Page 84 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 75

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

in essentially unamended form. Benjamin, alone of the three,
continued to hope for a cultural politics that could be at once
popular and avant-garde. His eventual suicide in 1940, after an
unsuccessful attempt to escape into Spain from Nazi-occupied
France, tells us much about the destinies of both western Marxism
and critical theory.

Herbert Marcuse
There is a similarly redemptive cast to the work of Marcuse, a
member of the Institute from as early as 1932, who, like Adorno
and Horkheimer, took refuge in the United States, but unlike
them, never permanently returned to Germany. An outspoken
opponent of the Vietnam War, Marcuse emerged as a somewhat
improbable counter-cultural hero for the American student New
Left. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, his work remained heavily
indebted to Freud and to the Marx of the Economic and Philo-
sophical Manuscripts. In Eros and Civilisation, he would try to
account for the apparently ‘self-defeating’ nature of emancipa-
tory struggles through a Freudian analysis of guilt. Guilt feeling,
he wrote, ‘introjects into individuals, and thus sustains, the prin-
cipal prohibitions, constraints, and delays in gratification upon
which civilisation depends’ (Marcuse, 1966, p. 63). While conced-
ing the force of Freud’s general theory of repression, Marcuse
would insist nonetheless that class societies produce levels of
‘surplus repression’ far in excess of those necessary to the creation
of social life per se. Moreover, the internalisation of guilt becomes
ever more pronounced under modern capitalist relations: ‘The
political economy of advanced capitalism’, he declared, ‘is also
a “psychological economy”: it produces and administers the
needs demanded by the system—even the instinctive needs’
(Marcuse, 1967, p. 6). The liberation of individual psychology
from repressive guilt, he argued, could be achieved only by a turn
to Eros and the freeing of sensual desire under the sign of the
pleasure principle. This apparently utopian ambition was attain-
able, Marcuse hoped, insofar as the overcoming of scarcity makes
the need for the surplus repression largely redundant.
While the pleasure principle provided Marcuse—and

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