is future-oriented, looking to the past to construct a better future. Marcuse's analysis implies that society trains the individual for the systematic repression of those emancipatory memories, and devalues experiences guided solely by the pleasure principle. Following Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, Marcuse criticizes "the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization: the faculty was chiefly directed towards remembering duties rather than pleasures; memory was linked with bad conscience, guilt and sin. Unhappiness and the threat of punishment, not happiness and the promise of freedom, linger in the memory" (E&C 232).
Marcuse claims that for Freud "phantasy" is a crucial mode of "thought-activity" that is split off from the reality-principle (E&C 14, 140ff). For Freud, phantasy "was kept free from reality- testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This is the act of phantasy-making (das Phantasieren), which begins already with the game of children, and later, continued as day- dreaming, abandons its dependence on real objects" (E&C 140). Building on this conception, Marcuse suggests that "phantasy" -- in day-dreaming, dreams at night, play, and its embodiments in art -- can project images of integral gratification, pleasure, and reconciliation, often denied in everyday life.
Hence, along with memory, Marcuse argues that phantasy can imagine another world and generate images of a better life by speaking the language of the pleasure principle and its demands for gratification. He stresses the importance of great art for liberation because it refuses "to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle (E&C 149). Art for Marcuse practices the "Great Refusal," incarnating the emancipatory contents of memory, phantasy, and the imagination through producing images of happiness and a life without anxiety. In Marcuse's view, phantasies and hopes embody the eruption of desires for increased freedom and gratification. The unconscious on this account contains the memory of integral gratification experienced in the womb, in childhood, and in peak experiences during one's life. Marcuse holds that the "psychoanalytic liberation of memory" and "restoration of phantasy" provide access to experiences of happiness and freedom which are subversive of the present life. He suggests that Freud's theory of human nature, far from refuting the possibility of a non-repressive civilization, indicates that there are aspects of human nature that are striving for happiness and freedom.
In defending the claims of the pleasure principle, Marcuse believes that he is remaining true to a materialism which takes seriously material needs and their satisfaction, and the biological "depth-dimension" of human nature. In his view, defence of the validity of the claims of the pleasure principle has critical- revolutionary import in that Freud's analysis implies that the human being can only tolerate so much repression and unhappiness, and when this point is passed the individual will rebel against the conditions of repression. Freud's theory thus contains elements of an anthropology of liberation which analyses those aspects of human nature that furnish the potential for radical opposition to the prevailing society.
Marcuse concludes that Freud's theory contains implications that have been covered over, or neglected, and which he wishes to restore in their most provocative form. He argues that this requires a restoration of Freud's instinct theory, preserving his claims for the importance of sexuality and acknowledgment of its vital and explosive claims. Neo-Freudians who deny the primacy of sexuality have, in Marcuse's view, repressed Freud's deep insights into human sexual being by relegating sexual instincts to a secondary place in their theory (E&C 238ff). Marcuse believes that Freud's theory discloses the depth and power of instinctual energies which contain untapped emancipatory potential. He describes these instinctual energies which seek pleasure and gratification as "Eros." A liberated Eros, Marcuse claims, would release energies that would not only seek sexual gratification, but would flow over into expanded human relations and more abundant creativity. The released Eros would desire, he suggests, a pleasurable aesthetic-erotic environment requiring a total restructuring of human life and the material conditions of existence.
In addition, Marcuse also accepts Freud's concept of Thanatos, the death instinct, as well as the Freudian notion of "the political economy of the instincts," in which strengthening the life instincts enable Eros to control and master Thanatos, and so to increase freedom and happiness, while diminishing aggression and destruction. Thus, surprisingly, Marcuse adopts a rather mechanistic concept of the instincts, building on Freud's biologistic energy-instinct model -- which has been sharply criticized and rejected both within various circles of psychoanalytic theory, as well as within critical theory (Habermas and his students) and poststructuralism. I believe, however, that one can construct a Marcusean theory of subjectivity without deploying the problematic aspects of Freud's instinct theory.
The key to Marcuse's reconstruction of the concept of subjectivity, I would suggest, is the "Philosophical Interlude" in E&C in which he develops a critical analysis of the presuppositions of Western rationality and its concept of the philosophical subject. Marcuse claims that the prevalent reality principle of Western civilization presupposes an antagonism between subject and object, mind and body, reason and the passions, and the individual and society. Nature is experienced on this basis as raw material to be mastered, as an object of domination, as provocation or resistance to be overpowered (E&C 110). The ego in Western thought is thus conceptualized as an aggressive, offensive subject, fighting and striving to conquer the resistant world. Through labor, the subject seeks continually to extend its power and control over nature. The Logos of this reality principle is, Marcuse argues, a logic of domination that finds its culmination in the reality principle of advanced industrial society, the performance principle. The performance principle is hostile to the senses and receptive faculties that strive for gratification and fulfillment. It contains a concept of repressive reason which seeks to tame instinctual drives for pleasure and enjoyment. Its values, which are the governing norms of modern societies, include:
profitable productivity, assertiveness, efficiency, competitiveness; in other words, the Performance Principle, the rule of functional rationality discriminating against emotions, a dual morality, the 'work ethic,' which means for the vast majority of the population condemnation to alienated and inhuman labor, and the will to power, the display of strength, virility (M&F 282).
This hegemonic version of the reality principle has been challenged, Marcuse argues, from the beginning of Western philosophy. Against the antagonistic struggle between subject and object, an opposing ideal of reconciliation and harmony has been formulated, in which the individual strives for fulfillment and gratification. This 'Logos of gratification,' Marcuse suggests, is found in Aristotle's notion of the nous theos and Hegel's ideal of spirit coming to rest and fruition in absolute knowledge (E&C 112ff). In these philosophical conceptions, the human being is to attain a condition of reconciliation after a process of struggle, suffering and labor, in which alienation and oppression are finally overcome. Schopenhauer advocates a similar idea of the restless, ever-striving "will" seeking peaceful Nirvana. In addition, Marcuse finds a logic of gratification and different conception of subjectivity in Nietzsche's emphasis on the body, the passions, joy and liberation from time and guilt (E&C 119f). The values affirmed in this reality principle would be the antithesis of the repressive performance principle and its dominating subject and would affirm
receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness, and so on. These characteristic appear indeed as opposites of domination and exploitation. On the primary psychological level, they would pertain to the domain of Eros, they would express the energy of the life instincts against the death instinct and destructive energy (M&F 284)
This alternative reality principle and conception of subjectivity also finds expression in Freud's notion of the Nirvana principle, which holds that all instincts aim at rest, quiescence and the absence of pain (E&C 5ff and 124ff). In addition, Marcuse draws on Schiller's conception of aesthetic education and play, arguing that in aesthetic and erotic experience, play, and fantasy, the conflict between reason and the senses would be overcome so that "reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational" (E&C 180). Operating through the play impulse the aesthetic function would 'abolish compulsion, and place man, both morally and physically in freedom.' It would harmonize the feelings and affections with the ideas of reason, deprive the 'laws of reason of their moral compulsion' and 'reconciles them with the interest of the senses' (E&C 182). In the language of poststructuralism, Marcuse thus envisages an embodied subjectivity in which the opposition between reason and the senses, central to the modern philosophical concept of the subject, is deconstructed. For Schiller and Marcuse, the play impulse is connected with the aesthetic function which would mediate between the passive, receptive "sensuous impulse' and the active creative "form impulse," thus reconciling reason and the senses. The play impulse aspires to a condition of freedom from restraint and anxiety, involving "freedom from the established reality: man is free when the 'reality loses its seriousness' and when its necessity 'becomes light'" (E&C 187). This "freedom to play" and to create an "aesthetic reality" requires liberation of the senses and, as both Schiller and Marcuse called for, "a total revolution in the mode of perception and feeling" (E&C 189).
The resultant conception of an aestheticized and eroticized subjectivity preserves the connotation of Sinnlichkeit as pertaining to sensuality, receptiveness, art and eros, thus redeeming the body and the senses against the tyranny of repressive reason and affirming the importance of aesthetics, play, and erotic activity in human life. Hence, against the rational and domineering subject of mastery, Marcuse advances a notion of subjectivity as mediating reason and the senses, as seeking harmony and gratification. Thus, he affirms an intersubjective ideal of a libidinal subjectivity in harmonious and gratifying relations with others and, one might add, with nature itself. Instead of controlling and dominating objects, Marcusean subjectivity seeks gratifying and peaceful relations with others and with the external world.
Moreover, Marcuse proposes a new concept of reason which he describes as "libidinal rationality" (E&C 223ff). In this conception reason is not repressive of the senses, but acts in harmony with them, helping to find objects of gratification and to cultivate and enhance sensuality. Marcuse rejects the dominant philosophical paradigm, which sees reason as the distinctly human faculty and the senses as disorderly, animalic, and inferior. The concept of reason operative in this model, Marcuse suggests, is repressive and totalitarian and does not adequately allow for aesthetic-erotic gratification and development (E&C 119ff), due to its embrace of the mind-body split. Marcuse's ideal is a form of human life in which reason becomes sensuous, protecting and enriching the life instincts, and whereby the unity of reason and the senses help create a "sensuous order" (E&C 223ff). He assumes that as more restrictions are taken away from the instincts and as they freely evolve, they will seek "lasting gratification" and will help generate social relations that will make continual gratification possible. In this way, "Eros redefines reason in its own terms. Reasonable is what sustains the order of gratification" (E&C 224).This could make possible freer, more fulfilling human relations and could create a social order and community based on freedom, gratification, cooperation, and rational authority. Then, "repressive reason gives way to a new rationality of gratification in which reason and happiness converge" (E&C 224).
