Marcuse describes a utopia based on aesthetics, sensuality and play, as opposed to our current construction of civilization based on reason, production and repression. He describes current civilization in terms of Freud’s metatheories, which were attempts to question the connection between civilization and barbarism, progress and suffering. Marcuse makes a distinction between these attempts and the practice of psychoanalysis proper. It does not attempt to achieve any of the radical societal changes that Freud envisioned. Psychoanalysis is merely a way to help subjects fit more easily into the current repressive constructs of civilization.

Marcuse’s foundation begins with a description of some of Freud’s key principles and their inherent constraint. Constraint is the precondition of what we call progress. Our instincts are founded in the pleasure principle of Eros (libidinal energy), which strives for nothing more than gratification as an end in itself. If we didn’t control our libidinal energy, we would become so focused on pleasure and gratification that we wouldn’t work and we (culture) would perish. This instinct that leads us to death is called the death drive. It is destructive, not for its own sake, but for the relief of tension, the tension we feel having left the womb, having lost our inorganic equilibrium, having lost freedom from excitation. The descent toward death is an unconscious flight from pain and want. (29)

The reality principle harnesses this libidinal energy and reroutes it into work. Man’s desires and reality become “organized by society, which represses his original instinctual needs. If absence from repression is the archetype of freedom, then civilization is the struggle against this freedom.” (p.15) For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is “suspended” and pain prevails. And since the basic instincts strive for the prevalence of pleasure and for the absence of pain, the pleasure principle is incompatible with reality and the instincts have to undergo a repressive regimentation. (35)

And so a world is created which is by design too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay. In other words, whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work. However, this is a fallacious situation because it represents scarcity as a fact, when scarcity is actually a consequence of this specific organization of scarcity. The distribution of scarcity has been imposed on individuals by violence and power to suppress Eros and force more productivity. The additional controls arising from specific institutions of domination, controls over and above those indispensable for civilized human association, are what Marcuse denotes as surplus-repression. (37)

The various modes of domination result in various historical forms of the reality principle. The performance principle is the current historical incarnation of the reality principle. Work has now become general and so have the restrictions placed upon the libido: labor time, which is the largest part of the individual’s life time, is painful time, for alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle. (45) Repression disappears in the grand objective order of things which rewards more or less adequately the complying individuals and, in doing so, reproduces more or less adequately society as a whole. (46)

Marcuse says we will never move beyond the performance principle by working towards leisure or higher values. Value is associated with production. It makes the equation that the harder one works, the more one produces, the happier one will become.

He outlines a new model characterized by Orpheus, Narcissus and the aesthetic (vs. the productive). It is the order of sensuousness and the play impulse. It is not a question of eliminating labor per se, but of eliminating labor as the organization of human existence, i.e., surplus-labor.

The two main principles of the aesthetic model are purposiveness without purpose and lawfulness without law. An object is not judged by its usefulness or purpose, but instead exists in its “pure form.” It is free from relations and properties, and there is no forced attainment of specific ends. That is, the cause and effect that we see in rational civilization does not apply to the aesthetic model.

In the Orphic-Narcissistic images we find the Great Refusal, the refusal to accept separation from the libidinous object (or subject). Orpheus and Narcissus protest against the repressive order of procreative sexuality. The language of Orphic Eros is song, work is play, life is that of beauty and existence is contemplation. The aesthetic model is necessarily unreasonable and sensuous. Reason is an instrument of constraint, and instrument of the current performance principle.

More to come.