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misses all signs of new freedom as " represssive desublimation ," and
finds absurd or trivial real-life examples that supposedly show whole
spheres of human activity being "de-eroticized." Similarly, he dis–
misses the early countercultural manifestations, such as "Zen ,
existentialism, and beat ways of life ," as "modes of protest and
transcendence [which] are no longer contradictory to the status quo, "
and which therefore' 'are quickly digested by the status quo as part of
its healthy diet." Nor does he take any note until his last page of the
new political forces mustering on the margins of social power . What–
ever seems better is objectively worse . In this book Marcuse 's lumber–
ing conceptual apparatus becomes his defense against the obvious; if
at moments it keeps him from being taken in , it all too often prevents
him from seeing straight.
In
An Essay on Liberation
(1969) the exact opposite occurs . The
youth culture that society had digested in the previous book now
becomes the agent of historical change , just when its disintegration
began to be apparent to others . Reviving pre-Marxist theories of
human nature, Marcuse now seeks "a biological foundation for
socialism," grounded in the mores of the counterculture . The same
dialectical machinery that previously found futility everywhere now
finds revolutionary potential in every accidental trait of the young,
including their use of dirty words, their dress, music, their supposed
bathing habits , and so on . Aching to recapture his lost utopianism,
Marcuse hitches his star to that of his young followers , translating
their behavior into the language of German philosophy, often with
ludicrous results . For social observation he substitutes a purely
journalistic perspective; instead of theory he offers political rhetoric;
ephemeral matters of fashion are hypostatized into world-historical
developments in a way that, at its worst, rivals the fatuities of
The
Greening ofAmen·ca .
I'm well aware that I've applied harsher standards to Marcuse
than to others I've written about here . This is because he promises
so much : of the theorists who influenced the sixties Marcuse alone
seemed capable of bringing Marxism up to date. That he failed to do
that is no disgrace . At the very least he created a framework of
analysis through which the cultural and personal dimension-the
arts, the media, sexual mores, the use of leisure-could be integrated
into social theory and political awareness . If his analysis could be
