The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

6. Marcuse's Growing Relevance

6 Marcuse's Growing Relevance I n this section, I return to debates within the Frankfurt school and their implications for the future of critical theory. I concentrate on Marcuse's version of critical theory, focusing on his Freudianization of Marxism (chap. 7), his theory of false needs (chap. 8), and his aesthetic -political theory (chap. 9). In this chapter, I introduce the general relevance of Marcuse's thought for my own version of critical theory, which I continue to elaborate in this and the last section. I also focus on Marcuse's debates with Habermas about the nature of organizational rationality (chap. 10) and science and technology (chap. 11). Here I examine aspects of Herbert Marcuse's more recent work in the context of a general examination and critique of contemporary Western Marxism. In this sense, I propose to treat Marcuse as the harbinger of a new perspective in the Marxist tradition as well as one of the most articulate expositors of the "old" Western Marxism, entombed once and for all in the 1960s. My argument is that Marcuse, in spite of his 1978 descent into aesthetic resignation before an apparently inflexible capitalist totality of domination (paralleling Adorno's [1984] own critique in this regard), illuminates certain current dilemmas of Western Marxism and points the way toward their resolution. Most notably, I believe , Marcuse understands the dialectic between individual and group 87 88 BACK TO FRANKFURT levels of socialist and feminist struggle, offering a Marxist perspective on the micro-macro problem addressed in chapter 4. He thus guides us beyond a monadic, inner-directed socialist asceticism (in spite of his own inability to creatively transform his own late 1960s insights in this respect ). The Problem of Radical Subjectivity As I discuss throughout this part of the book, Marcuse (1969) recognizes the requirements of a nonauthoritarian socialist movement that arise from the struggling individual-the "new sensibility." I intend to read Marcuse in this sense as a theorist who does not treat the liberation of the singular individual as the end point of socialist praxis but only as the beginning. This interpretation of Marcuse violates certain received canons . However, I argue that reading a theoretical text is as much an act of creation as of "objective" comprehension. I shall read Marcuse deconstructively against himself in searching his work for clues to the transcendence of what can be termed aesthetic Marxism. Marcuse, I contend, outlines an important theory of the objectification of subjectivity that has been almost universally ignored by both sympathetic and unsympathetic commentators in their rush to style him merely an exemplar of the Freudian-inspired new sensibility. Indeed, left-wing misreadings of Marcuse largely stem from an inability to appreciate the significance of his work on the psychoanalytic grounds of critical theory (Eros and Civilization, 1955), and notably the distinction he draws between basic repression and sublimation (required for all mature culture creation), on the one hand, and surplus repression, on the other. Elsewhere (see chaps. 10-12 and Agger 1979) I argue that Marcuse has left himself open to being read as endorsing "total liberation" from the civilizing, binding restraints of what Freud viewed as basic repression . This misinterpretation has allowed many of his readers to concentrate on the aesthetic and sexual dimensions of Marcuse's theory, ignoring its political import. In An Essay of Liberation (1969), his most programmatic political tract, he called for "new and durable work relations " springing from the life activity and self-externalization of the new sensibility. I want to protect the nature of Marcuse's Marxism against caricatures from the Left and the Right that paint him, critically or enthusiastically , as a theorist who has moved "beyond" Marxism. 89 MARCUSE'S GROWING RELEVANCE To move beyond Marxism implies that one abandons class struggle as the motive force of historical transformation. It also implies that one abandons Marx's aim of the dealienation of labor and its transformation into creative praxis. Marcuse does none of these things, although he is hazy enough about Marx to have opened the way for such readings. Marcuse can be more fruitfully read as a Marxist who argues that class struggle-and this is genuinely beyond Marx-must spring today from individuated foundations. His argument in An Essay on Liberation is that liberation must not be postponed until "after" the revolution; indeed, there is no clear-cut "before" and "after" but only an extended process...