Herbert Marcuse's EROS and Civilization

A fascinating attempt to meld psychoanalytic and Marxist analyses, which yields many insights and much hope. While holding fast to Freud's idea that civilization is the result of the repression of the pleasure principle in favor of the reality principle, Marcuse argues for his own idea of a surplus repression, which is the result of historically determined social domination due to scarcity. As technology creates abundance, such domination becomes increasingly irrational, opening the way for the reduction of surplus repression and even biological repression. In short, we will work less and play more. As civilization matures in the era of abundance, sexuality will be transformed into Eros, which will diffuse the pleasure principle into all aspects of life, including work. Right now, we don't have abundance, but we do have aesthetics ("the science of sensuousness") and archetypes such as Orpheus and Narcissus to provide an image of what can and will be.

From Herman Hesse, I've always thought of poetry as, somewhat contradictory, both game and prayer. After reading Marcuse, I've realized the connection between the two: poetry is play, and the prayer is for a time when poetry is purely play.

"The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutional repression since its inception, weakens as man's knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil... Technology operates against the repressive utilization of energy in so far as it minimizes the time necessary for the production of the necessities of life, thus saving time for the development of needs beyond the realm of necessity and necessary waste." (92-93)

"Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free." (93)

"With the rationalization of the productive apparatus, with the multiplication of functions, all domination assumes the form of administration." (98)

"The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations—and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue—which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions. (100)

"... happiness is not in the mere feeling of satisfaction but in the reality of freedom and satisfaction. Happiness involves knowledge: it is the prerogative of the animal rationale." (104)

"... behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason—the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination, the critique of the performance principle." (144)

"Primary narcissism is more than autoeroticism; it engulfs the "environment," integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world.... Freud describes the "ideational content" of the surviving primary ego-feeling as "limitless extension and oneness with the universe" (oceanic feeling).... In other words, narcissism may contain the germ of a different reality principle: the libidinal cathexis of the ego (one's own body) may become the source and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the obejctive world—transforming this world into a new mode of being." (168-169)

"The basic experience in this dimension is sensuous rather than conceptual; the aesthetic perception is essentially intuition, not notion. The nature of sensuousness is "receptivity," cognition through being affected by given objects.... The aesthetic perception is accompanied by pleasure. This pleasure derives from the perception of the pure form of an object, regardless of its "matter" and of its (internal or external) "purpose." (176-177)

"The two main categories defining this order are "purposiveness without purpose" and "lawfulness without law. They circumscribe, beyond the Kantian context, the essence of a truly non-repressive order. The first defines the structure of beauty, the second that of freedom; their common character is gratification in the free play of the released potentialities of man and nature." (177)

"the interest of the senses" (182)

"The quest for the solution of a "political" problem: the liberation of man from inhuman existential conditions. Schiller states that, in order to solve the political problem, "one must pass through the aesthetic, since it is beauty that leads to freedom." The play impulse is the vehicle of this liberation. The impulse does not aim at playing "with" something; rather it is the play of life itself, beyond want and external compulsion—the manifestation of an existence without fear and anxiety, and thus the manifestation of freedom itself." (187)

"No longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body would be resexualized. The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family." (201)

"In the light of the idea of non-repressive sublimation, Freud's definition of Eros as striving to "form living substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development" takes on added significance. The biological drive becomes a cultural drive. The pleasure principle reveals its own dialectic. The erotic aim of sustaining the entire body as subject-object of pleasure calls for the continual refinement of the organism, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own projects of realization: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury. All these activities flow directly from the pleasure principle, and at the same time, they constitute work which associates individuals to "greater unities"; no longer confined within the mutilating dominion of the performance principle, they modify the impulse without deflecting it from its aim. There is sublimation and, consequently, culture; but this sublimation proceeds in a system of expanding and enduring libidinal relations, which are in themselves work relations." (211-212)

"The striving for lasting gratification makes not only for an enlarged order of libidinal relations (community) but also for the perpetuation of this order on a higher scale.... mature civilization depends for its functioning on a multitude of co-ordinated arrangements." (223-224)

"The necessity of death does not refute the possibility of final liberation. Like the other necessities, it can be made rational—painless. Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion. After a fulfilled life, they may take it upon themselves to die—at a moment of their own choosing. But even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in pain. It is the remembrance of them, and the accumulated guilt of mankind against its victims, that darken the prospect of a civilization without repression." (236-237)