On Marcuse and suppression
Departing from my own feeling of
discontent or disharmony in relation to some facets of today’s society, I
wanted to take a closer look at the theory of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
who in his book One-Dimensional Man
(1964) analyses this discontent in the context of our contemporary culture.
Born in Germany in 1898, Marcuse
served as a soldier during the World War I. In the 1920s he studied with
Husserl and Heidegger, and in 1932 he joined the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, later
known as the Frankfurt School. Other prominent theorists associated with the
Frankfurt School are Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas and Walter Benjamin.
Their influence can clearly be seen in postmodernism, today’s theoretical
paradigm represented by thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Gadamer,
Sartre and Lyotard.
The Frankfurt School became famous
for their introduction of critical theory,
which may be defined as social critique that is aimed at change and
emancipation through enlightenment, and which does not stick dogmatically to
its own doctrinal assumptions. They distinguished “critical” from “traditional”
theory saying that a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks to explain
all the circumstances that enslave humans. The Frankfurt School saw modernity
and enlightenment joining hands to create a new universal myth that entrapped
us with its appeal, while controlling us and diminishing our freedom at every
step.
Due to his Jewish background,
Herbert Marcuse had to flee to the United States in 1933, never to live in
Germany again. The social theories of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School were
developed on the backdrop of the rise of the fascist movement in mid-war
Europe.
In the US, Marcuse taught at
American universities, becoming explicitly political, resonating with the
concerns of the student movement of the 1960s and thus making him the father of
the American New Left movement.
In his work One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse claims that while enlightenment in the
Renaissance intended to disclose the structures of society that stood in the
way of human emancipation, enlightenment today is used to maintain status quo
in a totalitarian system. In this
process, technology and science are used as suppressors and not liberators. He states
that capitalist, basic principles such as reason, freedom and individuality are
betrayed by late-capitalism, and that a symptom of this is the smoothness of
the cultural industry, which reduces the ability of critical thought in the
population. According to Marcuse, the masses are being kept in check, not by
force and surveillance, but by entertainment and consumption.
Like both Benjamin and Adorno,
Marcuse is of the opinion that art promises resistance to social repression (The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse, 1977)
Through detachment, the successful
artist will attain truth in his work.
True art must invoke a longing for something utopian and the promise of
happiness represented by beauty. This symbolic longing for fulfilment will
awaken us from complacency.
