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Marcuse & Habermas on New Science Ben Agger Marcuse& Habermason New Science Ben Agger Bishop's University Marx's meaningof materialismas wellas theextent of Hegel's influence on his thoughthas been in thecenter of controversyamong Marxists eversince thepublication in 1923 ofLukdcs' Historyand Class Con- sciousnessand Korsch'sMarxism and Philosophywith the Frankfurt school, includingMarcuse, embracing the Hegelian interpretation.The controversyhas resurfacedwithin the Frankfurt school in Habermas' critiqueof Marcuse's conceptof a "new scienceand new technology." Agger'sanalysis leads himto theconclusion that it is Marcuse'sposi- tionwhich reflects the thinkingof Marx whileHabermas' rejection of Marcuse's antipositivisticattack logically implies an un-Marxian politicalreformism. Ben Aggerteaches in theDepartment of Sociology at Bishop's University,Lennoxville, Qudbec. He has contributedarticles to various journalsand anthologies. I. CriticalTheory's Raison d'Etre Ever since Lenin describedcognition as the reflectionof an objective realityin his 1908 text,Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,Marxism has been torninternally by epistemologicalconflicts. Today, these epis- temologicalquarrels have resurfacedin the splitbetween Herbert Mar- cuse and many of his critics.Especially notoriousare Marcuse's argu- mentsagainst positivism and fora "new science"based on an epistemol- ogy opposed to Marxism-Leninism'sreflection-theory of knowledge. Essentially,Marcuse and othersfrom the originalFrankfurt school (Max Horkheimer,Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm) have triedto broadenthe focus of economismin the beliefthat Marx's critiqueof dominationwas definitelynot restrictedto purely economicfactors. So-called criticaltheory is an attemptto rehabilitate Marx's complex,nonmechanical analysis of relationsbetween economics This content downloaded on Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:46:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ben Agger 159 and culture.Indeed, Marcuse's attackon positivismis a vitaldimension of a dialecticalsocial theorywhich transcends economism and Marxism- Leninism'snaturalism, systematized by thephilosophical Lenin.' Below, I wantto examinesome of Marcuse'sviews on scienceand technology in counterpointto Jiirgen Habermas' 1968 critiqueof Marcuse's concept ofa "newscience and new technology." I rejectHabermas' position for its failureto appreciateMarcuse's 1. Lenin had not yet read Hegel when he helpedcreate correspondence-theory in his 1908 texton the empirio-critics.Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks were not to appear untillater, and the sectionon Hegel was writtenin 1914. The Philo- sophicalNotebooks, in spite of appearancesto the contrary,do not representa clean breakwith the naturalismof Lenin's pre-Hegelwritings. "Cognition is the eternal,endless approximation of thoughtto the world." [V. I. Lenin, Collected Works,Volume 38, "PhilosophicalNotebooks" (Moscow: Foreign Languages PublishingHouse, 1961), p. 195.] But he also writes"that man by his practice provesthe objectivecorrectness of his ideas,concepts, knowledge, science." (Ibid., p. 191.) In otherwords, Lenin flirtedwith a nonpositivistepistemology inspired by Hegel's destructionof the dualism of noumenonand phenomenon.Yet he could not ultimatelyshed the crudenaturalism of his 1908 text.His Philosophical Notebookshave been a source of officialSoviet Marxism'scanonization of the "dialecticalmethod" and dialecticallogic, almost a religiousformula for deter- miningpolitical sin and beatitude.Had Lenin emergedfrom Materialism and Empirio-Criticismto read Hegel's Phenomenologyof Mind insteadof Science of Logic, he mighthave brokenthrough epistemological naturalism and its conver- sion into a cosmic principleof Soviet Marxism.Critical theory salvages from Hegel not the conceptof a "unityof opposites"and its crystallizationas the AbsoluteIdea in Science of Logic but Hegel's earlierargument for a negative rationality,a negativephilosophy, in Phenomenologyof Mind. Unfortunatelyfor Lenin,he chancedupon thoseof Hegel's worksmost easily distorted as a tool of Soviet ideologists:a dialecticallogic, designedto reconcileall-perhaps irrecon- cilable--contradictions.It is in the Phenomenologyof Mind thatcorrespondence- theoryis givenits death-blowin Hegel's unremittingcritique of Verstand(naive commonsense). In Marx's hands,dialectical thought could strivefor the elimina- tion of exploitation;indeed, Hegelian Marxismis rooted squarelyin the Phe- nomenologyof Mind. Yet dialecticallogic foundin the Hegel read by Lenin and in Engels'Dialectics of Naturewas a conservativeformula for justifying existent reality,merely a dialecticof conceptsaccording to which A and not-A were identical.It was only a shortstep fromLenin's paean to Hegel in Philosophical Notebooksto the officialDialectical Materialisminvoked by Stalin in his-un- Marxian--crusadesagainst iconoclastic self-criticism such as thatof Trotskyand Bukharin.It is especiallysurprising that Lenin, who in his politicalpractice was highlysensitive to empiricaltendencies (eschewing pregiven strategies), could have retrievedthe highlyspeculative and empiricallyarbitrary 'dialectic of matter' fromthe ontological Hegel. It was impossiblefor Lenin's hard-headed pragmatism and empiricismin politicalmatters to have had a moderatingeffect on Stalin when Stalin could turnto the "dialecticalmethod," canonized in Philosophical Notebooks,and on the strengthof its authoritylegitimize any politicalstrategy. This content downloaded on Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:46:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 160 Marcuse& Habermason New Science critiqueof science.Throughout, I contend that Marcuse is faithfulto Marxin reproducinga complex, nonlinear theory of dominationcom- biningeconomic and cultural factors. In analyzingpositivist epistemology as a factorin moderndomination Marcuse does not vitiatethe basic Marx but onlyfurther develops Marx's analysisof the determinative effectof ideologyand consciousnesson materialsocial relations. Thus,Marcuse and thecritical theorists are not opportunistsor re- formistsocial democrats in theircritique of science as a hegemonicform of social ideology.I maintainthat Marcuse is no moreutopian or romanticthan Marx whenhe calls fora new scienceand technology; indeed,Marxism has beencrippled by theoristssince Lenin who have entertaineda crude correspondence-theory ofknowledge. Critical theory, emanatingfrom the original Institute for Social Researchin Frankfurt, aroseprecisely out of Lukics' and Korsch's1923 attackson theneo- Kantianismof EduardBernstein and on Lenin'snaturalism.2 Lukics, Korsch,and the Frankfurttheorists argued that official Marxism- representedby theComintern under Zinoviev's and Lenin'sdirection- was a counterrevolutionarymode of ideologywhich merely served to protectBolshevism's political authority. Critical theory opposed a crude naturalistepistemology-according to which the conceptreflects the givenobject-in attemptingto rescue Marx's latent theory of a dialecti- cal, postpositivistcognition. My thesisis thatMarcuse extends and bringsto a conclusionthe original'Hegelian Marxian' critique of Bernstein'sand Kautsky'sneo- Kantianismand Bolsheviknaturalism; and thatthis in no wayrenders himantimaterialist. I wish to showhow the argument for a newscience is oneof the most timely forms of creative Marxian theory; how, indeed, the critiqueof positivismadvanced by Marcuseis one of the most potentmodes of the critique of ideology, the model for which is definitely foundin Marx'swritings on Germanidealism and religion. I shallargue thatto be a Marxisttoday one musttreat cognition and technologyas vitallyself-expressive forms of humanlabor whichmust be liberated fromthe dominionof positivism.In otherwords, positivism is not a legitimateepistemological strategy for theorists who retain Marx's vision offundamental human liberation. One of theissues often raised in currentdiscussions of criticaltheory is therelation of theFrankfurt theorists to Marx.I believethat Marx wasnot an economicdeterminist and that his model of relations between 2. Georg Lukics, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Karl Korsch,Marxism and Philosophy(New York: MonthlyRe- viewPress, 1970). This content downloaded on Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:46:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ben Agger 161 'base' and 'superstructure'(economics and culture)orients the work of Marcuse,Horkheimer, and Adorno.Marx's modelcomprehends the reciprocalinfluences of ideology and economicstructures. In thissense, theFrankfurt critique of positivism-exemplifiedby Horkheimer's and Adorno'sDialectic of Enlightenmentand Marcuse'sOne-Dimensional Man-is directedat thesocial functionof positivistcommon sense in divertingattention from the inhumanity and contradictions ofcapitalism. Habermas,however, rejects Marx's model of criticaltheory, arguing thatMarx reduced reflection to laborin renderingstatic the relation of cultureand economics.He believesthat Marx did notprovide for the functionof consciousnessin readyingrevolutionary agents for political practice,indeed, that Marx reduced consciousness to an epiphenomenon automaticallyspringing from economic relations. I believethat Marx providedanalytically for the catalyst of self-reflectionthrough his con- ceptof critique.In thisvein, Marx was thefirst critical theorist. Yet Frankfurtcritical theory diverges from Marx's historically specific readingof the potentiallyrevolutionary industrial proletariat. While criticaltheory accepts Marx's model of thedialectic between theory and practice,it does notnecessarily
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