Worthless Word for the Day

[teapeebubbles]

the worthless word for the day is: desublimation

[fr. L. sublimare, to sublime + de-]
(to sublime is taken in the sense to convert
(something inferior) into something of higher worth)

a process by which things are undone that were
previously sublimated on a higher level of the
cultural scale [after Marcuse]

"...certain key notions and images of literature and
their fate will illustrate how the progress of
technological rationality is liquidating the
oppositional and transcending elements in the
'higher culture.' They succumb in fact to the process
of desublimation which prevails in the advanced regions
of contemporary society."
- Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)

"Herbert Marcuse's once influential The Aesthetic
Dimension argues that aesthetic form allows a given
(social) reality (or the reification thereof) to be
sublimated and thus transcended. In turn, this process
engenders in an audience a rebellious subjectivity --
a desublimation of the audience's perceptions,
creating a potential indictment of the dominant
ideology. Art is thus a dissenting force."
- Words of Art, compiled by Robert J. Belton