Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century

Radical Politics, Critical Theory, and Revolutionary Praxis

Robert Kirsch,Sarah Surak

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351331128
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Politics

This book engages the critical theory of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse to imagine spaces of resistance and liberation from the repressive forces of late capitalism. Marcuse, an influential counterculture voice in the 1960s, highlighted the "smooth democratic unfreedom" of postwar capitalism, a critique that is well adapted to the current context. The compilation begins with a previously unpublished lecture delivered by Marcuse in 1966 addressing the inadequacy of philosophy in its current form, arguing how it may be a force for liberation and social change. This lecture provides a theoretical mandate for the volume's original contributions from international scholars engaging how topics such as higher education, aesthetics, and political organization can contribute to the project of building a critical rationality for a qualitatively better world, offering an alternative to the bleak landscape of neoliberalism. The essays in this volume as whole engage the current context with an urgency appropriate to the problems facing an encroaching authoritarianism in political society with an interdisciplinary lens that speaks to the complexity of the problems facing modern society. The chapters originally published as a special issue in New Political Science.

Introduction

Robert Kirsch and Sarah Surak

Assessing the contemporary relevance of a given theorist is a difficult task, particularly when they reach such a level of popular and intellectual notoriety as to be characterized in a major motion picture.¹ This is especially so when considering Herbert Marcuse. His seminal work, One-Dimensional Man, found purchase in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, and he has since been subjected to multiple treatments across the left academy and right wing press.² While his work has been established as a mainstay in critical theory, any contemporary assessment must go beyond mere reconsideration of a theorist holding a place in the cannon. This special issue explores his contemporary relevance and finds it alive and well, vibrant across multiple fields of inquiry across many areas of social relations.

While One-Dimensional Man is only part of Marcuse’s body of work, and in the larger aegis of the first generation “Frankfurt School” of critical theorists, its notoriety accomplished at least two things. It enshrined Marcuse in popular culture as a “guru” of the New Left, as it was held up by radicals from France to Mexico, and it also served as an introduction for North American academia, the results of which were mixed. Some were confounded by his use of dialectics, and had a difficult time following the reasoning, even if attracted to his conclusions about a world restructured for human flourishing.³ Some doubted what they considered to be his utopian vision, seeing shadows of authoritarianism in his work.⁴ Others from within the analytic tradition not only found the logic confusing, but outright contradictory and dangerous, arguing that Marcuse would have a society dominated by an intellectual elite that would be unable to avoid the pitfalls of the liberalism it sought to supersede, or was even downright inane when compared to the acceptable reformism that liberalism would offer.⁵ But many found his insights of advanced industrial society prescient, and have made strides to include Marcuse in a conversation on radical democratic theory.⁶ Part of analyzing Marcuse’s contemporary relevance must, to some degree, grapple with this legacy of a radical vision that spurred such a wide register of reaction.

We believe that the many and varied reactions to Marcuse as well as his sustained presence across a wide array of intellectual fields evinces a critical theory that tries to envision and enact new ways of life. That is why this volume looks at a wide swath of social relations from a Marcusean lens, from public administration to vegetarianism to popular culture. But in order to train that lens, it is important to clear away the brush that emerges from Marcuse as the popular guru of the New Left, to see how his critical theory tries to imagine a world that works toward human emancipation. This volume does so by drawing on a wide range of works. Inclusion of this diversity we believe provides a broader perspective of the role and relevance of Marcuse’s analysis today. It also serves as a space to spark, continue, and expand conversations of Marcuse’s enduring relevance, rather than serve as a closing or endpoint to discussion.

Marcuse’s Critical Theory

Examining Marcuse’s scholarly reception is not an attempt to divine who got it right, but is rather to lay out the rich foundation for his critical theory that would allow such diverse responses in the first place, as well as how it is fertile soil for analysis across a wide range of intellectual fields. We do not seek an attempt at biography.⁷ Rather, we wish to expose his presentation of critical theory that is a mode of inquiry that demands application to the current context.

The “critical” of critical theory is derived from the Greek krisis. It is a medical concept that assessed whether the body’s self-healing properties would be enough for recovery; if the harm exceeded the body’s capacity for self-healing, the body was in crisis, necessitating an external intervention.⁸ The socialized concept of crisis uses the body politic as a metaphor, and the critical intervention is a recognition of the need to act in order to preserve the body politic. The necessity of action is a recognition that the body politic cannot heal itself through normal operations.⁹ Critical theory is a method to make such a diagnosis, and offer a vision of what restorative action might be undertaken. This etymological aside displays the importance of the second aspect, especially the need for vision.

Critical theory as a method is an antipode to noncritical theory. Critical theory behaves differently than other theories because it is, “an historically applied logic of analysis rather than a fixed theoretical or empirical content.”¹⁰ All this means is that rather than a closed system of thought which the theorist applies to the empirical world, critical theory examines the world as we find it to find its internal contradictions and crises, in order to envision a better world of emancipation for human subjects.¹¹ Marx’s critique of political economy is such an immanent critique; the inner contradictions of a capitalist mode of production produce a world that cannot live up to the lofty standards that it proclaims for itself. The emancipation of individuals by the unfolding of market society (liberalism, neoliberalism) cannot be achieved on its own bases.

The immanent critique that gives rise to Marcuse’s critical theory explicitly draws from this Marxian framework as he makes clear when discussing Marx’s critique of political economy as a step toward formulating a positive political economy “adequate to its task.”¹² Throughout all of Marcuse’s work, he draws a parallel critique of the culture of advanced industrial societies that Marx does of the capitalist mode of production.¹³ In other words, beyond recognizing that market societies fail, on their own terms, to deliver the goods in a timely, rational way, Marcuse also traces how what he calls a “comfortable, smooth, democratic unfreedom” emerges which legitimizes that failure and makes imagining alternatives difficult.¹⁴ Doing so is an attempt to expand on Marx’s method of analysis to include the new conditions that Marcuse observed with the defeat of fascism and the rise of the quasi-Keynesian welfare state, which sought to blur lines of class conflict through the advertising industrial complex, the managerial class, and give the working class a standard of material comfort such that they have, “more to lose than their chains.”¹⁵ The technological apparatus that provides this material well-being is thus obscured, and so the promised ends of emancipation are eschewed in favor of a rational administration of an irrational system.¹⁶

We therefore take Marcuse’s theory to be one of exposing the gap between the world as it is, and the world as promised by a ruling ideology. In doing so, Marcuse notes, we can grapple with the past in a way that can elucidate a more liberatory future.¹⁷ This sentiment reiterates the need for critical theory to orientate itself toward human emancipation, on the basis of a given set of social relations. Much the way Marx saw the most repulsive despotism hiding under the robes of liberalism, Marcuse sees repression and unfreedom in a society that produces an overwhelming amount of commodities, and tries to offer a corrective vision for human flourishing.

We can draw some preliminary conclusions from this method of immanent critique to how Marcuse would formulate his own critical theory. First, critical theory should not be a purely prescriptive measure, where one simply applies it to unsatisfactory social conditions in order to get a better result that is measurable. Second, Marcuse’s critical theory should itself be open to new avenues of critique in light of historical developments, and as new forms of social relations cohere.

One-Dimensional Society

The most widely known result of Marcuse’s critical theory of post-war advanced industrial society is his thesis of one-dimensionality. Whereas Marx’s critique of political economy used a version of market society in its stripped-down form to show the emergence of its internal contradictions, Marcuse responded to conditions emerging after World War II. For Marcuse, one-dimensionality is a “society without opposition.”¹⁸ In areas of politics, culture, and technology, one-dimensional society forecloses on avenues of resistance. This shift, from politics to administration, from culture to commodity consumption, and from technology as a means to leisure to an end in itself in the relentless pursuit for profit, is calamitous for Marcuse. It enshrines an instrumental rationality, where politics becomes picking various bodies to inhabit certain offices of a machinery that would operate in a given way no matter who was at the helm, where culture Is not a matter of Bildung, but purchasing the right clothes and attitude, calibrated to a desired performance of resistance, and where technology is only empiricism, insisting on a value-free understanding of the world, which in reality only serves to reify profit seeking as a mode of life.¹⁹ To be clear, a society without opposition may present itself as a vibrant society that is rife with turmoil and opposition, but this strikes at the very center of the one-dimensionality argument – that opposition is manufactured to maintain what Marcuse called, “the insane rationality of the whole.”²⁰

He, like many Frankfurt School theorists, focused on the problems of negation in advanced industrial society.²¹ For Marcuse, negation is indicative of the necessity and purpose of a critical theory as discussed above. If the goal of critical theory is to negate the existing order in terms of its own inner logic, if that negation is impossible, then progress toward a qualitatively better mode of life is not possible. To link this back to the Marxian basis upon which this analysis rests, for Marcuse, these are cultural shifts that mirror the consolidation of production into monopoly firms and the intrusion of economic rationality into everyday life, laid out in Capital, Vol. I.

However, there is a twist for Marcuse. Not only does one-dimensional society preclude the negativity necessary to show the gap between how society claims to function and how it actually works, limiting a vision for how things might be otherwise, but the same society produces its own resistance, but only in a way that reinforces the system it purports to resist. Of course, since the time of Marcuse’s writing, the material conditions have changed; the United States no longer has to contend with state socialisms (and it is worthwhile to note that critical theorists were just as critical of state socialism for its one-dimensional calcification of state bureaucracy as the only mode of progress), and so this special issue assesses the new possibilities of resistance and liberation, or how new modes of social relations reify structures of domination in locations like the university, the administrator’s office, and the farm. We further describe this contemporary application within the specific articles below.

It is also important to note that this is not a matter of hero worship. Our goals for this special issue are to keep the critical spirit that Marcuse had alive, and subject Marcuse’s own insights to criticism. This has been undertaken in other places, but we want to especially highlight where we might expand upon or critique Marcuse’s work within various institutions that we find in the current context.²²

Marcuse Scholarship Today: Liberation, Pedagogy, and the Neoliberal University

At the end of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse poses the following question: “How can the administered individuals – who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions … liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?” While Marcuse did not provide a pre-figurative roadmap, his work has inspired countless scholars and activists to engage...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Rationality of Philosophy
• 3. When Liberation Movements Become One-Dimensional: On Critical Theory and Intersectionality
• 4. Beyond the One-Dimensional University: A Marcusean Critique of Outcomes Assessment
• 5. Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Reflections on the 2015 York University Strike through a Marcusean Lens
• 6. The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements
• 7. Displaying Garbage: Installations as Spaces of Domination and Resistance
• 8. Herbert’s Herbivore: One-Dimensional Society and the Possibility of Radical Vegetarianism
• 9. Are We the Walking Dead? Zombie Apocalypse as Liberatory Art
• 10. Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times
• Index