The Rationalized Irrationality of Capitalism

Three thoughts related and disparate provoked by Marcuse. My motivation in all the reading I do is to find answers for my questions regarding the possibilities for and shape of social activism and social transformation.

1) In his book, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse writes convincingly about the relationship between capitalism and technology. Technological irrationality is contained by capitalism and thus seems rational. The limited gifts that both capitalism and modern technology have given us make capitalism and industrial technologization appear rational.

2) Marcuse’s book is at least in part an attempt to theorize the possibility of social change. His ambivalent wavering, as Andrew Feenberg has characterized it, comes off as both pessimistic and self-defeating. However, it can also be interpreted as an attempt to provoke a dialectical response and to re-invigorate the drive to action. This is the way I prefer to take his book.

3) On consumerism he writes of how (compulsive, conspicuous, continual) consumption de-politicizes human activity, desires, and interests. If political action, if free time, is found outside of capitalism (selling one’s labour, spending one’s wages), in the spaces of thought, art, and techne, and these spaces are not being sought out or experienced by the masses, what hope do we have for a revolutionary consciousness, for political action, for social change? With my optimistic view that social change directed toward the just treatment of all beings and earth others is still possible, Marcuse offers a program for us to get there.

Peripherally, I want to talk about the troubling phrase “vote with your dollar.” This injunction can be taken in a number of ways, I would like to offer one reading/deconstruction of it. Thinking along Marcusian lines, this phrase encapsulates the ulitmate defeat of any interest in genuine/true/authentic/effective political action. When our disatisfaction can only 'truly' be voiced and measured through consumption we have thoroughly been sucked into the capitalist container. In this sense, I find the phrase noted above troubling because I have so often heard it triumphed by persons interested in alternative social arrangements. While the injunction does certainly pertain in the case of goods that we require to meet our vital needs - whatever they are - it is deeply problematic to herald consumption as the way out of the current political-economic system – indeed, it bespeaks one’s thorough absorption into it.

21/03/2007 Quote from Martin Heidegger:
**As always with Heidegger substitute 'humanity' for 'man' in this passage.

"Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ex-sists, from our of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself" (The Question Concerning Technology, p.27).

22/03/2007
"If one adheres completely to this affirmation of the unavoidability of the current instrumental conception of technology, then it means that one affirms the reign of a process that confines itself to the incessant provision of means without heeding any one positing of ends" (Martin Heidegger, "Traditional and Technological Language" p.137).

Art was once the great refusal...

The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse has written and thought a lot about art, philosophy, and political action. For me this is wrapped up in his argument that art was once the great refusal. That is, art named things that were absent, art broke the spell of the things that are, art was the start of a (new) world.

These are provocative and invigorating ideas. But what are we to think about these notions in today's current context where art - our daily aesthetic experience - is so thoroughly dominated by the images of advertising, public relations, and popular culture? Though each of these contain subversive possibilities, for the most part they are implicated in the massification of culture. So, how can contemporary art practices address Marcuse's suggestion that in a one-dimensional culture there is no possibility of negation, no possibility of a space for sublimated art?

This minute was brought to you by Danielle

This space will post a thought or two each day or so that represents a quick snapshot of something on my mind that I don't want to disappear from my existence. Since I don't have much time to dedicate to writing I will produce a short written translation, in approximately a minute, of what is on my mind at the time.