| Philosopher, social theorist, and political activist, Herbert Marcuse
gained world renown during the 1960s as ‘father of the New Left.’ The author of
many books and articles, and for decades a popular university professor, Marcuse
gained notoriety when he was perceived as both an influence on and defender of
the ‘New Left’ in the United States and Europe. His theory of ‘one-dimensional’
society provided critical perspectives on contemporary capitalist and state communist
societies, while his notion of ‘the Great Refusal’ won him renown as a theorist
of revolutionary change and ‘liberation from the affluent society.’ Consequently,
he became one of the most influential intellectuals in the United States during
the 1960s and into the 1970s. Marcuse was born in Berlin and after serving
with the German army in World War I, he went to Freiburg to pursue his studies.
After receiving his PhD in literature in 1922, and following a short career as
a bookseller in Berlin, he returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study philosophy with
Martin Heidegger, then one of the most influential thinkers in Germany. In 1933,
Marcuse joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research)
in Frankfurt and soon became deeply involved in their interdisciplinary projects,
which included working out a model for radical social theory, developing a theory
of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, and providing a systematic
analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse identified with the ‘Critical
Theory’ of the Institute and throughout his life was close to Max Horkheimer,
T.W. Adorno, and others in the Institute’s inner circle. In 1934, Marcuse
– a German Jew and radical – fled from Nazism and emigrated to the United States
where he lived for the rest of his life. The Institute for Social Research was
granted offices and an academic affiliation with Columbia University, where Marcuse
worked during the 1930s and early 1940s. His first major work in English, Reason
and Revolution (1941), traced the genesis of the ideas of Hegel, Marx, and
modern social theory. It demonstrated the similarities between Hegel and Marx,
and introduced many English-speaking readers to the Hegelian–Marxian tradition
of dialectical thinking. In 1941, Marcuse joined the OSS (Office of Secret
Services) and then worked in the State Department, becoming the head of the Central
European bureau by the end of World War II. After serving in the US Government
from 1941 through the early 1950s, which Marcuse always claimed was motivated
by a desire to struggle against fascism, he returned to intellectual work and
published Eros and Civilization in 1955, which attempted an audacious synthesis
of Marx and Freud and sketched the outlines of a non-repressive society. In
1958, Marcuse received a tenured position at Brandeis University and became one
of the most popular and influential members of its faculty. During his period
of government work, Marcuse had been a specialist in fascism and communism, and
he published a critical study of the Soviet Union in 1958 (Soviet Marxism)
which broke the taboo in his circles against speaking critically of the USSR and
Soviet communism. In 1964, Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, a wide-ranging
critique of both advanced capitalist and communist societies that became one of
his most widely known works. The text theorized the decline of revolutionary potential
in capitalist societies and the development of new forms of social control. Marcuse
argued that ‘advanced industrial society’ created false needs which integrated
individuals into the existing system of production and consumption. For Marcuse,
mass media and culture, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes
of thought all reproduced the existing system and attempt to eliminate negativity,
critique, and opposition. The result was a ‘one-dimensional’ universe of thought
and behavior in which the very aptitude and ability for critical thinking and
oppositional behavior was withering away. One-Dimensional Man was
followed by a series of books and articles which articulated New Left politics
and critiques of capitalist societies in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (1965), An
Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972).
‘Repressive Tolerance’ attacked liberalism and those who refused to take a stand
during the controversies of the 1960s. It won Marcuse the reputation of being
an intransigent radical and voice for the Left; as we shall see below, it has
been a major target for right-wing attacks on Marcuse in the contemporary moment.
An Essay on Liberation celebrated the existing liberation movements from
the Viet Cong to the hippies and exhilarated many radicals while further alienating
establishment academics and those who opposed the movements of the 1960s. Counterrevolution
and Revolt, by contrast, articulates the new realism that was setting in during
the early 1970s when it was becoming clear that the most extravagant hopes of
the 1960s were being dashed by a turn to the right and ‘counterrevolution’ against
the 1960s. Marcuse and Education Marcuse’s engagement with education
involves radical critique of the existing system of education and the search for
emancipatory alternatives. In general, there has little serious engagement with
the potential of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School to present systematic
critique and positive alternatives for education. Hence, the articles collected
here, many of which were first presented at the 2005 conference of the American
Educational Research Association (AERA) in Montreal, will be breaking new ground
in laying out a series of Marcuse’s challenges for those who seek an emancipatory
reconstruction of education and society. An early attempt by Joseph DiVitis
to engage Marcuse’s implications for education was overly critical and generally
unsympathetic to Marcuse, reducing Marcuse’s complex positions to pan-rationalism
and Platonism (1974), which DeVitis claimed was ‘repressive’ in regard to education.
The only serious and sustained analysis of the implications of Marcuse’s thought
for education are found in Charles Reitz’s Art, Alienation and the Humanities
(2000). Reitz explicates the relevance of Marcuse’s thought to provide elements
of a radical philosophy of education that could be combined with critical pedagogy
and existing progressive alternative educational projects (2000, pp. 240ff.)
He suggests that Marcuse’s work in the 1930s mediates dichotomies in education
between humanities and the sciences that should be overcome, sublating the poles
of idealism and scientific empiricism (pp. 27ff.) In general, Reitz focuses
on Marcuse’s notion of aesthetic education, and posits an overly dualistic theory
in Marcuse between Hegelian–Marxian critical theory and an aesthetic ontology
grounded in Schiller, Freud and a subjectivist aestheticism. While Reitz is correct
that the latter dimension sometimes stands in an uneasy relation with Marcuse’s
critical theory, at its best Marcuse’s work combines critical philosophy, social
theory, aesthetics and radical politics. From this perspective, Marcuse’s educational
project is to mediate aesthetic education, the humanities, and the sciences with
a critical theory of the contemporary era and a radical politics aiming at emancipation
and a non-repressive society. Ironically, so far the Right has provided
more engagement with Marcuse’s impact on contemporary education than the Left,
but I want to dispose quickly of the right-wing critique of Marcuse by Allan Bloom
and Kors & Silvergate in their book The Shadow University (1998). Bloom,
in his infamous The Closing of the American Mind (1987) claimed Marcuse
was the most important philosopher of the 1960s counterculture, and that the spread
of his theories led to ‘the betrayal of liberty on America’s campuses’. Moreover,
Bloom claims that German thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Marcuse have spread
a corrosive nihilism and seduced the youth, writing that the USA imported ‘a clothing
of German fabrication for our souls, which … cast doubt upon the Americanization
of the world on which we had embarked’ (1987, p. 152). In the era of Bush
administration unilateralism, I and others might argue that any casting of doubt
on US imperial aspirations is a salutary contribution for which Marcuse should
be thanked. Revealing his inability to grasp the philosophical dimension and challenges
of Marcuse’s thought, Bloom also writes of Marcuse: ‘He ended up here writing
trashy culture criticism with a heavy sex interest’ (1987, p. 226), a simply
ludicrous claim. Kors & Silvergate (1998) make Marcuse responsible for
speech codes in the University, so-called ‘political correctness’, intolerance
toward conservatives, and other nightmares for the Right such as critical race
theory, gay and lesbian studies, and militant feminism because he argued for intolerance
against sexism, racism, homophobia, militarism, and imperialism and argued for
what we would now call multicultural education. In fact, probably more than
almost any other professional philosopher, Marcuse promoted classical philosophy
ranging from Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud,
as well as presenting a critical theory of contemporary societies, capitalist
and socialist, and projecting emancipatory alternatives to what he saw as a repressive
contemporary civilization. And while Marcuse actively opposed racism, sexism,
homophobia, and imperialism, while promoting the rights of oppressed groups and
multicultural education, it is an exaggeration to credit Marcuse with academic
programs in these areas because it was largely women, people of color, gays and
lesbians, and others in social movements and research areas where new program
areas like Women’s Studies, or Chicano studies, developed these new academic programs. Marcuse’s
critics, of course, do not really engage his ideas or note the wealth of his thought
that is probed in the presentations collected here. The AERA panel was organized
by Daniel Cho and Tyson Lewis and the panelists, whose papers we collected here,
along with papers produced in a Spring 2005 Origins of Critical Pedagogy seminar
at UCLA, are currently pursuing their PhDs at UCLA and have found Marcuse’s thought
useful and provocative for a wide variety of projects with which they are currently
involved. The papers also pose in a provisional fashion how Marcuse challenges
educational orthodoxy and offers alternatives to existing pedagogy and the system
of education, although limitations in Marcuse’s positions are also noted. Hence,
neither the AERA panel, nor this set of texts is in any way an exercise in hagiography
or theology, but rather of promoting critical thought and practice in the Marcusean
spirit. Tyson Lewis opens with a study of the relevance of Marcuse and Adorno’
s work in developing a radical critique of the current system of education and
producing emancipatory alternatives. Strong negative critique is one pole of Marcusean
thought, shared by Adorno, but Marcuse frequently also valorized alternative practices,
in this case stressing the importance of play, education of the senses, and cultivation
of the imagination for an emancipatory pedagogy. Lewis focuses on the intimate
connection between utopia and education in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor
Adorno, and Fredric Jameson. For Lewis, education forms a bridge that links the
present to the future and as such necessitates a utopian turn. Likewise, utopia,
in order to become concrete must ultimately address the question of the reconstruction
of education. This connection keeps Marcuse’s utopianism alive through the dystopia
of One-Dimensional Man, sparks Adorno’ s utopian imagination in his lectures
on education, and provides Jameson with a link between cognitive mapping and utopia. Daniel
Cho, reading Marcuse through the lens of Jacque Lacan’s psychoanalysis, suggests
that a radical practice of Marcuse’s Great Refusal in the arena of pedagogy and
social action would involve a symbolic destruction of the system and search for
radical alternatives. Cho underlines the affinities between Marcuse and Lacan’s
respective ‘return to Freud’, and demonstrating Marcuse’s continued influence
and legacy. Both Lewis and Cho take on Marcuse’s controversial engagement
with psychoanalysis. I might note that when I began presenting Marcuse’s thought
in the 1970s and 1980s I used to get attacked by Habermasians and post-structuralists
who argued that Marcuse’s use of Freud’s metapyschological categories of Eros
and Thanatos constituted an essentialism and reductionism of human life to two
basic instincts. I countered that Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud’s categories
could be read as conceptual mythologies used as hermeneutical devices to interpret
and illuminate certain phenomena (see Kellner, 1984), as do Lewis and Cho in their
presentations. Showing the range of imaginative reconstructions of Marcuse’s thought,
Lewis sees establishment education as an expression of Thanatos, with deadening
repetition, rote learning, and authoritarian discipline killing spontaneity and
creativity, while Cho argues that embracing Thanatos as symbolic death for the
system frees one from repressive and conformist practices and creates the space
for new life and pedagogy. Richard Van Heertum emphasizes Marcuse’s motif
of utopia and hope, bringing his thought together in the orbit of Ernst Bloch
and Paulo Freire. For Van Heertum, critical pedagogy needs to combine critique
with hope and theorists like Marcuse and Bloch provide rich and productive concepts
of hope, linking individual with community, desire with reconciliation, while
recognizing the traces in everyday culture of deeper desire. He argues Marcuse’s
conception of aesthetic education can help enrich critical pedagogy, offering
students tools to step outside the dominant discourse and rationality and contemplate
a different world. Tammy Shel, by contrast, stresses how Marcuse’s thought
can be used to critique the quantative model of education and the social sciences
and provides outlines of a pedagogy of caring which she believes will help provide
preconditions for a genuinely non-repressive and loving civilization. Shel argues
how ‘a pedagogy of caring is relevant for Marcuse’s goals and criticizes standardized
education as promoting what Marcuse (1964) calls a one-dimension society’. Clayton
Pierce takes on Marcuse’s dialectic of technology that provides both radical critique
of technological civilization and sketches of an alternative ‘new technology’
that could serve the interests of life and human emancipation. Pierce contends
that Marcuse’s challenge for qualitatively different forms of technology and a
new technique can best be met in the context of education. Pierce works through
three conceptions of technique in Marcuse’s work that sketches out ways of using
new technologies for emancipation, expanding the concept of technique to incorporate
the social and political dimensions of technique with the practical ones. Pierce
suggests that Marcuse’s dialectical vision of technology is highly relevant to
education, given the bifurcated debate over the contributions and limitations
of new modes of information technology and the need to overcome one-sided technophilia
and technophobia while maintaining a critical and reconstructive vision of technology
and education. Dolores Calderón in turn shows how Marcuse’s thought can
be appropriated both for radical critique of racism and oppression in contemporary
education through linking the concepts of one-dimensionality and the Great Refusal
with an interrogation of whiteness. Calderón argues that in the context of the
United States, the one-dimensionality that Marcuse condemns in One-Dimensional
Man is captured by the notion of whiteness which posits that whiteness in
the context of white supremacy is the ideological manifestation of capitalism
in the United States. The values Marcuse wants to break with or refuse in An
Essay on Liberation can be more concretely captured if it is made clear that
the ideology of whiteness represents the normative order of advanced industrial
society that must be ‘Refused’. In addition, for Marcuse’s Great Refusal to take
place, it follows that society must break and rupture the ideology of whiteness
and white supremacy. During our work on Marcuse for an AERA presentation,
we co-produced a graduate seminar at UCLA on ‘Origins of Critical Pedagogy,’ that
inquired into the relevance of Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and
Marcuse in transforming contemporary education and society. We have included here
two papers from that seminar which use Marcuse to provide critique of the disciplines
of information science and law school. Ajit Pyati, a PhD student in the UCLA Department
of Information Studies, shows how Marcuse can be used to present a radical critique
of his discipline. Pyati notes that critical theory is generally ignored in discussions
of Library and Information Science, and that Marcuse’s critique of technological
rationality and society can provide a more vigorous critical perspective on information
studies and the information society, than many competing perspectives. In the
same spirit, Saru Matambanadzo, a graduate student in Women’s Studies at UCLA,
shows how Marcusean perspectives can provide a sharp critique of Law School and
legal studies. Reflecting on her experiences at Harvard Law School, Matambanadzo
finds Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality appropriate in explicating the limitations
of legal education in the USA. Finally, we are also including an article
by our colleague in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies,
Richard Kahn, who applies Marcuse’s theories to develop radical critiques of environmental
social movements that Kahn claims are a central pedagogical force in today’s society
as they confront growing ecological crises at both the global and local levels.
Kahn concludes that Marcuse is a quintessential ecological theorist whose utopian
conception of nature extends far beyond more liberal and conservative versions
offered by many mainstream environmentalists, that Marcuse himself is fundamentally
linked to the more militant origins of US environmentalism in the 1960s, and that
he offers a version of pedagogy as politics that is useful for understanding
the educational role currently being played by revolutionary groups such as the
Earth Liberation Front. Following the varied presentations, Marcuse’s challenge
to education appears as a dialectical vision that combines radical critique of
the existing system with projection of emancipatory alternatives. This follows
the two poles of the Marcusean dialectic between domination and emancipation.
Indeed, some of the articles collected here focus on critique, others on alternative
educational praxis and pedagogy, with many combining these poles and in some cases
proposing reconstruction of Marcuse’s thought. Together, they show how the work
of Herbert Marcuse continues to challenge the institutions and practices of the
contemporary education establishment while providing emancipatory alternatives.
In an era of neo-conservative hegemony, Marcuse’s critical perspectives are more
needed than ever and provide moments of critique and alternative vision needed
to keep hope alive and envisage a different and better future. Douglas
Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA References
Bloom,
Allan (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
DeVitis,
Joseph (1974) Marcuse on Education: social critique and social control, Educational
Theory, 24(3), pp. 259‑268.
Kellner, Douglas (1984) Herbert
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley and London: University of California
Press (USA) and Macmillan (England).
Kors, Alan Charles & Harvey A. Silvergate
(1998) The Shadow University. New York: HarperCollins.
Reitz, Charles
(2000) Art, Alienation and the Humanities. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press. |
