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RICHARD POIRIER
literature--with the historical possibilities of a radical change in
the direction of history. Like Emerson, Thoreau, or Whitman,
Marcuse writes as if the stock images of romantic pastoral could be
transformed into reality, into a force which might at last, in
Mailer's phrase, determine "the links of cause and effect," the
process of evolution. It seems to me that Marcuse has even less
justification for thinking so than did these earlier American hope–
fuls. In prompting their expectations, they at least had what even
the materialists took to be a "new world," and it is to be remem–
bered that they were well aware of the illusive quality of the "new
world" they imagined.
In
An Essay on Liberation
Marcuse subscribes to one of the
manifestos issued by militant students in Paris in May 1968 where–
in
they assert that "we will no more be governed passively by the
laws of science than by those of economics or the imperative of
technology"--as if all three had the same status. "Science," they
continued, "is an art whose originality is that it has possible appli–
cations outside itself." No one who thinks on the terms "art,"
"applications," and "outside" will be happy with so confidently
French a formulation about science, and if it is useful to say this
about science it is useful to say it of any activity--of tennis or
bullfighting or cooking. Indeed if these supposed "applications" of
science "outside itself" are to be beneficial rather than repressive,
then other arts, like literature, painting, music, would also need to
have applications outside themselves. How else is man to know
how
to "apply" science to his own welfare?
Marcuse and his Paris radicals thus lead us down a familiar
path once more. Science and technology can only be of service to
man if man himself is renewed, is prepared to know what he needs
and what he does not need from science and technology. Other–
wise, all technology will do is further stimulate the brutal competi–
tion for goods, for the satisfaction of "false needs" which is the
present condition calling for radical change . How is this renewal to
occur and in what form? Apparently it is to be in accord with
some combination of images out of Karl Marx and Andre Breton,
the prophet of surrealism, of a style of art and literature developed
principally in the twentieth century which stresses the subcon–
scious or nonrational significance of images arrived at by chance
