In
1940s there were two tendencies within the history of Critical Theory. First,
the philosophical-cultural analysis of the trends of Western civilization developed
by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Second, the more
practical-political development of Critical Theory as a theory of social change
proposed by Marcuse and Neumann. For them, Critical Theory would be developed as
a theory of social change that would connect philosophy, social theory, and
radical politics- precisely the project of 1930s Critical Theory that
Horkheimer and Adorno were abandoning in the early 1940s in their turn toward
philosophical and cultural criticism divorced from social theory and radical
politics. Horkheimer and Adorno had
neglected the theory of social change. It is exactly what Marcuse and Neumann
were focusing on.
One-Dimensional Man was first published in 1964. It critiques the new modes
of domination and social control. As capitalism and technology developed,
advanced industrial society demanded increasing accommodation to the economic
and social apparatus and submission to increasing domination and
administration. Marcuse writes that independence of thought, autonomy, and the
right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical
function in a society. According to him, political power asserts itself through
its power over the machine process and over the technical organization of the apparatus.
He
distinguishes between true and false needs. According to him, the need to relax, to have
fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and
hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. The distinguishing
feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those
needs which demand liberation- liberation also from that which is tolerable and
rewarding and comfortable- while it sustains and absolves the destructive power
and repressive function of the affluent society.
The
means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging,
food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information
industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual
and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the
producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and
manipulate. They promote a false consciousness. The indoctrination becomes a
way of life. Thus, emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.
Technology
rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of
better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and
nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense
of this universe (p.20).
Just
as people know or feel that advertisements and political platforms must not be necessarily
true or right, and yet hear and read them and even let themselves be guided by
them, so they accept the traditional values and make them part of their mental
equipment. Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its
democratic aesthetics. It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine
arts at his fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set, or by just stepping into
his drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine
which remakes their content.
The
rulers of the world are losing their metaphysical features. Their appearance on
television, at press conferences, in parliament, and at public hearings is
hardly suitable for drama beyond that of the advertisement, while the
consequences of their actions surpass the scope of the drama (p.74). Free election
of masters does not abolish the masters of the slaves (p.10).
The
established societies themselves are changing, or have already changed the
basic institutions in the direction of increased planning. In Marcuse’s view
the power of reason and freedom are declining in the late industrial society.
With the increasing concentration and effectiveness of economic, political, and
cultural controls, the opposition in all these fields has been pacified, coordinated,
or liquidated. One-dimensional man means conforming to existing thought and behavior
and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that
transcend the existing society. ‘’One-dimensional man’’ has lost, or is losing,
individuality, freedom, and the ability to dissent and to control one’s own
destiny.
Marcuse
was one of the first theorists to analyze consumer society through analyzing
how consumerism, advertising, mass culture, and ideology integrate individuals
into and stabilize the capitalist system. One-dimensional man does not know it’s
true needs because its needs are not its own- they are administered,
superimposed, and heteronomous; it is not able to resist domination, nor to act
autonomously, for it identifies with public behavior and imitates an submits to
the powers that be. Lacking the power of authentic self-activity, one
dimensional man submits to increasingly total domination (xxviii).
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