Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society

1. Wasteful industrial production for the purpose of raising the apparent standard of living in a highly stratified society whose social apparatus having been privatized to a totalitarian thoroughness of centralization in governmental intervention results in an unhealthy emphasis on ’scientific’,investigation and equivocations of objectivity which exert undue influence over the individuals’ intellect, will, soul, psychology, work and speech.

2. ‘Normal’ is generally based on a biological conception of the human subject according to which measurable processes, quantifiable in their relation to others of their kind, can be compared to determine the pre-defined level of correspondence with conceptual criteria for judging relative ‘health’ against the abnormality, or “disease.”

3. Those in mental health, however they may defer to the same standards of the physician in determining normalcy, according to an individual’s socio-economic demographic, must take its standards from the societal context surrounding the individuals in questions; thus, ‘normal’, as a social construction (i.e. one which derives its objective status as the abstraction of human relations’ interpretation), it is based on a subjective context.

4. Since environment is necessary to therapeutic treatments of the abnormal, a certain level of arbitrariness may be present in determining the appropriate functioning of any member of a social class based on differences which may require one to conform under improper circumstances.

5. Society’s standards of normativity-as-health could, in isolation or free from outside contribution (because inefficient in misdirecting particular impulses as ‘non-desirable’ according to one set of assumptions in conflict with other necessities), require adjustment under threat of discipline.

6. To compensate with the pressures of the split between ideal potential and actual, human experience, the individual might bear a disproportionate share of the strain opening up a dichotomy between being manipulated and controlling to the point of subsuming even subjective necessities of instinct to the general dictates of technological, administrative and scientific discourse in preference to that of the individual’s health unconsciously.

7. ‘Control’ in advancing industrial society must of course always be practiced with an end in mind and by whom; but since healing this gap requires the concentration of a good deal in mental energy’s spirit re-directed to the acquisition and trade of goods and capital needed to perpetuate the cycle of treating these ailments and maintaining that, the needs of standardization for projection are centralized diffusively through community, groups, media, companies—in de iure fascist states, government: The human sciences and industries which treat and supplement their various abberations and manifestation become bound up in the business of their own representation.

8. So the social world becomes intertwined with people’s psychology in a manner directly related to the basis for judgment of what normal may be.

9. This leads to uniform health for the individual’s mental in state only in the event that societal relations and distribution of resources are directed toward being free in peace and happy; when certain aspects, perhaps one, of these break down, the continuing repression of the wider populace needed to contain their natural instincts at the cost of normalness more generally in appearance of social conformity ignites the psychologically motivated release of aggressive behavior.

10. Since normative development is that of reaching one’s full emotional and mental capacities to fulfillment, the stifling of individual development is in fact promoting a non-justified use of aggressive, if not violent, force.

11. As the pace of technological development quickens, new ways of recreating and labor come to bear on social relations; values become associated with each other through metaphorical interpretation; physical work is de-emphasized by technology proceding and service-oriented or ‘administrative’ efforts take precedence; the establishment re-orients traditional values while retaining conservatism’s facade: An increasingly less personal space.

12. Technology is ideological because it can be used or pursued in different ways according to varying logic by multiple individuals all applying their own interpretation of its use valued intention; that which trains can be used to enslave.

13. The possibility of a world based on competition, but not on beating the opposition, to get ahead is the real threat to the established system.

14. When this logic is internalized amidst the ‘people = corporation’ psychosis of capital: That’s when people become destructive of themselves and/or those around you because those same impulses can be directed into the labor system or social relations to sustain achievement; though to an extent unavoidable, when urges are systematically preyed upon and controlled to maximize profit in a disregard for human life or that of the environment—things get chopped up into only either subversion or repressive.

15. The balance between these two poles maintained in a system based solely on dehumanizing competition devolves onto factional aggression, mob mentality, leads to excessive force of violence.

16. Militarization takes places in conjunction with the desensitization to the glorification of various methods to annihilate human beings, even at times comical, as if these acts were on the same level as sports, news and less serious offenses.

17. Killings are commodified as human life is devalorized and their images perpetuated in sensationalistic depictions of mutilation, torture (i.e. “interrogation”) and rationalized violence.

18. The craftiest part, of course, would be the specification of tolerable allowances for puppet forms of criticism which further perpetuate the discriminatory rhetoric, reduplicating itself, to cover these atrocities under the illusory banner of necessity or choice. 

19. This logic of psychosis frames itself in non-reconcilable, oppositional dualities designed to prefute all dissent in advance.

20. The actual kernel of fact these paranoid depictions of ‘threat’ are based around is generally misrepresented as a threat or impediment to continued progress rather than having the capability to actually conduct full-scale aggression; rather ironically, I’d add.

21. Aggressive action throughout the modern west has heretofore been quite successful in promoting progress and affluence, leisure time for active pursuits (painting, science, provoking wars; writing books) but at the cost of continual, but non-sustainably, growth to occupy a disproportionate share of resources towards futile ends in maintaining its decadent means of livelihood: This makes for overstratification socially a level of competition within class and between individuals that creates its aggression.

22. The ‘marxist’ bit here that makes the squares all hot and bothered hankering for the Soviet days when their major fear was that the damn commies might nuke every one of us—even worse should nothing happen—vs. the palpable sense of breathing terror that AQ might down your plane or pop your ass for dealing trade with the wrong hand signals overseas is actually a historical form of rather moderate materialist means (basically, technological ones of production) rather than an anti-capitalist rhetoric of critique which is implicit in its psychological reformulations (à la Sartre) but that I’ve had to over-emphasize to make each paragraph’s propositional thesis in series (i.e. argument) concise.

23. Technological aggression is satisfied by a physical act perpetrated with an automatic device (more powerful by far than s/he that employs it) for various purposes in expending energy to be consumed—aside from that of human intellect or interaction, ingenuity—which is mediated through the object in question to which the ostensible subject surrenders agency in order to obliterate someone as a thing made hatefully inconvenient to the point of constituting a non-immediate threat (i.e. one that makes the terrorist feel threatened by); the illogic inherent seems that “instinctual satisfaction” is thwarted, but as the basic drive remains unaddressed, the ’super-sublimated’ frustration (I assume means “pre-conscious, animal drives made unconscious, left denied, so elevated to one’s psyche—a subjective control to defeat it“) leads to “repetition and escalation” in a manic equivocation that “more force = desired result” (with the September 11th example, retaliatory acts of Al Qaeda and Intelligence Community-sponsored terrorism that people thought wouldn’t count as long as no one knew or talked of them): Personal responsibility is bracketed as irrelevant to the material fact of the issue, some variety of institution or object, idea alleged as the actual culprit and pawned off as a slightly more representative variety of minor incontinence we deal with everyday.—feelings of guilt get displaced, thus reinforcing this strategy of terror-for-profit, to be re-focused on a removed sense of self providing the illusion of accountability with none of the requisite admission of oneself in negotiation of interpretations with an other (negation of an author, if you will) as the expansion of advanced capitalism becomes involved in a fateful psychical dialectic which enters into and propels its economic and political dynamic

24. Previous forms of aggression required some means of engaging instrumentality by means of the body, whereas modern types justify their use of force through solely the technology used to perpetrate them and are absolved at all responsible action.

25. Aggression mediated through technology, being especially easy to incite amongst the short-sighted consumerist and anti-erotic tendencies of Puritanism (this is what Gravity’s Rainbow was about—and just because it’s really hard doesn’t mean it didn’t have its point), now leading to wide-scale destruction without any personal involvement at all: Especially for subjective interpretations of alleged ‘defense’

26. American ‘war’-logic: Well if they’re going to do things don’t look to US like human, it’s not like corrupting a virgin to go dehumanize ‘em a little more (thus learning the proper, Enlightenment-spawned, capitalist method of violating human rights).

27. ‘Truth’ gets turned into what’s on the news and which conspiracy theory you believe refutes the most dominant paradigm.

28. The continued mania of competition ‘impersonally’ needed to get ahead in business, when applied to other areas of life, leads to the devaluation of human beings, as outlined above; but also makes fail the inter-personal subjectivities in love which Marcuse here seems to be implying is the foundations for aesthetic appreciation of beauty… Leading to forms of repression.

29. So a glut of aggression may underlie even ‘normal’ behavior in publicity, media—publication—and this can be recognized by means of its insistence on repetition of phrase & image, false confessions—forms of compulsion,—all lies: It leads to a complete divorcing of thought from feeling and, though effective in calming certain neuroses resulting from intellectual (“tax-farmer”) endeavor, it is ill-suited—likely by some form of un-intelligent design—to encouraging empathetic, critical and humane capacities.

30. Any time you’re talking about people, there is also a mental component—as important as the political—to be addressed; just because something is useful to society does not follow it is a good idea to perform that action—even if just once—because what is useful right just now may not be very good beyond that immediate application: A form of categorical imperative, I s’pose.

www.wbenjamin.org/marcuse.html

On Gravity’s Rainbow

www.dod.gov