Marcuse S Transcendent Project at 50 Pos

Marcuse’s
“Transcendent Project” at 50:

Post-‐Technological Rationality for Our Times
For the special issue on the 50th anniversary of the publication of
One-Dimensional Man
Radical Philosophy Review (Vol. 19, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 143-172)
By: Marcelo Vieta
This draft: March 8, 2015
Abstract
This article sets out to revisit Herbert Marcuse’s “transcendent project” of liberation, as
well as his notion of “post-technological rationality” that grounded this project,
articulated in outline form in the last section of One-Dimensional Man and in fragments
throughout his middle writings between 1955 and 1972. It does so in order to assess this
project’s continued validity for the struggle for alternatives to the (dis)organizations and
enclosures of neoliberal capitalism and its perpetual moments of crisis. The article first
reviews Marcuse’s place within substantivist critiques of technology. It then works
through how Marcuse’s post-technological rationality—the other side to his technology
critique—envisions social change happening via a re-rationalized, re-valued, and re-
aestheticized technological base spurred by the openings for alternatives made possible
by a reconstituted subjectivity, determinate negation, and moments of crisis.
Author Bio
Marcelo Vieta, PhD, Assistant Professor in Workplace and Organizational Learning for
Social Change, Program in Adult Education and Community Development and the
Centre for Learning, Social Economy & Work (CLSEW), Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education of the University of Toronto. marcelo.vieta@utoronto.ca
Marcuse’s “Transcendent Project” at 50:
Post-‐Technological Rationality for Our Times
Introduction
Herbert Marcuse, sage of the New Left during the 1960s and early 1970s,
believed our technological inheritance that, on one hand, captures and alienates late-
modern life within a formalized rationality of exchange value and instrumentality could
still be re-conceptualized and redeployed under other, more life-affirming values. Guided
by a new form of reason and driven by a new subject, a new technological rationality
could direct the project of liberation from the struggle against necessity, scarcity, toil, and
injustice. First clearly outlined, if in sketch form, in the last 54 pages of One-Dimensional
Man, yet present in fragments throughout his middle writings between 1955 and 1972,
such a “transcendent project”1 was to be grounded in a “post-technological
rationality”2—a different mode of “technological rationality…stripped of its exploitative
features”3 and legislated by different values that would lead to different means and ends
for technology. “Civilization,” wrote Marcuse in the last pages of One-Dimensional Man,
produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its own insufficiency, is own
blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill
this function only as post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality
4
of pacification, organon of the “art of life.”
Marcuse believed that a post-technological rationality functioning, for instance, as “the

rationality of art”5 and “the technology of pacification”6 would be able to “define yet
unrealized possibilities”7 as compelling alternatives to the “established reality.”8 The
other “universe of thought and practice against and within the existing one” that would be
subsequently opened up—a two-dimensional reality9—would then reposition the
technological base so that “concrete alternatives”10 such as the “total automation” of toil
would be “the optimum,”11 and “cooperation,” “self-determination,” and “tenderness
toward each other,”12 the potential.
This double-sidedness to Marcuse’s critique of technological rationality makes his
critical theory unique amongst substantivist theorists of technology, including Martin
Heidegger (his former teacher) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (his Frankfurt
School contemporaries). As Andrew Feenberg points out, while it is true that for Marcuse
“technology has the power and consequences Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer
deplore,” it also held for him “a promise.”13 For those that are currently struggling for
less commodified, less alienating, less technocratic, and more communal modes of life
across the globe, Marcuse’s “transcendent project” and its “post-technological
rationality” still contain evocative proposals for opening up contemporary life to other
potentialities grounded in a pacified and liberated existence through new forms of
technological mediations.14
Given the planetary extent of today’s socio-economic and environmental crises
and the persistent neoliberal (dis)orderings and enclosures that perpetuate them, the time
has come for seriously revisiting Marcuse’s propositions for a post-technological
rationality. Such a revisiting is particularly pertinent considering our neoliberal era where
capitalism itself—the ostensible bulwark of “freedom” and “democracy” for social
democrats and neo-conservatives alike—actually sits paradoxically “upon a form of
global disorder.”15 Certainly Marcuse offers a sharp critique of that global disorder, or,
1
more correctly, of the orderings and dis-orderings wrought by advanced (neoliberal)
capitalism’s social, technical, and economic frameworks that have led to our one-
dimensional worldview. He convincingly argued, for example, that we live in an age
where the very notion of alienation is itself alienated as we are more and more saturated
with images and goods of abundance. He was also one of the first critical social theorists
to point out that in advanced capitalism workers and labour movements are also deeply
ensconced in and coopted to work for the same interests of business owners and
management. He also reminded readers that at the same time that contemporary capital
“delivers the goods” to some, billions continue to live in marginalized and immiserated
conditions. Today, inequality seems to be solidly entrenched in our established reality;
the misery of the many still goes hand-in-hand with the wealth and sky-high corporate
earnings of the few.16
But Marcuse’s critique of technology is, seen from another perspective, also
undoubtedly a hopeful appeal for alternatives. Indeed, Marcuse offers us today an
important theoretical voice for pushing contemporary critical theory towards ethico-
political commitments that both critically diagnose our global neoliberal capitalist system
while, at the same time, opening up critical theory to reflections on real alternatives to
this system. Fifty years after the publication of One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse’s project
for a “post-technological rationality,” I argue in the following pages, is still relevant for
thinking through radical social transformations for our times. This is because his negative
dialectic critique also prefigures radical alternative re-organization from out of the dis-
organizations and dis-orders of contemporary life.
This article pays particular attention to Marcuse’s transcendent projects’ utopian
impulse and its implications for people today struggling for alternative forms of socio-
economic and technological life. It is an impulse that, far from ruling out Marcuse’s
critical theory, validates his negative dialectics for a radical and concrete politics of
technological transformation and social re-organization—from below and for today. My
goal in focusing on Marcuse’s utopian side to his critique of technology is to begin to
retrieve his vision of a post-technological rationality for contemporary radical left social
projects and critical theories seeking alternatives to neoliberal values and practices.
Indeed, his proposals that both drew from and inspired the New Left in the late 1960s and
early 1970s can still provide today’s newest social movements, projects for alternative
economics, and critical theoretical scholarship with rich conceptual tools from which to
assess new and transformative models of technology and organization.
In the following pages I first revisit Marcuse’s negative and substantivist side to
his critical theory of technological rationality, comparing and contrasting it to Heidegger,
Adorno, and Horkheimer’s still-influential technology critiques. Engaging in this
comparative exercise before discussing Marcuse’s utopian hopes for our technological
inheritance is important because Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer were three major
influences on his own critiques of technology.17 This exercise ultimately helps us to
better understand Marcuse’s theories for a post-technological rationality that I then map
out in the second part of the article. There, I consider the efficaciousness of Marcuse’s
utopian side to his technology critique for struggles against neoliberal enclosure and
technocratic power today. While present in moments throughout his middle writings,
Marcuse’s project for a post-technological rationality was most forcefully articulated, if
in outline form, in the last section of One-Dimensional Man entitled “The Chance of the
Alternatives.”18 Based on my reading, Marcuse’s “transcendent project” for alternatives
was guided by the following five historical-materially informed conceptual themes that I
explore in the second part of this article:
2
(1) a reconstituted subjectivity more sensitive to bodily and erotic ways of knowing, aspiring to
19
move beyond productivist modes of being;
(2) the (re)infusion of technologically-mediated life with new values grounded in aesthetic rather
20
than instrumental reason, and the transformational possibilities latent in the aesthetic, social,
and organizational practices of marginalized groups for inspiring social, economic, and
21
technological change;
22
(3) the oppositional and prefigurative force of determinate negation and resistance;
(4) the potential for capitalism’s inherent crises moments to trigger “external revolution” and
23
alternative social and economic practices from the margins; and
(5) the chances for bottom-up struggle to stimulate a “contagion” of opposition to the established
order and contribute to liberational movements such as workers’ control, alternative socio-
24
economic arrangements, and myriad other initiatives of the marginalized.
From Substantivist Critiques of Technology to a Post-Technological Rationality
For Marcuse, the way out from one-dimensional reality fundamentally included
the repositioning of the technological base. To do so depended on a “higher rationality”
that would ground a technologically transcendent project.25 This was to be a threefold
project. Via a negative dialectic mode of thinking and alternative social practices, this
project sought to show its own higher rationality by, at the same time: (1) “preserving and
improving” the achievements of modern civilization; (2) problematizing and falsifying
the established reality’s dominative “structures, tendencies, and relations”; and (3)
nurturing institutions which reduce the struggle for existence and offer “a greater chance
for the free development of human needs and faculties.”26 “Preserving and improving”
the achievements of modern civilization also necessarily meant the pacification of
existence and nature from dysfunctional capture within the current technocratic
framework.
Taking off from a Marxist and Freudian social theory, central to this project was
the relegation of necessary labour to a reworked technological apparatus that would
minimize rather than propagate surplus labour and surplus repression, thus freeing up and
reclaiming the spaces of life that Karl Marx called “disposable time,”27 or “the interval
[of life situated] between the buying and the selling.”28 The transcendent technological
project Marcuse envisioned ultimately strove towards unshackling modern civilization’s
potential to eradicate painful forms of labour while opening up time to other, less
repressive, less alienating, and more pleasurable forms of life. At the same time, such a
project would seek to treat and respect nature as “another subject instead of as mere raw
materials.”29 In other words, the re-appropriation of our technological inheritance for
more human-centred means and ends would mean technology’s reconciliation with both
nature and human beings, which had both fallen, under the thrall of positivist liberal
ideals of progress, within the control of calculative and dominative logics.30 As Marcuse
underscored once again late in One-Dimensional Man: “If the completion of the
technological project involves a break with the prevailing technological rationality, the
break in turn depends on the continued existence of the technical base.”31
The key, then, to understanding Marcuse’s two-folded critique of technological
rationality is to work out how he persistently argues for the need to change not merely the
direction of technology, as Jürgen Habermas and others have proposed, but the very
rationality that guides the technological apparatus of society.32 As Andrew Feenberg
reminds us, Marcuse’s two-folded conceptualization of technology most fundamentally
asks us to meditate on perhaps the most important question of our epoch: We must not
3
only consider “the ontological question of what technology is making of us” (i.e., the
primary concerns of Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer), but also “ask the political
question of what we can make of technology.”33
Technological rationality and one-dimensionality: Substantivist theories of technology
With the goal of considering where this political question could take us today,
addressed in detail the second part of this article, we must first understand how
Marcuse’s theories of post-technological rationality both emerge from and extend beyond
the substantivist critique of technology and one-dimensional society. Because the
substantivist view of technology has been highly influential in both radical Left and
conservative critiques of late-modernity, and because it was the starting point for
Marcuse’s own technology critique,34 we must start with the substantivist critiques of
technology in order to then more fully understand Marcuse’s hopes for re-appropriating
and moving beyond our technological inheritance.35
Substantivist theories of technology are best exemplified by Marcuse’s negative
side to his technology critique, and Heidegger’s and Adorno and Horkheimer’s related
critiques of technology—all deeply influential in critiques and philosophies of technology
since. Substantivist critiques of technology extend Marx’s critiques of the capitalist social
forces of production and the mechanized factory to the entire lifeworld and to the very
core of the human beings that reside therein. Rather than just focusing on how the
capitalist forces of production control the worker, for substantivist theorists our entire
lives and the modern self—work and leisure, mind and body—are substantively
subsumed under the technocratic imperative. The effects of this technocratic subsumption
of human beings is perhaps best encapsulated by Horkheimer’s remark in his seminal
1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “[T]he proposition that tools are
prolongations of human organs can [now] be inverted to state that the organs are also
prolongations of the tools.”36 For Horkheimer, and similarly for Heidegger, Adorno, and
Marcuse’s negative side to his technology critique, advanced industrial society’s capture
of our practices and thoughts means that “unconscious nature” can no longer be
distinguished from “the marks of deliberate work...[or]…the action of man in society,”37
as it had once been distinguishable in pre-industrial societies. Underpinned by a
Weberian formal rationality that overrides the more values-laden forms of reason
distinguishing pre-industrial from industrial societies (or now, in contemporary social
theoretical parlance, “post-industrial” ones), technological rationality fashions everyday
life into an instrumentalized “technological reality” that encloses the subject’s
perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and habits by projecting objects and nature as “a
world of instrumentalities.”38 Such rationality circumscribes onto the world the primary
value that one could call the value of the to-be-used-up.39
For substantivist theorists, the productivist values of late-modernity promulgate
an ideology of the neutrality of things as the entire world is at the disposal of the
subjective whims of individuals and systems. Furthermore, for Marcuse in particular,
technocratic social control in advanced industrial societies, similar to Michel Foucault’s
notion of “biopower”40 and Gilles Deleuze’s “societies of control,”41 42 is dispensed
diffusely within our very minds and bodies. We now think and behave in ways that prop
up the system of domination without the need for direct coercion from masters, bosses, or
the state. Further, the system operates under the ideological assumption that social
hierarchies and power are extrinsic to “neutral systems and machines.”43 In the first two
thirds of One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse sets out to expose the contradictions in this
4
assumption.
Most fundamentally, the new rationality undergirding Marcuse’s transcendent
project would require the rending of reason away from modern science’s claims to value-
neutrality. In fact, under the critical scrutiny of Marcuse, as for Adorno and
Horkheimer,44 the ideology of neutrality actually shows itself to be a value of
domination. Marcuse’s historical and dialectically material reflections on advanced
industrial society especially reveal that in actuality the systems, machines, and
technologies of control are not neutral but socially and politically inscribed in their very
structures and applications:
[T]he notion of the “neutrality” of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as such
cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of
domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques…. As a
technological universe, advanced industrial society is a political universe, the latest stage in the
realization of a specific historical project—namely the experience, transformation, and
45
organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination….
Over the past 45 years, a growing body of historical materialist social studies of
technology has further problematized the neutrality thesis of technology.46 Feenberg
sums up Marcuse’s position here when he writes that “capitalism’s technology is shaped
by the same bias that governs other aspects of capitalist production, such as
management.”47 “[V]alue neutral technology,” Feenberg concludes, “turns out to contain
a value in itself after all.”48
Sharing intellectual ground with Horkheimer’s critique of “instrumental
reason,”49 and taking off from Max Weber’s theories of “formal reason” within modern
bureaucratized societies,50 Marcuse’s substantivist critiques of technological rationality
map out its mode of reason as one that (one-dimensionally) predefines the very form of
the appearance of objects as ostensibly neutral and value-free. Under such a formally
rationalized world, objects appear to be for us, and actually become in practice, detached,
fungible, and orderable things that are emptied of any intrinsic meaning beyond their
exchange-value. At the disposal of willful subjects operating in a world mediated by
technical systems without objective limits, objects now enter into the abstracted realm of
equivalencies (for market exchange) and inventories of raw materials (for production).
Indeed, capitalist late-modernity is distinguished by the fact that everything—artifacts,
nature, our bodies, and even our thoughts, feelings, and emotions—are now exchangeable
as commodities, differentiated only by their function. As such, the critique of
technological rationality woven throughout the first two thirds of One-Dimensional Man
also draws from and parallels Marx’s dialectical materialist critique of the commodity
form, the exploitative rationality of capitalist modes of production, and the contradictions
imbedded in the social relations of production.51
As in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse’s
substantivist critiques of technological rationality contend in particular that the
commodification of things and alienation from our work and each other now reach far
beyond Marx’s industrial nightmare of the factory, permeating every nook and cranny of
life. Now, our alienation, disseminated and preserved by the cultural industry’s images of
wellbeing, is veiled by not only the ideology of efficiency and progress, but also the
system’s promise and actual delivery of affluence. The consequences of this reality for
those of us living in advanced industrial societies is that, distanced from the luridness of
the industrial revolution and seduced by high living standards and a marketplace of
overabundance, we lose sight of our alienation and, thus, also the very need for our
5
liberation. “The efficiency of the system,” writes Marcuse, “blunts the individual’s
recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of
the whole.”52 As inhabitants of advanced capitalist societies are saturated with a
prosperity that is guided by cultural imaginaries of abundance, alienation itself as a
concept is alienated within “the existence which is imposed upon [us] and have in it [our]
own development and satisfaction.”53 Paradoxically, these “satisfactions,” he clarifies,
are alienating in the same way that Marx proposed, but now extending beyond the
workplace onto all of life—“the reality constitutes a more progressive stage of
alienation.”54 Reprieve from necessary labour is increasingly fleeting as capitalism today,
within the work-as-empowerment values of human resource management and the so-
called “post-industrial” and “knowledge economy,” learns how to increasingly extend
“meaningful” and “autonomous” work into all aspects of life. As work time increasingly
bleeds into leisure and reproductive time via the productive tethers of emails, Tweets,
iPhones, and iPads, now home, the café, the park, and the beach too are productive sites
of valorization for the system. The result? The further alienation of labour’s valorizations,
and the ever increasing obscuring and securing of relative surplus value.55
Herein lies the sophistication of a technologically rationalized system that both
provides plentifully yet, to use Heidegger’s term, “enframes” our thoughts, cultural
values, social norms, and organizations and institutions, and diffusely controls our
behaviours and practices by “prescrib[ing] attitudes and habits” of perpetual work and
consumption.56 Here, Marcuse is in agreement with his Frankfurt School contemporaries,
as well: Modern forms of technologized life, in a historical materialist analysis not
present in Heidegger’s notion of the Gestell, is now “the essence” of the “knowledge”
underpinning the “bourgeois economy.”57 For Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse,
“techno-logy” defines and orders the modes that life is to take in the factory, the school,
the office, the home, and during leisure.58 In a revealingly substantivist moment early on
in Dialectic of Enlightenment, for Adorno and Horkheimer technology instrumentalizes
everything it touches in order to put all of life itself into the service of capitalism’s modes
of production: “technology aims to produce neither concepts nor images,” they expound,
“nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”59
For Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, by accepting advanced capitalism’s promises of
material abundance we paradoxically submit to endless servitude as workers and
consumers that have had our time, experiences, and very thoughts captured by the
system’s technocratic means.
And in our tacit collusion with this system, our manufactured patterns of thought
and experience further alienate us within the “technological veil that conceals the
reproduction of inequality and enslavement.”60 Here, Marcuse again sticks close to his
Frankfurt School heritage. Alienated yet not aware of our alienation, unfree in our
“freedom,” living “euphor[ically] in unhappiness,”61 acceptance of our technologically
mediated reality of abundance and wellbeing, it seems, is a Faustian bargain.
The substantivist critique of technology is persuasive in its diagnostic force for
unraveling the natural attitude of our late modern age. Politically, however, if left to a
one-sided philosophy of modernity, the substantivist critique leads towards, at worst, a
conservative resignation to our modern fate or, at best, a nostalgic, or even romantic
desire to return to an idealized “holistic,” “natural,” or “primitive” world long gone.
Marcuse’s explicitly two-folded critical theory of technology offers, unlike the critiques
of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Heidegger, concrete possibilities for the transformation of
the socio-technical sphere without falling into these conservative or romantic traps.
While Marcuse would agree that Heidegger’s theories of the capture of Being, or
6
Adorno and Horkheimer’s notions of the capture of consciousness, are characteristics of
our late-modern technological condition, for Marcuse the capture is not as total as with
Heidegger, Adorno, or Horkheimer. For Marcuse, worldly engagement continued to
reveal reality within dialectical processes that still engaged the subject with the object in
a movement from the given to something beyond it—the notion that all Being is a
movement towards becoming (from Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel). Furthermore, the
assumptions of capitalist logics, while tending to reify and totalize, are never total. Life
remains porous; it can never be completely integrated into capitalist means and ends
(variations on Weber and Lukács). As such, even technologically-mediated reality for
Marcuse could still be, as reality and truth were for the ancients, open-ended, subject to
change, and beyond that which is given to mere appearance; another potentiality is
always just beyond mere technological appearance. Moreover, according to Martin Jay,62
Marcuse shared Marx’s and Lukács’s ultimate faith in human beings’ continued
capacities for cooperation, organization, and resistance. As with Marx and Lukács, for
Marcuse the attempt by the capitalist to deskill workers within ever-more complex
divisions of labour or reskill them for capital’s own purposes is never complete. Some
form of agency—akin to Marx’s “anthropogenesis,” or “man’s ability to create himself
anew,” as Jay writes63—inevitably remains with human beings, even within capitalism’s
tendencies for unbridled self-expansion and its zealousness for the commodification of all
of life.
For Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer, on the other hand, whatever
possibilities that still existed for non-instrumentalized relations between individuals and
between the modern subject and nature seemed to rest with a deeper kind of philosophical
contemplation unattainable for most of us mere mortals. For these three philosophers, a
reflective disposition could somehow bracket-out our age of instrumentalist reason and
perhaps begin to look beyond it to another kind of existence that would no longer be
about, in Horkheimer’s words, the “co-ordination of means and ends.”64 65 But it is not
clear with these three philosophers how more mindfulness, remembrance, negation, free-
relation, contemplation, or sharper phenomenological attunement could help us reform,
never mind reinvent, technology. Indeed, the transformations of entrenched technical
systems via thought alone remains a speculative proposition at best.
Towards a “post-technological rationality” of liberation
In contrast to the conservative or pessimistic conclusions of solely substantivist

critiques, Marcuse believed our technological inheritance that, on one hand, perversely
captures and alienates modern life within a Weberian-like iron cage of formalized
rationality and instrumentality could also, on the other hand, be redeployed under other
values rooted in another form of reason in order to ground a project of human liberation
from the struggles against necessity and scarcity. For Marcuse, it is not technology per se
which is the problem but an incomplete, stunted techno-logy cleansed of its historical
materialist roots and shaped by an instrumentalized rationality that (falsely) deems our
positivist, economistic, and liberal technological base to be a deterministically
evolutionary given of “progress.” 66
At core for Marcuse’s other side to his technology critique, then, was the project
of freeing technology and its technics from the instrumentalist rationality that shaped it
and from the “performance principle” that guided it.67 For Marcuse’s transcendent project
of freedom, technology had to be placed under the authority of another form of reason
that would treat humans and nature as something other than a “standing-reserve” of
7
fungible raw materials.68 For Marcuse, the project of developing a technology of
liberation had to also treat humans as something other than a disposable army of
labourers used—and equally discarded—for capitalist production, surplus value
extraction, and accumulation. Indeed, our technological inheritance, reworked under
different values, would be central for cutting a different path for late-modernity under a
“new reality principle.”69
By An Essay on Liberation, published in 1969 but completed one year before in
the thick of the May Events of 1968,70 Marcuse was advocating for the “total
automation” of work and toil which would potentially free us up to create “concrete
alternatives” and practices.71 This vision was in part inspired by Marx’s propositions for
our technological inheritance and the “free development” of human beings in the section
of the Grundrisse known by autonomist Marxists as the “Fragment on Machines.”72
Echoing these passages of the Grundrisse, for Marcuse the refusal of dominative forms of
work and the relegation of toil to technology would, furthermore, privilege the practices
and values of cooperation and solidarity—i.e., “tenderness toward each other”73—while
increasing the chances of the “release of individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of
freedom beyond necessity.”74 75
Marcuse’s “Transcendent Project”: The Radical Re-Organization of

Technologically Mediated Life
Thus, despite Marcuse’s marked critiques of our technological capture, “another

alternative” for him still “seems possible.”76 His hope was influenced by the same late
1960s and early 1970s cultural, intellectual, and political fervor that motivated the likes
of Murray Bookchin,77 Erich Fromm,78 André Gorz,79 Ivan Illich,80, E.F. Schumacher,81
Raoul Vaneigem,82 and others, to reassess the liberational possibilities (and “post-
scarcity” alternatives) present in the technological inheritance of advanced industrial
society. According to my reading, Marcuse’s utopian visions and “transcendent project”
for social transformation, rooted in his notion of a post-technological rationality within a
recuperated two-dimensional reality, were guided by five historical-materially
conditioned conceptual themes. These themes are present throughout his middle writings
between the mid 1950s and early 1970s, evocatively outlined in the last pages of One-
Dimensional Man. I spend the remaining pages of this article exploring them.
(1) Reconstituted subjectivity
For Marcuse, the way out of technological domination and its invalidation of what
he called “truer” forms of life free from toil, alienation, and aggression begins with the
call for a reconstituted subjectivity.83 This new subjectivity was to be central for
reclaiming the technological inheritance for other means and ends rooted in other, more
life-affirming values and logics. Indeed, what Feenberg has termed Marcuse’s project for
“the redemption of technology”84 was to begin with this reconstituted subjectivity—a
“bodily, erotic, gendered, social, and aestheticized subjectivity”85—that moves beyond
the possessive-individualist and all-knowing subject bequeathed to us by the Age of
Reason and the Enlightenment. This new subjectivity would be immersed in a “new
sensibility” emerging from individuals and groups practicing a “methodical
disengagement and the refusal of the Establishment aiming at a radical transvaluation of
values.”86 Echoing passages from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of
Perception87 and Sense and Non-Sense,88 a new bodily and cognitive sensitivity would
8
give this transformed subjectivity a disposition to other forms of reason—an embodied
and sensual reason that would begin to achieve crucial insights into the contradictions
inherent to contemporary one-dimensional, technocratic society. His belief in the viability
of a radicalized and re-sensualized subject emerging, as I will shortly show, at the
margins of one-dimensional society began his divergence from his Frankfurt School
contemporaries, most noticeably after his Freudian-Marxist analysis in Eros and
Civilization.89
In the second part of Eros and Civilization Marcuse begins to articulate this Eros-
laden and bodily subjectivity. For this new subjectivity, the technological inheritance can
rematerialize within a revitalized sensuousness that the Enlightenment project,
exemplified by Kant’s “classical derivation of the aesthetic function” in the Critique of
Judgment, had relegated to the “lower faculties.”90 In themes he would pick up more fully
later in One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation, such a revitalized bodily
rationality, Marcuse believed, could guide a new technological existence rooted in values
directed towards ultimate freedom from a life of toil. Through the “self-sublimation of
sensuousness…[and] the de-sublimation of reason,” he argued, “the conquest of time,”
scarcity, and toil could finally be achieved by the “general automatization of labor.”91
Moreover, reason could be reconciled with the instincts and sensuality via the mediation
of the “productive imagination.”92 In a world infused with this sensual form of reason, an
intensification of imagination, fantasy, and play would override modernity’s penchant for
seriousness, productivism, and exploitative forms labour.93 This meant that the
“performance principle” (i.e., alienated labour) could be libidinally replaced by a non-
surplus repressive, Eros-laden, and life-affirming “reality principle” where play and work
would themselves be reconciled and fused under a new order not subject to the values of
“administration” by “rational routine”94 or the “mastery instinct.”95
This reconceptualization of the reality principle and the merger of work and play
resonates, in a way, with Charles Fourier’s utopian socialist vision for a new productive
society rooted in association, “attractive labour,” and adequate incomes for all.96 But
unlike Fourier’s minutely calculated organizational and administrative proposals for the
work complexes he termed phalanstrères, for Marcuse, freedom in “[w]ork as free play”
that was not “subject to administration” from above would privilege a “non-repressive
sublimation” in direct opposition to the capitalist performance principle.97 Marcuse’s new
productive society was rooted in the new subject seeking out the “transformation of
[alienated] labor into pleasure” via the “release of [repressed] libidinal forces” and
“pleasurable cooperation” free from authoritative administration.98 The bounding of the
status quo performance principle and its reconstitution under the values of a libidinally
infused “new reality principle”99 would then enable the reconstruction of the social
relations of alienated production, restructuring work itself by replacing human toil as
much as possible with fully technologized workplaces reconfigured to reduce “labor time
to a minimum.”100 Here, redesigned technological systems would aspire towards, as with
Marx’s hopes articulated in the Grundrisse, the “reduction of the working day to a point
where…human development” could be maximized rather than arrested.101 102 This was to
be, for Marcuse, the reconciliation of Eros (i.e., the pleasure principle, the life instincts,
“the essence of being”103) with work (i.e., the reality principle).104 105
By One-Dimensional Man, almost a decade after the publication of Eros and
Civilization, Marcuse was appealing to nothing less than the subversive power of this
new subjectivity’s re-sensualized form of reason for countering the “scientific subversion
of immediate experience.”106 This reclaimed subversive power of re-sensualized reason
would, in turn, drive the development of new concepts “which carry in themselves the
9
protest and the refusal” to the established ways of life.107 For Marcuse, while the
establishment’s scientific-technological reason merely affirms the established reality, a
sensualized and embodied reason, and the new conceptual perspectives that it opens up,
contains a potential opening for “the judgment that condemns the established reality.”108
Marcuse’s call for a re-rationalized “technological logos”109 spearheaded by this
new re-sensualized and radicalized subject is the cornerstone of the “transcendent
project” he begins to lay out in the last 54 pages of One-Dimensional Man. Infused with a
post-technological rationality, this project would hearken a new “Logos of technics.”110
With the goal of re-materializing the values that uphold life over those that contain and
arrest it, such a project would also firmly entrench ethico-political values within the new
technological logos. It would give a “new direction” to “technological progress”111 that
would strive towards the “pacification” of life.112 At the same time, a post-technological
rationality would directly threaten and potentially lead to advanced industrial society’s
eventual collapse and transformation—the “catastrophe of the established direction.”113
In sum, the re-materialized values that a new subjectivity was to engrain into a post-
technological rationality would work towards eradicating the capital-labour relationship
in favour of the maximization of “disposable time,”114 rending the “productive apparatus”
from the logics that administered people and dominated nature.115
(2) Aesthetic reason and the new organizational practices of marginalized groups
The reconstituted subject driving Marcuse’s “transcendent project” was to also be

informed by an astheticized social practice. For Marcuse, a new experience and a new
reality could be comprehended by converging the subversive capacities of reason with the
utopian impetus of aesthetic expression in what he termed “the technological rationality
of art.”116 For Marcuse, as for Adorno,117 art and artful ways of expression possessed
elements of “determinate negation”118 (see below), whereby the aesthetic dimension
would offer additional oppositional force to the established reality, as well as a
requisite—and prefigurative—creative energy for founding a different kind of world.
With the unleashing of fantasy, “free play and even the folly of the imagination,”119
Marcuse believed that passionate, sensualized, joyful, and, yes, even the utopian
possibilities of aesthetic practices would render the ugliness of contemporary, one-
dimensional existence an offense to the life instincts, beginning to strip away the
repressive and exploitative social conditions that arrest and contain experience.120 This,
for Marcuse, was creativity, imagination, fantasy, and art’s capacities for the “aesthetic
reduction.”121
As Feenberg explains, Marcuse’s notion of the aesthetic reduction would help a
post-technologically rationalized society “peel away the contingent aspects of objects…to
get at what they could be if released to their free development.”122 The aesthetic
reduction thus held a translational power for Marcuse that would, on the one hand,
violate the oppressive tendencies of the current “natural” order—which would be the
aesthetic reduction’s negative dialectical moment—while, at the same time, mapping out
(or translating) different potentialities for objects and human life itself—which would be
its prefigurative moment.123 124 For hints at the aesthetic reduction’s negation of the worst
aspects of the advanced industrial system, Marcuse specifically looked to the radicalized
practices of his life-time, such as the avant garde artists, the new music emerging from
the American ghetto, the cultural demands of the student and worker protagonists of the
May ‘68 events, and, more broadly, the “historical advantage of the late-comer” (i.e., the
people of the so-called “third world”).125
10
By the late 1960s, Marcuse saw examples of this new, aesthetically infused
subversive force emerging within the cultural, social, and organizational practices of
marginalized groups. The cultural practices of the marginalized and the outsider, Marcuse
believed, particularly challenge the givens of the status quo and show us ways through to
another world. Where many social critics at the time saw the struggles of the
marginalized groups and social movements of the 1960s as “merely ineffectual displays
of radical opinion and unrealistic demands for reform,” as Robert Scharff recently
reminded us,126 Marcuse saw, as Feenberg counters, the rise of
“new needs” and a “new sensibility” [operating] at a more basic level than politics…at the level
of the form of experience itself [where] the aesthetic qualities of objects are revealed
127
immediately to [a more liberated and receptive] sensation.
As with aesthetic practices, marginal practices operated for Marcuse on another

plane of reason and imagination that puts into relief the ugliness of established reality.
And like artistic practices, the practices of marginalized groups also make us aware of
different horizons to life. Marcuse believed that “late-comer[s]”—those that live in
conjunctures of “technical backwardness”—could skip the surplus repressive stages of
the “affluent society.”128 Their “historical chance” rested specifically in “the absence of
conditions which make for repressive exploitative technology and industrialization for
aggressive productivity.”129 In explicitly critical theoretical terms, the socio-economic
plight of late-comers, their cultural traditions and alternative economic practices, and
their inventiveness for meeting their necessities offered both a determinate negation of
the ideology of capitalist progress and an “instinctual revolt” against advanced industrial
society’s capture of inner life.130 By the possibility for “instinctual revolt” Marcuse meant
that the “low-technology” practices of the late-comer mapped out ways of reprioritizing
the “energy of the human body” while also rendering superfluous the need for the
“engines” of the affluent society’s repressions.131
(3) The oppositional and prefigurative force of determinate negation and resistance
In contemporary poststructuralist language, the aesthetic and socio-economic

expressions of the marginalized offer in their very practices an immanent critique or, in
critical theoretical parlance, a determinate negation, of the repressive, alienating, and
exploitative nature of late modern, advanced industrialized society. While contemporary
poststructuralist theorists might distance themselves from the language of dialectics and
“negation,”132 there are, nevertheless, important parallels between Marcuse’s theories of
oppositional social practices and contemporary poststructuralist analyses of how
alternative paths toward more ethico-political modes of life emerge within and out of
moments of struggle against constituted power. Both Marcuse’s version of determinate
negation and contemporary poststructuralist theories’ notions of immanent critique posit
that whether thinking, critiquing, or acting, we already always remain “within” social
relations of power, akin to always already “being within history.”133 Thus, in agreement
with John Grant, both determinate negation and immanent critique have roots in
dialectical analysis. What they specifically have in common is that they are
a type of inquiry that uses the criteria of what it examines in order to criticize and convict it on its
own terms. The operational premise of immanent critique is that by turning the claims of society’s
dominant ideologies or hegemonic powers back against them, the power to criticize and change
134
society is shown to be present in society as it exists.
11
Grant, for example, claims that the type of immanent analysis engaged with by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire and Multitude parallels the
critical dialectical stance taken by Marcuse and other early critical theorists. Grant calls
the form of immanent critique practiced by Marcuse and Hardt and Negri, “dialectical
immanence…an inquiry into the relational totality in which social phenomena exist and
which makes individual things what they are.”135 As Grant further explains:
The burden that Hardt and Negri assume for themselves repeats what Marcuse took on before
them. Without the comforts of idealism or the direction of a nighttime star, their common project
is to articulate in an immanent and historical materialist manner how new dimensions of resistance
136
emerge from changing patterns of social organization and political practice.
For instance, for contemporary poststructuralist theorists such as Simon Critchley,137

Richard Day,138 Hardt and Negri,139 and Jason Read,140 as well as “open” and autonomist
Marxists such as John Holloway,141 Harry Cleaver,142 and Maurizio Lazzarato,143 the
actual immanence of the bottom-up responses of the newest, alter-globalization social
justice movements that emerged in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 2000s were
oppositional forces against and beyond constituted forms of power. Together with the
situatedness and local-nature of their struggles that also kept an eye on the forces of
globalization, the newest social movements “both…intervene against state and corporate
power” as well as “prefigure, or [even] create, alternatives to the existing order.”144
In close affinity with these contemporary theories of immanent social struggles and
change emerging from within the multidimensional structures of power, by the late 1960s
Marcuse also believed that the socio-political alternatives being experimented with by the
New Left and other social movements of the time possessed a two-folded determinate
negation—a critical-interventional and prefigurative force. By then, Marcuse was
theorizing how struggles “from below” had the force to be both a determinate negation
(or immanent critique) of status quo (or constituted) forms of power, as well as the ability
to concretely revalorize and reconstruct the technologically mediated structures of life.145
As Grant affirms: “For Marcuse…only by grasping the immanent work of [actual]
political practice can the dynamics of social change be disclosed”146 since “‘it is the very
power of this society which contains new modes and dimensions of radical change.’”147
Here Marcuse presaged contemporary postructuralist theories of social change by three
decades.
Also similar to contemporary poststructural and autonomist Marxist social and
political theory via, as with Marcuse, their re-reading of the Grundrisse,148 for Marcuse
dominative forms of capitalist power are, as I have already mentioned, although totalizing
in their tendencies, never total in their actual domination. While one-dimensional society
tends towards calcifying thought, instincts, and practices, the calcification is never
complete. Everyday life and human capacities remain porous and cannot be totally
blanketed by any one ideology or predominant economic structure. Individuals and social
groups, especially marginal ones, remain at least partially outside of the system. Existing
within a manifold lifeworld that also embraces non-instrumentalized meaning and
practices, the marginalized and the oppressed still possess capacities for imagination and
creativity that overflow the system. Moreover, Marcuse’s conceptualization of power
is—similar to Foucault’s and Deleuze’s multivalent conceptualizations of it—diffuse and
present within all strata of life in different macro- and micro-political forms.149 Power-
from-above (i.e., “constituted power”) is thus prone to show cracks and openings that
12
bottom-up individual and collective practices, via the resistances of the oppressed and the
marginalized (i.e., “constituent power”), can take advantage of.
(4) “External revolution” and capitalism’s inherent moments of crises
By the mid 1960s, Marcuse had definitively moved beyond his earlier faith in a
Leninist vision of the vanguard party conscientizing the working class as the “subject of
the revolution.”150 By the time he had completed writing An Essay on Liberation in May
1968, and especially during the immediate years after the French May Events, Marcuse
believed that the catalyst for change that might be stimulated by crises moments would be
further driven by the cooperation and solidarity of the dominated themselves once they
realized, out of their own practices and resistances, that crises were actually openings for
creating another world.151
For Marcuse, then, crisis moments were also openings for determinate negation.
Particularly influenced by the May Events of ‘68, in the final pages of An Essay on
Liberation Marcuse both critiques ideologies of vanguardist revolution and offers further
visions for a post-technological society that are comparable to poststructural
conceptualizations of the oppositional and prefigurative politics of current alternative
socio-political practices responding to and moving beyond crises. For Marcuse, the
immanent contradictions of a system in perpetual crisis, together with the prefigurative
force in the actions of worker, student, countercultural, and anti-colonial struggles of the
1960s against imperialism, crises, and power-from-above, opened the way for social
transformation through the spontaneous, inventive, and non-vanguardist forms of social
expressions “from below.” “The change itself,” wrote Marcuse in An Essay on
Liberation,
[can] occur in a general, unstructured, unorganized, and diffused process of disintegration. This
process may be sparked by a crisis of the system which would activate the resistance not only
against the political but also against the mental repression imposed by the society. Its insane
features, expression of the ever more blatant contradiction between the available resources for
liberation and their use for the perpetuation of servitude, would undermine the daily routine, the
repressive conformity, and rationality required for the continued functioning of the [established]
152
society.
Passages such as this one, written just before, during, and immediately after the
May ‘68 events, sees the Marcuse of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s appealing to his most
radically utopian theories of immanent resistance. During this period, Marcuse most
strongly advocated for the capacities of grassroots groups to carry out immediate
struggles rooted in localized experiments of social change.153 Indeed, the hippie
communes of the 1960s, the US civil rights movement, the student struggles taking place
on US campuses during the 1960s and early 1970s, the emerging demands and practices
of workers’ control, and the revolt of small pockets of local groups within the former
colonies of the global South prefigured for Marcuse the potential for “new Form[s] of
life” intrinsic to more “autonomous” resistances on the margins.154
Crises are thus both threatening moments of dis-organization for the status quo’s
socio-economic order, and moments for re-organization for alternatives to this status quo.
“[E]xternal revolution,” for Marcuse155—i.e., revolution affecting the “metropoles” from
the periphery—could especially happen during moments where the late-capitalist system
started to come apart, dis-organize, and crack due to its own internal contradictions. For
Marcuse, these inherent moments of crisis could lead to the unraveling and eventual
13
disintegration of “the internal structure and cohesion of the capitalist system.” 156
What Marcuse termed the “translation of the economic into the radical political
struggle” could be the “consequence” of crisis-driven change.157 That is, while capitalist
crises would not necessarily be triggered by a predetermining working class
consciousness or revolution, awareness of our alienation and the potential for revolt could
nevertheless immanently emerge from out of the system’s inherent moments of crises.
For the oppressed, moments of economic and political tensions, in other words, translate,
or bring to the surface, their oppressions and the similitude of others’ oppressions.158
As autonomist Marxists Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver write, in unintended
synchrony with Marcuse, “crisis is, from the point of view of the working-class subject, a
moment not of breakdown but of breakthrough ....”159 For these thinkers, as for Marcuse,
crises are openings for the class struggle. As another autonomist Marxist, Maurizio
Lazzarato, further asserts, crises and the socio-political events they organically generate
can coalesce collective action via creative and collaborative resistances, put into relief the
contradictions of capitalist-rooted constituted power and its dominative modes of
organizing work and life, and demark “new possibilities for living.”160 In a similar tone,
Marcuse writes in An Essay on Liberation that
the strength of [status quo] moral [and]…operational values…is likely to wear off under the
impact of the growing contradictions within the society. The result would be…resistance to work,
refusal to perform, negligence, indifference—factors of dysfunction which would hit a highly
centralized and coordinated apparatus, where breakdown at one point may easily affect large
161
sections of the whole.
Thus, the resistances and “dysfunctions” emerging from the marginalized and
oppressed, for Marcuse, as for Bell, Cleaver, and Lazzarato, are both influenced by
capitalist crises while also potentially influencing the further collapse of sections of the
system. Comparable to autonomist Marxist theorists, in particular, for Marcuse such
resistances and bottom-up struggle could create new possibilities for life that would begin
to articulate themselves in the rupture of “work discipline” and, subsequently,
“slowdown, spread of disobedience to rules and regulations, wildcat strikes, boycotts,
sabotage, gratuitous acts of noncompliance.”162 The potential Marcuse saw for the re-
organization of life and work emerging immanently out of crises is in close affinity to
what the autonomists have called workers’ and oppressed peoples’ continued capacities
for the “refusal” of and “exodus” from alienating and oppressive social structures, and
exploitative forms of labour.163 164
In short, the subsequent socio-political events emerging from out of crises, and
the new technological, organizational, and communal spaces they catalyze, not only place
the contradictions of contemporary capitalism and its undergirding political system of
organizing life into sharp relief, they also reveal prefigurative openings for recomposing
life within more directly democratic and life-affirming values and logics.
(5) The “contagion” of bottom-up struggle
To sum up Marcuse’s transcendent project so far, openings for the construction of

another world could arise from out of the merger of reconstituted subjectivities, the socio-
economic and aesthetic practices of the marginalized, immanent struggles and desires for
freedom from below, and the inherent crises of the established system. Moreover, for
Marcuse, other potentialities for life could come to fruition via both the fractures the
system was susceptible to—its “internal contradictions”165—and the spontaneous,
14
decentralized, and diffuse-nature of bottom-up struggle and technological
reappropriations from the “subversive grass roots.” 166 These contradictions of the system
and the struggles against them could, in turn, stimulate a “contagion”167 and contribute to
broader liberational movements of workers’ control, cooperatives, and more benign and
humane uses of technology.168 “Contagion,” for Marcuse, as Christian Fuchs writes,
describes decentralized forms of protest that start on a small local scale, spread out, and intensify
themselves. In complexity thinking one terms such phenomena [the] butterﬂy effect,
intensiﬁcation, and non-linear causality. A recent British empirical study of protest has shown that
contagion effects are important aspects of protest, i.e. that protests can temporarily raise the
169
protest potential of the public as a whole.
As a consequence of the re-organizing of social, institutional, and organizational

structures unleashed by the contagion of resistance emerging within recurrent moments
of socio-economic crises of neoliberal capital, non-capitalist forms of local, everyday life
have been promisingly (and contagiously) emerging in the last two decades or so
throughout the world. Indeed, today’s contemporary countercultural (perhaps “alter-
cultural” is a better term) and bottom-up movements provide countless examples of how
contagions of alternative cultural expressions and social organization can merge with
Marcusean-like rematerialized values of love, joy, play, and cooperation. Some of the
newest social movements today are offering viable, non-hegemonic alternatives to, and
communal freedom from, neoliberal forms of organization, enclosure, exclusion,
oppression, and technological rationalities, despite, I would add, the preponderance of the
planetary neoliberal economic order.170
Recent socio-political events contagiously spawning explosions of social unrest
and resistance due to the cyclical and conjunctural crises inherent to contemporary
neoliberal capitalism can be seen as resonating with Marcuse’s assessment of crises as
potential openings for a new and re-rationalized technological existence. Events that have
in recent years reverberated into pockets of unstructured, spontaneous, and even mass
resistance and re-organization that, in the process, question the oppressions and
exclusions of the capitalist system included, among many others: “The Battle for Seattle”
in 1999 and its focus on alternative political projects and the plight of the global South’s
aid-based economies in the neoliberal world order; Quebec City and Genoa in 2001 and
the demands expressed there by myriad social groups against and beyond foreign debt
and the deplorable working conditions of vast swaths of the world’s population; the
World Social Forums’ demands for alternative economic models and technological
systems sensitive to local needs and the environment; Bolivia’s struggle for control of its
natural resources such as the Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000; the more recent demands
of the Occupy movements for an end to corporate greed, the system’s sharp inequalities,
and the financialization of life (demands in part spurred on by the lingering global
financial crisis); the socio-political transformations propagated by protagonists of the
Arab Spring; the growing wave of student movements struggling against the
corporatization of education; the anti-austerity movements in Europe between 2011 and
the time of this writing; and, the rise of worker-occupied and subsequently cooperatively
self-managed former capitalist businesses in Argentina and Latin America emerging from
out of the partial collapse of the neoliberal model in the region over the past two
decades.171
Concluding Thoughts: A Post-Technological Rationality for Our Times
15
Marcuse’s “transcendent project” envisioned a post-technologically rationalized
civilization potentially emerging from out of the technological inheritance of advanced
industrial society and capitalism’s crises moments. For Marcuse, such a project was
prefigured in experiments with directly democratic organization of his day,172 in the
liberational movements against colonialism and in social experiments “from below,”173
and in the practices of “workers’ control.”174 These experiments were, for him, embedded
with some degree of re-materialized values of “solidarity,” “cooperation” and
“autonomy;”175 “the [prefigurative] ingression of the future into the present” in acts of
“spontaneity;”176 and the negation of the profit and performance principle more generally
via the privileging of imagination, fantasy, and play rather than positivist reason,
seriousness, and commodified life.177 Indeed, these projects engrained their alternative
technological spaces, practices, ethics, and politics with “attractive labor,” a new form of
work that flows from “pleasurable co-operation,” and the “release” of creative and
“libidinal forces.”178 In sum, these types of experiments in social transformation, re-
emerging with force throughout the world once again as social practices from below that
both contend and move beyond the neoliberal global order, contain in them the potential
for an alternative techno-logy of liberation rather than domination.
No doubt, alternative socio-economic experiences and practices, however, are still
comparatively small in scale and fragmented when compared to the stubbornly
entrenched and planetary nature of the established neoliberal capitalist system. Today’s
alternative socio-economic and technological experiments lack the fully formulated
expressions of the total reworking of the technological base and the total transformation
of society that Marcuse ultimately desired. Indeed, contrary to Marcuse’s ultimate vision,
perhaps we must question whether such “total” transformations of our socio-economic
system can ever be achieved lest we be re-seduced back into hegemonic and oppressive
forms of vanguardist or essentialist thought and practice. Contemporary alternative socio-
economic practices that have for the past two decades taken up the slogan of “another
world is possible” nevertheless do have within them the germ of a “Great Refusal,” as
Marcuse would advocate in Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. Moreover,
their expressions of refusal and exodus from neoliberal capitalist modes of life are being
initiated from below (from the margins and the marginalized) and from within
conjunctures of exploitation and alienation, rather than from above via an enlightened
vanguard. Today’s countless prefigurative social movements against and beyond the
neoliberal global order179 are a testament to our still-active capacity for agency and
anthropogenesis, self-directed social transformation, and, most promisingly, for
proliferating the circulation of struggles as counter-forces to and creative springboards
beyond the circuits of neoliberal capital and its one-dimensional regimes.
Today’s newest social movements against and beyond neoliberal enclosures
prefigure how, in post-technologically rationalized moments, logos and eros, nature and
human life, and our search for the reduction of toil in light of our continued needs to
provision for our necessities in a world of limited resources, could be immanently
reconciled with our technological inheritance, and within our particular historical
conjuncture and socio-cultural contexts. Contemporary alternative organizational
practices aspiring to move beyond exploitations, exclusions, marginalizations, and
oppressions have affinities with a Marcusean ethics of caring for nature and for the other
as other subjects full of untapped potentiality. They are undergirding new technological
and organizational paradigms under the guidance of new rationalizations, values, and
priorities. As contemporary extensions of Marcuse’s vision for a post-technological
rationality, the practices of innumerable social movements today show us how we can
16
immanently (re)invent new technological and organizational realities rooted in social
values striving for the pacification and liberation of existence. Indeed, Marcuse still
offers today’s critical theorists and social activists deep theoretical ground from which to
better understand both what they are fighting against and what they are struggling for.
Endnotes
1
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 219–220.
2
Ibid., 238.
3
Ibid., 251.
4
Ibid., 238.
5
Ibid., 239.
6
Ibid., 240.
7
Ibid., 239.
8
Ibid., 173.
9
Christian Fuchs, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (London: Routledge),
68.
10
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 86.
11
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), 156.
12
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 88–91.
13
Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New
York: Routledge, 2005), 98.
14
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 220.
15
Valerie Fournier, Daniel King, Christopher Land, and Patrick Reedy, Ephemera: Theory and
Politics in Organization, call for papers for special issue “Any Answers - Any Alternatives?
Organization beyond the Crisis” (2010), http://www.ephemeraweb.org.
16
Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Picket, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First
Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
17
Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited; Feenberg, Heidegger and
Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History; Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest
for Radical Subjectivity,” Dogma: Revue Électronique, 2000, http://www.dogma.lu/txt/Kellner-
Marcuse01.htm.
18
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 203–
257.
19
I.e. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.
20
I.e. Ibid.; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial
Society; Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation.
21
I.e. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation; Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1972).
22
I.e. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society;
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation.
23
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 82.
24
Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 42–47.
25
26
Ibid.
27
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft)
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973), 706.
28
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critical Analysis of
Capitalist Production (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 155.
17
29
Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History, 98.
30
Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Studies in Philosophy
and Social Science, 9 (1941): 414–39.
31
32
33
Ibid., 98.
34
And, I would say, the starting point for poststructuralist critiques of, for instance,
“governmentality,” “the control society” and “bio-power” (Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the
Societies of Control,” October 59, Winter (1992): 3–7; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990); Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be
Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003); Nicholas
Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003)).
35
Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited, 72.
36
Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New
York: Continuum, 2002), 201.
37
Ibid.
38
39
I am indebted to Prof. Asher Horowitz for this term.
40
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction; Foucault, “Society Must Be
Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976.
41
Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”
42
Although neither theorist, that I know of, makes explicit mention of Marcuse’s similar and
earlier theories of power.
43
44
T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
(Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
45
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, xv–
xvi.
46
See, for example: Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under
Capitalism and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985); Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A
Critical Theory Revisited; Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge,
1999); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1967); David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial
Automation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); William Leiss, Under Technology’s Thumb
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Langdon Winner, The Whale and the
Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
47
48
49
Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory.”
50
Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” in Negations:
Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 201–226.
51
Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited; Feenberg, Heidegger and
Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History; Gad Horowitz, Repression  : Basic and
Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, and Marcuse (Buffalo: University of
Toronto Press, 1977).
52
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism.
56
57
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 2.
18
58
Ibid.; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society,
156.
59
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 2.
60
61
Ibid., 5.
62
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of
Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)
63
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 57.
64
Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 5.
65
Recall that for Heidegger all that one could hope for in the Gestell is a “free relation to
technology”—learning to live within its “danger” while awaiting a new dispensation within
human reflection (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays
(Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1977), 3–4, 25–36) or, more fantastically, “the god” (Martin
Heidegger, “Nur Noch Ein Gott Kann Uns Retten,” Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976: 193–219).
Adorno and Horkheimer also held little concrete hope for the possibility of civilizational change
within advanced industrial society other than relying on a dialectically negative form of reason
that may provision us with a capacity to achieve some sort of “remembrance of nature within the
subject” by recuperating the tensions between the object’s appearance and the object’s potential
beyond mere appearance (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, 32).
66
Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”; Marcuse, One-Dimensional
Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.
67
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, 156–157.
68
Martin. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (Toronto:
Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1977), 19.
69
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, 156.
70
Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (eds.), “Introduction: The Critical Theory of Herbert
Marcuse,” in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert
Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
71
72
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough Draft), 672–706.
73
74
75
Feenberg has observed that Marcuse’s more hopeful visions for technology are rooted in the
view that, despite its practical and social flaws, our technological inheritance is still open to re-
valuations and re-workings because of its inherent ambivalence (Feenberg, Transforming
Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited). This is not a neutrality thesis of technology. Rather, it
is an understanding that technology is inscribed not only with the technical codes etched into it by
its designers and implementers, but that it is also always re-inscribed by and within the social
contexts of users. Technical activities thus operate in a tension between the intended outcomes of
administrators, technocrats, planners, and marketers, and the reinterpretation of those activities in
the “margin of maneuver” available to users in the use-contexts of technology (Ibid., 84–85). In
turn, this margin of maneuver, for Feenberg, point to the “germs of a new society” (Ibid., 87).
Hence, technological spheres are, despite the corporatist and capitalist ideologies of our age,
always already a “scene of struggle” and a “social battlefield” (Ibid., 15), where “class and
power” determine “which of the ambivalent potentialities of the [technical] heritage will be
realized” (Ibid., 53). The ambivalence theory is, in sum, one of the keys to unlocking Marcuse’s
two-folded theory of technological rationality—its critical-diagnostic force and its
efficaciousness for contemporary projects of technological re-organization and social
transformation.
76
77
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1971).
19
78
Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (New York: Harper
& Row, 1968).
79
André Gorz, Réforme et Révolution. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); André Gorz, Ecology as
Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books Ltd., 1980).
80
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
81
E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (New York:
Harper & Row, 1973).
82
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2003).
83
Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity.”
84
Feenberg, “Heidegger and Marcuse,” 101.
85
Ibid., par. 5.
86
87
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).
88
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1964).
89
Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity.”
90
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, 172–180.
91
Ibid., 156.
92
Ibid., 197.
93
Ibid., 193.
94
Ibid., 18.
95
Ibid., 219.
96
Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1990); Charles Fourier, Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier
(New York: Schocken Books, 1971); Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud, 217ff.
97
98
Ibid., 217.
99
Ibid., 197.
100
Ibid., 152.
101
Ibid.
102
Already by 1955 and the publication of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse was advocating for the
consummation of alienation itself, where the “total automation” of toil would be the optimum
(Ibid., 156). This in turn would liberate time into something akin to Marx’s “disposable time” in
the Grundrisse, or time freed up from painful labour in order for humans to aspire to true self-
realization and human fulfillment (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (rough draft), 704–706).
103
104
Ibid., 47.
105
In Eros and Civilization Marcuse makes clear that “[t]he irreconcilable conflict” within
advanced industrial society is not between “work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle),
but between alienated labor (performance principle) and Eros” (Ibid., 47n).
106
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 140
(emphasis his).
107
Ibid. (emphasis mine).
108
Ibid., 140, 220.
109
Ibid., 236.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., 228.
112
Ibid., 236.
113
Ibid., 228.
114
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft), 705–706.
20
115
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 250;
also see: Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 79–91.
116
117
T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999).
118
119
Ibid.
120
121
122
123
Ibid., 239–240.
124
The theory of prefiguration I appeal to here is informed by the anarchist writings of Kropotkin
and Landauer, Buber’s reclamation of the concept of utopia for socialism, Richard Day’s
appropriation of the concept for his poststructuralist anarchism (Richard Day, Gramsci Is Dead:
Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London/Toronto: Pluto Press/Between the
Lines, 2005)), the writings of some autonomist Marxist theorists (i.e., Nick Dyer-Witheford,
Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1999)), as well as the implicit use of the concept throughout
Marcuse’s writings on post-technological rationality. The concept of prefiguration, present in
Marcuse’s notion of potentiality, for instance, alludes to the utopian possibilities inherent in
existing alternative economic and social practices. Rooted in a notion of utopia that is not
totalizing in outcome, these theorists do not shun the utopia that imbues prefigurative practices
but believe that it should be conceived or worked through in the now and by those living these
practices. Certain oppositional and inventive social and cultural practices have prefigurative
characteristics, these theorists believe, and further emphasize that utopias should not have to wait
for the revolution of the future. As Harry Cleaver writes, utopian prefiguration is about “the
search for the future in the present, and the identification of already existing activities which
embody new, alternative forms of social cooperation and ways of being” (quoted in Day, Gramsci
Is Dead  : Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, 156).
125
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, xviii.
126
Robert C. Scharff, “Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and
Redemption of History,” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2006): 93.
127
128
Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, xviii.
129
Ibid., xix.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.
132
E.g., Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze  : An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
133
John Grant, “Marcuse Remade? Theory and Explanation in Hardt and Negri,” Science &
Society 74, no. 1 (2010): 38.
134
Ibid., 39.
135
Ibid., 42 (emphasis mine).
136
Ibid., 46.
137
Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding  : Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
(London: Verso, 2007).
138
Day, Gramsci Is Dead  : Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements.
139
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New
York: The Penguin Press, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
140
Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2003).
21
141
John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
(London: Pluto Press, 2002).
142
Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Oakland, CA: AK Press/AntiThesis, 2000).
143
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” republicart.net, 5 (2003),
http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.htm.
144
Day, Gramsci Is Dead  : Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, 19 (emphasis
mine).
145
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 87; Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 44–46.
146
Grant, “Marcuse Remade? Theory and Explanation in Hardt and Negri,” 45.
147
Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 83, cited in Grant, “Marcuse Remade? Theory and Explanation
in Hardt and Negri,” 45.
148
Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology
Capitalism; Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital; Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on
the Grundrisse (New York: Autonomedia, 1991).
149
Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited, 72–75.
150
Feenberg and Leiss, “Introduction: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse,” xxvii.
151
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 88–91; Feenberg and Leiss, “Introduction: The Critical
Theory of Herbert Marcuse,” xxxvi–xxxxix.
152
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 83 (emphasis mine).
153
Feenberg and Leiss, “Introduction: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse.”
154
155
Ibid., 82.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid., 83.
158
Ibid.
159
Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver, “Marx’s Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle,” The
Commoner 5, Autumn (2002): 58–59.
160
Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” par. 3.
161
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 84 (emphasis mine).
162
Ibid., 83.
163
Kathi Weeks, “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Desire,” in The Philosophy of Antonio
Negri, eds. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 109–
35; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork
Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude:
For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2003).
164
Autonomist Marxist conceptualizations of “refusal” and “exodus” (or exit) posit them as
capacities always already present with living labour. They prefigure “potential mode[s] of life
that [challenge] the mode of life now defined by [capitalist] work” (Kathi Weeks, “The Refusal of
Work as Demand and Desire,” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, eds. Timothy S. Murphy and
Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 121. Moreover, for autonomist Marxists, as
with Marcuse, acts of refusal and exodus from the capital-labour relation can emerge from out of
desires that “rebel against the present system of work and work values” and as “creative
practice[s]…that seek to reappropriate and reconfigure existing forms of production and
reproduction” (Ibid., 122).
165
Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 56.
166
Ibid., 46.
167
Ibid., 42.
168
Ibid., 43–47.
169
Christian Fuchs, “The Self-Organization of Social Movements,” Systemic Practice and Action
Research 19, no. 1 (February 2006): 101–137 (121).
170
Marcelo Vieta, “Inklings of the Great Refusal: Echoes of Marcuse’s Post-Technological
Rationality Today,” in The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social
22
Movements, eds. Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2016), forthcoming.
171
Vieta, “Inklings of the Great Refusal.”
172
Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 45.
173
Ibid.
174
Ibid., 44.
175
176
Ibid., 89.
177
178
Ibid., 217.
179
See: Vieta, “Inklings of the Great Refusal.”
23

Marcuse S Transcendent Project at 50 Pos

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Marcuse’s

“Transcendent Project” at 50:

By: Marcelo Vieta

This draft: March 8, 2015

Marcuse believed that a post-technological rationality functioning, for instance, as “the

From Substantivist Critiques of Technology to a Post-Technological Rationality

Technological rationality and one-dimensionality: Substantivist theories of technology

Towards a “post-technological rationality” of liberation

In contrast to the conservative or pessimistic conclusions of solely substantivist

Marcuse’s “Transcendent Project”: The Radical Re-Organization of

Thus, despite Marcuse’s marked critiques of our technological capture, “another

(1) Reconstituted subjectivity

The reconstituted subject driving Marcuse’s “transcendent project” was to also be

As with aesthetic practices, marginal practices operated for Marcuse on another

In contemporary poststructuralist language, the aesthetic and socio-economic

For instance, for contemporary poststructuralist theorists such as Simon Critchley,137

(4) “External revolution” and capitalism’s inherent moments of crises

(5) The “contagion” of bottom-up struggle

To sum up Marcuse’s transcendent project so far, openings for the construction of

As a consequence of the re-organizing of social, institutional, and organizational

Concluding Thoughts: A Post-Technological Rationality for Our Times

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