Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times

Abstract

As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Toleration,neutrality, and freedom: a reply

ABSTRACT

In defending toleration against its many critics, Respecting Toleration has both conceptual and normative aims. Conceptually, I defend and explain the coherence of political toleration. This involves, in part, highlighting a distinction between two forms of toleration; one of which always involves objection, and one which does not. Normatively, I defend a particular understanding of toleration as the best way of accommodating contemporary diversity. In brief, the state should be guided by an active ideal of neutrality, and citizens must at minimum engage in forbearance tolerance with each others’ differences. In this paper, I respond to four main lines of criticism. The first is that my understanding of toleration – in which objection is not always necessary – is too broad, and that my non-moralised understanding of forbearance tolerance requires additional context. Second, my discussion of neutrality runs together the distinction between an active/passive state with a large/small state; wrongly fails to distinguish between mere preferences and deeply held beliefs; and is really a concern about equality. Third, my freedom-based justification for toleration is too limited; and may, in fact, enable recognition rather than resist it. Fourth, my rejection of inter-citizen respect for difference is too quick.     

The good of toleration: changing social relations or maximising individual freedom?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I take issue with Peter Balint’s recent account of the value of toleration as an instrument for securing freedom-maximising outcomes in pluralistic societies. In particular, I question the extent to which the ideal of toleration can be entirely reduced to someone’s intentional withholding of negative interference whose value lies in the protection of individual negative freedoms. I argue that couching the value of toleration entirely in these freedom-maximising terms fails to do justice to the relational value of toleration. To see this value, we must also have in sight the drastic changes that appeals to toleration make to the nature of what goes on between the tolerator and the tolerated, not only to the state of affairs that is created by their relation.     

The simplicity of toleration

ABSTRACT

Toleration is one of the core elements of a liberal polity, and yet it has come to be seen as puzzling, paradoxical and difficult. The aim of the present paper is to dispel three puzzles surrounding toleration. First, I will challenge the notion that it is difficult to see why tolerance should be a virtue given that it involves putting up with what one deems wrong. Second, I defuse the worry that the ideal of toleration is not fully realizable as toleration must necessarily be limited. Third, I take issue with the assumption that ‘true’ tolerance requires meta-tolerance, that is, that the issue of toleration must itself be approached in a ‘tolerant’ way.     

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.     

Education,epistemic virtues,and the power of toleration

ABSTRACT

Toleration is usually regarded as a pivotal democratic virtue that should be cultivated in the educational systems of liberal democracies. The concept of toleration, however, is marked by deep ambivalence. Power-theoretical criticisms of toleration as a political and educational ideal have emphasized that discourses of toleration are entangled with societal power struggles, and tend to naturalize social hierarchies and reify individual and collective identities. Given this criticism, toleration refers not just to justificatory problems concerning the limits of political or pedagogical authority, or to the peaceful negotiation of conflicts that pervade pluralistic societies. On the contrary, toleration itself seems to create and perpetuate precisely those political conflicts that it is meant to contain. This contribution develops a defence of toleration as a coherent and sound aim of public education and as a democratic virtue against the power-theoretical critique.     

Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention

ABSTRACT

The incorporation of socioeconomic concerns into transitional justice has traditionally, as a result of prevailing liberal notions about dealing with the past, been both conceptually and practically difficult. This article demonstrates and accounts for these difficulties through the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been characterized by a complex transition process and a far-reaching international intervention, encompassing transitional justice and peacebuilding as well as political and economic reforms. Examining the limits of international intervention in Bosnia and the marginalization of socioeconomic justice issues, the article analyses the events surrounding the protests that broke out in February 2014, and the ensuing international engagement with the protest movement. Faced with a broad-based civic movement calling for socioeconomic justice, the international community struggled to understand its claims as justice issues, framing them instead as problems to be tackled through reforms aimed at completing Bosnia’s transition towards a market economy. The operation of peacebuilding and transitional justice within the limits of neoliberal transformation is thus instrumental in explaining how and why socioeconomic justice issues become marginalized, as well as accounting for the expression of popular discontent where justice becomes an object of contestation and external intervention.     

Television TV by Barney Daniels Tjungurrayi

This paper examines the alliance that Derrida makes between his notion of justice as undeconstructible and a certain spirit of Marx's emancipatory promise. By following some of the precautions that Derrida undertakes in distinguishing the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructible justice should not be viewed as a contradiction in terms. I also argue that while the themes of justice, ethics, and politics can be rendered self‐present. Rather, Derrida's response to the injunctions of Marx suggests that it is precisely because justice and the emancipatory promise cannot be given over to the present that they are situated as undeconstructible. As such, taking responsibility for the heritage of Marxism involves working and sorting through the many spectres of Marx that inhabit the same injunction, where the promise remains as that yet to come.     

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.     

Toleration and modus vivendi

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore some connections between the ideas of toleration and modus vivendi, principally through a critical engagement with the work of John Gray. In particular, it argues that while Gray is right to see a connection between modus vivendi and a particular conception of toleration (here referred to as the ‘traditional conception’) it is both problematic and potentially confusing to tie either of these ideas, as he does, to a theory of value-pluralism. Instead, they should be viewed as distinct but partially overlapping and often mutually supportive ideas, the relevance of which are best explained in terms of the need or desire of people to live together under conditions of conflict about the worth of different ways of life, and motivated by a variety of pragmatic and principled concerns. The paper also offers a modest defence of the traditional conception of toleration against some of its critics, arguing that such a practice of toleration, if supported by a modus vivendi, can provide a peaceable means of accommodating differences in a way that is broadly accepted, although neither ideal nor necessarily uncontested, by both tolerators and the tolerated.     

These fine lines: locating noncitizenship in political protest in Europe

Abstract

Since 2012, refugee protest camps and occupations have been established throughout Europe that contest the exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, but that also make concrete demands for better living conditions and basic rights. It is a movement that is led by migrants as noncitizens, and so reveals new ways of thinking of the political agency and status of noncitizenship not as simply reactive to an absence of citizenship, but as a powerful and transgressive subjectivity in its own right. This paper argues that we should resist collapsing analysis back into the frameworks of citizenship, and instead be attentive to the politics of presence and solidarity manifest in these protest camps as a way of understanding, and engaging, noncitizen activism.     

Discourse Ethics and the Normative Justification of Tolerance

Abstract

The following paper considers the extent to which discourse ethics can adequately respond to Habermas' own call for normative justification for the expectation of tolerance. It concludes that discourse ethics is able to lend its services to the flagging fortunes of the idea of toleration, not by seeking to underscore this idea with rationally compelling argumentation, but by offering insights into the possibilities opened up to a life which accepts this principle.     

Public spheres on the move: the embodied deliberation of cycling in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Across Los Angeles, mass bike events have exploded in popularity and regularly stop cars to allow thousands of bodies to move together through the city. We argue that such “mobility events” are shared physical practices that embody political deliberation. By challenging dominant regimes of power, they create public spheres “on the move”, concretely and conceptually. While these publics have emancipatory potential, this potential is ambivalent because embodied practices can still reinforce social divisions. Our interdisciplinary approach, in conjunction with interpretive methodologies, contributes to the mobilities and political science literatures by tying together the structural factors and everyday practices at play in sociopolitical phenomena.     

Victims’ Rights and Distributive Justice: In Search of Actors

The aim of this article is to discuss the role that victim groups and organizations may have in framing and supporting an accountability agenda, as well as their potential for endorsing a distributive justice agenda. The article explores two empirical cases where victims' rights have been introduced and applied by victim organizations to promote accountability—Colombia and Peru. It will be argued that if transitional justice in general and victim reparations in particular are to embark in a quest for distributive justice, it cannot do so without considering victims as political actors, and putting forward demands in terms of victims’ rights.     

The power of protest on policing: Black Lives Matter protest and civilian evaluation of the police

In 2020, police brutality against Black Americans catalyzed Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across all 50 states. Though BLM protests continue to permeate society, few scholars explore how these protests change Americans' perceptions of the police. To investigate this phenomenon more meticulously, we administered an online survey experiment—oversampling Black American participants—to measure how protest culture, specifically BLM protests, influences civilians' perceptions of the police. Our survey found that (1) Black American participants have a lower evaluation of police performance, but a higher evaluation of the BLM Movement than White American participants; (2) the presence of a general protest negatively impacts peoples' perception of safety, police trustworthiness, and police performance; and (3) a BLM protest casts a stronger effect on White American participants than on Black American participants. Using Critical Race Theory and QuantCrit these findings suggest that the visibility of BLM protests changes both Black and White perceptions of the police to varying degrees.