Translation of a paper presented at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Aachen (AK Politik), September 30 2022.
Depressive Desublimation
The French author Frederic Beigbeder prefaced his debut novel 99 Francs1 with the following epigraph by Aldous Huxley, from a new preface to Brave New World from 1946:
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news- paper editors and schoolteachers.
A little more than 50 years later, for the protagonist of 99 Francs, the successful but deeply troubled and cocaine-addled adman Octave, the triumph of this new totalitarianism seems to have been completed:
To enslave mankind, advertising has chosen the means of lowliness, flattery and persuasion. We live in the first system of man's dominion over man, against which even freedom can do nothing. On the contrary, it relies entirely on freedom, its greatest discovery. Every criticism makes it look better, every pamphlet feeds the illusion of its hypocritical tolerance. One is elegantly subjugated. Everything is allowed, nobody humiliates you if you mess up. The system has achieved its goal: even disobedience has become a form of obedience,
he states on the first pages of the novel.
In what follows, however, the focus is less on the world of advertising and its proximity to totalitarian propaganda - the novel quotes extensively from Adolf Hitler’s and Joseph Goebbels' deliberations on propaganda techniques and mass psychology - and more on the "elegant subjugation" by a system of rule based on freedom, what could be understood by this paradoxical formulation and what this system does to the souls of those subjected to it. Or to phrase it as a question: where does the widespread feeling of lack of freedom come from, when one is constantly admonished to be free? Why is depression increasing at what appear to be epidemic proportions when people are constantly encouraged to enjoy themselves? I will try to shed some light on these paradoxes below, referring in particular to the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the cultural theorist Mark Fisher. My thesis here is that Fisher took up a conundrum already theorised by Marcuse and reformulated it under changed social conditions, and had done so since his earliest blog entries. Marcuse was an important and more open influence on Fisher in his late work, which remained fragmentary (Acid Communism and the final lectures published under the title of Post-Capitalist Desire).
The title of the paper - "depressive desublimation" - alludes to Marcuse's theorem of "repressive desublimation", which he developed in the course of the 50s to the mid-60s, especially in his works "Eros and Civilization" and “One-Dimensional Man" in order to flesh out his observation that a cultural and social change is taking place as the “by- product of the social controls of technological reality, which extend liberty while intensifying domination”.2 The concept of desublimation is borrowed from Freudian drive theory. By repressive desublimation Marcuse means
replacing mediated by immediate gratification. But it is desublimation practiced from a "position of strength" on the part of society, which can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens, and because the joys which it grants promote social cohesion and contentment.3
And a few pages later, he writes:
The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced—deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission. In contrast to the pleasures of adjusted desublimation, sublimation preserves the consciousness of the renunciations which the repressive society inflicts upon the individual, and thereby preserves the need for liberation.4
Even at the risk of brutally foreshortening his argument, I will try to summarize what Marcuse means by that. With Freud, he assumes that civilization means the suppression of impulses - or drives rather - in a sexual sense, but also in the sense that civilization means work, and work implies the renunciation of immediate pleasure. According to Freud, the energy - libido - suppressed in this way trickles in other channels and is materialized in cultural achievements of all kinds, a transformative process he calls sublimation. According to Marcuse, modern technological society has significantly reduced the amount of socially necessary work, potentially releasing the restrained libido. However, this released libido tends to be satisfied directly through sexual liberalization, mass consumption and the culture industry, hence stabilizing the relations of production in postwar capitalism. Sublimated libido, on the other hand, the marks of which Marcuse identifies above all in high literature, still bears traces of frustration, but for that very reason it is a form of indirect protest against social conditions, domination and control.
This motif can be found in numerous central places in Mark Fisher’s work. He repeatedly speaks of a "hedonic conservatism" that consists, for example, in the fact that one can comment on anything on Twitter, consume as much digital pornography as one wishes, while still having only minimal control over one's own life.5 Following the Italian philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi, he writes in "Ghosts of my Life" that internet pornography and drugs such as Viagra circumvent mediation - in this case seduction - and aim at direct pleasure. Communicative capitalism (Jodi Dean’s phrase), with its non-stop communicative demands, simply does not offer any opportunities let alone the leisure necessary for elaborate, artful, elegant, indeed sublimated forms of enjoyment: one is simply constantly busy reading emails or other notifications.6
As for the fate of the arts, Fisher comes to conclusions very similar to those of Marcuse. Contemporary culture is characterized by a “deflationary hedonic relativism” in which reading Milton or listening to Joy Division is simply a consumer choice like any other. The traditional elitist contempt for pop culture remains, Fisher argues, only with the difference that now all of culture is only valued according to the degree of unsublimated satisfaction it provides. Fisher denounces the faux populism of the opinion leaders of “pop” discourse as a thinly veiled ideology of domination: supposedly “popular” albums like the (now already long forgotten) Paris Hilton LP had in fact hardly been a commercial success, and the anti-intellectualism manifested in such a gesture betrays a ruling class reflex to project their own stupidity onto the masses.7
In comparison, Marcuse’s critique of the metacritique of the culture industry reads as follows:
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than them- selves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out. But such assimilation is historically premature; it establishes cultural equality while preserving domination. Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal-aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity— remote from the society which suppressed them.8
However, other than with Marcuse, there can be no talk of a "happy consciousness“9 in Fisher's orgy of overstimulation. In “Capitalist Realism”, he links his diagnosis of hedonic conservatism to the epidemic depression that is affecting societies in the capitalist centers, and it is younger people in particular who are suffering. According to Fisher, the syndrome does not consist an inability to enjoy, but an inability to do anything other than enjoy. For Fisher, the situation is characterized by a vague sense of something missing, and a failure to understand that this something is beyond the pleasure principle.
Our (m-)adman and narrator from 99 Francs is very similar in that respect; after a passage reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," in which he lists page after page of the exquisite consumer goods with which he decorates his home and his body, he asks himself: "With all the things that you own, you must necessarily be happy be. Why aren't you? Why do you keep sticking your nose in the snow?”10, only to collapse a few sentences later due to the consequences of a coke binge. The 21st century, according to Fisher, often feels like the morning after an amphetamine excess: after the rave decade, now the hangover.11
It is always-already “after the orgy”, to quote Jean Baudrillard, but the party must go on: capitalism cannot function without manic phases, Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism. According to Fisher, bipolar disorder is the signature of the structural instability of post-Fordist capitalism, and its “crises have become stationary”12 (Joseph Vogl, see this substack below). The intervals between the irrational euphoria of the boom and the depression after the crash are becoming ever shorter, as was recently observable in the highly volatile cryptocurrencies or the NFT market, which to some observers are reminiscent of the dot.com bubble of the late 90s. In fact, many of the tendencies described in Capitalist Realism seem only to have intensified since its first publication over a decade ago.
The keyword "post-Fordism" also marks the historical break that lies between Marcuse and Fisher, despite all the parallels. In their work "The New Spirit of Capitalism", published in 1999 (i.e. almost simultaneously with Beigbeder), Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe this transformation as follows: "Autonomy, spontaneity, mobility, availability, creativity, multiple competency" etc., i.e. aspects the atrophying of which the 1968 generation denounced in the Fordist mode of production - also known as "factory society" - have become criteria for success in the last 30 (i.e. now 50) years, if not even imperatives.13 The modern world of work allows you to be more free, self-determined and creative - but you also have to be. In the words of Boltanski and Chiapello, we are dealing with a bifurcation of "artistic critique" and social critique that still ran parallel at the time of the student revolt. In a way, Jacques Lacan was right when he dismissed the revolt of the students as an expression of the desire for a new master, and predicted that they would get one: “Disobedience, too, has become a form of obedience”, we just heard from Beigbeder.
Similarly, Fisher describes the psychological effects of this transition as follows:
the disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers - it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same factory for forty years. In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital's mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. Especially in the UK, the traditional representatives of the working class - union and labor leaders - found Fordism rather too congenial; its stability of antagonism gave them a guaranteed role. But this meant that it was easy for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy.14
In a sense, the era that gave us the slogan “the private is the political” also ushered in the privatization of politics. But the progress of neoliberalism also meant a change in the character of amusement: from an ever lacking compensation for an unlived life to a side hustle. Quoting the poet laureate David Guetta, Fisher writes:
Pleasure becomes an obligation that will never let up – ‘us hustler’s work is never through/ We work hard, play hard’ – and hedonism is explicitly paralleled with work: ‘Keep partyin’ like it’s your job’. It’s the perfect anthem for an era in which the boundaries between work and non-work are eroded – by the requirement that we are always-on.15
For Fisher, again following “Bifo” Berardi, the device of the smartphone is paradigmatic for the paradoxical nexus of privatization, libido, work and depressive exhaustion: it induces a strange existential state in which exhaustion turns into sleepless overstimulation. Anxiety and desire coexist, checking notifications is both something we have to do for work and a libidinal compulsion that can never be satisfied, no matter how many messages we read.16
If you're not having fun, you'll quickly become suspicious, and the phrase "good vibes only" is a direct order. Slavoj Žižek regularly emphasizes in his writings that the late-modern superego is no longer a kind of internalized law or prohibition that demands renunciation and self-control, as in the case of classical Freudians, but on the contrary commands enjoyment - albeit in a "healthy" harmless way, a controlled excess so to speak. Modern forms of relationships and the search for romantic and/or sexual partners arguably are a testament to this claim. Promiscuity is no longer subversive, but rather hedged and domesticated by Tinder algorithms and polyamory-management.17
The depressed person is thus, according to the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, “in direct opposition to the social norms of our time”. Depression is a "disease of responsibility," according to Ehrenberg, in the sense that the depressed person fails to meet their responsibilities as the owner of themselves by letting their human capital lie idle.18
While Marcuse still suspected desublimation of producing a “happy consciousness” the function of which was to paper over the damage caused by the mode of production, the happiness imperatives of post -Fordism often engender a sense of shame for the inadequacy of obeying them.
At the same time, depression is no longer a social taboo - in recent years in particular, a discursive explosion regarding the subject of mental health has been observable in both traditional and social media. However, the form this usually takes corresponds to the privatistic model that has been roughly outlined here. Depression, we are told, is an illness like any other and deserves no stigma but rather adequate medical attention and self-care. However, it is usually implied that it is endogenous. Not coincidentally, the so-called "biological revolution" in psychology and psychiatry, based on the triad of genes, drugs, and brain chemistry, paralleled the dawn of neoliberalism.19 There is indeed a sensitivity to the reality and spread of mental illnesses, in particular depression, but precisely not to the idea that they could have a general and universal character. As Fisher famously writes in Capitalist Realism:
The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.20
The conclusions Fisher draws from this critique for a repoliticization of mental illness are provocative. A society that prescribes enjoyment and happiness and blames the individual for their lack of it must be countered with de-personalization: it's not your fault, it's capitalism. But it’s not your own illness either, but a collective depression.
Quotes are my translation from the German edition published under 39,99 with Rowohlt in 2001. The French original was published with Grasset in 2000.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed., Routledge 1991, p. 76.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p. 79.
Mark Fisher, K-Punk. The Collected And Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. Darren Ambrose, Repeater 2018, p. 318.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures, Zer0 Books 2014, p. 216.
Fisher, K-Punk, pp. 513- 517.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 67f.
See ibid., passim.
Beigbeder, 39,99, p. 105.
Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, pp. 252f.
Joseph Vogl, „Die Literatur ist voll von solchen Dramen“. Im Gespräch mit Joseph Vogl über den Coup der GameStop-Aktionäre, Jungle World 6/21, for a translation see ruthless.substack.com, Asset Communism?
Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello, Der Neue Geist des Kapitalismus, Herbert von Halem 2006, pp. 143f., 1st ed. Gallimard 1999. Here, my translation.
Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?, Zer0 Books 2009, 34f.
Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 261.
Cf. Fisher, “Time-Wars. Towards an Alternative to the neo-Capitalist Era“, in: K-Punk, pp. 753-760.
Berardi goes so far as to speak of a counterintuitive new culture of frigidity and impotence. See Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, Futurability. The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso 2017, 80f. and passim.
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self. Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, McGill-Queen‘s University Press 2016, pp. 233, 4, 7.
See, for example, Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers. Psychiatry‘s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, WW Norton 2019.
Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 37.