Page 85 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 76

Contemporary Cultural Theory

eventually much of the student Left—with a sense of redemptive
purpose, One-Dimensional Man defined the shape of their oppo-
nents. For Marcuse, as for Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘technological
society’ was above all ‘a system of domination’ (Marcuse, 1972,
p. 14). For Marcuse, as for Adorno and Horkheimer, a combin-
ation of mass affluence and mass media had delivered the
working class into the arms of the bourgeoisie:

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television pro-
gramme and visit the same resort places... then this
assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but
the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve
the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the
underlying population (p. 21).

The working class in one-dimensional society had thus become
‘a prop of the established way of life’, whose triumph could only
ever ‘prolong this way in a different setting’ (p. 197). For Marcuse,
as for Adorno and Horkheimer, Marx’s dialectic was thereby
reduced to a theory bereft of practice: ‘Dialectical theory’, he
concluded, ‘defines the historical possibilities...but their real-
ization can only be in the practice which responds to the theory,
and, at present, the practice gives no such response’ (p. 197). But
where Adorno and Horkheimer had been driven towards an
almost unmitigated cultural pessimism, Marcuse still clung to
the hope that others might prove better qualified to serve as the
midwife of history. In the book’s closing pages, he looked to ‘the
substratum of the outcasts and outsiders’, located ‘underneath
the conservative popular base’, for the chance that ‘the histori-
cal extremes may meet again: the most advanced consciousness
of humanity, and its most exploited force’ (pp. 199–200). His
actual hopes were invested in people ‘of other races and other
colours, the unemployed and the unemployable’ (p. 200), but with
a little poetic licence student radicals were soon also able to
imagine themselves thus.
Marcuse’s strictly aesthetic notions recapitulate much that is
in Adorno: both in Eros and Civilisation and in The Aesthetic Dimen-
sion he argued that art must retain its negativity and autonomy,

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