Toward an Embodied Utopia: Marcuse, The Re-Ordering of Desire, and the “Broken” Promise of Post-Liberal Practices Joseph Winters Introduction Perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse articulated a hope for a radically transfigured world. He imag- ined a world characterized by receptive, generous relationships rather than domination and violence. Yet Marcuse’s philosophy of liberation has been placed on trial within various critical circles. Michel Foucault’s rejection of the “repressive hypothesis” and his concomitant analysis of power as generative is typically interpreted as an indirect response to Marcuse’s tendency to treat the social order as a primarily repressive force vis-à-vis our instincts and desires.1 Martin Jay has expressed concerns about the function of anamnesis in Marcuse’s utopian framework since memory for the latter is often directed toward some imaginary lost time, a time of plenitude and happiness.2 Jay therefore worries that Marcuse’s vision of the future, because it retrieves and re-collects this previous state of happi- ness, might be too conciliatory and totalizing. In general, those who have been influenced by post-structuralism cast a suspicious eye on any position that affirms the possibility of organizing human desires and relationships 1. For Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis, see his History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). For an attempt to show the secret, unacknowledged affinities between Foucault and Marcuse, see Joel Whitebook, “Michel Foucault: A Marcusean in Structuralist Clothing,” Thesis Eleven 71, no. 1 (2002): 52–70. 2. See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), pp. 220–40. 151 Telos 165 (Winter 2013): 151–68. doi:10.3817/1213165151 www.telospress.com 152 JOSEPH WINTERS without some kind of coercion. Since there is no space outside of power, utopian projections seem, at best, naïve, and potentially dangerous.3 Following Marcuse, we should remain committed to another kind of world, but without dismissing these concerns and objections. Taking Fou- cault’s critique into consideration, I suggest that we can re-read Marcuse in a way that does not confine him to the “repressive hypothesis.” In addi- tion, we can interpret his notion of utopia in a less unifying way than does Jay, thereby endorsing something like a broken utopia, a commitment to a better future that is tethered to and punctuated by the memory (and irrec- oncilability) of trauma, suffering, and loss. In fact, Marcuse’s notion of a new sensibility resonates with recent conversations between theologians and radical democrats who share a desire to foster an ethos of vulnerability in opposition to the culture of neo-liberalism. Marcuse, Repression, and the Re-ordering of Desire According to Marcuse, the established order of things remains in place due to the affective control it has over individuals. The Establishment maintains its dominion, in part, by shaping and regulating human desires and instincts in accordance with the logic of capital. A free society would require a break from this paradigm, a departure from habits and practices defined by aggression, cruelty, and destruction. As Marcuse puts it, our voluntary servitude . can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infra- structure of man, a political practice of methodological disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. Such a practice involves a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things so that the organ- ism way become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world.4 Liberation from the present order involves cultivating a new sensibility, alternative ways of responding and relating to the world. The construction of a new world entails “men who could speak a different language, have 3. Dangerous because utopian longings have historically neglected the ways in which visions of a different world are constrained and tainted by the relationships and limitations that mark the current world. Utopian constructions therefore overlook the ways in which they rely on and reinforce power relationships. I deal with this issue below. 4. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 6. TOWARD AN EMBODIED UTOPIA 153 different gestures, follow different impulses; men and women who have developed an instinctual barrier against cruelty, brutality, and ugliness.”5 For Marcuse, political change depends on the possibility of experienc- ing the world differently, of cultivating more receptive relationships with those who cohabit our lifeworlds. This receptivity requires greater sensi- tivity to the violence we (directly and indirectly) inflict on others, being more open and patient with forms of life that are strange and different, and being more capable of cultivating relationships marked by generos- ity and care rather than the will to dominate. This new sensibility would also influence the way we use and appropriate technological innovations. Although technology and science have been used for destruction and war, Marcuse argues that these productive forces can alternatively be released and re-channelled to fulfill fundamental needs and desires, to satisfy the demands of the life instincts (creation, preservation, and unity), and to build a world in which more people flourish and live together amicably.6 Because this new sensibility would require a complete break from the current social order, Marcuse seems to invite Foucault’s critique of the tendency to imagine power as a primarily repressive mechanism with respect to our desires and instincts. As Joel Whitebook points out, “Fou- cault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis is generally taken as a critique of Freud. The real target, however, is the left Freudian tradition, which received its paradigmatic articulation in the work of Herbert Marcuse.”7 Many passages in Marcuse’s corpus, taken out of context, might lead us to believe that he is a legitimate target of Foucault’s critique. Consider the following claim: “A universe of human relationships no longer medi- ated by the market, no longer based on competitive exploitation or terror, demands a sensitivity freed from the repressive satisfactions of the unfree societies.”8 The German thinker occasionally refers to the Establishment or contemporary society as a system of laws, taboos, and prohibitions that contain and subdue life instincts (which prevents humans from achiev- ing pleasure, happiness, and intimacy). Liberation is therefore typically defined as the release of these instincts from repressive mechanisms. In 5. Ibid., p. 21. 6. To some extent, this marks a break from other members of the Frankfurt School tradition (including Adorno and Habermas) who assume a necessary link between technol- ogy and instrumental rationality. On this issue, see Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), pp. 330–32. 7. Whitebook, “Michel Foucault,” p. 52. 8. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 27. 154 JOSEPH WINTERS addition, Marcuse predicts that our rebellion against repression will “take root in the very nature, the biology of the individual.”9 By locating libera- tion in the biological needs and drives of the individual, Marcuse could be read as locating liberation outside the strictures and constraints that mark any social order. More generally, he could be interpreted as affirming a biological substratum that is exterior to language, power, and history. Whereas Freud argues that civilization and nature will always be in con- flict (because order requires the sacrifice of happiness and the perpetual deferral of desire),10 Marcuse hopes for a future society in which the life instincts are freed from the shackles of civilization. In volume one of History of Sexuality, Foucault offers a different way to think about the relationship between the social order and human desire; he refuses the notion that the relationship between power and desire is necessarily an antagonistic one. Most historians, according to Foucault, assume that since the Victorian era, Western culture has been charac- terized by the repression of sexuality. They imagine that repression, in general, “operates as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence.”11 (For Foucault, this notion of repression implies that liberation is necessarily anticipated as a gen- eral transgression of the status quo and an irruption of the radically new.) But according to Foucault, what is so remarkable about modern society is the abundant proliferation of discourses and ways of speaking about sex, sexuality, and sexual desire. Although Foucault admits that bourgeois social arrangements impose a “restrictive economy” on sexual desire, this quality is ancillary to the generative function of power. Foucault therefore draws attention to “the multiplication of discourses in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it [sex], and so more and more, a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articula- tion and endlessly accumulated detail.”12 For Foucault, cultural discourses and practices are constitutive of sexual desire and identity. Rather than simply repress desire, power enables and compels bodily desires to enter the realm of intelligible speech and discourse. It is therefore futile and/or 9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1961). 11. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 4. 12. Ibid., p. 18. TOWARD AN EMBODIED UTOPIA 155 naïve to search for some authentic, liberated sexual identity outside of the domain of power. Such a space does not exist. Many contemporary authors have drawn from Foucault’s understand- ing of power, especially Judith Butler.