PARTISAN REVIEW
189
contending not with windmills but with the whole complex of
space exploration at Houston.
This rabid dependence on art is, I think, necessary, if these
writers are to get round a contradiction in the radical objection to
technology. For if technology is as subtly overwhelming as it is
said to be, and if it is now inseparable, for financial and organiza–
tional reasons, from repressive political and economic systems,
either communistic or capitalistic, then where is one to locate or
promote an alternative? Mailer locates an alternative in the activity
of art (which is hardly the basis of a political program), and in
analogous activities like boxing or the manners of the Hipster;
Marcuse locates it more statically in the forms of art, in the clas–
sics. Both are staunchly elitist. But what pastoralist is not? Mailer
in his discrimination about swinging as against square activity in
art is as opposed to popular or mass culture as is Marcuse in his
fear that high art will be adulterated by commercialized popular–
ity. Neither one has much trust at all in the masses they would try
to rescue from the ravages of technology. This fact is especially
glaring in Marcuse because he takes a more complicated, even
sometimes optimistic view of technology, while Mailer has increas–
ingly allegorized it as the enemy of the Novelistic Imagination.
Sensing benefits in technology for the masses while at the same
time being extraordinarily dubious about the ability of the masses
not to be corrupted by it, Marcuse has to posit a controlled situa–
tion. And the controllers are to be those capable of appreciating
and protecting the unadulterated images of high art. What else can
he mean when he announces in
An Essay on Liberation
in 1969
that human freedom depends largely on technical progress, on the
advancement of science? For this to be true, in view of the alleged
repressiveness of technology and science, Marcuse has to imagine
the real or potential existence of men and women who are not
repressed. We are back to American romantic literature of the
nineteenth century, to Emerson, Thoreau, and especially the Whit–
man of
Democratic Vistas.
An Essay on Liberation
should have (for ears tuned to Ameri–
can literature) an oddly familiar ring. Anyone with even a smatter–
ing of Emerson or Whitman will recognize the effort to link the
idea of a "new man"--really a figure resurrected from myth and
