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through an analysis of the languages we have come to speak. In
"ordinary language," to start with, we tend more and more to "identify
the thing with its function"-all too often, a function which sinister
interests have arranged it to serve. We allow the meanings of words
to be determined by the situation in which they are used; we raise no
general questions beyond the immediate context as to the
propriety
of
these words in this situation. In view of the vast store of unconscious
associations which all words have in our minds, this abdication of the
critical sense leaves us open to monstrous manipulation. Thus, for
instance, we speak of the "clean bomb," and of "games" which depict
the murder of hundreds of millions of people, with diminishing aware–
ness of the contradictions and ironies involved. (Marcuse
has
a better
case with "games": even outside the sheltered life of the RAND corpora–
tion, they appear to be gradually losing their quotation marks, and
taking their place in the structure of everyday experience. Other ex–
amples would probably not be too hard to find.) Sometimes Marcuse
exhibits a foreigner's charming sensitivity to the nuances of spoken
English. In discussing automation, he quotes a worker who at first felt
ill
at ease with the new machines; by and by, however, he came
around, and said: "All in all we are in the swing of things." Marcuse
pounces on this phrase with delight.
It
"admirably expresses the change
in mechanized enslavement: things swing rather than oppress; and
they swing the human instrument-not only its body, but also its mind
and even its soul." He then elaborates this concept of "swinging" with
a brief discussion of the passive erotic fantasies to which workers at
automated machines are prone, and the "functional" character these
fantasies have in keeping them going. (This adds evidence for another
of Marcuse's most interesting theories, too complex
to
discuss here: that
the partial sexual emancipation we have seen in the last fifty years has
actually, "dialectically," served to reinforce a more general repressive–
ness.) Such lively observations show Marcuse at his best, as he unearths
some universal alienation in a concrete event. It is too bad he doesn't
let himself
go
in this way more often.
We could wish for more concreteness, too, in his splendidly sug–
gestive discussion of the language of art. The great triumphs of nine–
teenth-century literature, he argues, stem from its power to seize and
to evoke the most urgent social conflicts of the age. This success could
be built only on a rich store of "negative and oppositional concepts"
in the general consciousness. "The category 'society' itself expressed
the acute conflict between the social and political spheres--society as
antagonistic to the state. Similarly, 'individual,' 'class,' 'private,' 'family'
denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated with the established