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Abstract
As mass society has given way to risk society in the popular imagination, the work of the Frankfurt School has lost much of the purchase it previously have had on academic understandings of consumer culture. In this article return to Marcuses concept of repressive desublimation, arguing that it still provides useful intellectual tool for thinking through the tensions and dilemmas of consumer societies, and one which is surprisingly compatible with the post-Weberian sociology of recent years. I begin by summarising Freud's writings on sublimation, then explain Marcuses companion concepts of 'repressive sublimation' and 'repressive desublimation'. I show that Marcuse's insights into the alienating nature of capitalism usefully complement more fashionable theoretical approaches to the same subject. I conclude by drawing on Hannah Arendt's argument that judgements taste are ultimately political judgements, suggesting that this is a fruitful way understanding the responsibilities of the citizen-consumer.
Key words Freud Marcuse Arendt desublimation consumerism
MODERNITY IN TRANSITION
The critique of mass society that was advanced by the exiled members of the Frankfurt School has always occupied a marginal position in the field of cultural studies. As British scholars in particular turned more enthusiastically to the study of popular culture, little confidence was extended to the pessimistic and elitist treatment of consumer culture associated with Critical Theory. Ignoring the structural and dialectical premises of the Frankfurt School's analysis of the culture industry, critics detected a misplaced obsession with the primacy of the (male) producer and the cheerless assumption that rising consumption levels had blinded people to irrationality and injustice, producing 'social conformity and political acquiescence'.' To the old charge of intellectual snobbery has more recently been added the claim that Critical Theory is out of date, for the openness and dynamism of our own 'reflexive' modernity, it is argued, has little in common with the Weber-inspired nightmare of a totally administered world. The same Zygmunt Bauman who had earlier described the Holocaust as a permanent possibility of a rationalised society, now believes that 'the turn of events in the world under capitalist rule proved to be the exact opposite of what Max Weber anticipated'. This means, in Bauman's view, tfiat 'Marcuse's quandary' over the struggle for freedom 'is outdated since "the individual" has already been granted all...