Culture, Power & Image
Poli 110DA 21
Life as an end is qualitatively
different from life as a means.
Herbert Marcuse
• 1898 – 1979
• Student of Heidegger, broke
w/him over Heidegger’s Nazi
party membership,
immigrated to US from
Germany in 1934
• Worked for US gov’t during &
immediately after WWII
• Member of Frankfurt school
• Taught at Columbia, Harvard,
Brandeis, UCSD
• Mentor of Angela Davis,
“Father of the New Left”
Marcuse
• One-Dimensional Man
– Neo-Marxist social criticism
– The absence of the critical dimension
– The prevalence of false consciousness
– Western totalitarianism
– Modes of thinking as an instrument of power
– Existential concerns: transcendence & authenticity
What is totalitarianism?
• The permanent and total mobilization of
society and the individual in the defense of
“the state”
– Terror
– “Technology”
• Totalitarianism “is not only a terroristic
political coordination of society, but also a
non-terroristic economic technical
coordination which operates through the
manipulation of needs by vested interests” (3)
• In the west, “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 freedom from toil
and domination.” (xliv)
• The full integration of state, economy, and
society thwarts criticism:
– The social order has integrated even concepts &
agents that were meant to negate and oppose it
– “society”, “individual”, “class”, “private”, “family”
– “With the growing integration of industrial society,
these categories are losing their critical
connotation, and tend to become descriptive,
deceptive, or operational terms.” (xlvi)
• “In this society, the productive apparatus
tends to become totalitarian to the extent to
which it determines not only the socially
needed occupation, skills, and attitudes but
also individual needs and aspirations. It thus
obliterates the opposition between the public
and private existence, between individual and
social needs.” (xlvii)
– The individual self is thus fully mobilized in the
service of the state
False Consciousness
• True and false needs:
– True: food, clothes, company, shelter
– False: “those which are superimposed upon the
particular social interests in his repression: the
needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness,
misery, and injustice.” (5)*
• Example: Relaxation.
– Work is hard and unpleasant
– You need to relax.
– Vacations are expensive.
– Work & save.
– Buy & buy.
– Now you’re broke. Back to work.
– Work is hard and unpleasant.
– “euphoria in unhappiness” (5)
• “No matter how much such needs may have
become the individual’s own, reproduced and
and fortified by the conditions of his
existence; no matter how much he indentifies
himself with them and finds himself in their
satisfaction…
• …they continue to be what they were from
the beginning—products of a society whose
dominant interest demands repression.” (5)
• “Private [mental] space has been invaded and
whittled down by technological reality.” (10)
• How to distinguish false from true needs?
– No judge can do it, it would be reprehensible.
– It must be left to the individual “if and when they
are free to give their own answer.” (6)
– But they are NOT free.
• Thus, the more this process proceeds, “the
more unimaginable” it becomes that
“individuals might break their servitude and
seize their own liberation.”
• “All liberation depends on the consciousness
of servitude.”
• This is in part because of the triumph of
positivism
– “The concept is synonymous with the corresponding
set of operations.”
– Example: length. What about justice?
• “Many of the more troublesome concepts are
being eliminated” because they cannot be
operationalized. (13)
– “debunking of the mind”
– Reason brought to earth, incorporated
• Criticism becomes impossible. Lacking a
“negative” dimension to criticize “positive”
thought, the status quo appears perfectly
rational.
–
–
–
–
The objective good of progress and efficiency
Justice  justice system
Free institutions  those of the free world
“Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which
could wipe out the human race also serve to protect
the very forces which perpetuate this danger?”
• The pattern of one-dimensional thought &
behavior either deflects ideas, actions,
feelings that transcend it, or reduces them to
its own terms.
– Reason and religion both tamed, co-opted
• Example: freedom. Don’t people choose freely?
Who is to contradict them?
– But the availability of choice here is not the issue.
That is a non-critical understanding of freedom
• Free election of masters abolishes neither masters nor slaves
• Free choice of goods & services is not free if these gods &
services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear
• Doing what you want isn’t freedom if your wants are given
to you by the forces of your exploitation. That you want that
just demonstrates the efficacy of the controls (7-8)*
So what?
• In the past, constant labor was necessary
• Now, technology has rendered this unnecessary,
also opening new political possibilities
– Where once life was a struggle to dominate the world,
there is now the possibility of its pacification
• “the development of man’s struggle with man and nature,
under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and
aspirations are no longer organized by the vested interests in
domination and scarcity”
So What?
• While there exists a trend toward this
consummation of technology, there are
“intensive efforts to contain this trend within
the established institutions.”
– Technology becomes an instrument of domination
rather than liberation, of servitude rather than
freedom. This is the “irrational element in its
rationality.”*
• “Life as an end is qualitatively different from
life as a means.” (17)
So What?
• What is being lost?
– Freedom FROM the economy
• The individual exists only as an economic unit
– Liberation from politics over which the individual
has no real control
• Democracy is not, in fact, rule by the people. It is only
insofar as elections are thought to be equivalent to
power
– Freedom of Choice?
– Freedom of individual thought, unrestrained by
manufactured “public opinion”