"Language is a bitch with an ice pick"*
Posted: February 21st, 2006, 7:37 am
What ever happened to Qat*
What ever happened to the counter culture?
Is there a generation gap anymore. Well we have no draft and every one has an Ipod so who needs it anyway. Freedom is not free, but you can get a good deal on it this week only. Head on down to the mall and shop till ya drop.
Desublimation. These books that I have read so long ago are bobbing back up into my conscousness.
This is a paste from
http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/bec ... arcuse.htm
One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse explored two especially insidious ways in which he believed that American capitalism had succeeded in dominating American society.
One of these ways was through the abuse of language. Language, Marcuse thought, was becoming one-dimensional and was contrived to manipulate thinking, indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers; political choices are constrained to arenas in which no really thoughtful choice is empowered; and standard vocabularies (in the military, for instance) are designed to inhibit any thought about value or morality.
The second means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. "Desublimation," then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us
We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual --- that is, formerly tabooed --- sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers. Looking at American society, today, little has changed, I would say. We have become progressively more narrow (repressed) in our satisfaction of even recreation! Being convinced that we can buy it in the form of ever-more-expensive mountain clothing or recreational vehicles. Meanwhile, most people who buy mountain clothing and four-wheel-drive vehicles never go to the mountains. We have become implicitly convinced (and victimized), believing that recreation is achieved in the purchase and ownership itself. This after all is what capitalism requires -- a never ending will to consume products.
What ever happened to the counter culture?
Is there a generation gap anymore. Well we have no draft and every one has an Ipod so who needs it anyway. Freedom is not free, but you can get a good deal on it this week only. Head on down to the mall and shop till ya drop.
Desublimation. These books that I have read so long ago are bobbing back up into my conscousness.
This is a paste from
http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/bec ... arcuse.htm
One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse explored two especially insidious ways in which he believed that American capitalism had succeeded in dominating American society.
One of these ways was through the abuse of language. Language, Marcuse thought, was becoming one-dimensional and was contrived to manipulate thinking, indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers; political choices are constrained to arenas in which no really thoughtful choice is empowered; and standard vocabularies (in the military, for instance) are designed to inhibit any thought about value or morality.
The second means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. "Desublimation," then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us
We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual --- that is, formerly tabooed --- sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers. Looking at American society, today, little has changed, I would say. We have become progressively more narrow (repressed) in our satisfaction of even recreation! Being convinced that we can buy it in the form of ever-more-expensive mountain clothing or recreational vehicles. Meanwhile, most people who buy mountain clothing and four-wheel-drive vehicles never go to the mountains. We have become implicitly convinced (and victimized), believing that recreation is achieved in the purchase and ownership itself. This after all is what capitalism requires -- a never ending will to consume products.