Abstract
As the possibilities for radical social change dramatically accelerated in the 1960s, Marcuse began renewed reflection on liberation and revolution which he concluded required utopian concepts of an alternative society and a new concept of socialism. He constantly argued that since the problems in the existing society could not be solved by piecemeal reform, a new society is needed to provide maximum human freedom and well-being.1 He remained an intransigent revolutionist who believed that it was necessary to have in view the goals of liberation to produce political theory and action which would not simply reproduce the oppressive features of the existing society. Since ‘the whole is not true’, a radically new social order is necessary to provide liberated human beings with a good life.2 Although Marcuse came to appreciate the benefits of more gradual social change, he maintained constantly that the changes and reforms should strive for human liberation and social revolution if they are not to be merely cosmetic improvements of the existing society. In this sense, whatever political positions Marcuse may have defended at a given time and place, the goal of a new society and liberated humanity remained central to his thought.
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Notes and References
On this topic, see Marcuse’s ‘debate’ with Karl Popper, Revolution or Reform?, ed. A. T. Ferguson (Chicago: New University Press, 1976).
Marcuse is in effect concretizing Adorno’s aphorism, ‘the whole is untrue’. See T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50, and ODM, 0.120, where Marcuse quotes Adorno: ‘that which is cannot be true’.
Marcuse’s total rejection of the existing society and call for a radically new one is criticized as a ‘manicheism’ by Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Utopianism and Manicheism’, Social Research, 39 (Winter 1972). Against this view, I would argue that Marcuse’s analysis of the interconnection of positive and negative features in the existing society indicates that he is not operating with a simple-minded manichean dualism, as Parekh and others claim. Marcuse’s point is that good and bad features of the present society are so welded together that only its radical transformation can eliminate the evil features. See the note 4 for sources.
See Marcuse’s description of ‘objective ambiguity’ and the ‘absorption of the negative by the positive’ in ODM, pp. 225ff; of the ‘inseparable unity of opposites’ in ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, p. 195; and CR&R, pp. 129–30, where he writes: ‘the repulsive unity of opposites (most concrete and unsublimated manifestation of capitalist dialectic!) has become the life element of the system; the protest against these conditions must become a political weapon. The fight will be won when the obscene symbiosis of opposites is broken — the symbiosis between the erotic play of the sea (its waves rolling in as advancing males, breaking by their own grace, turning female: caressing each other, and licking the rocks) and the booming death industries at its shores, between the flight of the white birds and that of the grey air force jets, between the silence of the night and the vicious farts of the motorcycles’.
A young German succintly explains Marcuse’s appeal in a conversation with Melvin Lasky, ‘Revolution Diary’: ‘Marcuse taught us that it was the System that was wrong, the whole System, all of it. You just simply couldn’t change a bit here and there. All of it had to be changed, for it was all of an organic piece. All of it was evil, and there was no reform possible, only Revolution’ (p. 6).
Marcuse, ‘The Question of Revolution’, New Left Review 45 (September–October 1967) pp. 6–7.
See Gesprcäche mit Herbert Marcuse, p. 101, for Marcuse’s opinion of 1968 as a radical break with the existing continuum of history.
Marcuse believes that this contradiction is fundamental and stresses its importance throughout his work. For example, see the discussion with Enzensberger, Zeit-Messungen, pp. 53ff.
Marcuse, ‘Scheitern der Neuen Linke?’, p. 37.
Marcuse, ‘Guardian Anniversary Talk’, in Teodori.
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, p. 19.
Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, Negations, p. 143.
Marcuse often expounded on this theme in the 1970s: ‘The word “utopian” should not be used by socialists anymore, because what is said to be utopian, really is not anymore. An example: the elimination of poverty, of suffering. Today the social wealth is so great that a rational organization of productive forces actually directed toward the interests of everyone would make possible the overcoming of poverty in the world in a few years. Further, shortening of working time is according to Marx the precondition of a socialist society. No one denies — not even the bourgeois economists — that the socially necessary labour time could be decisively reduced in the developed industrial lands without diminishing the cultural and material level of life. These examples provide indexes which show that the propagandistic caricature of socialism as utopian is really nothing else but its defamation’, Gespräche, p. 98.
Marcuse, ‘The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity. A Reconsideration’, Praxis, vol. V, no. 1–2 (1969) p. 20.
Marcuse uses the term ‘concrete utopia’ in ‘Theory and Praxis’, p. 27, and his Bahro review, ‘Proto-socialism’, p. 6. In a 1972 interview, Marcuse rejected the term ‘concrete utopia’: In this context, I reject the term utopia. Utopia means, if it has any meaning at all, something that can nowhere be realized’, Neues Forum, (November 1972) p. 19. Later in his attempt systematically to subvert and reverse meanings, Marcuse decided to utilize the term ‘concrete utopia’ which signifies utopian possibilities that can be realized; he stressed to me in conversation (La Jolla, 28 December 1978) that he now used Bloch’s term ‘concrete utopia’ as a positive term to signify the realizability-inprinciple of possibilities ideologically defamed as ‘utopian’. On Bloch’s concept of ‘concrete utopia’, see Douglas Kellner and Harry O’Hara, ‘Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch’, New German Critique, 9 (Fall 1976).
This was Marcuse’s own position in his 1933 essay ‘On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor’ (discussed in Chapter 3) and Eros and Civilization (discussed in Chapter 6). Its rejection represents one of the most significant changes in Marcuse’s theory in the 1960s. A series of articles appeared in the early 1970s which attacked — or defended — Marcuse for maintaining an unbridgeable gap between the realms of freedom and necessity, and work and play, which he had already rejected and overcome. See Edward Andrew, ‘Work and Freedom in Marcuse and Marx’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. III, no. 2 (June 1970); William Leiss, ‘Technological Rationality: Notes on “Work and Freedom” in Marcuse and Marx’, and Edward Andrew, ‘A Reply to William Leiss’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. IV, no. 3 (September 1971) Morton Schoolman, ‘Further Reflections on Marcuse and Marx’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. VI, no. 2 (June 1973). These essays are symptomatic of a widespread tendency to neglect emancipatory elements in Marcuse’s theory and to fail to note some of the most interesting transformations in his thought.
Morton Schoolman, ‘Further Reflections on Marcuse and Marx’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. VI, no. 2 (June 1973). These essays are symptomatic of a widespread tendency to neglect emancipatory elements in Marcuse’s theory and to fail to note some of the most interesting transformations in his thought.
Marcuse, ‘Foreword’, Negations, p. xviii. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973) pp. 690ff. Marx’s Grundrisse was of utmost importance in helping Marcuse to envisage a Marxian notion of liberated labour and the realm of freedom appearing within the realm of necessity. He refers to the Grundrisse model of liberated labour in several essays and in ODM, pp. 35ff and EL, p. 21. Although the Grundrisse was published in a German language version in Russia in two volumes in 1939 and 1941, Rosdolsky claims that ‘only three or four copies of the 1939–1941 edition ever reached the “western world”’, cited in Martin Nicolaus, ‘Forword’, Grundrisse, p. 7. Marcuse was one of the first ‘Western Marxists’ to see the significance of the Grundrisse for Marxisn theory. On the Grundrisse, see Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 1975).
Marcuse, ‘Forword’, Negations p. xx.
See EC, ODM and his neglected essay, ‘The Individual in the Great Society’, which I shall draw upon in the following discussion.
Marcuse, ‘The Individual in the Great Society’, p. 32.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marx, Capital III; Marcuse concluded his 1933 essay on labour by citing this passage. See ‘On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labour’, pp. 36–7 (discussed in 3.4).
Marcuse, ‘The Realm of Freedom’, p. 22.
Ibid. Actually, throughout Marx’s writings there is a distinction between labour as free, creative activity and alienated labour under capitalism; it is present in the section on automation in the Grundrisse, pp. 690–712 (discussed below) and appears in the distinction made by Marx, Engels and others between ‘work’ as ‘wage-slavery’ (enforced labour under capitalism) and ‘labour’ as free, creative activity under Communism. See, for example, the passage in Marx’s 1864 ‘Inaugural Address to the Working Men’s International Association’, where he distinguishes between ‘hired labour’ and ‘associated labour’: ‘to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart’; Marx, in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 518. See also Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’, where Marx talks of overcoming the antithesis between mental and physical labour so that ‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want’, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 531. These passages suggests that the model of labour and liberation which contains possibilities for the liberation of labour is the most widely used model for Marx and that the model in Capital III is both secondary in textual importance in the Marxian corpus and in many ways is politically questionable and misleading.
For critiques of fetishizing the development of the forces of production in socialist theory and practice, see Frederic and Lou Fleron, ‘Administration Theory as Repressive Political Theory’, Telos, 12 (Summer 1972) and Fleron’s Introduction and Afterword to the anthology edited by him, Technology and Communist Culture (New York: Praeger, 1977). In the same anthology see Andrew Feenberg, ‘Transition or Convergence: Communism and the Paradox of Development’.
See the examples in the Fleron articles and anthology (see note 26), and Rainer Traub, ‘Lenin and Taylor’, Telos, 37 (Fall 1978).
Earlier, Marcuse tended to accept Marx’s critique of Fourier that work could never become play, that freedom could never enter the realm of necessity. See EC, pp. 217ff (discussed in Chapter 6) and the articles, ‘Socialist Humanism?’, p. 113 and ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism?’. In the late 1960s, however, Marcuse favourably cited both Fourier’s notion of ‘attractive work’ and the surrealist notion of the union of freedom and necessity in liberated thought and action (EL, pp. 21ff).
Marcuse, ‘The Realm of Freedom’, p. 24.
Ibid.
For other formulations of the ‘vicious circle’ dilemma, see 5L, p. 80 and EL, pp. 17ff. John Fry, in Marcuse: Dilemma and Liberation, argues that Marcuse’s critical theory faces a double dilemma in that his social analysis discerns the crucial need for revolutionary change but sees no forces or possibilities to carry through the social transformation needed (pp. 25ff). Fry claims that according to Marcuse’s theory, for social change to occur, there must already be needs for social change and for the struggle to be genuinely emancipatory: the needs for emancipation must precede the struggles. This second dilemma faces the ‘vicious circle’ cited above, namely that for new needs to develop, the mechanisms which produced the old needs must be abolished; or, in Marx’s terms, social being must be changed to make possible changes in social consciousness. Fry concludes: ‘The original socioeconomic based dilemma has now become a re-enforced political, psychological, even instinctual/biological dilemma’ (p. 47). Fry argues that Marcuse never resolves this dilemma and that therefore his version of critical theory must be seen as a failure (pp. 149ff). Fry, however, wrote his book in the early 1970s and thus could not examine CR&R and Marcuse’s other 1970s works, which argue that advanced capitalism is itself producing the conditions to generate the new needs, and that these needs can be cultivated today in ‘catalyist’ groups and in ‘the long march through the institutions’, so that change of needs and society can take place in the same process. Fry’s book is outdated and ‘superseded by Marcuse’s 1970s works, which establish a new foundation for critical theory.
See CR&R, pp. 17ff. and ‘Proto-socialism’, discussed in the last chapter. I take up this argument again later in this chapter in discussion of Marcuse’s interpretation of the radical potential in the women’s liberation movement. It is important to note that Marcuse is not calling for a ‘new man’ to be generated instantly by a radical conversion or transfiguration à la Expressionism and some versions of Existentialism. Rather, Marcuse’s analysis suggests that a process of development is needed to create liberated individuals, which requires new institutions, new relations, new values, and ways of existing in a process of social transformation.
5L, pp. 65 and 74, and EL, p. 4.
In EC, Marcuse talked of technology making possible the abolition of alienated labour, but his central focus was on play, aesthetic and erotic gratification, and cultivation of a new reality principle and not on constructing a new technology. It is only with ODM that he radicalizes his critique of technology as hitherto domination and demands a ‘new technology’ (ODM, pp. 227ff). Ben Agger, in a generally provocative article, ‘Marcuse and Habermas on New Science’, Polity, vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter 1976) is thus mistaken when he claims that ‘One-Dimensional Man harbors an attack on the “use” of technology. An Essay on Liberation, however, charges technical rationality with containing an inherent function of domination, leading Marcuse to speculate about a nonexploitative science and technology’, p. 165. We see here that even some of Marcuse’s better interpreters have not thoroughly assimilated the critique of technology in ODM and the concepts of a ‘new technology’ and ‘aesthetic reduction’ which find their most detailed formulation in Marcuse’s seminal work, ODM.
Marcuse constantly makes this point and believes that the irrationality of the given society justifies total opposition. He also believes that criteria can be formulated to judge the possibilities of utilizing social resources to satisfy needs and develop potentialities, and that societies can be evaluated as to how they realize or fail to realize their own potentialities; see ODM, pp. 219ff. These criteria also enable one to judge the higher rationality of a ‘transcendent project’ (ODM, pp. 220f) and can even be used to justify violence to alter a society that miserably fails to meet human needs; see CPT and ‘Ethics and Revolution’.
See the critiques of Marcuse as a technological determinist and reductionist cited in 8.24, and my polemics there against this position. In addition to the critics cited in the earlier discussion, others who sharply criticize Marcuse’s alleged attack on science and technology in ODM include Peter Sedgwick, ‘Natural Science and Human Theory’, Socialist Register (1966) pp. 182ff; Rolf Ahlers, ‘Is Technology Intrinsically Repressive?’, Continuum VIII (1970) pp.111–22; Hans-Dieter Bahr, Kritik der ‘Politischen Technologie’ (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970); and Jürgen Habermas, ‘Technology and Science as “Ideology”’, Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). I criticize Habermas’s polemic against Marcuse’s notion of the new science and new technology in the following pages and am attempting throughout this chapter to make clear the importance of Marcuse’s critique of the dominant forms of science and technology and the relevance of his call for a new science and a new technology.
Habermas, ‘Technology’, pp. 86ff.
Ben Agger, in ‘Marcuse and Habermas’, argues that Habermas is unduly conservative in failing to grasp the possibility of a radical reconstruction of science, technology and labour which would eliminate the division of labour, hierarchy and certain forms of technology.
Agger, ‘Marcuse and Habermas’, p. 178.
Marcuse anticipates here ‘economic conversion’ projects begun in the late 1970s by the American Friends Service Committee, the Institute for Policy Studies, and other groups which would reconvert the economy from a war economy to a welfare economy.
For critiques of capitalist technology, see André Gorz, ‘Technical Intelligence and the Capitalist Division of Labor’, Telos, 12 (Summer 1972); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; and David Noble, America by Design. On the connection between post-Second World War technology and the ecological crisis, see Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971) and on the microcomputer technologies, see the CSE Microelectronics Group, Microelectronics: Capitalist Technology and the Working Class (London: CSE Books, 1980). On the relationships between technology and capitalist relations of production, see the work of the Radical Science Journal, nos 1–12 (London: 1974–1983), especially Bob Young, ‘Science is social relations’, Radical Science Journal, no. 5 (1977), as well as Les Levidow and Bob Young, eds, Science, Technology and the Labour Process (London: CSE Books, 1981). Young has told me that he believes that Marcuse had the most profound insights into the relationships between science, technology and capitalism of all neo Marxist thinkers (conversations in Austin and London, November 1980 and December–January 1980–1).
For discussions of alternative technologies which could concretize such a theory of liberation, see Murray Bookchin, ‘Towards a Liberatory Technology’, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971)
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
Radical Technology, ed. Godfrey Boyle and Peter Harper (New York: Random House, 1976); David Dickson, Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change (London: Fontana, 1974)
Michael Shamberg, Guerilla Television (NY: Holt, 1971)
Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’, in The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury, 1974).
It has been argued that Marcuse is a Rousseauean glorifier of nature against civilization by Andre Clair, ‘Une Philosophie de la Nature’, Esprit (Janvier, 1969) pp. 51ff, and by Jean-Marie Benoist, Marx est Mort (Paris: Gallimand, 1970).
See CR&R, chapter 2, ‘Nature and Revolution’ and ‘Ecology and Revolution’, Liberation (September 1972) pp. 10–12. Marcuse’s concept of a new relation to nature is rooted in the theories of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Feuerbach, and is similar in many ways to that of Ernst Bloch, who elaborates in detail a concept of nature as a support and ally in the human project. See Ernst Bloch, Das Materialismus-problem (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) and Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), as well as the article by Burghart Schmidt, ‘Marxismus und Naturbeherrschung bei Bloch’, in Kritik, 20 (1979).
On the centrality of the ‘domination of nature’ concept in the Western ideology of science, see the book by Marcuse’s student William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). Strangely, Leiss almost completely ignores Marcuse’s brilliant formulations of a new science and technology as alternatives to science-and-technologyas-domination; thus, in effect, Leiss capitulates to the very ideology of science and technology whose shortcomings he has pointed out. One searches in vain for an alternative conception of technology in Leiss’s book, which ignores completely Marcuse’s concept of the ‘aesthetic reduction’. Again, we see here that even the best of Marcuse’s students shy away from some of his most radical and provocative ideas.
Marcuse’s concept of false needs has always elicited heated debate; see the literature cited in Chapter 8, note 23. The debate is vitiated, in my view, by failure to discuss Marcuse’s concept of the ‘aesthetic reduction’ and the ‘new technology’, for it is these concepts which would provide criteria to distinguish between true and false needs. Further, Marcuse’s distinction rests on a theory of human nature and its liberation that involves theories of the aesthetic-erotic dimension of human nature, the emancipation of the senses, and the construction of a free society along the lines sketched out in this chapter. See Marcuse’s discussion of needs in the interview ‘For a United Front of the Left’. Neues Forum (November 1972) pp. 20ff. for further clarification.
Marcuse returns to the theme of the ‘reduction of overdevelopment’ in his 1966 preface to EC, pp. xviiif.
See the Club of Rome’s Report, The Limits to Growth (New York: Signet, 1972). The Left has generally neglected the problem of limits to growth and population control, leaving the field to ideologists like Paul Ehrlich, who makes uncontrolled population the problem of modern society, and its control the solution. See The Population Explosion (New York: Ballantine, 1968). The issues of limiting population and industrial growth have to be thought through by the Left, which has for the most part accepted production and industrial growth as progressive per se, and has ignored the problem of population control by simply labelling the existing population policies as genocidal, or cynically believing that excessive population breeds squalor and poverty, which create the conditions and numbers for revolution. Unfortunately, these conditions also make a fertile ground for hopeless poverty and fascism. Marcuse’s concept of the ‘aesthetic reduction’ thus forces radicals to confront some important issues that have been neglected and often misperceived. I elaborate these issues in a paper, ‘The Ideology of Growth’, in Growth in Texas: A Conference Report (Austin: Southwest Center for Public Policy, 1978).
See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology; and the discussion of these and other theories of technology by Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology.
For the futurist manifesto and other writings, see F. T. Marninetti, Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972).
On the Bauhaus merger of art and technology, see Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1956) and New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1935).
The concept of the ‘new sensibility’ functions for Marcuse both as a description of an historical force, depicting changes of subjectivity in contemporary society, and as an anthropological principle which serves as a normative-regulative ideal.
Marcuse, ‘1966 Political Preface’, EC, p. xiv.
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, and ‘A Revolution in Values’.
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, p. 197.
Marcuse, EL, pp. 10ff, CR&R, pp. 16ff, and ‘A Revolution in Values’, p. 331.
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, pp. 196–7.
Marcuse, CR&R, pp. 16ff, ‘Proto-Socialism’, and ‘Marxism and Feminism’, where Marcuse argues that the social conditions of advanced capitalism are producing the conditions for the liberation of women and the spread of emancipatory feminine values. Quoting Angela Davis, Marcuse claims: ‘The emerging conditions of such a development are mainly: —the alleviation of heavy physical labour, —the reduction of labour time. —the production of pleasant and cheap clothing. —the liberalization of sexual morality. —birth control, —general education’.
Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’. A German translation is accessible in Zeit-messungen, and was widely discussed; see, for example, the discussion with Silvia Bovenschen and others in Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse, which focused criticism on Marcuse’s notion of a ‘feminine nature’. See also the discussions by Joan Landes and Margaret Cerullo in Telos, 41 (Fall 1979).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marcuse, ‘A Revolution in Values’, pp. 332–3.
Marcuse returns here to his Freudian anthropology to suggest the possibility of ‘A Biological Foundation for Socialism?’ (EL, pp. 7ff). The question mark after the chapter title and use of qualifications like ‘perhaps’ throughout the chapter indicate that Marcuse intends to be more provocative and tentative than assertive in his biological speculations and renewed synthesis of Marx and Freud.
Marcuse frequently alludes in his writings to a close relation between Eros, beauty and a harmonious sensibility. Beauty has the power, he suggests, ‘to check aggression: it forbids and immobilizes the aggressor’ (EL, p. 26), a capacity he believes is symbolized by the Medusa myth. Marcuse also frequently cites Stendhal’s notion that beauty expresses the ‘promise of happiness’. Finally, he builds on Kant’s equation of beauty with harmony, fulfilment, and pure ‘interestless’ pleasure. He then concludes that aesthetic needs for beauty translates itself into the drive to create a joyful, peaceful and harmonious environment which would make possible the gratification of aestheticerotic needs.
For a discussion of philosophical attacks on the passions and subjectivity, see Robert Solomon, The Passions.
Marcuse attributes crucial importance to the anthropology in Marx’s 1844 (Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. We recall that Marcuse was one of the first to call attention to their significance and to appropriate aspects of the Marxian theory of human nature into his own emerging theory. See Marcuse, ‘The Foundations of Historical Materialism’, SCP (discussed in Chapter 3). He returns to Marx’s Manuscripts in CR&R, disclosing again that the section labelled by the editors, ‘Private Property and Communism’, pp. 293–306, is of vital importance for Marcuse’s project.
See also Marcuse, ‘Society as a Work of Art’, Neues Forum (November–December 1967) and ‘Art as a Form of Reality’, New Left Review, 74 (July–August 1972) pp. 51–8.
On Marcuse’s aesthetics, see the sympathetic but critical essay by Stephen Eric Bronner, ‘Art and Utopia’, Politics and Society (Winter 1973)
Heinz Paetzold’s competent but unexciting discussion in Neo-Marxistische Aesthetik (Düsseldorf: Swann, 1974)
Morton Schoolman’s provocative but flawed study, ‘Marcuse’s Aesthetics’, New German Critique, no. 8 (Spring 1976). On art and critical theory
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, and Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
Marcuse, Der deutsche Künstlerroman, discussed in Chapter 1.
See the discussions of Marcuse’s theory of art in Chapters 1, 4, 7, 8 and 9; in 10.4.2 I shall critically discuss Marcuse’s frequently unsystematic and sometimes contradictory analyses of art in his major works.
See Marcuse, EC, p. xxviii.
Marcuse, ‘A Note on Dialectic’, 1960 preface to Reason and Revolution, pp. x-xi.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marcuse, ‘Art as Form of Reality’, p. 54. A similar position is taken in ‘On Affirmative Culture’, Negations, discussed in Chapter 3.
See also Soviet Marxism, discussed in Chapter 7.
See Marcuse, CR&R, pp. 195ff, and AD, p. xff. and 71ff.
Conversation with Marcuse, San Francisco, California, 24 March 1978.
Ibid.
Ibid. Marcuse went so far as to say that rock music today is protofascistic! Compare CR&R, pp. 114f. Marcuse does seem to like the music of Bob Dylan — see CR&R, pp. 117, 121; I have been told that in the 1960s Marcuse lectured on the emancipatory features of Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ (conversation with Al Martinich, December 1978). Marcuse’s turn from celebration of contemporary oppositional art back to his preferred eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels and poetry did not please all his comrades in the cultural revolution. In a stinging review of CR&R, his friend Kingsley Widmer argues that ‘Marcuse’s apologetics for standard culturism seem not only misfocused but a mystification of radical retreat’, ‘Marcuse’s Mystification’, The Village Voice (28 September 1972) pp. 23–6. Widmer complains that Marcuse greatly overestimates the radical potential of ‘high art’ and underestimates the potential of contemporary aesthetic forms and rebellions. Stronger, Widmer accuses Marcuse of ‘a left-religiosity of accepted high-art which can only encourage intellectual falsification’, finding it odd that one of the most perceptive and thoroughgoing critics of contemporary culture exempts bourgeois art from his negative critique.
Marcuse acknowledges his debt to Adorno in AD, p. vii, passim. See T. W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Surhrkamp, 1970). The Aesthetic Dimension was written with Erika Sherover Marcuse, his third wife and former student, and is dedicated to her: ‘my wife, my friend and collaborator’ (AD, p. vii). The book first appeared in German with the title Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider eine bestimmte Marxistische Aesthetik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977). The German edition is slightly different, omitting, for instance, the concluding sentence in the English preface, discussed below, that ‘there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht’ (AD, p. xiii). The book received few reviews and did not elicit much discussion. Although AD develops the defence of bourgeois art in CR&R, and the critique of ‘anti-art’ and ‘socialist realism’, it contains some departures from Marcuse’s earlier positions which I emphasize below. My interpretation of AD is indebted to conversations with Fred Alford and to his review article in Telos, 48 (Summer 1981) pp. 179–88).
Marcuse, ‘Theory and Politics’, p. 142.
Compare EL, p. 43 and CR&R, p. 99 with AD, pp. 55, 58–61.
Marcuse’s final concession that total reconciliation and harmony are impossible puts in question some of his more utopian projections in EC concerning a non-repressive civilization.
In the passage before this, Marcuse articulates his final reflections on death (AD, p. 68). Compare EC, pp. 235ff; ‘The Ideology of Death’; and Reinhard Lettau’s reflections, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Vulgarity of Death’, New German Critique, 18 (Fall 1979).
AD, pp. viiff. Marcuse also takes this position in CR&R.
See Widmer, ‘Marcuse’s Mystification’. One could argue also that Marcuse fails to see the utopian and oppositional moments in the popular arts of which he is so disdainful. See my article, ‘TV’.
Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie.
See Chapter 6.
Marcuse constantly adhered to this position; compare Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, p. 55, who does not require that ‘authentic art’ should project images of liberation and who prefers ‘negative’ art.
Marcuse, ‘Theory and Politics’, pp. 141–3.
Marcuse takes this position in ‘On Affirmative Culture’ and ‘Art as a Form of Reality’, but in other works, as mentioned, he slides from overemphasizing one pole or the other.
See my studies of Expressionism in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, eds Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Bergen Press and Universe Books, 1983.
Marcuse is aware that no forms of high culture are per se revolutionary or reactionary (AD, p. 46), but he does not perceive how what he calls ‘anti-art’ — as well as popular culture — also takes many forms, with varying tendencies and political potential.
Marcuse, ‘Art as a Form of Reality’, p. 58.
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Kellner, D. (1984). Liberation and Utopia. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_11
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