5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Marcuse presses this reinterpretation of Freud into a critical theory of the psychic costs
of modernity. In Marcuse’s view, the massive social and industrial transformations
which have occurred in the twentieth century—changes in systems of economy and
technology as well as cultural production—have produced a radical escalation in
psychological repression. The more technocapitalism has advanced, he argues, the
more repression has become surplus. The immense productive capacities released
from technology, modernism and monopoly capitalism have been turned back upon the
individual subject with a vengeance. As a consequence, the personal sphere is subject
to decomposition and fragmentation. According to Marcuse, the psychoanalytic division
of the individual into id, ego, and superego is no longer relevant. A weakening in
patriarchal authority within the bourgeois nuclear family, accompanied by the impact
of the mass media and commodified culture, has led to an authority-bound, easily
manipulable subject. Subjecthood, in conditions of late capitalism, is rendered a mere
functional component of the system of domination.
Notwithstanding this bleak picture of the contemporary epoch, Marcuse was
optimistic about social change. In one sense, he used Freudian psychoanalysis
against itself, to trace the emancipatory potentials of modernity. He argued that the
performance principle, ironically, generates the economic and social conditions
necessary for a radical transformation of society. That is, the material affluence
generated by capitalism opens the way for undoing surplus repression. Emancipation
for Marcuse is linked to a reconciliation between culture, nature, and unconscious
pleasure, what he termed ‘libidinal rationality’. The pre-conditions for the realization
of libidinal rationality include the overcoming of the split between pleasure and
reality, life and death, and a recovery of repressed needs and aspirations. Through
changes in fantasy structures and the social context, Marcuse says, society can
become re-eroticized.
Marcuse’s analysis of contemporary ideological pressures toward ‘surplus repression’
contains many insights, but it is also clear that there are important limitations to his
approach. For one thing, he fails to point in anything but the most general way to how
ideology transforms repression from ‘basic’ into ‘surplus’, and so it is far from easy to
grasp the complex ways in which culture implants political domination upon the
emotional economy of subjects. (For a detailed discussion of this and related
psycho-political difficulties in Marcuse’s work, see Elliott, 1993). Similarly, the
argument that reason or rationality can be located in repressed drives (the notion of
‘libidinal rationality’) is underdeveloped. Marcuse’s work fails to analyse in any
substantive way intersubjective social relationships. Instead, his vision of political
autonomy is one in which repressed drives become liberated, and thus transfigurative