futures volume 9 issue 2 1977 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2877%2990007-6] donald gordon -- from...

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 9 Issue 2 1977 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2877%2990007-6] Donald Gordon -- From Prophecy to Prediction- Herbert Marcuse- Aspirati

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From Pro@cy to Predict i on

147

From Prophecy

serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction

of ideas, developments in predictive

fiction, and first attempts to forecast

the future scientifically.

Herbert Marcuse: aspirations and utopia

Donald Gordon

N

1969 Herbert Marcuse published An

Essay on Liberation.

The book was

written before, but contained ancillary

comments upon, the student revolts in

France in May of the previous year,

and upon the moments of common cause

that the militant students and some

industrial workers enjoyed. The author

accepted without resignation the re-

mark of

Human

that every barricade,

every car burned gave tens of thousands

of votes to the Gaulhst party.l What

impressed him was less the fact of

uncivil disobedience, or the success-

ful reaction to it, and more the radical

utopian character of the young mili-

tants demands. They had, he said with

only apparent paradox, invalidated the

concept of utopia by acting upon the

possibilities inherent in modern corpor-

ate capitalism, believing that their

objects (to take their lives out of the

hands of politicians, managers, and

generals and to make them worth living)

required

a struggle which can no

longer be contained by the rules and

regulations of a pseudo-democracy in a

free Orwellian world. 2

The book was, as Marcuse says, the

development of ideas put forward in

Eros

and Civ il izat i on (1955), One Di men-

sional Man (1964) and in his article

Repressive tolerance (1965) .3 Since

his emigration to the USA in 1934 he

had written a great deal, including a

Donald Gordon is the senior lecturer in Philo-

sophy in the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow,

Gl IXH, UK.

long book on Hegel; but many of his

most important papers were not pub-

lished in book form until they were

collected in ~~a~~o~ ( 1968).4 It seems

correct to say that until 1955 Marcuse

was a relatively obscure German philo-

sopher-sociologist, largely neglected or

shunned by academic philosophers and

certainly by English-writing philo-

sophers. These same philosophers con-

tinued to have little to do with him, but

in a larger republic of Jetters he became

all the rage, especially among the young

militant intellectuals who, by attesting

to a Marcusean account of society, gave

him a resurgent hope of radical change.

The new prophets success lay in his

capacity to unify the fragmented and

parochial voices of protest against the

social order, against repression, exploi-

tation, and bureaucracy in all societies,

particularly in liberal-democracies, par-

ticularly in the USA. He did this with

the aid of a formidable theoretical

vocabuIary drawn largely from Hegel,

Marx, and Freud. The primary instru-

ment of his success was One

Dimensional

M an.

By the time he wrote this book Mar-

cuse had proffered in his social theory a

number of accounts of past and present,

and of the future, matching his long

record of sympathetic addition to

Marxs work. He now claims that in the

present capitalist world, the bourgeoisie

and the proletariat are still the basic

cIasses but that they no longer appear

to be the agents of revohrtionary

change. The historical transformation of

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148

rom Prophecy to Prediction

society has been contained not by terror

but by technology:

Technical progress, extended to a whole

system of domination and coordination,

creates forms of life (and of power) which

appear to reconcile the forces opposing the

system and to defeat or refute all protest in

the name of the historical prospects of free-

dom and domination.5

Technological society appears to be the

embodiment of reason. The historical

classes collaborate, for example, in

developing peacefully the means of

destruction-

the perfection of waste,

as Marcuse calls it-because the making

of these weapons makes life richer and

easier for them both.

Naturally enough, Marcuse believes

such a society to be an irrational society

but he finds a theoretical difhculty in

his position. He wants to say that this

society is unfree, repressive, exploita-

tive, that the people in it are not really

happy, and have false notions about

their needs and interests. But how can

one even sry this? Words such as free

and rational express critical, oppo-

sitional concepts developed in periods

of class struggle. But there appears to be

no class struggle; accordingly, the

concepts seem to be part of the critical

lumber of spent antagonisms. Quite

unsurprisingly, Marcuse manages to

say something which previously he had

argued could not be said:

The fact that the vast majority of the

population accepts, and is made to accept,

this society does not render it fess irrational

and less rcprehensiblc.

The distinction

between true and false consciousness, real

and immediate interest

still is

meaningful.~

There are weighty considerations be-

hind these views deriving from Mar-

cuses early criticism of the work of the

great sociologist Max Weber but here

and in his later writings he is more

inclined to explore Orwellian themes.

The prevailing mode of freedom is

servitude, and the prevailing mode of

equality is superimposed inequality.

The expression of this is barred by the

closed definition of these concepts in

terms of the powers which shape the

respective universe

of discourse.7

Hence the irony of free Orwellian

world.

What then is to be said of the tradi-

tional sources of criticism? The patho-

logical device used by Marcuse is that of

one dimensional man. Art, philosophy,

and politics should constitute a dimen-

sion of reality separate from social

reality; they should be the instruments

of criticism, dissent, and change, but

more and more they are not. The suc-

cess of technological capitalism has been

such that men introject, absorb into

themselves, its values; they become

identified with their societies; the false

consciousness of the rationality of man

and his forms of thought and discourse

becomes the true consciousness. Cul-

tural values become absorbed into the

established order and are not rejected by

it. Great works of art do not become

obsolescent; they are no longer subver-

sive, no longer destructive, and there-

fore no longer true. This is the liquida-

tion of two-dimensional culture, the

assimilation of what can be and what

should be, to what is; the loss of tran-

scending elements in high culture, tradi-

tionally the realm of freedom and of the

refusal to behave. Philosophy, at least in

a famous set of fashions lumped together

as Positivism, is no longer critique: it is

content to leave everything as it is, to

examine the common usage of words

and to impose upon itself a restriction

to the prevalent behavioural universe.

Philosophy has become one dimen-

sional. When he first paraded the con

cept in an early paper Marcuse attacked

the Positivists for advocating a single

world of absolutely real facts, adding

darkly that this world was dominated

by powers concerned with the preser-

vation of this form of reality. Sadly,

Marcuse dismissed politically and philo-

sophically radical thinkers as knaves or

fools.

AIthough there is always an edge of

hope in these chapters, Marcuse gives

FUTURES April 877


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From Prophecy t o Predi cti on 149

impressive grounds for despair. How,

for example, to a mind not completely

conditioned, not completely absorbed

into the social reality, can such news-

paper headlines as Labour is seeking

missile harmony or advertising such as

Luxury fall-out shelter seem any-

thing but irreconcilably contradictory

and surrealistic? But there are also

impressive grounds for another sort of

despair

:

the book is saturated with

transferred psychoanalytic theory, or

the remains of psychoanalytic theory,

and the humourless writing does not

disguise but rather underscores the

tragi-comic possibilities of many of the

descriptions of one dimensionality.

Affecting to show, for example, how

acceptance of the technological reality

limits the scope of sublimation Marcuse

says

:

compare

love-making in a meadow and in

an automobile, on a lovers walk outside the

town walls and on a Manhattan street. In

the former cases, the environment partakes

of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to

be eroticised. *

An Essay on Li berat ion is a much more

narrowly political book. It is also a

utopian book, and what has to be

understood is Marcuses distrust of the

notion.

Utopian is, in the writings of

philosophers and social theorists, a

defamatory word; it was so used by

Engels to describe the writings of Saint-

Simon, Fourier,

and Owen. While

delighting in their socialism, Engels

described their visions as crude inven-

tions detached from any knowledge of

the economic process. These new

social systems were foredoomed as

Utopian; the more completely they

were worked in detail, the more they

could not avoid drifting off into pure

phantasies.g

Marx did not produce

such phantasies, nor did he produce a

blueprint of an ideal society, nor did he

ever say that socialism would be an ideal

society. On these grounds Marcuse

objects to Sir Karl Poppers claim that

Marx was a utopian. Thus-if Marcuse

is a utopian-he is not utopian in the

sense that Engels (describing Fourier)

or in the sense that Popper (describing

Marx) used the word.

There are inspirational and aspira-

tional utopias. The adjectives serve to

distinguish not utopias as such, but the

intentions behind them and the re-

sponses to them. Platos

Republic

is an

interesting middle case for his aspira-

tional vision sighs to a magnificent halt

as an inspirational vision, a pattern

laid up in Heaven. The benefit of the

inspirational utopia is that it stands less

chance of looking ridiculous in the light

(or darkness) of events. Accordingly,

and leaving aside the theoretical

grounds that Marx gives or that Mar-

cuse affects to give, one might say that

the best prescriptions for an aspira-

tional utopia are: Say little about the

future that is clear, make no predic-

tions, talk about tendencies, talk in

negations. Marcuse himself is, in inten-

tion, an aspirational utopian and he has

followed the rules faithfully. In

One

Di mensional M an

he gives an account of

historical tendencies which is neither

speculative nor historical, but empty. It

amounts to saying that an advanced

industrial society will either contain

change or it will not. Clearly any

prognostic power his thesis has is in

explaining the conditions which make

for totalitarian societies and those which

make for

refusal. A n Essay on Li berat i on

professes to go further:

What is denounced as utopian is no

longer that which has no place and can-

not have any place in the historical universe,

but rather that which is blocked from com-

ing about by the power of the established

societies.1

This thesis is ambiguous. When later in

the book he talks about comprehending

a future which is contained in the

present he intends both the blocking of

change that is pursued as an act of

policy by the established society and the

blocking of the sense required to say

that utopia is a possibility which is

immanently here, screened from our

vision and not describable in our lan-

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150

From Profi hecy to Predict i on

guage because our vision is uncritical

and our language has been distorted by

Orwellian syntax and logic. This is the

restoration of two dimensionality with a

vengeance

Corresponding to these physical and

metaphysical theses two sorts of action

are required to achieve liberation:

political subversion and political refusal

on the one hand; and a revolution in

perception and an attendant trans-

formation of language on the other. The

two modes are not ultimately distin-

guishable but on the second, Marcuse

develops the themes of

One Di mensi onal

M an.

What is needed is an awareness of

what has happened to our once-critical

concepts. Obscenity, for example is

an establishment moral concept and is

applied to the picture of a naked woman

exposing her pubic hair and not ap-

plied, as it should be, to the picture of a

fully clad general who exposes his

medals rewarded in a war of aggres-

sion. Happiness

denotes an objective

condition and requires, for its defi-

nition, something more than feel-

ings, and so on with other concepts

such as free, unexploited and a

host of others. In all this we are given

glimpses of a free society in which work

would cease to be toil and would allow

the play of the productive imagination.

We can even begin to conceive of

society as a work of art. None of this is

atavistic; it would require advanced

technology but a technology freed from

exploitative power and therefore serv-

ing the true ends of men-solidarity and

h appiness. And the first steps in the

liberation have been taken: reversals of

meaning, the ingression of the aesthetic

into the political, contradictoriness as a

form of the great refusal:

giving flowers to the police, flower power

-the redefinition and very negation of the

sense of power; the erotic belligerency of

the songs of protest; the sensuousnessof long

hair, of the body unsoiled by plastic cleanli-

ness.

Plainly, an aesthetic pulse beats very

strongly in these Marcusean pictures. It

probably has to. One of Marcuses

least-relinquishable preconceptions has,

for a long time, not been working; the

objective factor in radical change, the

industrial working class, is no longer the

subjective, self-conscious factor in this

change. But theoretical failure is turned

into practical success. Subversion will

not be determined by a theoretically

well-founded and elaborated strategy

but, in a shifting situation, by subjec-

tive factors, the development of authen-

tic awareness, and a sense of real needs.

The subversive forces are, because they

have been seen to be, the young and the

not-so-young intelligentsia. There is

considerable pathos in Marcuses dis-

covery of them and in the recovery of

utopian optimism through them, parti-

cularly in his reiterations of the signifi-

cance of the May 1968 rebellion. The

pathos is to be found in his critical

inability to account for them and it, and

his strenuous effort to find, in the

alliance of industrial workers and

students, the single focusing of the

historically exploited class and the

harbingers of the new vision.

As to the nature of the existence of

free and happy men in a socialist utopia

we are given,

as was to be expected

from an aspirational utopian, a brusque

answer: it is meaningless to ask for a

blueprint; the kind of life will be deter-

mined by trial and error. We cannot

say: this is what man will be like when

he is truly free and truly happy. We can

say: this is what man will

not

be like

when he

i s

truly free. The trouble is,

with a growing body of negations and

the proliferating descriptions of man

with false needs and false interests, that

the concept of man will disappear alto-

gether except perhaps in some inspira-

tional account of a world without sin,

2 City of God.

2

But what are the

people in a free society going to do ?

The answer. . . was given by a young black

girl. She said: for the first time in our life we

shall be free to think about what we are

going to do.13

Marcuse has had, and perhaps con-

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From Prophecy t o Predict i on 151

tinues to have,

a uniquely direct

influence on practical affairs, much

greater than that of any other man

whose profession was philosophy.

In his society he has contrived to

escape

the wisdom of its kept intel-

lectuals, although how he has man-

aged to do so is, on his own showing, a

difficult question to answer. His favour-

ite American targets-black oppres-

sion, the morality of big business, the

absurdity of pluralism in a bureaucrat-

ised and creepingly totalitarian society

-have been attacked with even greater

point and verve by others-notably by

those he mentions as influences, eg

William H. Whyte, Vance Packard,

and C. Wright Mills. He is not the

master of the sleeves-rolled-up specific

social programme in the manner of Ivan

Illich. He has been cited as an advocate

of violence and subversion, as an

historical relativist, as an ethical abso-

lutist almost in the manner of Kant, as

an elitist. Not all of these charges can be

true; one which can-elitism-is not.

The charge of elitism is unfair, just as

worries about the dictatorship of the

proletariat were ill-founded. The self-

appointed elite which would usher in

the liberated society would be replacing

another, but repressive, self-appointed

elite, and would, as a subverting force

in transition, be impossible in a society

of free men.

Some will wish to give a harsh judge-

ment of Marcuse. In one place, he

playfully chides Sir Karl Popper for his

disparagement of utopian thought, on

the ground that

such thought has been

playing an increasingly decisive part in

the conquest of nature and society.

Tremendous forces, he says, may be

released by the encouragement of

utopian thought. He points out that in

the Soviet Union science-fiction writers

have been reproved for lagging behind

science in their phantasies and have

been told to get their imagination off

the ground. It may be that some of

Marcuses work will find its way into the

canon of utopian literature, and that it

will be said of him that he helped to

release tremendous forces and that he

did it by getting his imagination off the

ground.

References

1.

2.

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10.

II.

12.

13

H.

Marcuse, An Essay on Li berati on (War-

mondswortb, Penguin, 1969), page 68.

H. Marcuse, c)i tit, page x.

H. Marcuse, Eros and ~~oil ~~at~on hew

York, Random House, 1955)

; One

Dimensional Man London, Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1964); Repressive

tolerance. in R. P. Wolff, B. Moore,

and H. Marcuse, A

Crit ique of Pw e

Ta~~rff~ce

London, Cape, 1969).

H.

Marcuse,

Jvegutions

Harmondsworth,

Penguin, 1968).

H. Marcuse,

One Di mens~anal Man

London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1964), page xii.

H. Marcuse,

ibid,

page xiii.

H. Marcuse, ibid, page 88.

H.

Marcuse, ibid, page 73.

F.

Engels,

Socialism : Ut ofi ian and Scient

Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970).

H.

Marcuse, An

Essay on Li berati on, of i

t i t , page 4.

H. Marcuse,

ibid,

page

36.

St. Augustine, 7ha Gi of

God.

H . Marcuse, ibid, page 91.

FUTURES April W7

futures volume 9 issue 2 1977 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2877%2990007-6] donald gordon -- from...

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