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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.
Those are all more or less well-defined terms you could bump into depending on your social circles. It might be beneficial to just read up on them a bit
if your social circle is full of people still discussing 100-year old pseudoscience as if it's something to take for granted, you might wante to reconsider your life choices.
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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.
Don't do this. One-day ban.
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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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Wait, isn't that TikTok right now?
The middle school I volunteered at had to implement strict restrictions on cell phone use because the students were engrossed in social media, in particularly TikTok. From what I saw, the kids weren't merely passively consuming it. Quite a few posted their own videos, and a lot of the classroom distraction / disruption resulted from these locally-made posts rather than from viral videos. (Those happened too, of course.) That's youth communicating with one another and jockeying for status and recognition among themselves. Way more interesting than the official school curriculum. (Relevant Far Side cartoon.)
Thirty years ago, a way to impress other youths was to get start a band, or to know some good local bands, or to know a local spot where some good local bands would be playing. Now, a way to impress other youths is to post a video that goes viral (at least among your group), or to know someone whose video went viral, or to be plugged in to some less-known sites that share videos that may go viral and be the first to share those among your friends.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
thats why i specified live. very different to perform in front of your local peer group, with a whole party atmosphere, vs uploading a video for random strangers. most kids just passively watch videos that already have millions of views.
Yes, most youths watch videos that are already viral. What I observed is that, even then, a lot of the time the youth's motivation for watching those videos is social. Either someone they know shared the video with them, or it's the video that other kids are talking about. "Fear of missing out" is a key driver here. Yes, a lot of it is just that stuff on their phones is much more interesting than the boring class, like videos and games. But a lot of it is social, and specifically social with the kids they know in-person rather than randos on the internet.
Once I was at this social gathering; my acquaintances brought their teens, the latter also friends. So the adults are all talking to each other, and these three teens are sitting quietly off in a corner, side-by-side, absorbed in their phones. So I watch them, and I see that occasionally one of them giggles, like out of the blue. I casually drift to their corner, peek at their phones. Sure 'nuf, they are texting each other, and sharing links. "Really?", I said, "y'all sitting next to each other, and still texting?" They just gave me this look, like, how-can-you-boomer-possibly-understand?
Kids these days.
Sharing links seems like a reasonable...reason to text, since you can't say links. I suppose also if they want to dissuade prying ears (the adults in the room).
But, I have a sneaking suspicion that fondness for texting is related to the younger generation's socialization problems. Usually people point out that technology causes awkwardness, but I imagine there is a feedback loop here: If you're bad at reading body language and tone, you might prefer the clarity of text.
That's a reasonable hypothesis. These three in particular were very well-adjusted young people with plenty of in-person friends, but maybe in general there is that feedback loop.
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