The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements

Abstract

With the recent surge of college protests against various forms of economic, political, social, and racial injustice, there have been persistent and pernicious reactions from other students, administrators and public figures that function to undermine the emancipatory impulses animating these demonstrations. The reactions are often justified under the banners of tolerance, chastising students to listen instead of protest. This article, focusing on Marcuse’s concepts of repressive toleration and counterrevolution, evaluates the reactionary responses to these events, as well as the critical potential of this fledgling student sensibility, a burgeoning refusal represented by protest events at American universities. We maintain that many of the calls for tolerance are actually demands for silence and belong to a wider counterrevolutionary phase of late capitalism observed by Marcuse. Bedrock liberties are dialectically inverted whereby speech and toleration are repressively deployed against demands for justice. This article concludes by arguing that it is crucial to the success of this resurgent sensibility for justice—and progress toward a radical socialist movement that coincides with the emancipatory vision of Herbert Marcuse—that the counterrevolutionary character of the responses are demystified.     

Are We the Walking Dead? Zombie Apocalypse as Liberatory Art

Abstract

Marcuse argued that subversive visions of a better reality can emerge from “low” as well as “high” culture, from within as well as outside the repressive apparatus. This article leverages Marcuse’s aesthetic theory to consider whether the enormously popular AMC cable series, The Walking Dead, might be considered emancipatory art. Set in a post-neoliberal America suffering through a zombie apocalypse, the dark, existential themes and urgent political ambivalences of this series reflect collective yearnings, tensions, and fissures in the current social reality worth attending to. I argue that The Walking Dead does have emancipatory potential, in that it addresses “depth dimension” concerns that occupied Marcuse; reflects disillusionment with core aspects of American neoliberalism; and reaches for less repressive, more life-affirming, alternative political visions. Time will tell if the show will sustain such visions or surrender to the status quo.     

Herbert’s Herbivore: One-Dimensional Society and the Possibility of Radical Vegetarianism

Abstract

Careful reading of Herbert Marcuse’s texts, including Counterrevolution and Revolt, One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, and Eros and Civilization, reveals his subtle attention to the human–animal dialectic and its role in human liberation. More specifically, animals mark the irrationality of advanced industrialized society for Marcuse, and his subtle but keen treatment of the animal question in politics provides an opening to radically rethink politics for animals and humans. Working from Marcuse’s critical theory, I explore the contemporary one-dimensional animal, which I argue imbricates both animals and humans in the violence and destruction that characterizes advanced industrial society. Using Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional society and his discussion of animals as my theoretical framework, I specifically consider vegetarianism in its capacity to militate against the contemporary political economy of meat. I conclude that Marcuse’s insights point to a radical vegetarianism aligned with anti-capitalist politics that offers the development of sensuous, pleasurable, life-affirming sensibilities that support true liberation for both animals and humans.     

Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Reflections on the 2015 York University Strike through a Marcusean Lens

Abstract

In this article, we see the month-long graduate student and contract faculty strike at York University (Toronto, 2015) through a lens informed by Herbert Marcuse’s thought. In the context of widespread student protests across North America against neoliberal austerity, we draw on our picket line experiences to argue that Marcuse’s work provides insights into how students and faculty can engage in critical praxis within the neoliberal university. We argue that CUPE 3903, the union of TAs and contract faculty at York, is a kind of counter-institution that Marcuse argued was necessary for liberation. Marcuse strategically urged students to take advantage of gaps or cracks in a disintegrating system. Our analysis revolves around the complex experience of the graduate student picket lines – a “gap” – as a site of rupture for the liberation of aesthetic experience, “organized spontaneity,” open, democratic organization, as well as conflict.     

Conference Plenary: When Liberation Movements Become One-Dimensional: On Critical Theory and Intersectionality

Abstract

One of the great obstacles to liberation and social change is the one-dimensional focus of many liberation movements. By “one-dimensional,” we mean the narrow reductionist approach to social change by many oppressed groups. In this article, we examine Marcuse’s notion of catalyst groups and connect that to the concept of intersectionality. We argue that critical theory must become a theory of intersectionality. While various forms of oppression have their own distinct logic of operation and specific target group, the continuation of each form of oppression is supported by other forms of oppression. One of the goals of this plenary was to help participants focus on the theme of the conference, critique and praxis, by envisioning new possibilities for theory, critique, praxis, and pedagogy in our time. To this end, we attempted to rethink Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensional thinking by linking it with Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic rivalry and the black feminist concept of intersectionality.     

Critical Theory of Society or Self-Critical Society

Abstract

This paper presents a critical comparative reading of Ulrich Beck and Herbert Marcuse. Beck's thesis on ‘selfcritical society’ and the concept of ‘sub-politics’ are evaluated within the framework of Marcusian critical theory. We argue for the continued relevance of Marcuse for the project of emancipatory politics. We recognise that a focus upon the imminent and spontaneous possibilities for radical social change within the ‘sub-political’ is a useful provocation to the high abstractionism of much critical theory, but suggest that such possibilities are better captured in a Marcusian theoretical frame than they are in Beck's account.     

Beyond the One-Dimensional University: A Marcusean Critique of Outcomes Assessment

Abstract

In August 2013, US president Barack Obama announced a plan to link federal financial aid to college performance. This plan, it is argued, will allow students, parents, and federal lenders to avoid paying tuition for an ultimately meaningless credential. It identifies relevant educational outcomes as rates of graduation, the earnings of graduates, and the attainment of advanced degrees after graduation. The president’s plan is part of a much larger trend toward “accountability” and “transparency” in education, an important feature of which is the proliferation of the language and programs related to assessment of student learning outcomes. In this essay, I show that outcomes assessment is a form of “one-dimensional thought” as this concept is developed in One-Dimensional Man and that it suffers from the defects identified by Marcuse there. Outcomes assessment, therefore, codifies ways of thinking about education that undermine its role in the development of liberated forms of consciousness and emancipatory praxis.     

The Place of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. This claim has most significantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Indefinite Detention”, presents a more differentiated account of power that registers the significance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.     

Autonomy and Psychic Socialization: From Non-Alienated Labour to Non Surplus Repressive Sublimation

Abstract

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his col leagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse's concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis's understanding of psychic socialization. It will be suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis's appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory.     

论米歇尔·亨利的生命现象学马克思主义

米歇尔·亨利第一次将他的生命现象学运用于马克思关于“社会现实”的分析。亨利关于马克思的哲学思想是“一种新现象学的马克思主义”。在马克思的文本中,现象学最基本的原则“回到事物自身”被亨利解读为“回到个体现实性生命”,所有社会中显示的关系必须还原到个体生命。“社会总体性”还原到纯粹的“个体主体性”是理解马克思社会批判的有力工具。“彻底的主体性”概念是亨利新现象学的马克思主义的核心概念。马克思的“现实性”应该被理解为个体的主体实践。马克思看到了实践的原初本质:实践恰恰是一种努力的主观体验,简言之即劳动。马克思以“谱系学”开始进行社会批判,这是一种对各种社会结构下的主观现实性的描述方法。     

Tensions in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.     

Waging Lawfare: Law,Environment and Depoliticization in Neoliberal Australia

ABSTRACT

When environmental NGOs in Australia successfully sued the nation’s environment minister in August 2015 to temporarily withhold environmental approval for Australia’s largest coal mine, the ruling Coalition government accused environmentalists of waging “lawfare.” Through a critical discourse analysis of Parliamentary debate and media coverage, this article explores the lawfare battles fought in Australia in 2015, arguing that these were a site of depoliticization, in Mouffe’s (2005, Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. Abingdon: Routledge) sense of the term. By exploring how the question of legal regulation of coal mining was rationalized, moralized, and stripped of significant political or ideological differences, this seeks to add to our understanding of processes of depoliticization by considering metadiscourses concerning “the law.”     

Intersectional citizenship,violence, and lesbian resistance in South Africa

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on intersectionality and citizenship, with scholars positing a need to analyze multiple identities simultaneously in order to understand both the legal incorporation and embodied experience of citizenship for marginalized groups. Building upon this central insight, I contribute to this literature by articulating the components of an intersectional citizenship framework to better understand the way multiple identities mediate citizenship, with particular reference to black lesbians in South Africa. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen members of the black lesbian organization Free Gender, in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I argue that Free Gender’s organizational goals can usefully be understood as asserting the commensurability of the identity “black lesbian” with “community member,” “African,” and “woman.” In applying a theoretical framework of intersectional citizenship to South Africa, it becomes clear that Free Gender’s activism reveals differential access to identities necessary to be seen as citizens entitled to rights. More than just extending juridical citizenship, black lesbians must have socially and politically legitimate access to multiple identity categories simultaneously in order to live free of violence.     

Political cartoons as carnivalesque: a multimodal discourse analysis of Argentina’s Humor Registrado magazine

Political cartoons, although generally neglected by academic criticism, are often one of the only forms of socio-political critique permitted during authoritarian rule (Barajas, Rafael. 2000. “The Transformative Power of art: Mexico’s Combat Cartoonists.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 3: 6–41). This paper explores the reasons behind this, reading the genre as a form of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, a participatory space of oppositional discourse outside the official version with which it has an “ambivalent” relationship (Bakhtin, Mikhael. 1984. Rabelais and His World (Trans Iswolsky H). Bloomington: Indiana University Press) and can be allowed to circulate as a “safety valve” (Holquist, Michael. 1984. “Prologue.” In Rabelais and his World, edited by M. Bakhtin, xiii–xxiii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press) of controlled protest. Drawing on tools of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics (Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge) and Semiology (Barthes, Roland. 1968. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang) for methodological purposes, this study investigates this hypothesis through the political cartoons of the covers of satirical fortnightly publication Humor Registrado during the final year of Argentina’s last dictatorship, 1982–1983. The magazine’s role in challenging the dictatorship is explored through an analysis of its representations of key social actors and events during Argentina’s difficult period of transition from dictatorship to democracy following defeat in the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War.     

Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness

Abstract

Strongly positive uses of terms that designate an absence, a cognitive or ontological impossibility or a sensory privation are among the persistent conceptual figures of Benjamin’s thought. This article analyses the moves by which Benjamin gave his concept of ‘the expressionless’ (das Ausdruckslose) its intriguing semantic meaning and moral value. Drawing on the poetics and philosophy of the sublime from Greek antiquity through modern times, the article reveals key historical reference points of Benjamin’s concept and, furthermore, his strategy of advocating a novel theory of the sublime as an antithesis to, or an interruption of, the beautiful by selectively integrating older traditions (such as the topos of god’s “imagelessness”) with theorems previously unrelated to these traditions (such as phenomenological reflections on body perception and colour and the twentieth-century discourse on “decision”).     

The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space: A New Network Exploring the Disciplinary Effects of the Spatial Turn

There is much concern in the social sciences and humanities today about how people are connected with and responsible to those who live in distant places. Recent examples are abundant: from climate change to the cyclone that hit Burma in 2008. At the same time, new forces and personalities in the social sciences and humanities are seeking to ‘open out’ understandings of ‘the spatial’ as a concept. There is a movement to view ‘space’ as something which is more than a pre-defined container of territorial politics; instead, as often the sphere of multiplicity, difference, affect and/or post-territorial interconnections. This brief paper talks about the “Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space” global network, which seeks to explore how these new forces of interrogation into the spatial, materiality, political and ethical connectivity are having an influence upon how people perceive of and constitute new spaces of politics and democracy today.     

Childhood,Biosocial Power and the “Anthropological Machine”

Abstract

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival.     

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

Brown kids in white suburbs: Housing mobility and the many faces of social capital

Abstract

Social capital has many faces in the geography of urban opportunity, and as such, particular housing policies might have positive effects on some forms of social capital and negative effects on others. The author defines social support and social leverage as two key dimensions of social capital that can be accessed by individuals. A sample of 132 low‐income African‐American and Latino adolescents is used to examine the early impacts of a Yonkers, NY, housing mobility program on social capital.¹

Overall, program participants (^‘’movers^‘’) appear to be no more cut off from social support than a control group of “stayer” youth. On the other hand, movers are also no more likely to report access to good sources of job information or school advice— to leverage that might enhance opportunity. Adding just one steadily employed adult to an adolescent's circle of significant ties has dramatic effects on perceived access to such leverage.     

Capitalism,nature, socialism a theoretical introduction∗

This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist”; theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, under‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society.

While the two processes of capital over‐production and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements”; as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism”; throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post‐Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self‐consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific”; discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post‐Marxist discussions of the problem of capital's use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modern world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific”; discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non‐capitalist or anti‐capitalist, constitute “civil society,”; which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.