Herbert Marcuse

Tonight I am reading Herbert Marcuse's 5 Lectures, which I am borrowing from our dear friend, Jason Stopa.

I don't have the time, patience, nor the discipline to write up a full biography, so settle for this quick introduction to give some background and context, or do your own research.

Marcuse (July 19,1898 – July 29,1979) was a German Jewish philosopher and sociologist, a member of the Frankfurt School. He was also one of Angela Davis's professors at UCSD. (Angela also studied under Adorno in Frankfurt for a time, someday I'll look at her more closely). Marcuse is widely known for tying the theories of Freud with Marxism.

Herbert's Hippopotamus is an intensely engaging and inspiring, 1 hour 9 minute documentary that was made by UCSD film student, Paul Alexander Juutilainen in 1996. The film examines Marcuse at UCSD mainly from 1968 to 1969 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5311625903124176509 - which is also available for download if you notice the link on the left. There are a lot of interesting parts in this movie (ie, the interactions with Reagan are amazing, however did he become our president?), and I highly suggest it (of course). "Why... the visionary force of a youth movement had been over 70 years old"

here are two passages from Freedom and Freud's Theory of Instincts, that I found amazing.

pg 3.
"The irrationality of unfreedom is most crassly expressed in the intensified subjection of individuals to the enormous apparatus of production and distribution, in the de-privatization of free time, in the almost indistinguishable fusion of constructive and destructive social labor. And it is precisely this fusion that is the condition of the constantly increasing productivity and domination of nature which keeps individuals- or at least the majority of them in the advanced countries - living in increasing comfort. Thus irrationality becomes the form of social reason, becomes the rational universal. Psychologically - and that is all that concerns us here - the difference between domination and freedom is becoming smaller. The individual reproduces on the deepest level, in his instinctual structure, the values and behavior patterns that serve to maintain domination, while domination becomes increasingly less autonomous, less "personal," more objective and universal. What actually dominates is the economic, political, and cultural apparatus, which has become an indivisible unity constructed by social labor."

pg 9-10.
"Life is experienced as a struggle with one's self and the environment; it is suffered and won by conquests. Its substance is unpleasure, not pleasure. Happiness is a reward, relaxation, coincidence, a moment - in any case, not the goal of existence. That goal is rather labor. And labor is essentially alienated labor. Only in privileged situations does man work "for himself" in his occupation, does he satisfy his own needs, sublimated and unsublimated, in his occupation; normally he is busy all day long carrying out a prescribed social function while his self-fulfillment, if there is any, is limited to a scanty free time. The social structuring of time is patterned on the structuring of the instincts completed in childhood; only the limitation of Eros makes possible the limitation of free, that is, pleasurable time to a minimum deducted from full-time labor. And time, like existence itself, is divided into the primary content "alienated labor" and the secondary content "non-labor."
But the structuring of the instincts that dethrones the pleasure principle also makes possible ethics, which has become increasingly more decisive in the development of Western civilization."

I honestly intend on "unpacking" the above statements, as well as a better essay on Marcuse, someday, for now, it's there for you to do what you will with it.