Repressive desublimation

Repressive desublimation is a term, first coined by Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, that refers to the way in which, in advanced industrial society (capitalism), "the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.”^[1] In other words, where art was previously a way to represent "that which is" from "that which is not,"^[2] capitalist society causes the "flattening out"^[3] of art into a commodity incorporated into society itself. As Marcuse put it in One-Dimensional Man, "The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship."

By offering instantaneous, rather than mediated, gratifications,^[4] repressive desublimation was considered by Marcuse to remove the energies otherwise available for a social critique; and thus to function as an emancipating dynamic under the guise of collectivist politics.