Marcuse, Schiller and Web 2.0 (30 March 2010)

I've been reading Eros and Civilization, Marcuse's book about Freudian theory. The number of people willing to take Freud seriously has probably diminished severely since 1955, when it was published. And the 1960s would seem to have discredited the idea that hedonism could point the way to revolution. The core idea is that society now generates "surplus repression" that is no longer needed to assure the survival of civilization, now that we have better technology. This repression keeps us enslaved to capital and stuck pursuing alienated forms of labor instead of the free play of our human faculties. But the affluent society should present no obstacles (other than ideological ones) to ridding ourselves of surplus repression and getting in touch with ourselves. Whether or not society has moved in that direction is an open question.

One indicator would be a decrease in employment -- people would be less willing to work for money. Another would be production taking place outside of the aegis of the market -- i.e., peer production. And the nature of narcissism would be reversed: "narcissism, usually understood as egoistic withdrawal from reality, here is connected with oneness with the universe.... Beyond all immature autoeroticism, narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order.... Narcissus's life is that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation." Perhaps the narcissism in our culture that social critics across the political spectrum have complained about since the 1970s is actually cause for celebration, the manifestation of a new organization of culture that champions personal display over ascetic achievement, which is arguably a mystification of capitalist accumulation for its own sake. I'm not ready to sign on to that interpretation, but I am less inclined to immediately dismiss it.

Marcuse includes a chapter on the aesthetic theory of 18th century philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whom he makes sound surprisingly relevant. As Marcuse explains it, Schiller's philosophy seems to fit the Web 2.0 mode of reflexive self-display:

The aesthetic experience would arrest the violent and exploitative productivity which made man into an instrument of labor. But he would not be returned to a state of suffering passivity. His existence would still be activity, but "what he possess and produces need no longer bear the traces of servitude, the fearful design of its purpose"; beyond want and anxiety, human activity becomes display -- the free manifestation of personalities.

Later he describes one of the main elements of Schiller's aesthetics as "the transformation of toil (labor) into play, and of repressive productivity into 'display' -- a transformation that must be preceded by the conquest of want (scarcity) as the determining factor of civilization." Some would argue that those conditions are now fairly close to being met -- that we live in a culture of abundance, certainly of digital abundance, and immaterial labor (online sociality) is supplanting alienated toil for wages. One way, then, of understanding all the identity production online is as the kind of "good" narcissism, this sort of playful display.

I'm still too deeply skeptical of aesthetics to fully buy into this. I am inclined to interpret narcissism as a more profound form of alienation rather than freedom from it, and immaterial labor as a subtle form of exploitation, the colonization of a sanctified space by commercialism. But Marcuse's ideas have challenged me to think about how to articulate my reasons for thinking this. (I'm not up to the challenge right now, however.) I need better explanations for why all the things I criticize all the time are not in fact positive developments.

The meaning of human capital and the future of the humanities (28 March 2010)

Is college just for the credential, or do people actually learn anything? What improves the college graduates "human capital": what they learned in class or the mere fact of the diploma? Considering the policy of lax grading, just getting in to the "elite" schools seems to function as proof that a student deserve a permanent competitive advantage in the labor market. But that would seem to make the entire edifice of secondary education a big charade, and the professors who are involved with it clearly aren't that cynical or in such colossal bad faith. And motivated students seem to appreciate learning for its own sake, whether or not that helps them gain an economic footing in society. But if we learn for the sake of fulfilling our human potential, but the economy denies us a way of making that fulfillment socially meaningful, we become drop-outs of a different sort, free-loading off society pursuing our own esoterica while contributing nothing. Or the alternative is that we are being trained into a condition of inevitable frustration, "overqualified" for whatever socially necessary but soul-crushingly dull tasks fall our way.

So what is the deal with higher education under capitalism? Is it a consumer good (entertainment for students) or a raw material of production (inchoate knowledge transmitted and transformed into human capital to be applied practically in the economy at large)? Is it a mandatory furlough period to ease job market pressures? A way to stock individuals with useful modes of information processing and a diverse base of more or less random learning that may or may not yield surprising ideas for innovation? A period during which the critical networking skills for the "social factory" are honed? Is it a way of sorting workers into their various destinies based on their ability to figure out the game of capitalism (how to acquire status that can masquerade as hard capital) and master its strategy (figure out who is worth knowing and how to manipulate them into helping you)?

Mark Thoma linked to this post by Frances Woolley, which questions whether human capital is a myth, and highlights what is at stake.

For example, if what is taught at universities actually makes people more productive, then simply taking university courses should be enough increase earnings. In fact, to get much of a payoff from university education, you have to finish your degree (the “sheepskin effect” ). One reason education pays is that completing a degree “signals” your ability, determination, competence and general stick-with-it-ness.
Perhaps we should think of human capital as a fairy tale, a reassuring bedside story. But the power of fairy tales is that they reflect certain elemental truths about the human condition. People who teach economics may find it deeply comforting to think that their pay is justified by their high levels of human capital.
But human capital is more than a comforting story – it is a myth that shapes our understanding of the world and thus public policy. Ontario’s government is urging universities to increase retention rates, so everyone who starts university completes a degree. If the human capital theory is true, then this is sound policy: more students completing university means more human capital means a more productive economy. If, however, the value of university education is as a signal of ability, then one of the most important things that universities do is fail students. Unless some students fail, the ability to complete a university degree confers no special distinction on the graduate.
Whether or not human capital theory is true determines the best response to the demographic challenges ... If education makes people more productive, then more education can increase the productivity of our economy – possibly enough so that fewer workers are able to support the large number of pensioners. If, however, education is basically about sorting workers – if people are getting more and more degrees in hope of eventually capturing that one elusive stable professional job with benefits – then the best way of responding to the demographic crisis is to scale back post-secondary education. Doing so would effectively increase the size of the working age population substantially, easing demographic problems.

Scaling back education is hard to accept from that utopian point of view that it enriches human potential independent of its social benefits -- it helps people live richer lives. Thoma's autobiographical anecdote in his response to Woolley is a pretty good example of that. He defends education for its own sake rather than for productivity, and concludes: "I believe education is the key to a better future and I will not give up trying to increase access to as many people as possible. I don't care at all if it dilutes the signal to employers, they'll just have to figure out some other way to cull the herd."

That echoes a point Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization:

Productivity ... expresses perhaps more than any other idea the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus denigrates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals -- in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need -- the more productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.

But, he argues, historical conditions are so improved by productivity that individuals can begin to see the way back to their own needs, afforded enough leisure to conceive strategies for ending "the subjugation of man to his labor." Education begins to push in two contradictory directions, honing productivity while teaching people not to waste that productivity on meaningless work and channel it instead into their own potential.

At its heart, Eros and Civilization celebrates education for its own sake and not as preparation to reproduce the existing social order. When you strip away the Freudian claptrap, Marcuse's argument is basically that we misapprehend the needs of the system for our own wants and needs. In other words, we become convinced that we need to go to college to get a job rather than to learn, that the job market will reveal to us what we should do with our lives and our time. This he calls "surplus repression," as it directs us toward alienated labor (working for somebody else and not on something that we are personally invested in) that is not really necessary any longer for survival (at least in developed nations -- whether we are obligated to perpetuate capitalism in the West so its benefits can trickle down and liberate the poorer countries is a different question). Marcuse: "The elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate not labor but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." That is basically what's at stake in defining the purpose of higher education: either it is worker training and sorting, supported by capital and carried out for its benefit, or it is a refuge from that organizing logic, a place where one learns what it can mean to be a human. (Hence, the humanities.)

Optimistic ways to be negative (26 Jan 2010)

Going through the archive of this blog, I came across this post, about negativity. There I confess to having a knee-jerk skepticism about things billed as optimistic or positive, particularly when those terms are being used as synonyms for "feel-good" in the midst of a recommendation. I haven't changed much: My first instinct is still to read "optimistic" as actually meaning "short-sighted" or "blinkered," and to see positive spin as ideologically motivated hoodwinking. The role that blithe confidence and animal spirits played in the economic crisis has probably only made me more skeptical -- it's no good if too many people are persuaded to ignore their natural human tendency toward risk aversion. And the incentives are all in place for the financial sector and the media to collude in puffing up confidence, which I am taking to be broader than a mere willingness to spend or invest. This is obviously speculation, but complacency with one's culture would seem to reinforce a blind confidence in the general economic situation, and vice versa. And a habit of resistance and skepticism about culture seems good practice for a similar skepticism towards salespeople, investment schemes, and peddlers of financial products. After the events of the past few years, could one possibly err on the side of being too cynical? Haven't the bailouts and the events leading up to them proven once and for all that most of us lack the imagination to be cynical enough?

Frederic Jameson's gloss on Marcuse, which prompted my earlier post, seems worth quoting again: "Thus it is that the happier we are, the more surely we are given over, without even being aware of it, into the power of the socio-economic system itself." But "happiness" must be understood in a particular way, as a specific kind of narcissism endemic to consumer culture. The kind of happiness Marcuse and Jameson are talking about -- in my interpretation, anyway -- is the special satisfaction of self-fashioning with the tools afforded us by consumerism. It is a matter of experiencing a moment of cool because one is doing the approved things, or doing new things in the approved way, or is generally adding new flourishes and wrinkles to the carnival of public consumption. It is the happiness of online "sharing," of participation in pseudoevents, of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation -- the removal of moral and intellectual engagement from pleasure, and its transformation into a kind of compulsion or addiction. Jameson: "It is only when individual happiness, subjective contentment, is not positive (in the sense of ultimate satiation by the consumer society), but rather negative, as a symbolic refusal of everything which that society has to offer, that happiness can recover its right to be thought of as a measure and an enlargement of human possibilities."

Back in 2005, I endorsed the idea of resistance for its own sake.

What matters are acts of resistance, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—not laughing when the laugh track cues you, not saying “have a nice day” when you don’t mean it, adopting a stubborn literalism in the face of “witty” ads trying to win you to their snarky side, etc. One can help but be implicated in the consumerist system—one can’t simply stop shopping unless one has survival resources that extend beyond what the typical American habitus equips one for. But one can begin to seek out the sorts of tactics Michel de Certeau writes about in The Practice of Everyday Life, the subversive moves wherein the producer’s intentions are subverted by the consumers in an effort to manifest a sense of life outside of the market hegemony. Debord advocated cultural detournement, taking cultural artifacts and parodying them, using them in ways opposite to how they are intended. Sontag called it camp, approaching culture with an incisive irony that turned the consumer society’s soporifics and stupefiers against it. All of these are semi-idealistic, optimistic ways to be negative.

I'm less salient about those approaches now; cultural resistance seems to have been absorbed into what it attempts to resist. The problem with consumer culture is not its content but its form; when we express our resistance with the tools supplied to us to publicize it, our acts of local refusal become general endorsements of the larger system of cultural mediation. (Whatever we complain about on Twitter may be bad; Twitter itself is okay.) It is imperative to resist when we can, but what we end up having to resist the most is the petty vanities of celebrating our own resistance.

Moronization and the End of Privacy (15 Jan 2010)

After having battled through the critiques of positivism and analytic philosophy in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, I was happy to come across some passages toward the end, which seemed to justify the effort. He is describing the conditions of autonomy within a consumer society, in which industrially instigated "needs" are promulgated socially and to a degree constitute what is "social."

Can you tell I have been reading Marcuse? Contra Marcuse, let me have a crack at that in plainer language: as far as I can tell, Marcuse argues that technological advancement, because it is fixated on exploitation and productivity, has brought with it a false liberty that obscures real freedom, which is a matter of generating autonomous needs and decreasing the amount of domination required to reproduce society. The "sale of [our society's] goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration" rather than by true liberation from the brutalities of nature, necessity and hierarchical oppression. The success of this sick society depends on our being inculcated with the appropriate needs that direct our energy to ends that support the existing social relations; i.e., we chase an idea of identity that depends on consumer goods as signifiers and mass media as a means of articulation. Consumerism seizes a monopoly on the making of social meaning. It provides the system in which a given meaning of a thing, a practice, can transcend one's personal idiosyncratic view and become something we all know will be widely understood and interpreted predictably.

Interestingly, Marcuse regards this as the end of privacy:

Expansion has, in all forms of team-work, community life, and fun, invaded the inner space of privacy and practically eliminated the possibility of that isolation in which the individual, thrown back on himself alone, can think and question and find. This sort of privacy -- the sole condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to freedom and independence of thought -- has long since become the most expensive commodity, available only to the very rich (who don't use it). In this respect, too, "culture" reveals its feudal origins and limitations. It can become democratic only through the abolition of mass democracy, i.e., if society has succeeded in restoring the prerogatives of privacy by granting them to all and protecting them for each.

To the denial of freedom, even of the possibility of freedom, corresponds the granting of liberties where they strengthen the repression. The degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace wherever there still is peace and silence, to be ugly and to uglify things, to ooze familiarity, to offend against good form is frightening. It is frightening because it expresses the lawful and even organized effort to reject the Other in his own right, to prevent autonomy even in a small, reserved sphere of existence. In the overdeveloped countries, an ever-larger part of the population becomes one huge captive audience -- captured not by a totalitarian regime but by the liberties of the citizens whose media of amusement and elevation compel the Other to partake of their sounds, sights, and smells.

You can see why the Frankfurt school theorists are sometimes dismissed as elitist. But this captures something of why critics are horrified at social networks -- it erodes the possibility of privacy even further while all the while making its surrender seem voluntary. (Just have a look at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, proclaiming the end of privacy as a social norm.) And what is lost with privacy is not just safety from prying eyes and identity thieves and surveillance; rather we elect to give up privacy to participate in the "media of amusement and elevation" rather then sit quietly in a room, as Pascal prescribed. And with that we surrender our ability to be self-directed (such as it is), to create our own wants, to think, to be other. Instead we look for distinctions within the social language of commercial objects and activities, and then we look to promote ourselves through them. This is what it means by and large to be social, to interact with other people, particularly through a medium like Facebook, which simultaneously records these exchanges and transforms them into marketing and demographic data. Hence, that data is what we are choosing to reduce ourselves to.

As a result of this ongoing process of needs administration, we can end up feeling helpless when the apparatus is disabled. I always notice this when I travel. Suddenly the system that tells me what to want is opaque to me. Here's how Marcuse puts it:

Massive socialization begins at home and arrests the development of consciousness and conscience. The attainment of autonomy demands conditions in which the repressed dimensions of experience can come to life again; their liberation demands repression of the heteronomous needs and satisfactions which organize life in this society. The more they have become the individual's own needs and satisfactions, the more would their repression appear to be an all but fatal deprivation. But precisely by virtue of this fatal character, it may create the primary subjective prerequisite for qualitative change--namely, the redefinition of needs.

To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.

To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve -- the disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since become part of socially necessary labor -- necessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.

So to call Marcuse an elitist is to miss the point. The critique is not about the "uglification" of pop culture (though he does seem to regard that as a hint to its inadequacy). It's about what manufactured culture accomplishes in the maintenance of the existing relations of production -- how they perpetuate norms of exploitation, oppression, domination, etc., in the name of productivity, understood by consumers as "entertainment" or a lush surfeit of goods, and understood by capitalists as profit and further capital accumulation.

But Marcuse sees hopefulness in this, I think, as he seems to be arguing that the more dependent we become on these media technologies to constitute our desires, our identities, and the more they are centralized, the easier it will be for revolutionaries to know what to disrupt to change society completely. Once the internet supplies all our social needs and let's us become what we are in the sick society, simply destroying the internet will set everybody "free" to build a "real" one -- that's basically the fantasy that The Matrix depicts.

Capitalism hasn't destroyed itself with its rapacity, as Marx predicted. Perhaps, Marcuse seems to imply, unhinged consumerism will do the trick. But he still ends the book on a note of profound pessimism, with the "Great Refusal" that's necessary to stop the one-dimensionalizing of everything unlikely to come from anyone who isn't already beyond the pale of society. "The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concession to the underdog, and their armed forces sufficiently trained and equipped to take care of emergency situations." The absolute refusal that's necessary from the critical-theory point of view "seems the more unreasonable the more the established system develops its productivity and alleviates the burden of life."

So what do we do? Live in a jelly jar? Is this the first step?

Anonymous authority (26 June 2008)

I've been on a kick where I'm reading works by outdated Frankfurt School thinkers -- first, Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, then Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm. (Maybe I'll move on The Authoritarian Personality next.) Marcuse argues that economic productivity has moved us beyond scarcity as a motive, and therefore civilization should be capable of transcending Freud's reality principle, which asserts (as Marcuse interprets it) that we need to repress libidinal urges and channel them into alienated labor, into work conceived as a necessary evil. This transcendence, Marcuse argues, would be a matter of ceasing to repressive erotic impulses, a position that is easy to lampoon as a call to free love and orgies and pansexual abandon. (Because he is working in the hypersexualized Freudian context, he practically invites this interpretation.) But if one puts aside the polymorphous perversity, one can see a more useful ideal that Marcuse is sketching out, basically a utopian version of the grail of meaningful work for all: "The free development of transformed libido within transformed institutions, while eroticizing previously tabooed zones, time, and relations, would minimize the manifestations of mere sexuality by integrating them into a far larger order, including the order of work." If I'm understanding this correctly (the 1960s context of this book tempts me to use the word grok), he's saying that non-repressed society -- a culture that moved beyond capitalism's repressive reason and no longer mandated the "performance principle" -- would not be fixated on genital sex, but would instead suffuse social relations with the positive vibes of love. "The organism in its entirety becomes the substratum of sexuality, while at the same time the instinct's objective is no longer absorbed by a specialized function -- namely, that of bringing 'one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.' " That fixation, he suggests, is the product of the repressive culture; in the utopian culture the joy limited to sexual intimacy would be accessible in basically any social activity (and bourgeois fictions like the nuclear family and "falling in love" would fall away). Then we would finally be free, without institutions working to make us repress our libidinous instincts and sacrifice the primal pleasures of sensuousness and free play.

Now, it would be easier to buy into this if it conjured up in me the vision of idealized Fourierist phlanastèries instead of the Manson family. But I get stuck on the dirty-hippie attempt to realize these ideals, shed their hang-ups and unleash free love, an effort doomed by the way it was embedded in a hostile culture and easily coopted and enticed by that culture. The lesson to seems to have been that one can't will oneself into the post-repressed state, the institutions that shape us -- the society in which who we are has meaning -- need to be changed before we can change. Efforts to set up alternative, independent societies are useful to the degree that their ideas are absorbed and shift the nature of the hegemonic culture, but in and of themselves, they are doomed to eventual failure.

Why? As Marcuse points out,

Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. If society cannot use its growing productivity for reducing repression (because such usage would upset the status quo), productivity must be turned against the individuals; it becomes itself an instrument of universal control. Totalitarianism spreads over late industrial civilization wherever the interests of domination prevail upon productivity, arresting and diverting its potentialities.

The methods for doing this? Marcuse lays them out in a passage that seems to draw heavily from Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: The "coordination of the private and public existence of spontaneous and required reactions. The promotion of thoughtless leisure activities, the triumph of anti-intellectual ideologies, exemplify the trend.... The individuals who relax in this uniformly controlled reality recall not the dream but the day, not the fairy tale but its denunciation. In their erotic relations, they 'keep their appointments' -- with charm, with romance, with their favorite commercials." Technology is not helping. In a passage that would please Nicholas Carr, he writes, "With the control of information, with the absorption of individual into mass communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all the others in a state of anesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded." Think of the internet in this light, and there might be reason to fear Google, which is nothing if not an administrator of knowledge, perhaps the most efficient the world has ever seen.

Marcuse says that the non-repressive utopia will be based on "purposiveness without purpose" and "lawfulness without law" -- an ethos of aestheticism. Fromm, too, dreams of human liberation into "an active and spontaneous realization of the individual self." But in Escape From Freedom he argues that we often see individuality as a burden, as a state of insecurity and purposelessness that is not pleasurable but intolerable.

Capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing of positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self. However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness.

Capitalism destroys the traditional ways our identity would be anchored, in the class or religion to which we were born, in the duties assigned to us, in our our overall lack of social or geographical mobility. The powerlessness and unrootedness is exacerbated by the rationalization of life in a capitalist society, with all relations between people reified, instrumentalized and marked with alienation and mutual manipulation. People have no value in and of themselves, but only in what they can contribute and sell. So in isolation, they learn that they are worthless, with no innate qualities.

Fromm figured this left them vulnerable to totalitarian movements like Nazism, that promised to supply individuals a purpose in supplication to an authority figure who alleviates one's feelings of inferiority and insignificance but taking away the burden of individuality. It's obvious he has Hitler and Mussolini in mind, but Fromm also points to anonymous authority, which reigns while leaving its subjects seemingly free.

It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion.... In anonymous authority, both command and commander have become invisible. It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

This analysis presages Althusser's definition of ideology, in which such dispersed, institutional authority is actually constituitive of the individual rather than a response to developing individualism. In Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson looks at how that authority manifests specifically in advertisements, which present themselves as common sense and help us call into a being a sharpened sense of identity that we then become reliant on -- as though it were the source of our integrity. Ads seem always to be reminding us of what we already know; that is the velvet way they exercise their insidious authority.

Fromm characterizes the seductiveness of ads, as anonymous authority, in a similar way.

It does not appeal to reason but to emotion.... by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of b.o. or halitosis, or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one's whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soap. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness.

That passage touches on a few of my favorite themes -- (a) ads and entertainment are indistinguishable, (b) ads turn our insecurity into a feeling of certainty and a possibility for productive action -- a purchase, (c) ads work by stimulating fantasies not about the product but about ourselves; they encourage us to consume our sense of ourselves vicariously; to enjoy ourselves through the product the way we would enjoy the details of the lives of any other celebrity -- it puts us on their level, particularly when ads feature celebrity endorsements, and most significant, I think, (d) the point of ads collectively is to reduce our objections to non-logic and experience it as liberation.

Of course, Marcuse sees the undermining of reason -- of constricting, repressing rationality -- as liberation. But ad discourse evokes a fantasia that merely teases us with the kind of non-repression Marcuse sees as being just around the corner in his dialectic of civilization. We "keep our appointments" with commercials, just like Marcuse noted, but what we experience there is enough of the utopian promise to defuse the possibility of our ever fighting to bring that utopia into being. Ads de-repress us as they exert their authority; they solve our problems with individuality while seeming to reinforce our freedom (our freedom from hang-ups). It seems that capitalism's systems for entertaining/controlling us can absorb even the rationality-smashing protocol and make it too serve the status quo.