Page 36 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

Herbert Marcuse explored the specifically political dimensions of these cultural
changes. This was most powerfully expressed in his One Dimensional Man (Marcuse,
1964b), where he traced the new forms of alienation and need repression generated
in the contemporary ‘totalitarian’ form of organized capitalism prevailing in both
the United States and the Soviet Union (Marcuse, 1958). The capitalist system, he
argued, had developed to the point at which basic human needs could be satisfied
and new ‘false needs’ created. False needs are those that are imposed on individuals
as a means for their repression – and Marcuse instances the need to consume com-
modities in the ways that they are presented in advertisements. In such a situation,
people become oriented to the needs generated by the forms of cultural production
of the mass media, and so their needs come to be determined by external powers over
which they have no control. Although individuals may identify with these needs –
regarding them as their own true needs – they are, in fact, products of ideological
domination: they are repressive needs, from which individuals must be liberated. The
cultural sphere is marked by ‘desublimation’, by a destruction of the truths previ-
ously found in the sublimations of a truly artistic culture. Commodification of cul-
tural products ensures that people lose the ability to think critically about their own
society and are socialized into the ‘Happy Consciousness’ (Marcuse, 1964b: 79) of the
new conformism: the existing world is seen as a rational world that delivers the
desired goods and is, therefore, to be welcomed.
This conformist orientation and the lack of any critical potential are seen by Marcuse
as indicative of the ‘one-dimensional thought’ that characterizes contemporary capital-
ism. Rationalization consists not simply of the application of rational knowledge, but
also of the extension of a systematically rational pattern of mind and behaviour. Positive,
technical knowledge is ideological, a source of domination. In these circumstances, no
effective challenge to economic, political, and cultural domination can be mounted
from within contemporary capitalism itself. The primary challenge must come from
those outside the system, from the subordinate masses of the Third World and the mar-
ginalized, poor, and excluded sections of the western proletariat who have not been
incorporated into the happy consciousness of their affluent and conformist compatriots.

Authoritarianism, Socialization, and Culture

The rationalization of economics, politics, and culture was seen as producing social
stability by defusing the critical consciousness of those who live in contemporary
capitalist societies. An important theme in the writings of the Frankfurt School,
therefore, was the exploration of the psychological processes that complemented the
social processes of rationalization and homogenization. It is through their socializa-
tion into its culture that people come to identify with the system that oppresses
them, and Institute members turned to psychoanalytical ideas for insights into this.
Much work on developing this integration of Freud with Marx was done by Erich
Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm produced many ideas that contributed to the
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