Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times

The original version of this article was presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society in 2015. I would like to thank Sarah Surak, Robert Kirsch, Thiago Dias, and the anonymous New Political Science reviewers for their insightful comments.

Abstract

As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.

Notes

The original version of this article was presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society in 2015. I would like to thank Sarah Surak, Robert Kirsch, Thiago Dias, and the anonymous New Political Science reviewers for their insightful comments.

¹ See the introductory chapter of One-Dimensional Man, “The Paralysis of Criticism: Society without Opposites.”

² Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York, NY: Verso, 2005), p. XLIII.

³ Herbert Marcuse, “Political preface,” in Herbert Marcuse (ed.), Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquire into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. XI–XIII.

⁴ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Advanced Industrial Society (New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 255.

⁵ Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 441.

⁶ Ibid., 442.

⁷ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. xl.

⁸ Ibid., 30.

⁹ Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1984), p. 367.

¹⁰ Herbert Marcuse, “On the Problem of the Dialectic,” in Richard Wolin and John Abromeit (eds), Heideggerian Marxism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), p. 55.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Marcuse, “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism,” in Marcuse (ed.), Heideggerian Marxism, p. 1.

¹³ Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 401.

¹⁴ Ibid., 315.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 327.

¹⁷ Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity,” in William Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris (eds), New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), p. 97.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid., 93.

²⁰ Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, 1989), p. XVII.

²¹ Ibid., XXVI.

²² Herbert Marcuse, “Obsolescence of Socialism: Marcuse – Brandeis Farewell Lecture 27 April 1965,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds), Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia, vol. 6 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), p. 242.

²³ Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009), p. 35.

²⁴ Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 80.

²⁵ For example: “The Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis” (1963), “The Obsolescence of Socialism” (1965) and “The Obsolescence of Marxism” (1967). Even in his defense of black movements, the notion of obsolescence presents itself when Marcuse remarks on how the deviations of spectacle operates upon the products of that manifestation (Herbert Marcuse, “Art and Revolt,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse – Art and liberation, vol. 4 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), pp. 168–169. The same is true for his last defense, of ecological movements – even there the scenario of obsolescence will be present, when Marcuse recognizes the potential weakness of such movements without a critique on Capitalism (Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Societies,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds), Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse – Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation, vol. 5 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 213.

²⁶ Andrew Feenberg, “Commentaries – I,” in Marcuse (ed.), Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation…, p. 215.

²⁷ Marcuse, “Obsolescence in Psychoanalysis,” p. 109.

²⁸ Ibid., 111.

²⁹ Marcuse, Eros and Civilization…, p. 30; Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” in Sigmund Freud (ed.), Complete Works (London, UK: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 3990.

³⁰ Marcuse, “Obsolescence in Psychoanalysis,” p. 112.

³¹ Ibid., 115.

³² For example: Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Freud (ed.), Complete Works, pp. 2931–2954. It is important to note that Narcissism here differs from the myth of Narcissus referred in Eros and Civilization. In this last case, Narcissus refuses to be part of society where he lives and constitutes its own identity forged by erotic ties with Nature and himself (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization…, pp. 159–172). Differently, the narcissistic individual of the one-dimensional reality lives and suffers as the “image and likeness” of society.

³³ Freud, “On Narcissism…,” p. 2943, our brackets.

³⁴ Marcuse, “Obsolescence of psychoanalysis,” pp. 109–110.

³⁵ Ibid., 110.

³⁶ See Eros and Civilization’s critique of “Freudian neo-revisionism,” which justifies a review of Freud’s theory of instinct in order to adapt or reject its categories in front of new social demands.

³⁷ Marcuse, “The Obsolescence of Marxism,” in Herbert Marcuse (ed.), Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia, vol. 6 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), p. 188. A similar position against revisionism can be founded in Marcuse’s considerations on psychoanalysis, as we saw above.

³⁸ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man…, p. 58.

³⁹ Ibid., 55.

⁴⁰ Marcuse, “Obsolescence of Marxism,” p. 190.

⁴¹ Ibid., 191–192.

⁴² Ibid., 195.

⁴³ Ibid., 196.

⁴⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “Re-examination of the Concept of Revolution,” in Marcuse (ed.), Collected Papers…, vol. 6, p. 203.

⁴⁵ Herbert Marcuse, “Discussion between Herbert Marcuse and Peter Merseburguer on the Panorama Program of the NDR (23 October 1967),” in Marcuse, Collected Papers…, vol. 6, p. 269.

⁴⁶ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm (accessed November 8, 2016).

⁴⁷ Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence with Rudi Dutschke (1970–1972),” in Marcuse (ed.), Collected Papers…, vol. 6, p. 338.

⁴⁸ Marcuse, “Re-examination of the concept of revolution,” p. 202.

⁴⁹ Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, “Introduction: Marcuse’s Adventures in Marxism,” in Marcuse (ed.), Collected Papers…, vol. 6, p. 3.