Metapolitics of Utopianism

...From the myth of Orpheus to the novel of Proust," he argues, "happiness and freedom have been linked with the idea of the recapture of time...

...As to be expected, the political implications which can be drawn from these conflicting tendencies are no simpler...

...The pour-soi and en-soi, Sartre's variation on the theme of subject and object, cannot be reconciled...

...gratification...

...Art and technology must ultimately converge...

...The most recent manifestation of this basically anarchistic position is the Weatherman faction of the SDS...

...The Essay on Liberation goes even further in explicitly stating the need for a new philo METAPOLITICS OF UTOPIANISM sophical anthropology, a frankly "biological foundation" for socialism...

...Eros and Civilization was his first attempt to outline the contours of the society beyond repressive domination...

...Using his own reasoning against him, it might therefore be argued that his recent praise of play as a superior alternative to labor indicates an ahistorical strain in his thinking...

...Here more than anywhere else he reveals his roots in the German Idealist tradition...

...Gratification and sensual receptivity are the traits of his new aestheticism...

...The inevitable result of this attitude, if apolitical quietism is to be avoided, is what the French call une politique du pire based on the apocalyptic hope that out of total chaos will come total change...

...The failure of socialism, he seems to be saying, has been a failure of imagination...

...135-36...

...Here the stress on sensual gratification, which was developed in his postwar work on Freud, exists in embryo...

...8 HERE THEN is the belief that identity between thought and being—and Marcuse s Marcuse, Negations, pp...

...It has no essential duration, existing in the "inbetween" separating true praxis...

...MARTIN JAY political philosopher Carl Schmitt.' (There is, of course, no necessary connection between the philosophical positions collectively known as Existentialist and their political counterpart, although in the sad case of Heidegger his Nazi sympathies cannot be totally dissociated from his philosophy...

...4 For a discussion of the problem, see Alfred Schmidt, "Existential-Ontologie and historischer Materialismus bei Herbert Marcuse," in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, ed...

...cuse thinks it is, would therefore not put an end to all contradictions...

...That wing of the student movement which takes his name as a justification for such activity is misapplying his teachings, at least insofar as they neglect his stress on present historical possibilities...

...If the instinct's basic objective is not the termination of life but of pain—the absence of tension— then, paradoxically, in terms of the instinct, the conflict between life and death is the more reduced the closer life approximates the state of METAPOLITICS OF UTOPIANISM These then are the two strains in Marcuse's vision of the liberated society: the first, the stress on radical action, on the deed, on self-creation as the only mode of authentic being...

...The one theme is basically active, one might even say Promethean, to use Marx's favorite metaphor...

...The totality," he wrote elsewhere, "is the untrue...

...In his essay on "Philosophy and Critical Theory," which first appeared in the Zeitschriftt fur Sozialforschung orschung in 1937, Marcuse wrote: Under the name of reason it [philosophy] conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled...

...If Marcuse is too quick to assume art would be aufgehoben in a rational society, so too—and this is a vitally important point —is he overly hasty in assuming politics would be overcome in a grand synthesis of differences...

...Short of nuclear disaster, he has said, history will go on...

...Because Marx was more pessimistic on this point, he never believed that the complete identity of the production and consumption processes could be achieved...

...It is not insignificant that Theodor W. Adorno, who until his untimely death last summer was the Institut's director, chose music, the most unrepresentational of aesthetic modes, as the medium through which to examine bourgeois culture for traces of its transcendent negation...

...It is far easier, after all, to read the unfortunate essay on "Repressive Tolerance" than to wrestle with the conceptual subtleties and stylistic impenetrability of Reason and Revolution...

...Indeed, among his most devastating critiques is an attack on the antinormative political existentialism of the pro-Nazi 5 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp...

...The resulting antagonisms are integrated through the process of labor, which also becomes the decisive force for the development of culture...

...And, of course, at the center of the national question is the irreducible fact of linguistic differences...

...In One-dimensional Man, 5 Marcuse openly appropriates a passage from Heidegger's Holzwege to attack the "technological a priori...

...The end of scarcity, by no means as easily accomplished as he believes, is a thin reed on which to base the end of social, political, and psychological contradictions...

...Far less attention has been paid to its philosophical sources...

...If there is a leftist parallel to Schmitt and his decisionism, it can be found in those who would collapse theory into an unmediated praxis...

...Whatever his indebtedness to Heidegger, he has never abandoned his conviction in the validity of values beyond experience...

...Firmly grounded in the Marxist tradition, Marcuse is quick to point out that social conditions, behind the facade of onedimensionality, are still fundamentally contradictory and antagonistic...

...Eros lives in the division and boundary between subject and object, man and nature," Marcuse admonishes Brown...

...Although Marcuse has always warned against the complete separation of theory and praxis, at no time has he advocated action as sufficient in itself...

...An alternative mode existed in symbolically mediated interaction, i.e., in language and expressive gestures, which at least in his early work Hegel did not see as identical with the dialectic of labor...

...It is only as a utopian hope that the coordination of self-creating action and rational theory should be understood in Marcuse's work...

...12 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, transl...

...Conflict," he writes, "is the original mean 6 Herbert Marcuse, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State," in Negations, by Marcuse, transl...

...Whoever may be right, it is important to note that Marcuse has always identified the doers of the authentic deed with a specific historical group...

...Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 41...

...What is this true harmony he so fervently seeks...

...the second, the unity of opposites, the true harmony of pacified existence, the end of conflict and contradiction...

...18 What Marcuse was perhaps forgetting in his desire to demonstrate the closeness of Marx and Hegel has recently been shown by the most gifted second-generation student of the Frankfurt school, Jurgen Habermas...

...ing of being-for-others...

...20 Thus, in Marcuse's thinking, the problems of symbolic interaction are contained within the larger framework of the dialectic of labor and the production process...

...In his analysis of Marcuse's aesthetics, 16 Herbert Read has argued that the achievement of a rational society would not end the need for art, as Marcuse has implied...

...4 It is important to note for our purposes that, as Alfred Schmidt has 2 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), P. 22...

...I think it is more important to note that Marcuse's discovery of Homo Ludens in his recent work occurred against the background of his life-long conviction of the ontological importance of labor...

...This doesn't work, however, because of Marcuse's insistence that self-creating action is the only truly authentic mode of being...

...14 13 For a discussion of this problem in Marx, see Alfred Schmidt, Der Begri/f der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt a.M.: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1962...

...Here his distance from all types of existentialism is evident...

...The goal may be the unity of thought and action, but at this moment in historical time, their relationship is necessarily problematical...

...If one element of his utopian vision is a stress on radical praxis as authentic behavior, which can perhaps be derived from his connection with Heidegger, there is another and more important strain...

...Here the implications are far more problematical...

...Although he is often taken to task for his "pessimism," he maintains a belief, expressed in all his works, that true reconciliation, however frustrated in the false harmony of contemporary society, is indeed a possibility...

...Although he abandoned much of Heidegger's terminology and moved away from his ontological approach to history during his tenure with the Institut, Marcuse has never fully relinquished his conviction that the free man is the man who can create himself through radical praxis...

...To Marcuse, however, Hegel was saying that, "Language . . . makes it possible for an individual to take a conscious position against his fellows and to assert his needs and desires against those of the other individuals...

...Marcuse, however, disagrees both with the gloomy reduction of man to a "useless passion" (in Being and Nothingness) and with the stress on the non-identity of subject and object in the work of the other leading figures of the Frankfurt school...

...the other is rather passive, Orphic in the sense Marcuse interprets Orpheus in Eros and Civilization, as the singer of joy and fulfillment...

...During this period, he attempted to reconcile Heidegger's existential phenomenology with historical materialism, 3 anticipating in a sense what Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were to try to do after the war...

...Yet there is a persistent interpretation of Marcuse on just this level...

...METAPOLITICS OF UTOPIANISM need to repress himself for the sake of productive work is no longer binding...

...Its effects spill over into the only type of political action he sanctions today: the Great Refusal, a complete rejection of the mechanics of political change presented by the system...

...Time would not seem linear, as a perpetual line or rising curve, but cyclical, as the return contained in Nietzsche's idea of the `perpetuity of pleasure.' "11 There is more than a little of the tyranny of Greece, or at least the Greek idea of cyclical time, in all of this, not to mention the influence of one of Marcuse's colleagues, Walter Benjamin...

...As Hannah Arendt,22 among others, has so often pointed out, speech and political praxis are inseparable...

...To Marcuse, man can exist authentically only by performing radical deeds, only by engaging in self-creating praxis...

...Since 1928 much, of course, has happened to emasculate the revolutionary potential of the working class, especially in the United States of America to which Marcuse fled in 1934...

...By and large ignored, however, are the roots of his arguments, which are too deeply embedded in a tradition alien to the thinking of most Americans to make painless comprehension likely...

...The image of the Greeks, which was so powerful among the German philosophers, was not that of a nation of tragedy writers, but rather that of a people in a state of pre-alienated wholeness which Winckelmann had introduced to the German mind in the 18th century...

...Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968...

...Marcuse has always been fond of quoting Benjamin's observation that in 1830 the revolutionaries of Paris shot at public clocks to make time stop...

...One might add that Heidegger's influence has persisted in another way as well...

...The abolition of labor, even if it were as easily attained as Mar 21 Habermas, Technik and Wissenschaft als `7deologie," p. 46...

...10 And in his later essay, "Progress and Freud's Theory of Instincts," he outlines more explicitly a utopian idea of temporality...

...He transcends Marx's relatively cautious stance, as mentioned before, by arguing that labor can indeed be abolished...

...22 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp...

...Through what the French, in a delightful phrase, call "la drugstorisation de Marcuse," he has himself become something of a commodity...

...21 The link between Marcuse's hostility toward politics and his neglect of the problem of symbolic interaction should not be missed...

...What the Czechs were in part trying to say, before they lost the chance to say anything at all, was that politics in the sense of readjusting priorities and working through the competition for power doesn't end when an economy is socialized...

...Those familiar solely with Marcuse's writings in English are often surprised to learn that, before joining the Institut in Frankfurt in 1932, he spent several years with Martin Heidegger at Freiburg...

...What he therefore neglects to note is that, as Habermas has put it, "Freedom from hunger and toil doesn't necessarily converge with freedom from slavery and degradation, because an automatically developmental connection between labor and interaction doesn't exist...

...Man is only man as autonomous subject, never as contingent predicate...

...He has tried to speak the unspeakable, in an increasingly urgent effort to reintroduce a utopian cast to socialist theory...

...Beacon Press, 1955), p. 213...

...This, of course, is not to say that he believes the synthesis has already been achieved, as Hegelians of the Right have always assumed...

...It is not significant that Bloch, whose animistic belief in the resurrection of a new natural subject marks him as a leading identity theorist, embraced Marcuse at a conference in Yugoslavia in 1968 and welcomed him back to the ranks of the utopian optimists of the 1920s...

...Although in large measure this is a response to the sadly true observation that the system all too often fails to do what it promises, it is also a reflection of his more basic rejection of politics as such...

...16 Herbert Read, "Rational Society and Irrational Art," The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, Kurt Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., eds...

...To the consternation of those who still romanticize the proletariat, he was among the first to face the implications of its integration...

...I I T WOULD BE a grave error to dismiss Mar cure as an existentialist decked out in Marxist trappings, as some of his critics on the Left have done...

...If in our own irrational society art provides une promesse de bonheur, a promise of unfulfilled happiness, as Marcuse has argued, there is no necessary reason to suppose that a new society, however rational, would satisfy all of man's needs or end all his fears...

...What then does Marcuse mean by reconciliation...

...the unity of subject and object is a hallmark of absolute idealism...

...No article on the New Left is complete without a ritual mention of his name...

...Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp, 31-42...

...Utopian possibilities are no longer chimerical...

...153-54...

...To declare their unity as already existing is to fall prey to ideology...

...Time loses its power when remembrance redeems the past...

...THE RISE of Herbert Marcuse from the relative obscurity of his first 65 years to a position as one of the media's favorite seducers of the young has not been without its cost...

...At no time, however, does he imply that the individual should be sacrificed to the whole in the name of a hypostatized objective rationality...

...The vaunted American system of pluralistic politics may indeed be a mask Georg Lukacs, T. W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse," Triquarterly, Spring 1968...

...The implications of this way of thinking would seem blatantly eschatological...

...The question of nationalism, for example, is likely to frustrate hopes for a reconciliation of particular and universal interests in the future, as were frustrated expectations of an international proletariat in the past...

...19 Jurgen Habermas, Technik and Wissenschaft als "Ideologie" (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968...

...This is a reality Marcuse's utopianism fails to acknowledge, thus allowing him to maintain an implicit faith in the possibility of a Benjamin-like "explosion in the continuum of history...

...Thus, unlike labor, play produces no permanent objectifications...

...In his own words, Marcuse desires the "pacification of existence...

...In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 12 Benjamin developed the ideal of "Jetztzeit" (now-time) as a mystical explosion in the continuum of history, a kind of Messianic time qualitatively different from the empty, linear, unfulfilled temporal experience of ordinary men...

...Whatever the source of the taboo, of the major figures connected with the Frankfurt school only Marcuse has dared in recent years to break it...

...See also GeorgeLichtheim, "From Marx to Hegel: Reflections on MARTIN JAY there is an anarchistic element in his work in the healthy sense of distrusting rigid organizations, it would be a grave error to interpret him as an advocate of indiscriminate activism or political decisionism...

...And both strains, he has cogently argued, are denied and frustrated in the contemporary world of repressive capitalism and authoritarian socialism...

...s Marcuse, Negations, p. 198...

...Symbolic interaction and the politics with which it is so intimately tied would continue to express the sedimented antagonisms of the past...

...Overcoming this separation belongs to the preconditions of freedom...

...Labor, Habermas has argued in his article "Arbeit and Interaktion," 19 was not the only category of self-creation in Hegel's thinking...

...Negative Dialektik, Adorno's last great work, stresses non-identity and the importance of negation as the last refuge of freedom...

...While his critiques of both these current societies are wellknown, his utopian alternative has been largely ignored...

...One might even venture the observation that he has succumbed to the lure of Greece and its alleged cultural serenity which had such an enormous influence on German philosophy during its classical period, as E. M. Butler has shown in her masterful The Tyranny of Greece over Germany...

...As a result, Marcuse is still to a considerable extent Cet Inconnu, as the French journal La Nef subtitled its recent issue devoted to him.' Although we cannot here undertake a complete exploration of the foundation of his thought, we can look into the one aspect of it that has recently come to the fore: its utopianism...

...clearly means being-in-the-world, social relations— can be established on the basis of a shared rationality...

...MARTIN JAY bilities liberated by the abolition of human toil...

...Indeed, it would be tempting to say that Marcuse has surrendered to what Freud called the "Nirvana Principle," the yearning for the end of tension that is life, if Marcuse were not so sure that life without tension is a possibility...

...As suffering and want recede, the Nirvana principle may become reconciled with the reality principle...

...It may be said that radical praxis is merely the means of achieving the revolutionary breakthrough leading to the pacification of existence...

...The Institut's reluctance to suggest anything that might be taken as a universal view of man's essence prevented it from accepting without reservation the anthropological implications of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts when these were recovered in the early '30s...

...METAPOLITICS OF UTOPIANISM It is, therefore, ironic that the existentialist strain in Marcuse's thinking, sometimes cited as the source of his anarchistic impulses, is less influential in promoting antipolitical politics than is the idealist strain...

...By doing so, he has nevertheless helped give substance and direction to the inchoate yearnings of those dissatisfied with what they see as the present Hobson's Choice of authoritarian socialism or repressive advanced capitalism...

...Boston: Beacon Press, 1967...

...for manipulation and special interests, as he has always argued, yet pluralism as such is the very essence of politics...

...In his article on hedonism written for the Zeitschrift in 1938, he stresses the function of hedonistic philosophies in preserving the claim of personal human happiness against the demands of overarching totalities such as the state...

...7 The familiar aphorism from No Exit makes the same point: `L'Enfer, c'est les autres...

...This permits him to give so much emphasis to the utopian possi fiir Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik [69: 3] June 1933, p. 279...

...155-61...

...the logos of gratification must be joined with a technology freed from its project of domination...

...The stress here on reconciling production and consumption foreshadows his later use of Schiller's "play drive" in Eros and Civilization...

...Ober die philosophischen Grundlagen des Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsbegriffs," Archie Marcuse's interpretation of Hegel is colored by his acceptance of the Marxist centrality of labor...

...Only its psychoanalytic elements— the goal of a society freed from historicallygrounded "surplus repression" and the "performance principle" (a kind of generalized Protestant ethic)—have been discussed with any rigor...

...Here, curiously, Marcuse shows himself both beyond Marx and beholden to him...

...The Marxist "fundamental situation" (Grundsituation), he argued, is that in which the historically-conscious man performs radical acts in order to live authentically...

...Not everyone, he argued, was in the position to perform the radical acts constituting authentic behavior...

...a The end of the dichotomy between internalized, spiritualized culture and material, sensual activity in the "real" world is thus part of his utopian vision...

...As a result, he has been the frequent target of other theorists on the Left who see the stirring of new "negative" forces in society, such as the alienated "new working class" of white-collar workers and technicians...

...14 In Eros and Civilization (p...

...N HIS TREATMENT of Heidegger's con cept of authentic existence, Marcuse was critical of the abstract, undialectical quality of his teacher's idea of history...

...however, even Hegel retained the tension between the two, the distinction" (in Negations, p. 238...

...To forget is to forgive the injustices of the past...

...no discussion of the "counter culture" dares ignore his message of liberation...

...At this stage in man's development, Marcuse claimed, only the proletariat is the true actor on the historical stage because of its crucial role in the production process...

...The eternal return is forever bisected by the linear time of mortal men who are born and must ultimately die...

...MARTIN JAY remembrance alone provides the joy without the anxiety over its passing and thus gives it an otherwise impossible duration...

...First and only in labor," he wrote, "does man become historically real and win his specific place in historical occurrence...

...214), Marcuse writes, "The death instinct operates under the Nirvana principle: it tends toward the state of `constant gratification' where no tension is felt...

...By consciously donning the utopian mantle, Marcuse has invited the scorn of "realists" in both the socialist and capitalist camps...

...In recent years, Max Horkheimer, who is more responsible than anyone else for the genesis of the Institut's "Critical Theory," has come to believe that this refusal to picture the "other" society beyond capitalism is not unrelated to the Jewish ban on naming or describing God...

...Only by examining these can the political implications of Marcuse's vision be adequately understood...

...lieves labor can be abolished...

...In Reason and Revolution he wrote: "The concept of labor is not peripheral in Hegel's system, but is the central notion through which he conceives the development of society...

...Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason...

...The historicist strain in Marx's own thinking was always in tension with his implicit philosophical anthropology...

...The belief that political conflict is an epiphenomenon of economic and social contradictions is a fallacy that finally ought to be laid to rest...

...Indeed, Marx did not even fully accept the Hegelian notion of identity of subject and object to which Marcuse seems to have returned...

...On the other hand, he does believe that, for the first time, preconditions do exist—created paradoxically by the technology whose other effects he so dislikes—which make the prospects for reconciliation favorable...

...17 17 When Marcuse first stressed the ontological centrality of labor in one of his early Heideggerian essays, his attitude toward play was less favorable than in Eros and Civilization...

...Play, it might be argued, is really on the same conceptual axis as labor, if at the other end...

...Rather, it is now comprehended by thought and defined as a concept [Begriff...

...To ignore the importance of class differences would be to retreat into idealism...

...Class conflict may not be the form in which contradiction now manifests itself, but no universal class has emerged in which all antagonisms have been dialectically resolved...

...Furthermore, the expectation that international tension will end when the entire world becomes socialist is a hope that drowned in the waters of the Ussuri River last year to the sound of Russian and Chinese guns...

...In the end it is perhaps all reducible to that "aestheticization" of politics against which Walter Benjamin so earnestly warned (see Illuminations, p. 244...

...Occasional attempts by his successors to describe "Socialist Man" have usually been thwarted by the recognition that he will have to define 1 "Marcuse: Cet Inconnu," La Net (Paris), January— February 1969...

...The bogey of the unchained voluptuary," he wrote, "who would abandon himself only to his sensual wants is rooted in the separation of intellectual from material productive forces and the separation of the labor process from the process of consumption...

...The relevant issue here is the possibility of the reconciliation of opposites, which anyone who works within a Hegelian framework must confront...

...Here, Marcuse's former colleagues at the Institut fur Sozialforschung, Horkheimer and Adorno, reluctantly reach similar conclusions in their later work...

...Unlike Marx, or at least the mature Marx, Marcuse be 10 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston...

...Nor does it express man's essentially historical nature...

...At its highest level, as authentic reality, the world no longer stands opposed to the rational thought of men as mere material objectivity...

...Besides being too schematic, this solution fails to do justice to the mixture of both strains in his work...

...Whether or not the two strains are compatible is a problem Marcuse doesn't seem to have worked out in any detail...

...This is especially clear when compared with the position taken by Sartre in one of the classic existentialist texts, Being and Nothingness...

...Integration, as he has used it, doesn't mean true harmony...

...20 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 75...

...It is no accident that in his recent works Marcuse has taken more and more to quoting that other great defector from the mundane course of history, Friedrich Nietzsche...

...Perhaps the most unhistorical element in his work is Marcuse's notion that the abolition of labor and its replacement by play— in Schiller's sense of unrepressed sensuousness reconciled with the "order of freedom" —would be the hallmark of the new age...

...Thus, in positing a utopia of identity in which all contradictions are overcome, Marcuse displays that basic hostility to politics which has been the curse of too many German thinkers for too many years...

...Heidegger's indifference to the real course of history was not unrelated to the volkisch ideology of the national Gemeinschaf t transcending social contradictions...

...Elsewhere, he supports an identity theory which, though demanding the preservation of the individual, is scarcely less utopian than Brown's...

...13 The only place in his writings where Marcuse displays similar caution is in his critique of Norman 0. Brown whose mysticism demands the total negation of the principium individuationis...

...And in the 1960s, Horkheimer returned to his early interest in Schopenhauer and a pessimistic denial that the world can be made rational...

...The driving impetus in Marcuse's thinking toward harmony is further demonstrated in his treatment of time...

...Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263...

...But Marcuse, when questioned on this point, has denied any eschatological intentions...

...This allows him to see play as resolving contradictions, as he once argued labor did, rather than creating new ones, as is the case when play is understood as related to what Habermas calls "symbolically-mediated interaction...

...That is, the external, antithetical character of material objectivity is overcome in a process through which the identity of subject and object is established as the rational, conceptual structure that is common to both...

...The unconscious attractionthat draws the instincts back to an `earlier state' would be affectively counteracted by the desirability of the attained state of life...

...The desired transition, he argues, is from Marx to Fourier, from realism to surrealism...

...Although Marcuse has often been accused of anarchism—such disparate thinkers as Hans Heinz Holz and George Lichtheim have leveled this charge against him 16—and if indeed 15 Hans Heinz Holz, Utopie and Anarchismus (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968...

...suggested, Marxism served him as a "positive philosophy" answering Heidegger's question, "What is authentic existence and how is authentic existence possible...

...Reifying the status quo and rejecting any medium of real change except the sudden and total collapse of the system is to jump out of history...

...It is to these that we now turn...

...The political imperative that follows from all of this is the cul-de-sac of apocalyptic metapolitics, which is really no politics at all...

...Noticeably absent would be conflict, strife, and striving—in short, such attributes that have characterized Western history for millennia...

...Above all, the mystery of death and the arbitrariness of suffering would make human existence a continuing subject for the aesthetic imagination...

...If the so-called existentialist element in his utopian vision ought not to be interpreted as a justification for the indeterminate negation of the system, what of the other central theme in his work, the yearning for harmony and reconciliation of dialectical contradictions...

...Marxist theory has steadfastly refused to offer a blueprint for postcapitalist society...

...In Being and Nothingness, the dialectic of opposing forces remains inevitably truncated: the redeeming power of synthesis is ultimately denied as a possible end to the historical process...

...to ignore the historical element in his "existentialist" stress on praxis is to falsify his analysis...

...And yet, it would go on very differently than it has been experienced until now...

...1s Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 78...

...3 See, e.g., Herbert Marcuse, `Beitrage zu einer Phanomenologie des Historischen Materialismus," Philosophische Hefte, I:1(1928...

...Yet, by giving so much weight to that abolition, he reveals his indebtedness to Marx's conviction that labor is the basic human life activity...

...Marcuse has, however, always been careful to avoid advocating simple sexual freedom as the answer to social repression, in the way Wilhelm Reich occasionally did...

...In Eros and Civilization, he stresses the function of memory, of "re-membering" that which is asunder, as a vehicle of liberation...

...In play, he argued, the sway of the objective world over the free subject is suspended...

...With the end of scarcity, so runs the familiar argument in Eros and Civilization, man's 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, transl...

...Few Marxist or neo-Marxist thinkers have been as sensitive to this historicist ban on positing a normative human nature as those of the socalled Frankfurt school of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, with which Marcuse was associated during the 1930s...

...It is almost as if Marcuse, in his belief that the metapolitical utopia is just around the corner, has forgotten his tempering of the ahistorical element in Heidegger's thinking...

...Paradoxically, the radical optimism of Marcuse's utopian vision is the dialectical counterpart of that resignation about the possibilities for change within or growing out of the system which has earned him so much abuse from liberals and the orthodox Left...

...The details of his attempt need not concern us now...

...Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), p. 364...

...Marcuse's attitude toward technology—he has been accused of being everything from a romantic Luddite to a technological determinist—owes much to Heidegger's hostility to the technological logos which he interpreted as a falling away from the basic insights of the pre-Socratics, a process that began centuries before technology itself achieved its domination over nature and man...

...Metapolitics rather than true political activity becomes the only authentic mode of revolutionary behavior...

...Although he has recently seen evidence of cracks in the one-dimensionality of the system in student protest and the rumblings of what Marx would have dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, at no time has he mistaken these forces for a new proletariat or a new historical subject...

...It is perhaps best to leave this problem by saying that Marcuse, as so many other thinkers of stature, has unresolved tensions in his thought...

...Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures, transl...

...Another possible solution would be to divide his work into that of an "early" and a "late" Marcuse, as is sometimes done for Marx, with the result that a Heideggerian Marcuse is somehow supplanted by a Hegelianized one under the influence of Horkheimer and the Institut...

...himself in a process of self-creation that cannot be predicted in advance...