MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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Marcuse explicitly rejects totalitarian dictation , but often he writes
more in the spirit of a conservative elitist than a democratic radical.
Though Marcuse will not force men to be free, he has little respect
for the way they live , work , and play .
The same can be said of many of Marcuse's former colleagues in
the Frankfurt school , out of which his work emerged in the twenties
and thirties . As brilliant theorists who evolved a humanistic, Hegelian
Marxism and applied it to many areas of contemporary life their work
was of inestimable value . They fashioned a profound synthesis be–
tween dialectical materialism and the Western cultural tradition that
Nazism had overshadowed and Stalinism had ruptured . But their
writings on popular culture- T.W. Adorno on jazz , for example–
reveal the extent to which their critical perspective belongs not to
Marxism , but to the long and honorable line of conservative attacks
on modernity. By attacking the "culture industry" they affirmed an
allegiance to high culture and the autonomy of art which Stalinism
had betrayed. But they also left little room for new perspectives on
either mass culture or the avant-garde , of the sort we find in more
democratic theorists like Brecht or Walter Benjamin .
The style of these men expresses the same elite viewpoint . The
nimble and elegant ping-pong of Adorno 's dialectics affirms its
author 's contempt for the common sense of empiricism and the
bureaucratic sloganeering of the Stalinists , and announces his ad–
herence to the German philosophical tradition; but the language is
opaque to all but the most subtle and highly trained reader. Mar–
cuse 's cruder and more accessible style is equally insulting to the
empirical mind . The conceptual " transcendence" that he gains by
his play of abstractions fails to compensate for the loss of concreteness,
the lack of observed reality. Words like
liberation, domination ,
transcendence,
and
reification
sometimes take on a mechanical trajec–
tory of their own in his prose , become reified , as it were, into opaque
verbal blocks that relate only to each other , not to the world . Robert
Frost compared free verse to playing tennis with the net down ; at his
worst Marcuse plays philosophy with the world down , and triumphs
in a hollow kingdom of words. Even his major work of social criticism,
One-Dimensional Man ,
shows what difficulty he has keeping his eye
trained for long on society . The famous analysis is nearly all in the
first two chapters, after which he turns in relief from society to ideol-
