Maria Shuvalova 2009 Conference Paper

Herbert Marcuse: A Way of Being A Public Intellectual

MARIA SHUVALOVA

Tver State University

Russia

e-mail: mariashuvalova@yandex.ru

ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to examine Herbert Marcuse’s views on the public role of the intellectuals and his attitude to mass media as an instrument of social and political discourse. Production of the ideas for a long time being a privilege of philosophy became an occupation of media technologists. In order to clarify the transformation of the function of the public intellectual in the context of the cultural milieu it is essential to analyze intellectual projects of philosophers, who succeed in public affairs. Among the Frankfurt School’s intellectuals Herbert Marcuse was the most popular media person. Interdisciplinary and dialectical approach applied by Marcuse, emphasized interrelation between technology, politics, economy and culture is especially important for evaluation of the role of mass media in contemporary society.

Keywords: Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Mass Media, Intellectuals.

Media activity is usually considered as a contemporary phenomenon. In the age of digital technologies the ideas spreading through the media channels are powerful forces of domination. Production of the ideas for a long time being a privilege of philosophy became an occupation of media technologists. Intellectual component made way to practical purposes. Philosopher as a mediator of the ideas today is a rare agent of mass communication. Nevertheless the problem of philosophical interpretation of the role of intellectuals in the global public sphere is an important issue of today. In order to clarify the transformation of the function of the public intellectual in the context of the cultural milieu it is essential to analyze intellectual projects of philosophers, who succeed in public affairs.

Among the Frankfurt School’s intellectuals Herbert Marcuse was the most popular media person. His popularity reached a climax when the philosopher entered his seventies. According to Richard Wolin “for the 1960’s generation, Marcuse was a towering figure — living proof that the so-called generation gap was, in large measure, a mass media fabrication. Unlike his Frankfurter School companions de route, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse remained remarkably open and receptive to contemporary political developments” (Marcuse 2005a:ix). Marcuse successfully escaped an age-related disease of denying the role of young people for self-determination in the questions of way of life, culture, politics and liberation and effectively used mass media resource for dissemination of the ideas of critical theory. Addressing Marcuse’s legacy it is possible to reconstruct his approaches to the role of public intellectual in contemporary society. In today’s media-driven age, Marcuse’s concerns are still relevant for a new generation.

I. HERBERT MARCUSE ON MASS MEDIA

Marcuse’s early writings offer passing considerations on the phenomenon of mass communication, although mechanisms of the impacts that mass media has on society had been explored in details in the early 1940s, when he worked for the Office of War Information of the US State Department. Being engaged in the struggle against Nazism as an intelligence analyst, Marcuse examined the ways that the mass media and official government discourse within the allied countries could present images of German fascism to the American public (Marcuse 1998:19).

In the postwar period, as new means of mass media extensively spread their influence on American society the question arose: “What is the nature of its influence repressive or liberating?” In the address to the UNESCO symposium on social development entitled “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society,” written in 1961, Marcuse pointed out that it is not easy to distinguish between the mass media as “as technical instruments, as instruments of manipulation, and as instruments of information and entertainment” (Marcuse 2001:53). Nevertheless Marcuse was definitely disposed to the second option. Mass media were presented as an effective instrument of indoctrination which crushes the freedom of the individual. Marcuse argued that “the intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought after its absorption by mass communication and indoctrination – abolition of “public opinion” together with its makers. In his view, “the unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the predominance of forces which prevent their realization by preconditioning the material and intellectual needs which perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence” (Marcuse 2001:51).

During the 1960s, the philosopher sequentially evolved the idea of the repressive nature of mass media in the contemporary public discourse. In his program writing “One-dimensional Man” Marcuse considered mass media as an instrument of integration of the individuals into the “one-dimensional” society of repression and domination. “The total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality has coordinated the means of expression to the point where communication of transcending contents becomes technically impossible” (Marcuse 2002:69). Marcuse was confident that “indoctrination of media could be overcome by critical and dialectical thinking which perceived a freer and happier form of culture and society and a “great refusal” of all modes of repression and domination” (Marcuse 2002: 79).

In the talk “The Containment of Social Change in Industrial Society” presented at Stanford University on May 4, 1965 Herbert Marcuse revealed the new status of mass media and explained the reason for its extensive public influence. He declared that the function of a Father, (described in details in “Eros and Civilization” 1956), in industrial society was replaced by mass media. Marcuse insisted that “with this decline of the Father the function of representing the reality principle is transferred to the mass media and to those who represent the mass media. The super-ego as represented by the authoritative father is weakened and the moral imperatives, once imposed upon the child by the super-ego, are being replaced by the imperatives of the mass media. They tell the child and the adolescent, and without the innumerable conflicts formerly involved in the quest for identity, exactly who he is and who he is supposed to be”. Marcuse states that the “function which was formerly fulfilled in the family, and was supposed to be the result of the child’s and adolescent’s own struggle for recognition, is now performed to a great extent by the media” (Marcuse 2001: 90).

In the welcoming address for Syracuse University “The Individual in the Great Society” (1965) first published in 1966 in the underground San Diego journal “Alternatives” Marcuse proposed another way for overcoming media indoctrination. It is the education that can help to resist the indoctrination of mass society by “the immunization of children and adults against the mass media; unhampered access to information suppressed or distorted by these media; methodical distrust of politicians and leaders, and abstention from their performances; and organization of effective protest and refusal which do not inevitably end with the martyrdom of those who protest and refuse” (Marcuse 1966:34).

Mass media in technological society played a trick on Marcuse. His opponent in panel discussion entitled "Democracy Has/Hasn't a Future ... a Present" Norman Mailer noted: “The danger of this technological society is that it appropriates everything that's new. It does not appropriate Marcuse’s thought. But it takes one piece of Marcuse's flesh and it introduces it into the machine. It appropriates him to the point where people who couldn't begin to understand one of his sentences can use his name at a cocktail party” (Marcuse 2005:98). Marcuse admitted that fact himself in his interview, which first appeared in French journal Express and was later digested in The New York Times in 1968. “It is the press and publicity that have given me this title and have turned me into a rather salable piece of merchandise I particularly object to the juxtaposition of my name and photograph with those of Che Guevara, Debray, Rudi Dutschke, etc., because these men have truly risked and are still risking their lives in the battle for a more human society, whereas I participate in this battle only through my words and my ideas. It is a fundamental difference” (Marcuse 2005:100).

Marcuse blamed American television for stimulation of consumption that subjects people to the capitalist mode of production. However, he questioned the fact that it is not the fault of the television or technology in general. “It is the fault of the miserable use that is made of technological progress. Television could just as well be used to re-educate the population” (Marcuse 2005:107).

At the very end of the 1960s, H. Marcuse turned to the problem of the New Left’s representations in the mass media. Speaking at the twenties anniversary of radical newspaper “The Guardian” he argued that “the reason for limits of democratic persuasion of the New Left is the mere fact that the Left has no adequate access to the media of mass communication. (Marcuse 2005:124). In Essay on Liberation the philosopher came to conclusion that that leftist minority does not possess the large funds required for equal access to the mass media which speak day and night for the dominant interests. It reduced the method of persuasion that remained the only considerable measure of left intellectuals (Marcuse 1969: 65).

In 1972 Marcuse appeared with sustained critique of American democracy. In his essay The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy he made a statement that the main problem of affluent society “is not oppression of underground media and non-conformist activities, but rather reluctance of the wide public to assume anything that contradicts the accepted truth or falsehood” (Marcuse 2001:169).

Anti-intellectualism, according to Marcuse, was one of the main destructive features of the contemporary society. Who can be a mediator between the general public and the rich intellectual tradition of Western culture? What is the place of the intellectual in the political discourse?

2. HERBERT MARCUSE: A WAY OF BEING PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

By his age and education, Marcuse was undoubtedly a representative of the “book culture”, but by the methods of communication with the audience he championed the ideas of “media culture”. “Until the end of his life Marcuse was a media-event. That is very seldom in our days” said A. Juutilainen in his documentary “Herbert Hippopotamus”. Researcher Beverly James counted that Marcuse’s name appeared in 271 articles in the New York Times published between 1964 and 1974 (Beverly 2006:21).

In 1960-70 his works and public speeches were widely discussed in academic circles and scholarly publications, as well as in the mass media. The character of the public issues was sometimes provocative and far from academic representations of the scholar. For example, in 1971 Playboy magazine devoted the profile to Herbert Marcuse’s public phenomenon. At the same time Herbert Marcuse became one of the figures from which Russell Jacoby derived his model of the “public intellectual”. Public speeches and interviews is a valuable source for the reconstruction of his intellectual biography. Recollections of colleagues and former students are also a great help. Extant video and audio sources brilliantly communicate his manner of public speaking and relations with the audience.

In is interesting to summarize Marcuse’s views on the position of intellectuals in the public discourse. In his early works, Marcuse concentrated mainly on the role that the philosopher should play in the society. In 1937, analyzing the differences between philosophy and critical theory in the essay of the same name, Marcuse proclaims that “the transformation of a given status is not the business of philosophy” and “the philosopher can only participate in social struggles insofar as he is not a professional philosopher” (Marcuse 1970a:108). That opinion can be explained by the fact that Marcuse himself at that time was not involved into the public discussions.

In the historical review “Theories of Social Change” dated back roughly to the late 1930s or early 1940s H. Marcuse and his friend and colleague Franz Neumann searching the preceding of the concept of “social change” briefly touched upon the role of the intellectuals in French philosophical tradition comparing two opposite views of Condorcet and De Maistre. Marcuse points out that in spite of the fact that the sphere of intellectual culture was considered by Condorcet the realm of conscious freedom of thought, speech and religion, control in the form of education became an intellectual factor and “the intellectuals seemed to be those best equipped to discharge this task” (Marcuse 1998:118). The social order was based on super-human authority; it was to be an order of control, punishment and compulsion in which the intellectual was in De Maistre opinion “the eternal enemy and the executioner “the corner stone of society” (Marcuse 1998:118). Both concepts counterpoised intellectual and society.

The possibility of dialogue with the audience and topicality of questions raised by a philosopher were discussed by Marcuse long before he became popular media person. In his letter to Horkheimer in November, 1941 he wrote: “I’m just not one for leaving “messages in a bottle.” What we have to say is not just for some mythical future” (Marcuse 1998:233).

The problem of the publicity of philosophical engagement came in the focus of Marcuse’s analysis two decades before he was proclaimed “a prophet” and “a guru of the New Left”. He appealed to his teacher Heidegger to make public avowal of his changed views. In 1947, he spoke of the importance of the public declaration of the philosopher’s position. Marcuse argued that in the case of Heidegger and any other philosopher there can be “no separation between the philosopher and man” (Marcuse 1998:264). Heidegger misjudged Hitler and Nazism and in Marcuse’s view that was one of the errors a philosopher is not allowed to commit. “He certainly can and does commit many, many mistakes but this is not an error and this is not a mistake, this is actually the betrayal of philosophy as such, and of everything philosophy stands for”(Marcuse 2005a :170).

From the mid-1960s Herbert Marcuse referred frequently to the function of intellectuals in political and social discourse. One of the main responsibilities of scholar regarding the analysis of the contemporary society, according to Marcuse, is his capability to “go beyond the words or rather to stay this side of the words, in the given universe of powers, capabilities, tendencies which defines their content” (Marcuse 1966:14).

According to Marcuse, the main contradiction in the formation of intellectual space is that “the individual in the struggle for moral and intellectual autonomy, and the individual in the struggle for existence are separated” (Marcuse 1966:29). He argues that it is the “progressive education could create intellectual climate for emergence of the new individual needs… It would include immunization of children and adults against mass media, unhampered access to information suppressed or distorted by this media, methodical distrust of politicians and leaders” (Marcuse 1966:34).

In his public lecture “Beyond One-Dimensional Man” delivered as the “First Annual Hans Meyerhoff Memorial Lecture” at the University of California in October 1968, Herbert Marcuse faced the audience with the question of the responsibility of the intellectual. “This choice can be formulated in the following question. Man’s reason, imagination, sensibility shall they be in the service of ever more efficient and prosperous servitude or rather or shall they serve to cut this link, releasing man’s faculties and his imagination and sensibility from this profitable bondage?” Marcuse anticipated the answer: “Today the real possibilities of human freedom are so real and the crimes of the society which prevents their realization are so blatant that the philosopher, the educator can no longer avoid taking sides, and that means alliance, solidarity with those who are no longer capable and no longer willing to have their future, to have their existence determined and defined by the requirements of the status quo”. Marcuse concludes by saying that:” We see that today students all over the globe in the East as well as in the West, in the Third World as well as in the First and Second are demonstrating this unwillingness, the refusal. If the philosopher, the educator still takes seriously his job of enlightenment he will find himself whether he wants it or not with those who want to give meaning and reality to the words and ideas he has taught during his life as educator, and not only academic meaning but a meaning to be fought for, a meaning to be lived for” (Marcuse 2001:119).

In his London speech “Liberation from the Affluent Society”, Marcuse paid special attention to the role of intelligentsia. In Marcuse’s view intelligentsia one of the non-integrated social groups which, by virtue of its privileged position, can pierce the ideological and material veil of mass communication and indoctrination (Marcuse 1968:188). He makes an attempt to debunk the fatal prejudice against the intellectuals as catalyst of historical change. Marcuse declares that due to the increasingly scientific character of the material process of production the role of the intelligentsia changes. It is the group from which the decisive holders of decisive positions will be recruited: scientists, researchers, technicians, engineers, psychologists etc. He further argues that intelligentsia has a decisive preparatory function. Marcuse outlines the challenge for intellectuals “to organize themselves not only on a regional, not only on a national, but on an international level” (Marcuse 1968:189). Although Marcuse has to admit the fact that the role of intellectuals is limited and New Left Movement hardly will be a mass movement in foreseeable future, he definitely against any form of defeatism and even makes optimistic statements about the tangible manifestations of the essential weakness of the existing political system (Marcuse 1968:192). Marcuse insisted that intellectuals “do not or should not identify reality with established reality. Given the imagination and rationality of true intellectuals, we can expect great things. In any case, the famous dictatorship of the intellectuals has never existed” (Marcuse 2005:115).

Describing the New Left movement, Marcuse articulates its intellectual component. He points out that this movement’s spokesmen are not traditional politicians but rather such suspect figures as poets, writers, and intellectuals. According to Marcuse, opposition is concentrated among the outsiders within the established order. Intellectuals belong to the Second group of the opposition. It consists of those “privileged whose consciousness and instincts break through or escape social control”, “those social strata that, owing to their position and education, still have access to the facts and to the total structure of the facts-access that is truly hard to come by. These strata still have knowledge and consciousness of the continuously sharpening contradictions and of the price that the so-called affluent society extorts from its victims” (Marcuse 1970a:85).

Marcuse supports student’s demand for including the critical thought into intellectual discussion in the frames of university curriculum and as an alternative to establish “free universities” for intellectual analysis of such contemporary phenomena as Marxism, psychoanalysis, imperialism, foreign policy in the Cold War etc. (Marcuse 1970a:89). But in Marcuse’s view intellectuals should not limit their activity to pure discussion. Marcuse calls for their political engagement and warns about the danger of defeatism (Marcuse 1970a:94).

Nevertheless Marcuse was often accused of elitism by his opponents. As far as the notion of elitism was often identified with intellectuals, in his public speeches Marcuse preferred to identify intellectuals with avant-garde. Defining his New Left line in 1968 he claimed that “because the students and intellectuals have no experience in what is today called politics that they are in the avant-garde. Because the political experience today is the experience of a game that is both faked and bloody”. According to Marcuse, radical change always started with a very small minority, and mostly with a very small minority of intellectuals (Marcuse 2005:156).

In his essay “Repressive tolerance” dedicated to students at Brandeis University, Marcuse, who was persuaded there is no force which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, he believes that it is “the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities--that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does” (Marcuse 1969b:95). In the Postscript 1968, Marcuse proposed the alternative for non-democratic dictatorship of the government of non-intellectual “elite” minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen and argues that the political prerogatives of intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole (Marcuse 1969b:136).

Marcuse declared that he would prefer a “dictatorship of intellectuals” to “dictatorship of politicians, managers and generals” (Marcuse 2005:110). In “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy” (1972) Marcuse proposed to use revolutionary term “avant-garde” instead of Élites. “Avant-garde has always been a small group, and has always included “intellectuals.” And its task has always been education” (Marcuse 2001:178). In the interview with Bill Moyers in 1974 H. Marcuse clarified his position by saying that if the alternative really would be democracy or dictatorship - even educational or intellectual dictatorship – he would be for democracy. As far as Marcuse ascertained the Hobson's choice and lack of democracy in contemporary society he inclined to intellectual dictatorship (Marcuse 2005:160).

Some mass media identified H. Marcuse as an outsider in the academic world, vagabond professor, but he felt quite comfortably in his position. According to the numerous interviews he had no sense of loneliness. Marcuse declares that he has nothing to do with the New York Times identification of him as a “Farther of the New Left” – this title he disliked and neglected. In many interviews he rejected the role of the father of the student’s movement. At first, Marcuse pretended to ignore his raising popularity and concentrated on teaching 19th Century German philosophy. "If there’s one thing the New Left doesn’t need," came the word from La Jolla, "it’s a new father image." But as the media -- Time, The New York Times -- began portraying him as theoretician of the New Left, it became impossible to escape his new identity. The decisive point came in 1968, when the student-worker insurrection in France canonized him as a 20th century Karl Marx (Horowitz 1970: 223).

The way Herbert Marcuse identified himself in his interviews and public speeches is a specifically important issue. In his report “Liberation from the Affluent Society”, Marcuse ironically named himself a “hopeless philosopher for whom philosophy has become inseparable from politics and even asking for indulgence for philosophical speech on dialectics of liberation” (Marcuse 1968:176).

In his “Le Monde” interview Marcuse outlines the spectrum of his intellectual engagements: “For myself, it is true that for a long time now I have not been a militant activist. I write, I teach, I give lectures, I talk to the students: these are normal activities of an intellectual in the United States because in that country the situation is in no sense revolutionary, it is not even pre-revolutionary. Therefore an intellectual’s duty is first of all a mission of radical education. We are, in America, entering into a new “period of illumination” (Marcuse 1969a). In his interview to M. Malinovich he states that “some things have to remain vague because the theoretician is not a prophet. It's more important to say things in a vague way than not to say them at all” (Miedzian Malinovich 1981:369)

Herbert Marcuse showed that it is possible to use the media, which is considered a repressive instrument of the affluent society as an instrument in the struggle against one-dimensionality. Marcuse’s legacy can be a critical impulse for the representatives of the academia searching for publicity in order to promote their ideas. His way of public speaking without intrusion is based on the authority of the scholar. The significance of Herbert Marcuse’s way of being a public intellectual is underpinned by the following features:

1. Marcuse constructed an intellectual system relied on classics, e.g. Kant, Hegel, Freud, thus opening the horizons for a new mode of thought aimed at the understanding of the reality of actually existing contemporary society.

2. Marcuse did not prescribe readymade formulas: he used the method of negations and questioning. He was able to keep analysis from sliding into the advocacy.

3. Marcuse did not make advances to the young audience, but tried to reveal the intellectual standards for the students and young audience.

Interdisciplinary and dialectical approach applied by Marcuse, emphasized interrelation between technology, politics, economy and culture is especially important for evaluation of the role of mass media in contemporary society.

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