Performance Principle

Marcuse's reworking of Freud's reality principle to identify its historically specific form in advanced industrial society. Freud argued that civilization requires the subordination of the pleasure principle to the reality principle — the deferral of immediate gratification in favor of long-term satisfaction through productive work. Marcuse accepted the basic structure but argued that the reality principle takes different forms in different societies, and that the form characteristic of capitalism is the performance principle: the demand that the individual prove her worth through competitive productive output, measured in terms the market determines. The performance principle is not necessary. It is one configuration of the reality principle among several possible configurations. Other societies have organized the subordination of pleasure to reality around different criteria — kinship obligation, religious practice, communal ritual — and other societies could, in principle, organize it around criteria more attuned to human flourishing. The performance principle's particular effectiveness is that it presents itself as the reality principle itself, as though