Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979

Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979 When I heard that Herbert Marcuse had died, I immediatelythought , "The same year as John Wayne." For people like me Marcuse was something of a star, a presence, a symbol of certain values. I felt connected to him, though not in any simple way. I discovered his books at a time when I was groping toward a radicalism that would make sense of my experience as a middleclass American. Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man excited me because they were about problems I was struggling with—the relation of psychology to politics, the idea of a cultural revolution, the prospects for radical change in a society where most people had enough to eat. Still, my copies of the books are filled with comments like "European elitism" and "glib" and "what bullshit!" As my politics matured, I found that I disagreed with most of what Marcuse said and hated what the new left made of his ideas. In some ways I defined my political outlook in reaction to Marcuse's, an acknowledgment that he'd made certain territory his own. In his monolithically bleak view of advanced capitalism and his contempt for American workers' enjoyment of their material 141 A M E R I C A N G I R L S W A N T E V E R Y T H I N G gains, Marcuse was hardly distinguishable from conservative critics of mass culture. His version of that perennial aristocratic nightmare , "mass man," was the passive, manipulated consumer who had no autonomous desires, only socially imposed "false needs" for the system's products and spectacles. He could see no value in the formal political liberties that might seem to give American rebels room to maneuver, or in the prosperity that encouraged cultural experiment as well as consumption; he argued that, on the contrary , this society's superficial tolerance only reinforced rulingclass power, maintaining an illusion of freedom and harmlessly absorbing dissent. From Marcuse's standpoint the only revolutionary act was to stand outside the system and say no; to try to make positive changes was to be taken over and used. The line between his sort of apocalyptic utopianism and nihilistic pessimism is not easy to draw. Though Marcuse refrained from pursuing the rougher edges of his vision, many who shared his assumptions were less cautious. According to his obituary in the Times, Marcuse "despised" being called "father of the new left." I doubt that, say, the Weather Underground would particularly appreciate being called "children of Marcuse." But I don't think it's unfair to make the connection. What Marcuse had most obviously in common with many of his new left children, or cousins, was the alienated snobbery of the middle-class intellectual. Classes that take money for granted are always horrified at the naive delight of the "vulgar" nouveau riche in getting and spending. But a deeper, more complicated kind of class bias denned the relationship between the new left and the rest of America. Marcuse and like-minded radicals simply assumed that their perception of social reality was more accurate than that of the average nonrevolutionary worker. It did not occur to them that in some ways the opposite might be true. Yet I think their onedimensional view of American life, their obsession with consumer goods as the root of all evil, and their conviction that most people were satisfied robots had less to do with the objective workings of the system than with the way many middle-class intellectuals ex142 Herbert Marcuse, 1898-19-19 perienced themselves. Trapped in abstractions, cut off from a sense of their own autonomous desires, they projected their self-estrangement onto others. Their hatred of things—which was mixed with a fascination that bordered on prurience—was a form of identification ; while they felt impotent, objectified, they endowed objects with seductive power. I say "they," but I don't want to claim too much distance. I can remember, some fifteen years ago, having a screaming fight with my then-husband because he wanted to buy a TV set to watch the news and I didn't want to have one in the house. Secretly I felt a bit foolish. A TV set was just a TV set— what was I so afraid of? The answer was simple: I knew that the morning after the set arrived I would wake up and find...