There was a period in the late 1960s when Herbert Marcuse became a much-reviled minor celebrity in the USA.1 The source of his notoriety was his vocal support for the so-called ‘New Left’.2 Although Marcuse had expressed deep pessimism about the prospects for social change in many of his post-war writings, he became convinced in 1965 or thereabouts that the New Left stood a reasonable chance of rousing ordinary Americans from their conformist slumbers. There were few aspects of the New Left to which he failed to respond enthusiastically. In his opinion the student movement, the civil rights movement and even the counterculture were animated by a noble subversive impulse that posed a significant threat to the status quo. Contrary to what many of his opponents on the orthodox Marxist left tended to claim, Marcuse never believed that the youthful radicals whose activities he endorsed could somehow replace the working class as the main agent of progressive change. What he did believe was that the New Left had the potential to exercise a radicalizing influence on working people, freeing them from their enslavement to the dehumanized world of consumer capitalism and setting them on a revolutionary path. In arguing this line he earned the undying enmity of middle America’s most conservative spokesmen. By the time he turned seventy in 1968 he was widely known as a sort of latter day Socrates, shamelessly corrupting the minds of the youth with his hostility to the American way.
It is hardly surprising that Marcuse’s support for the New Left should have bewildered so many people. The contrast between the young radicals and their intellectual apologist was a startling one. Marcuse was elderly, ascetic (in lifestyle if not in ideology) and ruminative. His acolytes in the student movement were largely under thirty, hedonistic and full of rage. Yet it was precisely the element of emotional extremism in the New Left’s outlook that Marcuse seems to have found attractive. In particular he laid considerable emphasis on what could perhaps be called its negationism. Convinced that the only way of changing anything was to create the impression that in principle it was possible to change everything, many New Leftists related to the world in a spirit of uncompromising negativity. Their strategy was to try and spark a rebellion against mainstream society by screaming ‘no!, no!, no!’ at everything that existed. As the cultural critic Greil Marcus once put it, they proceeded at all times on the assumption that ‘natural facts’ were as much open to change as ‘ideological constructs’ (Marcus 1989: 3). The New Left’s critics regarded its negationism as a symptom of stalled adolescence at best and as a threat to social order at worst. Marcuse was beguiled by it and referred to it in many of his writings as ‘The Great Refusal’.3
There are many reasons why Marcuse’s analysis of the New Left’s negationism retains its relevance. One of them is that the politics of negationism has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the last ten or fifteen years. The emergence of the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement in the late 1990s, combined with the recent outpouring of protest against the consequences of the international financial crisis, means that the advanced capitalist world is once again playing host to a loose coalition of activists whose anger sometimes seems directed against more or less everything. A reading of Marcuse can perhaps shed some light on what this new generation of youthful enragés is trying to achieve. At the same time his writings on the New Left also raise a fascinating problem in the intellectual history of the Frankfurt School. At first sight his support for negationism seems wildly inconsistent with the ideas of other Frankfurt thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In spite of the luminous strain of utopianism in their work – and in spite of their frequent recourse to the Hegelian category of negation – Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer had a highly pronounced understanding of the limits of human endeavour. Each of them believed that too much confidence in the power of human beings to change the world would ultimately lead to fascism. (As is well known, the most fruitful consequence of this train of thought was Adorno and Horkheimer’s seminal analysis of the role of ‘instrumental rationality’ in modern culture).4 When Marcuse wrote so enthusiastically about the New Left’s negationism, he appeared to be endorsing a political culture that defied everything his colleagues had said about the dangers of technocratic arrogance. Certainly that was what Adorno, Horkheimer and the young Jürgen Habermas believed at the time. But were things really as simple as that? Did Marcuse’s ideas really diverge so fundamentally from the Frankfurt orthodoxy? The purpose of this chapter is to bring these and other questions into focus. After reconstructing Marcuse’s account of the New Left’s negationist strategy, I shall argue that he endorsed negationism not in spite of his commitment to critical theory but because of it. More precisely, seeking to re-read Marcuse’s writings on the New Left from the perspective of recent critical work on post-war radicalism, I argue that he regarded negationism as a mode of political engagement that actually reinforced traditional Frankfurt thinking about the limits of the human condition.
Marcuse’s enthusiasm for the negationist sensibility did not suddenly come upon him in the 1960s. His sense of the ‘power of negative thinking’ first made itself felt in the days when Hitler still ruled Germany. Grimly aware that the Nazis exerted a powerful hold on the minds of the German working-class, Marcuse regarded uncompromising hostility to everything that existed as an essential component of the struggle against fascism. At this stage his understanding of negationism was expressed indirectly through his explication of the work of Hegel, whom he sedulously defended against the charge of conservatism in his early books Hegel’s Ontology (1932) and Reason and Revolution (1941). In the latter book he described the negative moment of the Hegelian dialectic in terms that would not have seemed out of place in a countercultural manifesto in the 1960s: ‘the given facts that appear to common sense as the positive index of truth are in reality the negation of truth, so that truth can only be established by their destruction’ (Marcuse 1960: 26–7; quoted in Robinson 1970: 186).
Although fascism had long since been defeated by the time the New Left began to emerge, Marcuse’s negationism was rooted in the same sort of political considerations in the 1960s as it had been thirty years earlier. He still regarded what he now called the Great Refusal as a crucial weapon in any struggle against bourgeois authoritarianism. His support for the New Left and other movements of radical protest grew out of his gloomy analysis of the changing face of post-war capitalism. In a series of highly provocative books and articles, notably Eros and Civilisation (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (1965) and An Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse portrayed the emerging consumer society as a sort of glossy prison.5 Recognizing that most Western societies retained an ostensible commitment to liberalism, he nevertheless argued that they had reached a point at which a ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom’ was the order of the day (Marcuse 2002: 3). The new consumer societies were not fascist but their capacity to secure the consent of their citizens was virtually total. The continued existence of democratic institutions merely obscured the fact that most sources of opposition to bourgeois society had been shut down. In a move that outraged orthodox Marxists, Marcuse insisted that the working class no longer played an oppositional role and seemed largely happy with its lot.
Marcuse’s explanation for the new mood of political quietism ranged widely across matters of economics, politics and culture. At the core of his argument was the claim that advanced industrial societies were increasingly falling prey to a form of ‘technological rationality’. Drawing heavily on the description of the modern labour process in the work of Marx, Veblen and Weber, Marcuse argued that consumer society’s unprecedented levels of wealth had been made possible by the wholesale rationalization of production. Marx’s famous prediction that capitalism would turn the individual worker into an ‘appendage to the machine’ had come true with a vengeance (Marx and Engels 1958). In the interests of profit and productivity the workplace had been reorganized along strict Taylorist lines, with the result that a deskilled and demoralized workforce now spent most of its time responding to orders issued by machines. Marcuse’s point was that the new forms of work inevitably gave rise to a mood of mass conformity. Stripped of their autonomy by automated technology and the bureaucracy that oversaw the productive process, ordinary people had lost all confidence in their ability to act independently in pursuit of social or political objectives. Slavery on the production line had narrowed people’s perspectives to the point where change seemed literally inconceivable. Moreover, the problem was compounded by other contemporary developments such as the blurring of class distinctions, the growth of bureaucracy, the ‘repressive desublimation’ of the sexual instinct and the vogue for positivism among mainstream intellectuals.
Marcuse’s account of technological rationality had a psychoanalytical dimension that takes us to the heart of his support for the New Left. Endorsing Freud’s notion of the death instinct, Marcuse argued that human beings possess a set of innate aggressive impulses whose ultimate goal is the annihilation of the self. In ordinary circumstances these impulses are buried deep in the unconscious by the process of sublimation. In consumer societies the situation is rather different. One of the secrets of late capitalism’s hold over ordinary people was that it encouraged them to express their aggressive impulses by directing them away from the self and towards an external source. The automated technology that dominated advanced industrial societies was not simply the last word in Taylorist efficiency. It was also a sign that human beings had effectively declared war on the natural world. By holding out the prospect that human beings could achieve total control over nature, modern technology stymied the wholesale sublimation of the death instinct and instead channelled its energies into productive activity. In so doing it bound people to the existing order by vicariously satisfying one of their most powerful and dangerous needs.
In some of the most influential passages in his later work, Marcuse extended his argument about the role of the death instinct to the area of consumption. Casting a jaundiced eye across the various means by which consumer society incited people into buying goods they did not really need, he argued that the simple act of acquiring more possessions had now become an outlet for the expression of ‘primary aggressiveness’:
the masters have created the public which asks for their wares, and asks for them more insistently if it can release, in and through the wares, its frustration and the aggressiveness resulting from this frustration. Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be … Organized capitalism has sublimated and turned to socially productive use frustration and primary aggressiveness on an unprecedented scale – unprecedented not in terms of the quantity of violence but rather in terms of its capacity to produce long-term contentment and satisfaction, to reproduce the ‘voluntary servitude’ (Marcuse 1972: 22).
Marcuse was at pains to emphasize that the culture of consumerism affected the body as much as the mind. Its audacious attempt to harness primary aggressiveness to the new forms of production and consumption had penetrated into the ‘organic structure of man’ and changed it profoundly. The borders between culture and biology were by no means impermeable. However historically unprecedented they might have been, consumerism’s distinctive pleasures had rapidly acquired the status of a biological need. To leave them unsatisfied would be to render the body ‘dysfunction[al]’. It followed that any attempt to challenge the status quo ran the risk not merely of inducing extreme psychological frustration but of literally making people ill (Marcuse 1972: 20–21).
These psychoanalytical speculations formed the backdrop to Marcuse’s endorsement of the New Left. Recognizing that conventional radical politics posed no threat to the new consumer order, Marcuse argued that the New Left was unique among contemporary political movements in forging a style of cultural radicalism that powerfully subverted the psychological mechanisms on which consumerism depended. At the core of its ‘new sensibility’ was a potent combination of aesthetic passion and negationist scorn. Marcuse believed that ‘nonconformist youth’ instinctively grasped the elementary Freudian axiom that the most effective way of challenging the death instinct was to cultivate a sense of beauty. The result was that they had responded to consumerism’s exploitation of primary aggressiveness by projecting a vision of a new society governed by an ‘aesthetic ethos’. Their goal was to use advanced technology, economic planning and libertarian audacity to forge the sort of socialist commonwealth first outlined in the pages of Eros and Civilisation – one in which labour would be unalienated, the sexual impulse desublimated and ‘the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful [would] become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself’ (Marcuse 1972: 33). At the same time, Marcuse recognized that utopian speculation was not enough in itself to bring the old world crashing down. Because the New Left knew perfectly well that consumerism exercised an iron grip on the minds of ordinary people, it also aspired to scramble prevailing habits of thought by mounting a ferocious assault on all aspects of the existing order. The obverse side of its unabashed utopianism was a mode of uncompromising negationism fully worthy of Bakunin.
Marcuse’s most sustained analysis of the New Left’s negationism can be found in An Essay on Liberation. While recognizing that most New Leftists lived their lives in a state of permanent querulousness, he argued that their desire to tear up the existing order and rebuild society from scratch was most in evidence in three of their most distinctive cultural practices – their uncompromising use of provocative language, their consumption of psychotropic drugs and their support for the artistic avant-garde. His account of these practices made short shrift of the common assumption that the culture of the New Left was simply a form of mindless hedonism. Instead it showed that even the New Left’s most disreputable activities were charged with political purpose. His assessment of the New Left’s Rabelaisian way with language owed a clear debt to the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, especially the great essay on ‘The Culture Industry’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). In one of the more overlooked passages in that essay, Adorno and Horkheimer speculated about the role of sanitized language in securing social control. In order to conceal the brutal realities of modern life from the bulk of the populace, or so they argued, authoritarian societies had begun a process whereby the accepted distinction between signifier and signifier had broken down. Words were increasingly being used by the culture industry in a sort of ‘talismanic’ fashion. By continually applying ludicrously euphemistic terms to truly horrible phenomena – a notorious example from our own time would be the use of the phrase ‘collateral damage’ to refer to civilian casualties – broadcasters, politicians and other representatives of the dominant culture effectively conflated reality with the words used to represent it. The result was that people slowly became desensitized to barbarism as they began to perceive a de facto correspondence between the avoidable evils of modern life and the hail of neutral terms that referred to them: ‘the word, which can now be only a sign without any meaning, becomes so fixed to the thing that it is just a petrified formula’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1995: 164). Marcuse’s point was that the New Left sought to put this process into reverse by eschewing euphemism and resorting to extreme linguistic provocation in its stead. Whereas the establishment sought to control minds through the endless repetition of vague-sounding terms, its radical opponents obsessively deployed obscenities, curses and other forms of taboo language in order to effect a ‘methodical reversal of meaning’ (Marcuse 1972: 41). For example, the ultimate effect of referring to a respected politician as a ‘pig’ was to puncture his reputation for public service and expose his status as the unscrupulous representative of a greedy oligarchy. Marcuse even detected a strain of Freudian radicalism in some of the New Left’s uses of language, especially those of the black liberation movement. Commenting on the incorrigible tendency of young radicals to refer to politicians, capitalists and the like as ‘motherfuckers’ (a term he was too squeamish to use himself),6 he claimed that it had the salutary effect of implying that the crimes of the establishment were ultimately rooted in sexual guilt. This was all of a piece with the New Left’s wider project of desublimation.
Having portrayed the New Left’s approach to language as a species of what Umberto Eco would later call ‘semiological guerrilla warfare’ (Quoted in Hebdige 1979: 105), Marcuse went on to relate its use of drugs and its taste in art to its goal of negating everyday habits of perception. In a passage of An Essay on Liberation that recalled his earlier attempts to fuse Marxism with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, he argued that society’s ruling groups had now acquired the power to shape the most basic forms of human experience in their own interests. Under the new consumer dispensation there was nothing remotely neutral about the way people processed their sense impressions or responded to emotional stimuli. Even the most apparently reflexive or irrational acts of perception reflected the influence of the dominant ideology. Marcuse’s argument was that the New Left grasped this point intuitively and aimed to scramble established patterns of sensibility in order to reconfigure them along progressive lines. The great significance of psychedelic drugs such as LSD was that they disordered the senses to the point where ‘reality’ no longer seemed easy to grasp. In so doing they exposed the artificial nature of established ways of seeing and encouraged the individual to effect a ‘revolution in perception’: ‘Today’s rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way … The “trip” involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society’ (Marcuse 1972: 43).
There was an interesting tension between Marcuse’s remarks about psychedelic drugs and those of the writers, musicians and self-appointed visionaries who had experienced them at first hand. Marcuse’s position was that psychedelics worked to impede basic habits of perception, in the process acting as a sort of narcotic forcing house for new ways of looking at the world. By contrast, countercultural spokesmen such as Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ken Kesey argued that LSD involved a miraculous enhancement of the sensorium rather than its violent subversion. According to this latter view, which filtered down to a mass audience in the music of the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd, the role of ‘acid’ was not to disorder the senses but to render them more sensitive to the ‘basic energy underlying the universe’ (Leary 1973: 18). Indeed, the counterculture’s evocation of the psychedelic experience had a religious dimension that went largely unnoticed in Marcuse’s account. Timothy Leary was being entirely orthodox when he described the ingestion of LSD as a ‘sacred ritual’ whose purpose was to bring the individual closer to God. Marcuse’s indifference to the counterculture’s spiritual aspirations hinted at the single biggest limitation in his account of the New Left. Dogmatic in his belief that the rise of science had engendered an irreversible ‘disenchantment’ of human culture, he seemed not to grasp the idea that the politics of radical anti-capitalism might seek to reverse the process of secularization rather than bring it to its climax. His failure to mention the contemporaneous rise of ‘liberation theology’ was perhaps the more most striking example of this deep-seated ideological blindness.
A concern with perception also shaped Marcuse’s account of the New Left’s taste in art. Arguing – or at least implying – that New Leftists were naturally drawn towards modernist and what we would now call postmodernist trends in culture, Marcuse claimed that the great virtue of ‘contemporary art’ was that it employed radically innovative forms to throw the senses into crisis. The motivation behind the original modernist revolution was to prevent works of art from communicating an easily comprehensible message. Abstraction in painting, serialism in classical music and the use of stream-of-consciousness techniques in literature induced a mood of acute semiotic unease in everyone who encountered them, raising the suspicion that the subject matter of individual works was ultimately unknowable. (Marcuse pointed out that these feelings of aesthetic disorientation had been taken to new heights by the so-called ‘anti-art’ that flourished in the post-war years). The result was that the mere act of wrestling with a work of art seemed to call the most fundamental habits of perception into question, creating the exhilarating – though also highly disconcerting – sense that the old ways of processing information about the world were outdated and needed to be replaced by something new:
These [the new artistic techniques] are not merely new modes of perception reorienting and intensifying the old ones; they rather dissolve the very structure of perception in order to make room – for what? The new object of art is not yet ‘given’, but the familiar object has become impossible, false … The senses must learn not to see things any more in the medium of that law and order which has formed them; the bad functionalism which organizes our sensibility must be smashed7 (Marcuse 1972: 45).
Marcuse’s account of modernism in An Essay on Liberation served as an interesting coda to some of his earlier writings on the arts, notably the classic essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ from 1937. According to the young Marcuse, writing just after the rise of Hitler forced him to leave Germany, the art of the modern period was distinguished by its complex synthesis of subversive and conservative elements. At the dawn of the capitalist age the outlook of society had been predominantly optimistic. The rise of market relations fuelled the belief that a new age of human happiness was about to dawn. However, when it became clear that the bourgeois dream of liberty, equality and fraternity was incompatible with the grim realities of capitalist reification, the universal yearning for happiness was exiled to the cultural margins. The arts became the only place – or at least one of the few places – in which the early bourgeoisie’s thrilling vision of liberated humanity could still be expressed. Industrial society’s most gifted painters, musicians and writers held out what Stendhal famously called ‘une promesse de bonheur’. In their work they created parallel universes in which fraternity, love, sensuousness, creativity and liberty suffused the life of the individual, though they also expressed the intense misery which arose from the realization that happiness could not be achieved in real life. Marcuse’s point was that the utopianism of bourgeois art played a socially ambiguous role. If art’s glorious evocation of human happiness prompted a critical attitude towards the decidedly unhappy societies in which people were obliged to live, it was nevertheless the case that artists went out of their way to disavow their own work’s subversive potential. Bourgeois culture was dominated by the idea of the soul, or so Marcuse argued. Anxious to reconcile people to the existing order, artists extolled the ‘immaterial’ dimensions of the human personality and made it clear that although happiness might occasionally (and evanescently) irradiate the individual’s inner life it could never filter through to society’s material practices (Marcuse 2007). In his comments on modernism in An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse affirmed the main arguments of his earlier writings but also went beyond them. No longer willing to describe bourgeois culture in strictly homogeneous terms, he now argued that modernism aspired to undermine art’s unworldliness and put its vision of happiness at the service of radical politics. Modernism’s startling stylistic innovations represented a sort of concerted attack on art’s preoccupation with the soul, intentionally ‘desublimating’ art’s content and showing that its utopian energies need not remain remote from everyday life. If the art of the high-bourgeois period subsisted solely in the realms of the spirit, modernism brought the ‘aesthetic dimension’ down to earth and set it to the task of ‘reconstructing reality’ (Marcuse 1972: 44).
Although Marcuse saw much to admire in the New Left’s attitude towards drugs and art, he realized that neither psychedelics nor modernism necessarily posed a threat to the existing order. In some respects their subversive edge had been blunted. Many users of LSD had retreated into what the counterculture sometimes called ‘inner space’, emphasizing its purely psychological effects and ignoring its capacity to induce revolutionary consciousness8 (Marcuse 1972: 44). By contrast, modernism’s critique of one-dimensional society had been undermined by a combination of commercial pressure and intrinsic aesthetic weakness. Even the most challenging of modern artists had seen their work ‘absorbed in the art gallery’ (Marcuse 1972: 48), while ultimately – in a disconcerting illustration of culture’s dialectical complexity – modernism’s bold formal experiments had served not as agents of desublimation but as reminders of art’s autonomy from everyday life. Nevertheless, Marcuse’s account of the New Left’s cultural practices was anything but pessimistic. Intent on showing that certain forms of cultural resistance retained their political bite, he launched into a lyrical (and also rather embarrassing) tribute to the ‘frightening immediac[ies]’ of black culture (Marcuse 1972: 52). Because black Americans had endured a long history of physical oppression, or so the argument seemed to go, they naturally created forms in which bodily expression took priority over everything else. The revolutionary significance of gospel, blues and jazz was that they eschewed all reference to the immaterial soul in favour of an intensely corporeal attitude that brought art into direct contact with everyday life. This made them all but invulnerable to the sort of aesthetic recuperation that had stymied some of the New Left’s other cultural practices. Marcuse’s implied conclusion could scarcely have been more provocative: If the New Left wanted to achieve its political goals it would have to become more black. These days his evocation of black culture’s frenzied exploration of the ‘dark continent’ seems like the height of inverted racism. In those days it struck many young people as the acme of revolutionary wisdom. Negationism and reverence for people of colour were two sides of the same coin.
There were plenty of people in the 1960s who dismissed Marcuse’s defence of the New Left as a species of old man’s folly. The assumption on the part of many of his critics was that Marcuse – flattered by the admiration of the student movement and anxious to feel young again – had rushed to endorse the programme of the youthful revolutionaries without bothering to understand it first. Nothing in An Essay on Liberation or the other writings on the New Left suggests that the charge was justified. As we have seen, Marcuse’s interpretation of the New Left might have been somewhat grandiose but it was clearly related to his wider theoretical concerns. Appalled that the one-dimensional world of consumer capitalism had ruthlessly exploited the death instinct in order to win the support of the masses, he saw the New Left’s synthesis of aesthetic aspiration, sexual permissiveness and uncompromising negativity as a crucial component in the struggle for a new civilization. The interesting attacks on Marcuse came not from those who dismissed him out of hand but from those whose intellectual background he shared. Especially fascinating was the sharp exchange of letters between Marcuse and his friend Theodor Adorno that occurred in the last six months of Adorno’s life in 1969. Since the letters went a long way towards crystallizing the tension between Marcuse and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School over the nature of the New Left, I will summarize their main points in this section before commenting on them in the final section.
Marcuse’s exchange with Adorno took place against the backdrop of the Institute for Social Research’s troubled relationship with the student movement in Germany. In his capacity as Director of the Institute – a position he had held since 1958 – Adorno came into conflict with student activists on a number of occasions from the mid-1960s onwards.9 As early as 1964 he sued two students from the Subversive Aktion group for producing a satirical poster that used quotations from his work without his permission. Thereafter the more uncompromising enragés at Frankfurt treated him less as a venerable Marxist thinker from whom they could learn than as a tedious obstacle to the radicalization of the student body. Things came to a head in the first six months of 1969, in what turned out to be the last two terms Adorno spent at the Institute before his death. At the end of January a group of students from the SDS (German Socialist Student Alliance or Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) occupied the Institute as part of their campaign to reform university rules. Mortified at the thought that they were betraying the students but anxious to protect the Institute’s academic integrity, Adorno and his colleague Ludwig von Friedeburg summoned the police and watched as 76 activists were taken into custody (Only one of them – Adorno’s PhD student Hans-Jürgen Krahl – eventually stood trial). After that the Institute’s students announced open season on their beleaguered Director. In April a faction from the SDS effectively forced him to cancel a philosophy course after disrupting one of his lectures; three female students went so far as to bare their breasts at him while their comrades distributed a leaflet announcing that ‘Adorno as institution is dead’ (Leslie 1999: 121). There was to be no possibility of a rapprochement. Plunged into depression by his various battles against the students, Adorno died of a heart attack while on holiday in Switzerland in August.
Marcuse became embroiled in Adorno’s battle with the student movement after receiving an invitation to deliver a public lecture at the Institute (Marcuse was teaching at the University of San Diego at California at the time and visited Germany only rarely). In a letter to Adorno dated 5 April 1969, Marcuse expressed concern about the way the demonstration in January had been broken up and said that he would only agree to lecture at the Institute if he could also hold a meeting with the students (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 125). There followed a lengthy exchange of letters in which Adorno and Marcuse debated the rights and wrongs of the student movement with a notable undercurrent of suppressed acrimony. It has to be said that Adorno made a far more powerful case than Marcuse. The most noticeable thing about his comments on the student movement was that they displayed the same sense of dialectical subtlety as his more famous analyses of music, philosophy and the culture industry. His central argument was that the New Left could not be regarded as a straightforwardly progressive movement because of its ‘immanent antinomies’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 128). Although the revolutionary students had gone some way towards puncturing the authoritarian temper of the age, they were by no means free of authoritarian reflexes themselves. In a passage that implicitly linked his analysis of the New Left to the account of modern culture that he and Horkheimer first outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno claimed that the ‘student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 128). The assumption here was that instrumental rationality had exercised as big an influence on the thought processes of the revolutionary students as on the culture they sought to oppose. Raised in advanced capitalist societies whose highest goal was the subordination of the natural world to the will of human beings – societies whose reverence for science led to a persistent emphasis on the general at the expense of the particular – most student activists had betrayed their own cause by embracing styles of protest that threatened to engender a new form of ‘left fascism’.10 Adorno had no doubt that most of the tactics the SDS employed against the Institute were intended to shut down debate rather than open it up. Hinting at a Freudian explanation for the students’ behaviour, he implied that many New Leftists had regressed to a pre-oedipal stage of development and had thus conflated revolution with indiscriminate violence. Rendered infantile by an excess of hatred and a terrible lack of theoretical sophistication, they failed to recognize that a humane politics could only emerge once the urge to revolt against everything had been held in check. Theirs was a commitment to the ‘blind primacy of action’ that paid no mind to the ‘content and shape of that against which [they] revolt[ed]’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 131).
Having concluded that the New Left’s authoritarian, juvenile and semi-fascist tendencies greatly outweighed its capacity to do good, Adorno went on to consider the issue of how people like himself should respond to the new forms of student activism. He rejected the idea that radical intellectuals had a duty to serve as cheerleaders for the revolutionary students in their battle against academic authority. The only principled position was to defend the integrity of the academy against a tidal wave of adolescent nihilism. In their frenzied desire to lash out at everything and everyone in their immediate environment, the SDS and other student movements ran the risk of destroying valuable traditions of radical scholarship that would be needed by the progressive movements of the future (not surprisingly, Adorno’s particular example was the work of the Frankfurt School itself). In these circumstances it was perfectly legitimate (though also deeply traumatizing) for radical intellectuals to call on the state to prevent student radicals disrupting university life. It was a serious error to ‘abstractly demonize’ the police because of its wider role in the maintenance of the status quo (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 127). Faced with an unappeasable canaille of students intent on vandalizing university property and attacking members of staff, senior academics like Adorno had no choice but to collaborate with the authorities in curtailing their activities at the earliest opportunity. The idea that the police should only be called after violence had broken out was a piece of ultra-leftist nonsense. Moreover, Adorno’s determination to stand up to the students was clearly reinforced by his sense that many of their activities had been undertaken for fundamentally trivial reasons. Thinking back to the original student occupation in January, he claimed that Krahl and his comrades had ‘only organized the whole stunt in order to get taken into custody, and thereby hold together the disintegrating Frankfurt SDS group’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 124). No movement that behaved as opportunistically as this deserved to be treated with respect.
Marcuse’s response to his old friend’s polemical onslaught was strident in tone but extraordinarily defensive in substance. At no point in his defence of the student movement did he repeat the arguments of An Essay on Liberation, even though the book had been published less than a year earlier. Instead he seemed ready to agree – tacitly, at least – with Adorno’s claim that the New Left had nothing interesting to say about the nature of advanced capitalism or the prospects for its revolutionary transformation. His tactic was not to endorse the New Left’s ideology but to portray its activities as the expression of a sort of biological necessity. Starting from the premise that modern capitalism had induced a mood of well-nigh physical anguish in the majority of people, he argued that the student movement’s apoplectic displays of resistance had the merit of affording a brief measure of relief from the exhausting experience of being oppressed:
We cannot abolish from the world the fact that these students are influenced by us (and certainly not least by you) – I am proud of that and am willing to come to terms with patricide, even though it hurts sometimes. And the means that they use in order to translate theory into activity?? We know (and they know) that the situation is not a revolutionary one, not even a pre-revolutionary one. But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in. And this fresh air is not that of a ‘left fascism’ (contradictio in adjecto!). It is the air that we (at least I) also want to breathe some day, and it is certainly not the air of the establishment (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 125).
Marcuse was not claiming that the sense of catharsis induced by the New Left’s activities was somehow revolutionary in itself. His point was that it cleared the ground for a fresh wave of radical thinking. Once the stultifying mental atmosphere of the one-dimensional society had been punctured by an orgy of sit-ins, occupations and riots, it would once again become possible for radical intellectuals to address the issue of how the existing order could be overthrown. The New Left had no coherent theory of its own but it was creating a space in which revolutionary strategy could be reforged.
Unable – or at least unwilling – to provide a defence of the New Left’s ideology, Marcuse resorted to some astonishingly demagogic arguments in an effort to bolster his case. In one letter he claimed that the mere act of calling the police to disperse an occupation was tantamount to siding with the establishment against its enemies. In another he accused Adorno of being more concerned with protecting the Institute’s funding than with defending its ideas. Nevertheless, there were several passages in which he came close to echoing Adorno’s fears about the student movement’s nihilistic tendencies. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the risible passage in which he addressed the issue of how Adorno should have behaved during the January occupation. Recognizing that student radicals could not be allowed to disrupt university life with impunity, Marcuse suggested – apparently in all seriousness – that in Adorno’s shoes he would have ‘left them [the students] sitting there and left it to somebody else to call the police’! (Adorno and Marcuse 1999: 125). He also claimed that he would have tolerated the occupation of any university building except his own apartment. It was a classic case of the sort of blatant hypocrisy which right-wing commentators have often ascribed to the modern university’s ‘tenured radicals’.11 Revelling in his role as the fashionable apologist for what Leszek Kolakowski once called ‘dream-hungry youth’, Marcuse made it clear that he expected other people to protect him from their excesses. It was hardly surprising that Adorno responded with such dismay.
Although the term was never used during the course of their correspondence, it was clear that Adorno and Marcuse were essentially doing battle over the nature of the New Left’s negationism. Adorno’s attack on the New Left was a predictable consequence of his obsession with the limits of human action. Convinced that the outlook of the student movement was little more than an ultra-leftist variation on the scientific triumphalism engendered by instrumental rationality, he implied that the students’ indiscriminate negativity – their uncompromising belief that everything was open to challenge – contained the seeds of a new form of radical authoritarianism. For Adorno, in spite of his Hegelian heritage, negationism was dangerous because its faith in the power of human beings to sweep everything aside was utterly unrealistic. Faced with the exasperating realization that the world was less open to change than they previously believed, New Leftists were more likely to inspire a resurgence of fascism than a new age of individual liberty. As we have seen, Marcuse seemed strangely cowed by the force of his old friend’s pessimism. Indeed, the three letters he wrote to Adorno between April and July 1969 contained the first signs that his faith in the New Left was beginning to weaken. Still inclined to defend the student movement whenever he could, he now conceded that it was dangerously prone to nihilism and that the state was occasionally justified in suppressing its activities. His intricate defence of negationism in An Essay on Liberation suddenly seemed surplus to requirements.
The contrast between An Essay on Liberation and the letters to Adorno suggests one way in which the evolution of Marcuse’s attitude towards the New Left might be interpreted. In the first flush of enthusiasm for the student movement, or so it could be argued, Marcuse celebrated the New Left’s negationism and saw it as an essential aspect of the renewal of revolutionary politics. Later, chastened by Adorno’s much gloomier perspective, he began to see the dangers of negationism and moved to distance himself from the youthful radicals he had once championed. According to this interpretation – an interpretation that finds some support in the treatment of the New Left in Marcuse’s last major book Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972) – Marcuse’s change of heart was occasioned by his growing awareness that the young revolutionaries had no understanding of the limits of the possible.12 Whereas An Essay on Liberation failed to recognize that negationism implied a dangerously unrealistic belief in the malleability of the human condition, Marcuse’s later work restored a sense that radical politics could only succeed once the ineluctable aspects of life had been taken into account. This interpretation is attractive in its simplicity and undoubtedly captures an aspect of Marcuse’s response to the New Left. However, it fails to register another, rather more subterranean element in his thinking that is ultimately more important. What I want to suggest in this section is that, at some level of his mind, Marcuse had always known that the New Left was vulnerable to the charge of disregarding the limits of revolutionary action and had implicitly tried to counter it. There were passages in his work in which he implied that the New Left actually combined implacable hostility to the existing order with the recognition that not all humanity’s problems were open to resolution. Moreover, in stark contrast to Adorno, he appeared to believe that this salutary combination of optimism and pessimism was in some sense a consequence of the New Left’s negationism. Far from seeing negationism as a symptom of adolescent naiveté, he implicitly portrayed it as the royal road to political wisdom.
This is a matter that is best approached indirectly. Marcuse’s belief that the New Left combined revolutionary enthusiasm with a clear-sighted understanding of the limits of political action was never expressed in so many words. Instead it flashed temporarily into focus in stray sentences whose meaning often seemed tantalizingly unclear. The true significance of those sentences only became apparent (at least to the present reader) when a small number of critics, historians and theorists began to explore the nature of the negationist sensibility in a body of work that first took shape in the 1980s. The most insightful writer on negationism was probably the American critic Greil Marcus, whose monumental history Lipstick Traces (1989) only mentioned Marcuse twice but provided a crucial analytical framework through which his work can be approached.13 Marcus’s starting point was his desire to understand the punk movement. Staggered by the incandescent negativity with which bands like the Sex Pistols expressed their opposition to consumer society, Marcus soon came to realize that punk’s negationism had been prefigured by a host of other revolutionary movements dating back to the Middle Ages. The purpose of Lipstick Traces was therefore to relate punk to a wider tradition of European dissidence encompassing The Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptist Commune at Münster, the Paris Commune, Dadaism, Lettrism and Situationism. At the core of the book was a powerful argument about the janus-faced nature of negationism. Drawing on his memories of participating in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, Marcus affirmed that anyone who embraced the negationist sensibility was likely to experience a thrilling sense of expanding possibilities – or, as he put it in the book’s most memorable sentence, ‘all those who glimpse possibility in a spectral moment become rich’ (Marcus 1989: 447). On the other hand, he also argued – or at least implied – that negationists often had a better and more visceral understanding of the limits to human action than their less uncompromising coevals. Precisely because they set out to prove that everything was open to change – precisely because they refused to recognize that ‘natural facts’ were somehow less malleable than ‘ideological constructs’ – they responded all the more combustibly when they finally realized that certain things simply could not be abused out of existence. The men and women whom Marcus evoked in Lipstick Traces were all faced with the problem of how to deal with the resulting sense of self-division. Dadaists like Richard Huelsenbeck, situationists like Guy Debord and punks like Johnny Rotten sought to preserve their negationist instincts while simultaneously developing forms of behaviour that allowed them to manage (or even valorize) the shattering recognition that the material universe was more recalcitrant than they had previously believed. As Marcus made clear, many negationists became insanely preoccupied with their own bodies. Preternaturally sensitive to the frailties to which flesh was heir, they tore themselves apart trying to sustain the sense that anything was possible when the realities of the decaying body insisted otherwise.
Some of Marcus’s arguments echoed those of Adorno in his correspondence with Marcuse. Just as Adorno claimed that frustration in the face of the material world’s intractability had inclined many negationists towards left fascism, so Marcus pointed out that men such as Debord, Rotten and Isidore Isou were by no means immune to displays of megalomania. Indeed, in a fascinating account of the four members of the Lettrist International who disrupted Easter high mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1950, he implied that some negationists had responded to their bodily anxieties by investing in quasi-occult fantasies of personal divinity (Marcus 1989: 279f). Nevertheless, he also made it clear that not every negationist had betrayed his own principles while trying to palliate the agonies of self-division. Especially relevant to an understanding of Marcuse were the passages in Lipstick Traces evoking what might be called the aestheticization of death. If the inevitability of death represented the single biggest affront to negationist aspirations, or so Marcus implied, it was more or less inevitable that certain negationists would seek to come to terms with their mortality by integrating a highly stylized vision of dying into their everyday behaviour. Quoting from a contemporary description of a performance by the Dadaist Emmy Hennings, Marcus emphasized the fact that Hennings had come by 1912 to resemble nothing so much as an exquisite cadaver:
She stepped onto the cabaret stage, ribboned about the neck, her face waxen. With her cropped yellow hair and the stiffly layered ruffles of her skimpy dark velvet dress, she was separated from all of humanity … a violent distortion of the Gothic, her voice hops over corpses, mocks them, soulfully trilling like a yellow canary (Raven Siurlai, quoted in Marcus 1989: 213).
It is my contention that passages such as these cast a powerful retrospective light on Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of negationism. As we have seen, Marcuse’s writings on the New Left were occasionally punctuated by obscure and seemingly throwaway remarks that hinted at the deeper existential significance of the negationist sensibility without ever offering up a precise meaning. One of the virtues of books like Lipstick Traces was that they provided a theory of negationism that clarified our sense of what Marcuse might have had in mind. For example, the following passage from Marcuse’s contribution to the famous ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference in 1967 surely seems clearer now than it can have done at the time:
Walter Benjamin quotes reports that during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city of Paris there were people shooting at the clocks on the towers of the churches, palaces and so on, thereby consciously or half-consciously expressing the need that somehow time has to be arrested; that at least the prevailing, the established time continuum has to be arrested, and that a new time has to begin – a very strong emphasis on the qualitative difference and on the totality of the rupture between the new society and the old14 (Marcuse 2005: 78).
At first sight this passage seems to contain little more than a vivid meditation on the structural dimensions of socialist revolution. The impassioned Communards firing on clocks dramatize the idea that the good society can only be built once capitalist relations of production have been wholly dismantled. But there is more to it than that. Viewed from a perspective informed by the work of Greil Marcus and other recent writers on negationism, the passage reads like an allegory of what happens when revolutionary fervour runs up against the things that cannot be changed. Marcuse’s Communards are negationists to the core, impelled by a righteous hatred of the existing order to demand a complete overhaul of every aspect of their lives. Their peremptory way with Parisian clocks symbolizes their realization that the obverse side of revolutionary ambition is despair in the face of death. Whipped into a Dionysian fervour by the sudden conviction that everything is up for grabs, the Communards do not fire on clocks because they somehow believe that the onward march of time can be avoided. Their behaviour has more to do with managing anxiety than with sustaining the myth that the old world can be overthrown in toto. To put a clock out of action is to participate in a ritual that affords temporary respite from the harrying sense that time is running out. Even before the new society has taken shape – even before the walls of heaven have been stormed – the men and women who set out to transform everything have tempered their hunger for change with a grim infusion of realism.15 Like Emmy Hennings and the other exhausted rebels in Lipstick Traces, they aestheticize their own deaths in order to keep despair at bay.
A measure of support for this interpretation of Marcuse’s approach to negationism can be drawn from other aspects of his work. There were many places in his writings where Marcuse tried to identify what he regarded as exemplary states of consciousness: that is, states of consciousness that would balance an expansive and life-affirming sense of possibility against a keen awareness of the limits of the human condition. This was particularly the case in Eros and Civilisation, in whose pages – several years before the emergence of the New Left – he speculated about the ‘desublimated’ forms of culture that might conceivably exist under socialism. As Stoddard Martin has reminded us in a subtle attempt to relate Eros and Civilisation to a wider tradition of antinomian thinking, there was nothing crudely utopian about Marcuse’s vision of the socialist future. Endorsing Marx’s notion that the abolition of market institutions would hasten the end of alienation, he nevertheless predicted that the ‘Orphic-Narcissistic’ citizenry of the post-capitalist age would combine enhanced creativity with a stoical recognition of their own mortality. Although the sexual impulse would be liberated from the ‘performance principle’ and begin to suffuse all aspects of life, people would tend to relate to the object world in a manner at once languid, inward-looking and oneiric. The gently sensuous nature of everyday existence would go some way towards dismantling the opposition between wakefulness and sleep, creating a mode of sensibility in which the desire for pleasure would be permanently transfigured by the lure of unconsciousness. In turn this would reduce the fear of death. Absorbed in the sensuousness of the moment but at the same time yearning for rest, Marcuse’s model citizen would neither welcome the prospect of death nor especially fear it:
If [his] attitude is akin to death and brings death, then rest and sleep and death are not painfully separated and distinguished: the Nirvana principle rules throughout … And when he dies he continues to live as the flower that bears his name (Marcuse 1970, quoted in Martin 1986: 11).
However different Marcuse’s revolutionary negationist and his Orphic-Narcissistic citizen of the future might initially have seemed, they were bound together by their extraordinary ability to overcome antinomies. Just as the negationist demanded total change while recognizing that the body placed severe limits on all forms of political ambition, so the men and women of the socialist millennium took their pleasures where they could while waiting dispassionately for their own erasure from history. In the end it is difficult to resist the sort of biblical language that is otherwise wholly alien to Marcuse’s work. The defining characteristic of the Marcusean citizen is the desire to enact the principle that in the midst of life there is death.
Marcuse’s support for the New Left’s negationism was a natural consequence of his analysis of the authoritarian tenor of post-war capitalism. Convinced that consumer societies had defused most forms of political resistance in spite of paying lip service to democratic norms, he regarded negationism as an indispensable means of provoking opposition to the status quo. Nevertheless, Adorno and his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research were wrong to interpret Marcuse’s endorsement of the New Left as a sign that he had succumbed to the authoritarian logic of instrumental rationality. Implicit in the writings on the New Left was a subtle understanding of the contradictions of negationism. Ostensibly encouraging the illusion that everything was open to change, or so Marcuse implied, the habit of indiscriminate oppositionism rapidly forced its youthful exponents to confront the fact that many sources of human misery were simply ineluctable. Far from having an unrealistic sense of what political movements could or could not achieve, most New Leftists were burdened with a discomforting awareness of the miseries of bodily decay and death. Herbert Marcuse cannot reasonably be accused of betraying his own intellectual tradition at the moment of his greatest fame. Insofar as his writings on the New Left balanced a Marxist sense of political possibility against a well-nigh Burkean emphasis on the limits of human endeavour, they were suffused through and through with the Frankfurt School’s most distinctive habits of thought.
Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer, 1995. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by J. Cumming. London: Verso.
Adorno, T., and H. Marcuse, 1999. ‘Correspondence on the German Student Movement’, translated by E. Leslie. New Left Review 233, 123–6.
Doohm, S.M., 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Geoghegan, V., 1981. Reason and Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse. London: Pluto Press.
Hebdige, D., 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.
Held, D., 1980. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kearney, R., 1999. ‘Herbert Marcuse’, in Modern Movements in European Philosophy, second edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 203–19.
Kellner, D., 1984. Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kimball, R., 1998. Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education. Michigan: Elephant Paperbacks.
Leary, T., 1973. The Politics of Ecstasy. St Albans: Paladin.
Leslie, E., 1999. ‘Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement’. New Left Review 233, 118–23.
Marcus, G., 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker and Warburg.
Marcus, G., 1993. In the Fascist Bathroom: Writings on Punk 1977–1992. London: Viking.
Marcuse, H., 1960. Reason and Revolution: An Introduction to the Dialectical Thinking of Hegel and Marx. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H., 1970. Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Sphere.
Marcuse, H., 1972. An Essay on Liberation. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
Marcuse, H., 2002. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge.
Marcuse, H., 2005. The New Left and the 1960s, D. Kellner (ed.), London: Routledge.
Marcuse, H., 2007. ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, in The Essential Marcuse, A. Feenberg and W. Leiss (eds), Boston: Beacon Press, 201–32.
Martin, S., 1986. Art, Messianism and Crime: A Study of Antinomianism in Modern Literature and Lives. London: Macmillan.
Marx, K., and F. Engels, 1958. ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Selected Works in Two Volumes, Vol. 1. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 21–65.
Marx, K., 1958. Letter to L. Kugelmann in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. 2. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 463–4.
McGann, J., 1989. ‘Umbah-Umbah’. London Review of Books, 11(12), 13–15.
Miller, J., 1994. Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Robinson, P. A. 1970. The Sexual Radicals: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse. London: Temple Smith.
Rogoff, I., 1991. ‘“Situations”: Tales of Tiny Epiphanies and Radiant Transgressions’, in Art History, 14(1), 136–42.
Savage, J., 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber.
1 There is now a very large body of secondary literature on Marcuse’s work. Among the most useful general surveys are Geoghegan 1981; Kearney 1999; Kellner 1984; Robinson 1970: 147–244.
2 For the history of the New Left in the USA, see, inter alia, Miller 1994.
3 Since the term negationism can be used in a number of different ways, I want to make it clear that it refers in this chapter primarily to the violently confrontational sensibility with which the New Left was associated. Although Marcuse’s negationism was not unrelated to the category of negation in the Hegelian dialectic, I will only make glancing references to the philosophical aspects of the issue.
4 Perhaps the most comprehensive introduction to the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental rationality can be found in Held 1980.
5 It is a truism of Marcuse studies that Marcuse’s outlook changed dramatically in the fifteen or so years between Eros and Civilisation and An Essay on Liberation. My reason for conflating his three most important books of the period is that their central theoretical concerns – the rise of late capitalism, the nature of a non-repressive civilization, the importance of negationism – remained broadly the same while undergoing important changes of emphasis.
6 Marcuse got around the problem of using the word motherfuckers by referring to ‘men who have perpetrated the unspeakable Oedipal crime’ (Marcuse 1972: 42). The stern opponent of linguistic corruption clearly had euphemistic gifts of his own!
7 Interestingly, Marcuse sought to give credence to his remarks about modernism by invoking the work of the Russian Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum: whom, perversely, he quoted only in French. As is well known, Eikhenbaum and the other formalists argued that literature seeks to impede (and hence ‘defamiliarize’) perception by interposing a layer of formally complex language between the reader and a work’s content. The Russian Formalists would become increasingly influential in the English-speaking world in the 1970s.
8 At one point Marcuse claimed that users of psychedelic drugs had created ‘artificial paradises within the society from which [they] withdrew’. The allusion to Charles Baudelaire (whose book Les Paradis Artificiels had first been published in 1860) might well have been a sly dig at the cult of the French symbolist poets which writers and musicians such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan had managed to whip up among sections of countercultural youth.
9 My account of the Institute for Social Research’s relationship with the student movement draws heavily on Leslie 1999. For a lengthier survey of Adorno’s problems with the student movement, see Doohm 2005.
10 The phrase ‘left fascism’ had been coined by Jürgen Habermas and immediately taken up by Adorno. Marcuse strongly objected to it.
11 See, inter alia, Kimball 1998.
12 In Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse acknowledged that some members of the New Left had been driven by their political isolation into adopting inappropriately violent and authoritarian forms of resistance. His solution to the problem was for the New Left to establish a ‘United Front’ with the working class. For a penetrating account of Counter-Revolution and Revolt, see Kellner 1984: 291f.
13 See Marcus 1989. The brief references to Marcuse occur on p. 70 and p. 269. Marcus also touched on punk’s negationism in Marcus 1993. For a narrative history of British punk that builds on Marcus’s understanding of negationism, see Savage 1991. For other discussions of negationism inspired by Marcus’s work, see inter alia, McGann 1989, Rogoff 1991.
14 For other passages that can arguably be interpreted in much the same way, see Marcuse 2005: 64, 85–6, 103, 171. See also the very important passage in An Essay on Liberation in which Marcuse argued that the New Left’s project was one of ‘projecting and defining the objective (material) conditions of freedom, its real limits and chances’ (emphasis mine) (Marcuse 1972: 37).
15 It was Karl Marx who famously described the Communards as ‘storming heaven’ in a letter to Louis Kugelmann dated 12 April 1871. See Marx 1958: 463.