192
RICHARD POIRIER
beings would use their freedom. However, [this] embarrassingly
ridiculous sound may also indicate the degree to which this vision
has become obsolete and pertains to a stage of the development of
the productive forces which have been surpassed." In other words,
the vision of freedom, if not the particular uses of it, is no longer
embarrassing or ridiculous.
It
has become less so not because of
political actions or revolutionary agitation. The vision of freedom
has become less silly because of changes in modes of production.
Marcuse ' writes, that is, as if the Great Refusal to conformity,
which he has located in the aesthetic values and aesthetic truth of
higher culture, merely awaits its opportunity--if it doesn't col–
lapse into pop culture (as he reiteratively fears)--to make a
qual£–
tat£ve
change in the life that is to be made
quant£tat£vely
available
by technology. Who, however, is going to create this opportunity?
How is it to be made into an historical instead of literary circum–
stance in a world presumably imbued with "false needs," and ren–
dered incapable of transcending a universe of facts created and
validated by technology? The "new type of man" he asserts must
have "a different sensitivity as well as consciousness." They would
be "men who would speak a different language, have different
gestures, follow different impulses; men who have developed an
instinctual barrier against cruelty, brutality, ugliness. Such an in–
stinctual transformation is conceivable as a factor of social change
only if it enters the social division of labor, the productions rela–
tions themselves. They would be shaped by men and women who
have the good conscience of being human, tender, sensuous, no
longer ashamed of themselves.... "
It
is Whitman once more.
What, again, lets Marcuse assume that such a person might
evolve out of a social system which produces the "one-dimensional
man" of the book so entitled in 1964? Probably the answer is
implicit in the date of
An Essay on L£berat£on
(1969) with its
reference to the events of the preceding spring, especially of May
1968 in Paris. Those events seemed to support Marcuse's theory
that no matter how "happy" men might seem to be or even be–
lieve themselves to be under collective capitalism or socialized
regimentation, they really are not happy. The May uprisings meant
that under the false consciousness of contentment there really was
some shred of the true consciousness of repression. Again, art is
the monumental evidence that hidden in man, in some or in a few,
