Marcuse, Herbert: One Dimensional Man

Citation: Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man, Beacon, 1991.

Theses:

• One-dimensional man has 2 "contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society" (xlvii).

Big Takeaways

• Ch 1 & 2 about technology's impact
• Ch. 3 about culture and how tech rationality liquidate oppositional potential in high culture
• Ch. 4 is about language and its role in one-dimensional life (combination of opposites).
• Ch. 5 is about negative thinking
• Ch.7 technological rationality emerges in a milieu that determines its ends and invites total administration based on the fixed, static, and predictable laws of science, which govern man and nature. 
• Both capital welfare state and communism have molded people into one-dimensional perpetuators of a way of being. Rather than a two-dimension, dialectical epistemology, people lose their revolutionary capacity for individual freedom. They are easily mobilized against an Enemy who is always within and without and must be fought against. People mistake their better lifestyle and increased comfort for freedom. They conflate false needs with true needs. As industrial society advances and becomes more automated, people become practitioners of technological rationality, which Marcuse argues is ultimately irrational. Marcuse believes that negation, negative thinking and mass refusal can open up opportunities for something new, existing as potential in the material world, but not yet realized: what is isn't totally realized in its current form. 

Keywords	individual freedom technology negation
Glossary	totalitarianism: "the manipulation of vested needs by vested interests...precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole...specific systems of production and distribution" as well as parties and the like constitute the practitioners of totalitarianism (3). false needs: "those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice...Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs" (5). for more see p. 5 True needs are vital ones: "nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture" (5). Negations: In a two-dimensional society, negation is the critical role undermined by mass culture and society. "the protest against that which is" (63).  Sublimation: "it is mediation between the conscious and the unconscious, between the primary and secondary processes, between the intellect and instinct, renunciation and rebellion...sublimation becomes the cognitive power which defeats suppression while bowing to it" (76).  Desublimation: finding ways to express desires but only in repressive, non-liberatory ways, a "conformist function" of industrial society. Happy Consciousness: "the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods" (84).  Unification of Opposites: a mode of discourse in industrial society "which characterizes the commercial and political style" which "make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal" (90).  Determinate choice: Marcuse argues against historical teleologies of orthodox Marxism. "Men make their own history but make it under given conditions" (221). History isn't on a set course. Change comes through the system, but it is not fixed by the system.
Quotes	Introduction "Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination. Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change" (xliv). "its sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, is itself irrational" (xlv). "theory...must be a historical position in the sense that it must be grounded on the capabilities of the given society" (xlvii). This reminds me of Foucault's "What is Critique" as explained by Judith Butler. It is a way of life, but one that takes society as it is. "The analysis is focused on advanced industrial society, in which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions...as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it...it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the opposition between the private and public existence, between individual and social needs" (xlvii). "As the project unfolds, it shapes the entire universe of discourse and action, intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality" (xlx). Chapter 1 "Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear--that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls" (8). "assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population" (8). "The industrial society...becomes irrational when the success of these efforts opens new dimensions of human realization...the institutions which served the struggle for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence. Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means" (17).  Chapter 2 "What is at stake in these technological changes is far more than a pay system, the relation of the worker to other classes, and the organization of work. What is at stake is the compatibility of technical progress with the very institutions in which industrialization developed" (29). Marcuse here is concerned about the transition from industrialism, which measured the output of work, and industrialization in which technology obviates the need for this kind of measurement. The danger is that the institutions that came out of the kind of labor-intensive industrialization will no longer coincide with the production systems and technology in late capitalism.  "This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing" (33).  "there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the 'good' life. This is the rational and material ground for the unification of opposites, for one-dimensional political behavior. On this ground, the transcending political forces within society are arrested, and qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without" (49).  Chapter 3 "If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator--the commodity form...Exchange value, not truth value counts" (57). "Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition...in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail" (79).   Chapter 4 Writing about the doublespeak inherent in one-dimensional society: "It is the logic of a society which can afford to dispense with logic and play with destruction, a society with technological mastery of mind and matter" (89).  "A universe of discourse in which the categories of freedom have become interchangeable and even identical with their opposites is not only practicing Orwellian and Aesopian language but is repulsing and forgetting the historical reality--the horror of fascism; the idea of socialism; the preconditions of democracy; the content of freedom" (98).  "Language not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information; where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom" (103).  Chapter 5 Chapter 6 "True, the rationality of pure science is value-free and does not stipulate any practical ends, it is 'neutral to any extraneous values that may be imposed upon it. But this neutrality is a positive character. Scientific rationality makes for a specific societal organization precisely because it projects mere form...which can be bent to practically all ends" (156-57). "The scientific abstraction from concreteness, the quantification of qualities which yield exactness as well as universal validity, involve a specific concrete experience...a specific mode of seeing the world...seeing within a purposive, practical context" (164).  "The point which I am trying to make is that science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of man--a link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole...Thus the rational hierarchy merges with the social one" (166).  "he hypothetical system of forms and functions becomes dependent on another system--a pre-established universe of ends, in which and for which it develops" (168).  Chapter 7 "By classifying and distinguishing meanings, and keeping them apart, it purges thought and speech of contradictions, illusions, and transgressions...In one way or another, all possibly meaningful predicates are prejudged...But this radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, 'abstract' individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him...who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated" (182). Chapter 8 "The disharmony between the individual and the social needs, and the lack of representative institutions in which the individuals work for themselves and speak for themselves, lead to the reality of such universals as the Nation, the Party, the Constitution, the Corporation, the Church--a reality which is not identical with any particular identifiable entity (individual, group, or institution)" (206).  "The hypostasized whole resists analytic dissolution...because it is the concrete, objective ground of their functioning in the given social and historical context. As such, it is a real force, felt and exercised by the individuals in their actions, circumstances, and relationships" (207). On "objective" terms and discourse, Marcuse argues that words consist of physical reality and historically determined meaning: "The two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are interrelated in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the historical aspect can never be eliminated so radically that only the 'absolute' physical layer remains" (218).  "the rationality of the possible depends on that of the actual, the truth of the transcending project on that of the project in realization...Continuity is preserved through rupture: quantitative development becomes qualitative change if it attains the very structure of an established system; the established rationality becomes irrational when, in the course of its internal development, the potentialities of the system have outgrown its institutions" (221) Chapter 9 "This sort of privacy--the sole condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to freedom and independence of though--has long since become the most expensive commodity, available only to the very rich (who don't use it)" (244). [this reminds me of Arendt's vita activa based in Greek society wherein only those who don't labor for their existence can be private citizens who act in the public's interest. "The creation of repressive needs has long since become part of socially necessary labor--necessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained" (246). Chapter 10 "If the horror of such realizations does not penetrate into consciousness, if it is readily taken for granted, it is because the achievements are (a) perfectly rational in terms of the existing order, (b) tokens of human ingenuity and power beyond the traditional limits of imagination" (248). "society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained, and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject" (252).  "underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions...Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system" )256-57).
Summary	Introduction Marcuse's methodology requires abstraction from already existing organizations, resources, and structures, which doesn't permit itself to be bound by what already exists, but rather seeks new possibilities via abstraction. Parts of the preface sound like Foucault's biopolitics, in which difference is managed within an allowable range and conformity isn't enforced. Bourgeoisie and proletariat agonism no longer the agents of historical transformation; rather, the preservation of institutional status quo is preeminent.  Since the proletariat has been neutralized as an agent of change, Marcuse wonders about the project of critical theory. He believes change is possible but must originate from people coming to true consciousness and recognizing "they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing" (xlvi). It is a mass refusal that is necessary. Technology is not value neutral, not simply a tool whose value corresponds to its use or effect. Chapter 1 Marcuse critiques both capitalist and Soviet styled mass societies for their desire to force acceptance of principles within the status quo. (2) Technology and automation contain within them the ability the free man and society from toil and labor, but instead it "imposes its economic and political requirements for defense and expansion on labor time and free time, on the material and intellectual culture" (3).  On p. 4, Marcuse writes about NEW MODES OF REALIZATION, which could bring about a "free society." However, these take the form of negation: freedom FROM the economy; freedom FROM politics; from from "public opinion" and group thinking (intellectual freedom). Marcuse differentiates between true and false needs. False needs are coercive needs to replicate the demands and dominant interests of society and demand repression. True needs are vital ones: "nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture" (5). The individual should determine the criteria for true and false needs, but only when the individual has been freed from indoctrination and manipulation, even the affective coercion of "instincts."  The ability to free oneself is inversely proportionate to society's administrative, productive, and technical growth. As they increase, it's harder to extricate oneself.  There's an affective quality to technological "introjection," wherein the private space that allows for "inner freedom" takes over "the entire individual," and afterword people aren't adjusted as much as they mimic a "self" that is actually that of society and its needs. There's a scientific management quality to the way technology allows for the domination of the "inner" self, which should be a place for critical thinking, negative thinking, but is actually managed and neutralized. (This strikes me as analagous to hegemony and biopolitical adjustments in the milieu). When man is alienated he is done so in totality and becomes one-dimensional in every respect and in so doing "false consciousness...becomes the true consciousness" (11). In other words, ideology becomes reality. This isn't the end of ideology, but rather its intensification in a "way of life" that is comfortable and resists change. In this one-dimensional way of life, "ideas, aspirations, and objectives" appear to "transcend...discourse and action" (12).  Marcuse renounces the kind of "total empiricism" in intellectual fields of study, wherein objects of study become reflections of systems of operation. Something's length, for example, corresponds to the system of measurement. It is fixed when the operations are fixed. "In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations" (13).  The transformation of industrialized science and technology for the benefits of life will not be spontaneous (contra Hardt and Negri Empire). It requires technical shifts in political and economic structures that create the "second nature" of man (18).  Chapter 2 This chapter explains the way capitalism negotiated its contradictions a la Marx.  In Marx, technology lasts after revolution and becomes the means by which life is made better. Therefore, it assumes that change inheres in the technology itself prior to a change in society. However, the laboring class in advanced capitalism have undergone an unforeseen transformation. Automation has reformulated Marx's inhumane exploitation of manual laborers into a more sustainable yet equally as exploitative kind of slavery that isolates workers from each other and exhausts mental capacities rather than just physical capacities. (25).  Whereas the blue-collar laborer for Marx was the producer of society's wealth but one who lived in abject poverty, the blue-collar-white-collar service economy erases the feeling of belonging to a certain class and instead makes one not feel oppressed even though they are still alienated from their labor and exploited as Marx said.   Marcuse here is concerned about the transition from industrialism, which measured the output of work, and industrialization in which technology obviates the need for this kind of measurement. The danger is that the institutions that came out of the kind of labor-intensive industrialization will no longer coincide with the production systems and technology in late capitalism.  Corporations, at the time Marcuse was writing, sapped workers of the intellectual labor in exchange for things like pensions. This obviated the labor unions and created loyal workers.  The bureaucratization of corporations is so effective that it refracts and fractures any animus directed at it. And thus "Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement" (32).  Even though people have higher qualities of life, they still live as instruments, as servants. This is possible because people are preconditioned (instinctually) to choose this kind of servitude so that it appears as freedom and agency.  The technological arms race encloses the master and servant in a mobius strip relationship. Corps dream up what is needed for existence and security, the people buy it, but since its the consumption by the people that create the need for those corporations, they must dream up new necessities.  It is in the interests of nation-states to expand and support the welfare-state so that laborers don't push back as heavily against automation. In communism, this pushback from labor unions won't be as prevalent, so theoretically they will surpass capitalist economies. Therefore, capitalist economies should secure the lives of laborers. The socialist revolution can only come about once the material conditions (wealth, technology) make it possible. This is a strict historical teleology of Marx. Therefore, the first phase of socialist revolution will maintain capitalist markings, even in its modes of production (41).  Advanced capitalist societies protect the status quo from by perpetuating an ongoing "war" against an enemy, which is in fact a form of liberation. "For the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs. He threatens in peace as much as in way...he is thus being built into the system as a cohesive power" (51). The pitting of pluralistic societies against perpetual enemies creates a cohesive force that helps maintain the status quo.  Chapter 3 Two dimensional culture neutralized via mass production. The agonism inherent in high culture diluted in "their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale" (57).  The dilution of high culture and its antagonism erases its critical distance. As it is blended into mass culture, it is not because people are more educated and can now appreciate them, but because they are "deprived of their antagonistic force (64).  Resistance to absorption by one-dimensionality creates avante-garde art.  Marcuse spends some time discussing the difference between sublimation and desublimation by using sex in literature and culture as a point of investigation. Whereas previous high art used sexuality to critique its social categorization, perverse sexuality in the industrial commercial society is certainly immoral, but also not critical since it fulfills a desire without challenging it.  Chapter 4 Marcuse argues that we've entered an age of the Happy Consciousness, in which life has been improved far beyond that of previous generations. It is super rational, and its efficiency and productiveness make its control bearable for society.  The media helps perpetuate a discourse of productivity for the unhappy society. This results in dialectical thinking vs. habituated, technologically rational thinking. The discourse used by the ruling classes--"defense laboratories and the executive offices, the governments and the machines, the time-keepers and managers, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlors--elides an tension in language. In this discourse, words and concepts correspond without any negotiation for new creation of meaning. The word absorbs the concept and its parts. They are, then, captured and static. Marcuse provides examples that might be called empty signifiers or idiographs in rhetoric (freedom, equality, democracy). By flattening out any room for nuance in these terms "The ritualized concept is made immune against contradiction" (88). Equality when uttered in the West means something different than when it is uttered in the East. Freedom can be understood as free market, so that equality is inequality. Equality can also mean normalization, so that those who are outliers are treated equally in a systematically unequal reality. But importantly, this is a reality that presents itself as fact, finished.  The discourse is evinced in commercial marketing wherein things are "on brand" or create an affective automatic response in the consumer so that there's nothing paradoxical about the language; its reality maintain fixed referents.  Language assists in hiding regimes of control. Operational language doesn't coerce people to believe but justifies itself as reality since it gets the job done, since it is effective.  When the language of politics is that of advertising and entertainment domination masks itself as fun. "This is not the satire-play after the tragedy...the tragedy may just begin. And again, it will not be the hero but the people who will be the ritual victims" (104).  Chapter 5 human capacity for reason is a subversive power. Early philosophy tried to found reason as a universal objective faculty. Marcuse locates the origins of philosophy in a dialectical logic that negotiates being with non-being. It is an ethical action to "act in accordance with truth," with what is. What is gains its origins in intuition, an already apparent realization of what is preferable or essential.  Marcuse spends some time contrasting Platonic and Aristotelian logic. Plato's was much more transactional. The essence and meaning of things was negotiated between is and should. For Aristotle, logic became more formulaic, so much so that letters could stand in for nouns because their qualities were irrelevant. This is important for Marcuse because Aristotle's formal logic is the first step toward scientific rationality--that is a neutral mode of thought or way of knowing that works equally well regardless of its content: a function.  Essentially, Marcuse privileges the critical power of negative thinking inherent in dialectical reasoning over positivism.  Chapter 6 The technological rationality promotes the "objective order of things" as a priori rather than constructed. The absorption of negative critique creates a new social structure.  Since scientific rationality casts itself as neutral, any reason that makes claims that cannot be validated through scientific method or meet the same standards of "neutrality" are typed as ideas and "their concrete, critical content evaporates into the ethical or metaphysical atmosphere" (148).  Technological rationality, inasmuch as it increases the comforts of life and improves production, creates unfreedom and doesn't allow for escape.  While all logic dominates particularities, logics pertain to different discourses of reality and as such create differences among them. (167-168).  Technology is mature reification. Since nature and man are governable by objective qualities and laws, the need for all-encompassing administration entails.  Chapter 7 Positive thinking encourages a kind of discourse or linguistic analysis that militates against metaphysics; it erases the power of the negative in reason. The technological discourse sees scientific progress as able to bring in what was once outside or unknowable, and as a result typifies any kind of metaphysics as illogical and unreasonable: unscientific. There's an anti-intellectualism in this kind of linguistic analysis, wherein intellectuals don't speak the common language, but the common language is "purged" of its ability to express anything outside of social utility; it describes known behaviors, appearance as reality. Marcuse wants to distinguish between everyday, behavioral language whose subjects we perceive as stable, who perform a limited function (The broom is in the corner) and philosophical language (alienation, man, substance) that exceed any limitation as subjects; they are always negotiable. Technological discourse imagines a shared universal world wherein meanings are fixed and there's no difference between a pineapple and a gas chamber. They both describe something; there's no critical role to work out.  Technological discourse ostensibly expresses thought in a neutral shared medium, but this "neutral" medium comes from above (e.g., advertisements, masters). Chapter 8 Marcuse is concerned with something like synecdoche in analytic philosophy: people deploy terms with many parts, organizations, and roles as a force in and of themselves. EX: the nation declared war. In this way, the nation is not presented as a problematic organization and people aren't making decisions as individuals, but rather as reps of an unproblematic term. Essentially, we're all operating with a sense of universal terms that don't interrogate the meaning of its parts or its historical reification.  Even those these terms don't refer to anything in reality and resist hypostosization, they carry real meaning and force for those who use them because they are the "established state of affairs which determines the life of the individuals" (207).  non-political universals are the stuff of existence. Terms like beauty and white cannot be reduced to a single referent, but rather act more like universal qualities that adhere to specific things (e.g., beautiful girl). These universals relate all the characteristics of something not yet realized. "The concept of beauty comprehends all the beauty not yet realized" (214).  Chapter 9 People easily negotiate the uncomfortable and irrational rationality of the era. Though they can readily see the contradictions, they gloss over them with banalities like: it's better now than it used to be; if it weren't for this thing some other, more awful thing would happen. When confronted with negative thinking, critical thinking, the person "strives to define the irrational character of the established rationality...and to define the tendencies which cause this rationality to generate its own transformation (227).  Marcuse is negotiating the tension between technological and metaphysical, science vs. philosophy. He theorizes a trajectory wherein technology realizes and formulates new, metaphysical ends, but that this will cause some turmoil because scientists must recognize that the production of scientific and technological knowledge is political.  People defend the irrational production of destructive weapons and bad policies because the alternative, not being entertained by false needs and having to create oneself from scratch, is much more painful: "they cannot...tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction" (246). It's not that the entertainment or education make them better producers, but rather that they provide for them the semblance of freedom and escape--UNFREEDOM Chapter 10 Critique doesn't have to offer solutions. In fact, it cannot: "Dialectical theory is not refuted, but it cannot offer the remedy. It cannot be positive. To be sure, the dialectical concept, in comprehending the given facts, transcends the given facts. This is the very token of its truth. It defines the historical possibilities, even necessities; but their realization can only be in the practice which responds to the theory, and, at present, the practice gives no such response" (253).  Critique can only be negative. To perform a solution, to be objective, empirical, or value-neutral is to reproduce the ideology masquerading as objectivity.  Marcuse locates hope in those marginalized people who refuse to play the game and attack the system from outside its logic. He adds, however, that the techniques of administration could make concessions and still maintain dominance. This alludes to biopower and neoliberal domination in my reading.