One-Dimensional Man Research Articles

The Cultural Revolution in David Lodge's Changing Places

Utilizing Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1962) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) as a theoretical backdrop, this article seeks to gauge the extent to which the teachings of the German philosopher and political theorist lay the groundwork for the protests mounted by the university students in David Lodge’s campus novel Changing Places (1975). Admittedly, the Student Revolution spilled over into numerous fields. However, given space restrictions, only its cultural manifestations will be examined. It will be clear that at the root of Lodge’s students’ uprising lies an overpowering urge to break with the cultural heritage and with the academics upholding it. It will be equally clear, nonetheless, that these young activists’ faith in Marcuse’s political doctrine is unwelcome to conservative academics on the ground that it has diverse adverse effects on universities. Not only are politically oriented texts and discourses given precedence over traditional ones but also teachers and administrators are, at times, hindered from doing their duties. The plausible conclusion to draw, in the light of the research’s findings, is that although cultural revolutions undeniably pave the way for a number of personal and collective achievements and help us modernize many aspects of life, they should not blind us to the enduring significance of previous cultural traditions and of the aesthetic value of literary works.

Unhappy consciousness, one-dimensionality, and the possibility of social transformation.

The present article departs from concepts and ideas thoroughly developed by Herbert Marcuse. As such, it deals with his approach concerning the possibility of social transformation, looking to problematize the obstacles and hardships associated to the ongoing forms of social domination. To take this through, central works such as Eros and civilization and One-dimensional man are taken up, along with a number of lesser known texts and posthumously published reflections. Asserting the influence of Hegel, Marx and Freud, it is considered possible to criticize some of the existing contradictions that mark capitalist relations, interpreting them dialectically and immanently to unveil the potentials for social change through democratic attunement.

Infusing local culture in Singaporean animation: Developing a framework of cultural specifics from a study of contemporary cinema in Singapore

Notwithstanding a materializing Singapore cinema, research attention has not been paid to how animated cultural products can make an impact on the construction of a local identity. This can be considered detrimental to the cultural promotion of a local but heterogeneous mediascape. This practice-based research attempts to outline a practical framework of cultural specifics capable of producing an animated film that is identifiably ‘Singaporean’ to a global audience. Resistance against the Marcusian One-Dimensional Man theory, the premise of Kenneth Paul Tan’s Cinema and Television in Singapore in 2008, will be the basis of this research to understand the emergence of contemporary Singaporean films. Alfian bin Sa’at’s definition of the ‘heartlander’, a recurring and highly relatable element in Singaporean cinema largely due to the geographical statistic of the population percentage living in Singaporean public housing (referred to as HDB), provides the social semiotics needed by the research to understand Singapore culture. Films such as Ilo Ilo by Anthony Chen and Sandcastle by Boo Junfeng will be analysed according to five indicators – setting, characters, mise en scène, language and premise – as they manifest Singaporean traits in their attempts to integrate local culture. The same indicators are used to analyse films such as ‘Tatsumi’ by Eric Khoo so as to locate cultural deficiency within these local animated features. ‘Flats’ by Ervin Han and similar animated shorts are subsequently examined as examples of attempts at infusing local culture into an animated production. The practical result of the research is presented as a production journal of an animated short explicating the socio-political aspects of local identity.

Irony and Dialectics: One-dimensional Man and 1968

<p><strong>[Ironía y dialéctica: El hombre unidimensional y 1968]</strong></p><p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>In this article, the author analyses the role of irony in one of the texts that had the most influence in the 1968 movements around the world: The One-dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse. Understanding irony as an evident sign of human two-dimensionality, and emphasizing its dialectical potential, the author questions the subversive viability and the specific characteristics of every type of irony. To conclude, he focuses in the operability of irony in Marcuse’s work to encourage resilience and increase the possibility of inspiring political engagement through it.</p><p><strong>RESUMEN</strong></p><p>En el presente artículo, el autor analiza el papel que juega la ironía en uno de los textos que más influyeron en los movimientos de 1968 alrededor del mundo: <em>El hombre unidimensional</em>, de Herbert Marcuse. Entendiendo la ironía como una muestra evidente de la bidimensionalidad humana y haciendo énfasis en su potencial dialéctico, el autor se cuestiona sobre la viabilidad subversiva y las características particulares de cada tipo de ironía. Para concluir se centra en la operatividad que tiene la ironía en la obra de Marcuse para fomentar el desarrollo de resiliencia y aumentar la posibilidad de inspirar participación política a través de ella.</p>

THE PAUL TILLICH’S CONCEPT OF GOD AS BEING (IN SEARCH OF THE NEW PARADIGM OF RELIGIOSITY)

In the article author founds the “two-worldness” of human being, which means existence on the border between empirical and spiritual worlds. Author believes, that the reduction of the second spiritual world, completed by postmodern culture, causes the emergence of one-dimensional man, which means the existence on the horizontal surface without height and depth. Author highlights Paul Tillich’s concept of God as Being, in which empirical dimension represents the surface, and God represents the deepest foundation of human existence, the Ground of Being. Here Tillich follows Heidegger in his differentiation of ontic and ontological, but he doesn’t inherit his negation of metaphysical world. And he doesn’t follow the traditional image of objective God either. In situation of loss of old symbols of God, Spirit, we can find our ground only in our own depth. That reminds us the call to God in “De profundis” Psalm. In the limit situation, when person loses all he believed in, he can open God in the most profound depth of his soul. Spirituality of a person is understood as a measure of the incarnation of the spirit in our life, actions, personality. Author proposes to call such unity of spirit and existence as “spiritual-existential Self”.

An Autonomist Marcuse?

This essay examines key Marcusean themes through the lens of Italian (post-)autonomist thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Bifo criticizes Marcuse’s argument that repressed “authentic” human qualities need to be “liberated” to bring about universal human happiness, because what Bifo calls “semiocapitalism”—global capitalism in the age of digital networks, financialization, and computerization—effectively “subsumes” desires and libidinal energies vis-à-vis the production, circulation, and consumption of “info-commodities.” Yet Bifo also glosses over Marcuse’s anticipations of certain post-autonomist ideas, such as Marcuse’s use of Marx’s Grundrisse (an iconic text for the autonomist and post-autonomist traditions) and his evocation of the “general intellect” in One-Dimensional Man, as well as the theorization of the subsumption of desire via what Marcuse termed “repressive desublimation.” Bifo’s criticisms, as well as unanticipated congruences between Marcuse and autonomist thought, none of which have been addressed in the extant literature, thus constitute this essay’s central focus.

From One-Dimensional Man to One-Dimensions Economy and Economics

The evolution to dominance of neoclassical economics is reviewed in light of Marcuse’s OneDimensional Man in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the classic’s first publication.

On the Legacy of One-Dimensional Man

On the Legacy of One-Dimensional Man

Stanisław Barańczak i awangarda

The poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, who himself was against historical avant-garde as a movement that abandoned ethical commitments, has quite a lot in common with avant-garde. Like other New Wave artists, his poetry can be read in the context of the neo-avant-garde and counterculture, e.g. in the context of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Herbert Marcuse’s Onedimensional Man, with the propositions that overlap in many places with those of Baranczak’s “dialectic Romanticism”. When analysing the links of this poetry with the participant art of the 1960s and 1970s, it can be concluded that new-wave commitment has little in common with the typical attempts of the neo-avant-garde at regaining privacy, since the political character of Baranczak’s poetry is based on giving a position of privilege to the martyrdom code of Polish romanticism, which he frames in elitist modernist language.

Herbert’s Herbivore: One-Dimensional Society and the Possibility of Radical Vegetarianism

Careful reading of Herbert Marcuse’s texts, including Counterrevolution and Revolt, One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, and Eros and Civilization, reveals his subtle attention to the human–animal dialectic and its role in human liberation. More specifically, animals mark the irrationality of advanced industrialized society for Marcuse, and his subtle but keen treatment of the animal question in politics provides an opening to radically rethink politics for animals and humans. Working from Marcuse’s critical theory, I explore the contemporary one-dimensional animal, which I argue imbricates both animals and humans in the violence and destruction that characterizes advanced industrial society. Using Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional society and his discussion of animals as my theoretical framework, I specifically consider vegetarianism in its capacity to militate against the contemporary political economy of meat. I conclude that Marcuse’s insights point to a radical vegetarianism aligned with anti-capitalist politics that offers the development of sensuous, pleasurable, life-affirming sensibilities that support true liberation for both animals and humans.

Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times

As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.

Beyond the One-Dimensional University: A Marcusean Critique of Outcomes Assessment

In August 2013, US president Barack Obama announced a plan to link federal financial aid to college performance. This plan, it is argued, will allow students, parents, and federal lenders to avoid paying tuition for an ultimately meaningless credential. It identifies relevant educational outcomes as rates of graduation, the earnings of graduates, and the attainment of advanced degrees after graduation. The president’s plan is part of a much larger trend toward “accountability” and “transparency” in education, an important feature of which is the proliferation of the language and programs related to assessment of student learning outcomes. In this essay, I show that outcomes assessment is a form of “one-dimensional thought” as this concept is developed in One-Dimensional Man and that it suffers from the defects identified by Marcuse there. Outcomes assessment, therefore, codifies ways of thinking about education that undermine its role in the development of liberated forms of consciousness and emancipatory praxis.

Celebrating Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Celebrating Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

From Enjoyment to Refusal: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism

From Enjoyment to RefusalMarcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism Zachary Tavlin In this essay, I will attempt to provide a way to read a direct heir of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, with a key member of the Marxian Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse has clearly opened a relation between Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in Eros and Civilization. I will draw upon Freud’s theories of society and culture, as well as his system of subject-formation. Then, after considering Marcuse’s corrective on the basis of historical capitalism, as well as his critique of consumer capitalism in One-Dimensional Man, I will apply Lacan’s theory of the “two deaths” as a way of pressing the theoretical relevance of Marcuse’s critique for affluent capitalism, which relies upon the “injunction to enjoy.” I will also draw upon Žižek’s reading of Lacan as a way of articulating the political obstacles of (what Žižek calls) postmodern ideology, and the requisite theoretical deadlocks that need to be overcome before one can say anything of practical import. Finally, I will discuss the relevance of the categories of private and public space for the situation of postmodern ideology, as a way to initiate a “proposal without a program” that draws upon the “ethic of refusal” at the heart of the death drive. marcuse and freud Marcuse’s move is not to overtly contend with Freud’s claim that civilization requires a repression of the drives, but to historicize it, so that we can view late capitalism from the perspective of its work on Eros and Thanatos (libido and death drive) and still develop a theoretical model of a non-repressive economic and cultural system. Freud posits that obedience to the pleasure principle becomes untenable in a reality-space where pleasures themselves (or those things that satisfy our desires, which for Freud must be material and not merely hallucinatory or phantasmatic) are scarce. For Freud, reality is constructed in the first place by the psyche once the hallucinatory object (primordially, of the mother’s breast), continually recalled, inevitably fails to satisfy the quantity of excitation released by the circulating drive. Here, one [End Page 64] interprets the pleasure principle alongside the reality principle; the ego responds to reality in order to regulate sustainable pleasures and close the gap between the sexual aim and object. Civilization and society are upper-level reality constructions for the individual, fully analogous to this primordial reality construction. The renunciation of an unrestrained (but ultimately inadequate, since it intends towards repeatable as well as unrepeatable objects) Eros is paid for by a modest though consistent Eros, weakened and made indirect through the extension of desire toward social mediations like friendship (specifically friendships of utility, which in the influential Aristotelian account are degraded forms of friendship). For Freud, the result is being-with (a term I borrow from Heidegger to mark a difference: for the latter, Mit-sein is not produced but is rather an originary condition for Dasein). But it is, to a certain extent, the source of suffering: We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 26, italics mine) The suffering of civilized society is born out of the social contract’s (implicit) stipulation that absolute gratification is to be denied to its members. This is a problem for Freud, but a structurally necessary one. And importantly, as a principle of civilization, the price (of repression and neurotic symptoms) is universal and not dependent upon the means and style of production. But what if this structural scarcity is not universal with regard to civilization as such, but indeed particular to the logic of capital? Certainly, as Marcuse points out, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few provides a specific type of scarcity. Marcuse goes further and affirms the question: “[Freud’s argument] applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually...

A Decision Model in One-dimensional Man

A Decision Model in One-dimensional Man

Refusing Marcuse: Fifty Years after One-Dimensional Man

One-Dimensional Man was published just half a century ago, catapulting a rather obscure professor in his sixties to international fame. In less than five years, over 100,000 copies of the book would be sold in the United States alone, with translations extending the influence of Herbert Marcuse into sixteen foreign languages. He addressed packed auditoriums all over the United States and Europe. At a student-occupied university in France, young rebels put on a kind of teach-in they called a “journée marcusienne.” In Paris, Marcuse met with Nguyen Than Le, North Vietnam’s chief delegate to the peace talks with the United States. At the University of Rome, students brandished placards proclaiming their allegiance to Marx, Mao and Marcuse. Before the sixties had ended, he was commonly designated as the unofficial faculty advisor to the New Left.

Managerialism: Born in the USAConfronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, by LockeRobert R. and SpenderJ.-C.. London & New York: Zed Books, 2011.Managerialism: A Critique of an Ideology, by KlikauerThomas. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Managerialism: Born in the USAConfronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, by LockeRobert R. and SpenderJ.-C.. London & New York: Zed Books, 2011.Managerialism: A Critique of an Ideology, by KlikauerThomas. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Back to the Era of Conditioning Theory? The Case of the Moodle Platform

This article discusses the role of critical theory in the process of enlightening teachers and students in the digital era, in which higher education has been obsessed by meritocracy. Taking critical theory especially, Herbert Marcuse’s critique of the “one-dimensional man”, as guide line, the author objects to the conditioning theory as the basis of teaching and learning, since it would alienate the intrinsic relationship between teachers and students. To show the tenability of my view, an empirical study on the awareness of the negative function of teaching and learning integrated with ICT among teachers and students is conducted. As result, some main problems are found as follows: 1. Although both student and teacher are aware of their own rights and the significance of autonomy, their teaching and learning integrated with ICT are far from expectation, as seen in the low speed of the Moodle platform. 2. On the other hand, teachers in university are rather passive in using the Moodle platform (They are asked for and the Moodle system is free). They are, in fact, not conscious of the danger of being dominated by the system and, consequently, of the inequality of rights, which could hinder the development of autonomy and self-reflection. By criticizing the Moodle system, I indirectly show the indispensable role of critical theory in helping teachers and students to emancipate themselves from the pitfall of technology and its instrumental rationality

Religion, Freedom, and Justice in the Debates on Welfare in Germany

A radical suspicion regarding the value of productivity figures centrally in the work of Herbert Marcuse. In his view, socially necessary productivity historically constituted the primary hindrance to achieving human potential. In Eros and Civilization he argues, “The work that created and enlarged the material basis of civilization was chiefly labor, alienated labor, painful and miserable—and still is.”1 He makes a similar point in One-Dimensional Man, but in more hopeful terms, when he suggests that “truth and a true human existence” stand just beyond “the realm of necessity.”2 Thus, on the one hand, the technological advancement of industry opens the…

Introduction

To choose Herbert Marcuse and religion as the topic for a special issue might seem strikingly anachronistic. Formed by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, Marcuse worked in the OSS during the Second World War, and later, in his mature theoretical works, such as Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, he grew into the cultural critic who would become a prominent mentor of the student revolt of the 1960s, especially in the United States and Germany. This is a stirring narrative, no doubt, but does it not simply belong to another era? To be sure,…