Policy Futures in Education, Volume 4, Number 1, 2006

doi:10.2304/pfie.2006.4.1.1

INTRODUCTION

Marcuses Challenges to Education

DOUGLAS KELLNER University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Philosopher, social theorist, and political activist, Herbert Marcuse gained world renown during the 1960s as father of the New Left. The author of many books and articles, and for decades a popular university professor, Marcuse gained notoriety when he was perceived as both an influence on and defender of the New Left in the United States and Europe. His theory of onedimensional society provided critical perspectives on contemporary capitalist and state communist societies, while his notion of the Great Refusal won him renown as a theorist of revolutionary change and liberation from the affluent society. Consequently, he became one of the most influential intellectuals in the United States during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Marcuse was born in Berlin and after serving with the German army in World War I, he went to Freiburg to pursue his studies. After receiving his PhD in literature in 1922, and following a short career as a bookseller in Berlin, he returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger, then one of the most influential thinkers in Germany. In 1933, Marcuse joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt and soon became deeply involved in their interdisciplinary projects, which included working out a model for radical social theory, developing a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, and providing a systematic analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse identified with the Critical Theory of the Institute and throughout his life was close to Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, and others in the Institutes inner circle. In 1934, Marcuse a German Jew and radical fled from Nazism and emigrated to the United States where he lived for the rest of his life. The Institute for Social Research was granted offices and an academic affiliation with Columbia University, where Marcuse worked during the 1930s and early 1940s. His first major work in English, Reason and Revolution (1941), traced the genesis of the ideas of Hegel, Marx, and modern social theory. It demonstrated the similarities between Hegel and Marx, and introduced many English-speaking readers to the HegelianMarxian tradition of dialectical thinking. In 1941, Marcuse joined the OSS (Office of Secret Services) and then worked in the State Department, becoming the head of the Central European bureau by the end of World War II. After serving in the US Government from 1941 through the early 1950s, which Marcuse always claimed was motivated by a desire to struggle against fascism, he returned to intellectual work and published Eros and Civilization in 1955, which attempted an audacious synthesis of Marx and Freud and sketched the outlines of a non-repressive society. In 1958, Marcuse received a tenured position at Brandeis University and became one of the most popular and influential members of its faculty. During his period of government work, Marcuse had been a specialist in fascism and communism, and he published a critical study of the Soviet Union in 1958 (Soviet Marxism) which broke the taboo in his circles against speaking critically of the USSR and Soviet communism. In 1964, Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, a wideranging critique of both advanced capitalist and communist societies that became one of his most

Douglas Kellner widely known works. The text theorized the decline of revolutionary potential in capitalist societies and the development of new forms of social control. Marcuse argued that advanced industrial society created false needs which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption. For Marcuse, mass media and culture, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought all reproduced the existing system and attempt to eliminate negativity, critique, and opposition. The result was a one-dimensional universe of thought and behavior in which the very aptitude and ability for critical thinking and oppositional behavior was withering away. One-Dimensional Man was followed by a series of books and articles which articulated New Left politics and critiques of capitalist societies in Repressive Tolerance (1965), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). Repressive Tolerance attacked liberalism and those who refused to take a stand during the controversies of the 1960s. It won Marcuse the reputation of being an intransigent radical and voice for the Left; as we shall see below, it has been a major target for right-wing attacks on Marcuse in the contemporary moment. An Essay on Liberation celebrated the existing liberation movements from the Viet Cong to the hippies and exhilarated many radicals while further alienating establishment academics and those who opposed the movements of the 1960s. Counterrevolution and Revolt, by contrast, articulates the new realism that was setting in during the early 1970s when it was becoming clear that the most extravagant hopes of the 1960s were being dashed by a turn to the right and counterrevolution against the 1960s. Marcuse and Education Marcuses engagement with education involves radical critique of the existing system of education and the search for emancipatory alternatives. In general, there has little serious engagement with the potential of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School to present systematic critique and positive alternatives for education. Hence, the articles collected here, many of which were first presented at the 2005 conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Montreal, will be breaking new ground in laying out a series of Marcuses challenges for those who seek an emancipatory reconstruction of education and society. An early attempt by Joseph DiVitis to engage Marcuses implications for education was overly critical and generally unsympathetic to Marcuse, reducing Marcuses complex positions to panrationalism and Platonism (1974), which DeVitis claimed was repressive in regard to education. The only serious and sustained analysis of the implications of Marcuses thought for education are found in Charles Reitzs Art, Alienation and the Humanities (2000). Reitz explicates the relevance of Marcuses thought to provide elements of a radical philosophy of education that could be combined with critical pedagogy and existing progressive alternative educational projects (2000, pp. 240ff.) He suggests that Marcuses work in the 1930s mediates dichotomies in education between humanities and the sciences that should be overcome, sublating the poles of idealism and scientific empiricism (pp. 27ff.) In general, Reitz focuses on Marcuses notion of aesthetic education, and posits an overly dualistic theory in Marcuse between Hegelian Marxian critical theory and an aesthetic ontology grounded in Schiller, Freud and a subjectivist aestheticism. While Reitz is correct that the latter dimension sometimes stands in an uneasy relation with Marcuses critical theory, at its best Marcuses work combines critical philosophy, social theory, aesthetics and radical politics. From this perspective, Marcuses educational project is to mediate aesthetic education, the humanities, and the sciences with a critical theory of the contemporary era and a radical politics aiming at emancipation and a non-repressive society. Ironically, so far the Right has provided more engagement with Marcuses impact on contemporary education than the Left, but I want to dispose quickly of the right-wing critique of Marcuse by Allan Bloom and Kors & Silvergate in their book The Shadow University (1998). Bloom, in his infamous The Closing of the American Mind (1987) claimed Marcuse was the most important philosopher of the 1960s counterculture, and that the spread of his theories led to the betrayal of liberty on Americas campuses. Moreover, Bloom claims that German thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Marcuse have spread a corrosive nihilism and seduced the youth, writing that the

Introduction USA imported a clothing of German fabrication for our souls, which cast doubt upon the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked (1987, p. 152). In the era of Bush administration unilateralism, I and others might argue that any casting of doubt on US imperial aspirations is a salutary contribution for which Marcuse should be thanked. Revealing his inability to grasp the philosophical dimension and challenges of Marcuses thought, Bloom also writes of Marcuse: He ended up here writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy sex interest (1987, p. 226), a simply ludicrous claim. Kors & Silvergate (1998) make Marcuse responsible for speech codes in the University, so-called political correctness, intolerance toward conservatives, and other nightmares for the Right such as critical race theory, gay and lesbian studies, and militant feminism because he argued for intolerance against sexism, racism, homophobia, militarism, and imperialism and argued for what we would now call multicultural education. In fact, probably more than almost any other professional philosopher, Marcuse promoted classical philosophy ranging from Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud, as well as presenting a critical theory of contemporary societies, capitalist and socialist, and projecting emancipatory alternatives to what he saw as a repressive contemporary civilization. And while Marcuse actively opposed racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism, while promoting the rights of oppressed groups and multicultural education, it is an exaggeration to credit Marcuse with academic programs in these areas because it was largely women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and others in social movements and research areas where new program areas like Womens Studies, or Chicano studies, developed these new academic programs. Marcuses critics, of course, do not really engage his ideas or note the wealth of his thought that is probed in the presentations collected here. The AERA panel was organized by Daniel Cho and Tyson Lewis and the panelists, whose papers we collected here, along with papers produced in a Spring 2005 Origins of Critical Pedagogy seminar at UCLA, are currently pursuing their PhDs at UCLA and have found Marcuses thought useful and provocative for a wide variety of projects with which they are currently involved. The papers also pose in a provisional fashion how Marcuse challenges educational orthodoxy and offers alternatives to existing pedagogy and the system of education, although limitations in Marcuses positions are also noted. Hence, neither the AERA panel, nor this set of texts is in any way an exercise in hagiography or theology, but rather of promoting critical thought and practice in the Marcusean spirit. Tyson Lewis opens with a study of the relevance of Marcuse and Adorno s work in developing a radical critique of the current system of education and producing emancipatory alternatives. Strong negative critique is one pole of Marcusean thought, shared by Adorno, but Marcuse frequently also valorized alternative practices, in this case stressing the importance of play, education of the senses, and cultivation of the imagination for an emancipatory pedagogy. Lewis focuses on the intimate connection between utopia and education in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Fredric Jameson. For Lewis, education forms a bridge that links the present to the future and as such necessitates a utopian turn. Likewise, utopia, in order to become concrete must ultimately address the question of the reconstruction of education. This connection keeps Marcuses utopianism alive through the dystopia of One-Dimensional Man, sparks Adorno s utopian imagination in his lectures on education, and provides Jameson with a link between cognitive mapping and utopia. Daniel Cho, reading Marcuse through the lens of Jacque Lacans psychoanalysis, suggests that a radical practice of Marcuses Great Refusal in the arena of pedagogy and social action would involve a symbolic destruction of the system and search for radical alternatives. Cho underlines the affinities between Marcuse and Lacans respective return to Freud, and demonstrating Marcuses continued influence and legacy. Both Lewis and Cho take on Marcuses controversial engagement with psychoanalysis. I might note that when I began presenting Marcuses thought in the 1970s and 1980s I used to get attacked by Habermasians and post-structuralists who argued that Marcuses use of Freuds metapyschological categories of Eros and Thanatos constituted an essentialism and reductionism of human life to two basic instincts. I countered that Marcuses appropriation of Freuds categories

Douglas Kellner could be read as conceptual mythologies used as hermeneutical devices to interpret and illuminate certain phenomena (see Kellner, 1984), as do Lewis and Cho in their presentations. Showing the range of imaginative reconstructions of Marcuses thought, Lewis sees establishment education as an expression of Thanatos, with deadening repetition, rote learning, and authoritarian discipline killing spontaneity and creativity, while Cho argues that embracing Thanatos as symbolic death for the system frees one from repressive and conformist practices and creates the space for new life and pedagogy. Richard Van Heertum emphasizes Marcuses motif of utopia and hope, bringing his thought together in the orbit of Ernst Bloch and Paulo Freire. For Van Heertum, critical pedagogy needs to combine critique with hope and theorists like Marcuse and Bloch provide rich and productive concepts of hope, linking individual with community, desire with reconciliation, while recognizing the traces in everyday culture of deeper desire. He argues Marcuses conception of aesthetic education can help enrich critical pedagogy, offering students tools to step outside the dominant discourse and rationality and contemplate a different world. Tammy Shel, by contrast, stresses how Marcuses thought can be used to critique the quantative model of education and the social sciences and provides outlines of a pedagogy of caring which she believes will help provide preconditions for a genuinely non-repressive and loving civilization. Shel argues how a pedagogy of caring is relevant for Marcuses goals and criticizes standardized education as promoting what Marcuse (1964) calls a one-dimension society. Clayton Pierce takes on Marcuses dialectic of technology that provides both radical critique of technological civilization and sketches of an alternative new technology that could serve the interests of life and human emancipation. Pierce contends that Marcuses challenge for qualitatively different forms of technology and a new technique can best be met in the context of education. Pierce works through three conceptions of technique in Marcuses work that sketches out ways of using new technologies for emancipation, expanding the concept of technique to incorporate the social and political dimensions of technique with the practical ones. Pierce suggests that Marcuses dialectical vision of technology is highly relevant to education, given the bifurcated debate over the contributions and limitations of new modes of information technology and the need to overcome one-sided technophilia and technophobia while maintaining a critical and reconstructive vision of technology and education. Dolores Caldern in turn shows how Marcuses thought can be appropriated both for radical critique of racism and oppression in contemporary education through linking the concepts of onedimensionality and the Great Refusal with an interrogation of whiteness. Caldern argues that in the context of the United States, the one-dimensionality that Marcuse condemns in One-Dimensional Man is captured by the notion of whiteness which posits that whiteness in the context of white supremacy is the ideological manifestation of capitalism in the United States. The values Marcuse wants to break with or refuse in An Essay on Liberation can be more concretely captured if it is made clear that the ideology of whiteness represents the normative order of advanced industrial society that must be Refused. In addition, for Marcuses Great Refusal to take place, it follows that society must break and rupture the ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. During our work on Marcuse for an AERA presentation, we co-produced a graduate seminar at UCLA on Origins of Critical Pedagogy, that inquired into the relevance of Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Marcuse in transforming contemporary education and society. We have included here two papers from that seminar which use Marcuse to provide critique of the disciplines of information science and law school. Ajit Pyati, a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, shows how Marcuse can be used to present a radical critique of his discipline. Pyati notes that critical theory is generally ignored in discussions of Library and Information Science, and that Marcuses critique of technological rationality and society can provide a more vigorous critical perspective on information studies and the information society, than many competing perspectives. In the same spirit, Saru Matambanadzo, a graduate student in Womens Studies at UCLA, shows how Marcusean perspectives can provide a sharp critique of Law School and legal studies. Reflecting on her experiences at Harvard Law School,

Introduction Matambanadzo finds Marcuses concept of one-dimensionality appropriate in explicating the limitations of legal education in the USA. Finally, we are also including an article by our colleague in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Richard Kahn, who applies Marcuses theories to develop radical critiques of environmental social movements that Kahn claims are a central pedagogical force in todays society as they confront growing ecological crises at both the global and local levels. Kahn concludes that Marcuse is a quintessential ecological theorist whose utopian conception of nature extends far beyond more liberal and conservative versions offered by many mainstream environmentalists, that Marcuse himself is fundamentally linked to the more militant origins of US environmentalism in the 1960s, and that he offers a version of pedagogy as politics that is useful for understanding the educational role currently being played by revolutionary groups such as the Earth Liberation Front. Following the varied presentations, Marcuses challenge to education appears as a dialectical vision that combines radical critique of the existing system with projection of emancipatory alternatives. This follows the two poles of the Marcusean dialectic between domination and emancipation. Indeed, some of the articles collected here focus on critique, others on alternative educational praxis and pedagogy, with many combining these poles and in some cases proposing reconstruction of Marcuses thought. Together, they show how the work of Herbert Marcuse continues to challenge the institutions and practices of the contemporary education establishment while providing emancipatory alternatives. In an era of neo-conservative hegemony, Marcuses critical perspectives are more needed than ever and provide moments of critique and alternative vision needed to keep hope alive and envisage a different and better future. References
Bloom, Allan (1987) The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. DeVitis, Joseph (1974) Marcuse on Education: social critique and social control, Educational Theory, 24(3), pp. 259-268. Kellner, Douglas (1984) Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley and London: University of California Press (USA) and Macmillan (England). Kors, Alan Charles & Harvey A. Silvergate (1998) The Shadow University. New York: HarperCollins. Reitz, Charles (2000) Art, Alienation and the Humanities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Correspondence: Professor Douglas Kellner, Social Sciences and Comparative Education, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951521, 3022B Moore Hall , Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521, USA (kellner@ucla.edu).