Negations Essays in Critical Theory Herbert Marcuse may fly Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted. In this context, MayFlyBooks has been established as an independent publishing house, publishing political, theoretical and aesthetic works on the question of organization. MayFlyBooks publications are published under Creative Commons license free online and in paperback. MayFlyBooks is a not- for-profit operation that publishes books that matter, not because they reinforce or reassure any existing market. 1. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory NEGATIONS Negations: Essays in Critical Theory Herbert Marcuse With Translations from the German by Jeremy J. Shapiro First published by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1968. Published by MayFlyBooks in paperback in London and free online at www.mayflybooks.org in 2009. Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UK. With permission of the Literary Estate of Herbert Marcuse, Peter Marcuse, Executor. Supplementary material from previously unpublished work of Herbert Marcuse, much now in the Archives of the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, has been and will be published by Routledge Publishers, England, in a six-volume series edited by Douglas Kellner and by zu Klampen Verlag in a five-volume German series edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen. All rights to further publication are retained by the Estate. CC: Literary Estate of Herbert Marcuse, Peter Marcuse, 2009. ISBN (Print) 978-1-906948-04-7 ISBN (PDF) 978-1-906948-05-4 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Contents Contents vii Acknowledgements ix Translator’s Note xi Foreword to the 2009 Edition Steffen Böhm and Campbell Jones xiii Foreword xvii 1 The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state 1 2 The concept of essence 31 3 The affirmative character of culture 65 4 Philosophy and critical theory 99 5 On hedonism 119 6 Industrialization and capitalism in the work of Max Weber 151 7 Love mystified: A critique of Norman O. Brown 171 8 Aggressiveness in advanced industrial societies 187 Notes 203 Acknowledgements Chapter 1 originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. III (1934). Chapter 2 originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. V (1936). Chapter 3 originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI (1937). Chapter 4 originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI (1937). Chapter 5 originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VII (1938). Chapter 6 first published in German in Max Weber und die Soziologie heute (1964). This translation is based on a revised form of the essay first published in German in Kultur in Gesellschaft (1965). Chapter 7 (‘Love Mystified’) was first published in Commentary, February 1967. Norman O. Brown’s response (‘A reply to Herbert Marcuse’) was published in Commentary in March 1967. Chapter 8 printed first in Negations (Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1968). Translator’s Note My translation of the foreword and the first five essays in this volume are from the German text in Kultur und Gesellschaft (2 volumes, 1965). The translation of ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber’ is principally the work of Professor Kurt Wolff of Brandeis University, who had translated an earlier version of the German text. He has graciously allowed me to use his translation, which I have modified in accordance with the revised German text published in Kultur und Gesellschaft. Professor Wolff has inspected the changes and made improvements. I should like to thank Shierry Weber for giving generously of her time and energy in providing what proved to be indispensable assistance at every stage of the translation. I am grateful also to Rusty Simonds and Sharon Herson for several useful suggestions and to Roberta Fitzsimmons for negentropy. J.J.S. Foreword to the 2009 Edition Steffen Böhm and Campbell Jones With this publication of Herbert Marcuse’s Negations we also announce the establishment of MayFlyBooks, and with this a programme for the determinate negation of contemporary corporate capitalism. Marcuse’s book, which we are reprinting here, bears the mark of a particular historical moment, characterized by economic and cultural over- industrialization, war and totalitarianism. This is the specific moment against which Marcuse set himself. In the current historical situation one senses the equally pressing need for options against the impositions of the increasingly grotesque forms of global capitalism. As Marcuse responded to the particular historical moment in which he lived, we sense today the demand to perform similar negations, which will be at once determinate, specific and singular at the same time that they keep an eye on the universal. This is not to say that the world we live in, like that of Marcuse, is one that is simply in crisis, but rather that, across the various spaces in which it is grasped in thought, it is not in crisis enough. This is the result of the impositions and extensions not only of the capitalist mode of production and the commodification of life, but of the incorporation of the very spaces in which these social processes might have been understood and transformed. Here we think with Marcuse of the place of culture and the diversion or incorporation of the critical impulse, but also the almost complete abdication of responsibility by those working in what are still nobly called universities. Struggling against these totalisations, Marcuse’s book is caught at the borderline between utopianism and despair. On the one hand, it outlines concrete theoretical and practical proposals for overcoming the xiii Negations present, while, on the other hand, it is keenly aware that the present is marked by an almost complete subsumption in ‘total administration’. This dialectic therefore eschews two of the most dominant trends in thought today: first, naive utopianism that imagines the easy escape from the present, as if the collapse of the capitalist empire is already at hand, and, second, the varieties of empiricism and fatalism that merely document the state of affairs and our failures to date. The essays in this book fall in two parts. The first five chapters were written and published before the start of the Second World War at a time when Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. These essays were originally published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), the ‘house journal’ and main literary organ of the Frankfurt School, which was edited and led by Max Horkheimer during the 1930s. Marcuse joined the Institute in 1933, the same year he emigrated from Germany, first to Switzerland and then to the United States, where he lived until his death in 1979. These essays therefore precede, and can be read as preparations for, Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse’s elaboration of the negative philosophy which he takes from Hegel. The final three chapters in Negations appeared later, in the mid through late 1960s, in the years following the publication of One-Dimensional Man in 1964, in those years in which Marcuse was elevated into a public intellectual figure in the days of 1968. Forty years after their original publication, these essays are not, however, of merely historical interest, nor as part of a documentary testimony to Marcuse or the ‘Frankfurt School’. For Marcuse, published works are profoundly historical, both in their location in relation to the moment against which they are opposed, but, at the same time, texts cannot deny their relation to that which exceeds that moment. From our current situation of suffocating affluence we can again sense Marcuse’s dismay at the failure or unwillingness to seize the productive capacities unleashed by capitalism and put them towards more humane purposes than those to which they were and currently are being put. The conditions for transformation were for Marcuse, as they are for us now, present in the very same conditions that also give us so much reason for despair. Negations is therefore not a negative book but a call to action, a thinking that involves an affirmation of thinking and of life and a xiv Foreword to the 2009 Edition hopefulness that knows also that hopefulness without negation – an awareness of what must be negated and the risks of that task – is naive. In this way, it is continuous with the project that, as Adorno stressed in Negative Dialectics, to stay positive, to affirm life, one must engage in a process of negating what is. Because only through this negating of what is can one find determinate possibilities of development, progress, freedom. Positive possibilities of a new life that escape the stultifying repetition of the present can only come through negation. Being simply ‘positive’ involves the danger of putting forward utopian futures which have no relation to the present, to the ‘what is’, to contemporary social relations. This is why Marx so vehemently criticised the utopian socialists of his time, as their utopian ideas for new towns and communities were not founded in an understanding of the realities of ‘actually existing’ capitalist relations.