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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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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
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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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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.
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