Spatializing Marcuse: Critical Theory for Contemporary Times 9781529211115

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Stuart Elden, University of Warwick

Margath A. Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Geographic and Environmental Sciences and School of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville.

This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century. Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics, and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure, and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.

S PATI A L I ZI NG M A RC U SE MARGATH A . WALKER

“Moving clearly between philosophy, social theory, and a range of contemporary examples, this is a compelling political and geographical account of why Herbert Marcuse’s work remains of enduring importance today.”

Walker demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1110-8

9 781529 211108

B R I S TO L

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE C RI T I C AL T HEORY FOR CON T E MP ORARY T I ME S M A RG ATH A . WA L KE R

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE Critical Theory for Contemporary Times Margath A. Walker

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-1110-8 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-1112-2 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-1111-5 ePdf The right of Margath A. Walker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Clifford Hayes Front cover image: alamy Bristol University Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Robert and Margaret Plotkin

Contents Acknowledgements

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1

1

2 3 4 5 6

Introduction: Why Not Demand the Impossible? Geography and Marcuse Dimensionality Flattened Mission: Reconstruction Topologies of the Right Here, Not Yet, and Over False Binaries New Sensibilities

Notes References Index

14 37 56 78 95 117 125 146

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Acknowledgements My decision to commit to Marcuse’s writings as a topic of study solidified in late 2014 at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of One-​Dimensional Man held at Columbia University. It was in that room, among so many admirers and critics of the legacy of Marcuse, that it became possible, however fleetingly, to envision ‘a qualitatively different society’ (Herbert Marcuse). How we want to live, and what prevents us from doing so, is a question posed countless times by a social philosopher who not only defined an era, but whose radical thought continues to resonate today. Learning about and reading with Marcuse was a long process filled with questions, support, and provocations from multiple audiences. I am infinitely grateful to colleagues, friends, and family who have contributed in direct and untold ways to this book. What began as an enchantment with the writings of Marcuse benefited enormously from the generosity of accomplished scholars. I would like to thank Douglas Kellner for his time and advice; Arnold Farr for his willingness to be interviewed; and Terry Maley for his encouragement. Many thanks also to Stuart Elden for encouraging work related to Marcuse early on and in later iterations. Gratitude goes out to other members of the International Marcuse Society for their support: in particular, Harold Marcuse, Andrew Lamas, Sarah Surak, Reese Faust, and Brandon Absher. The University of Louisville has a wonderful intellectual environment and I owe many of my colleagues a debt. In the beginning stages of the proposal, a writing group at my home institution helped me to cement my ideas. Thanks to Lisa Markowitz, Karl Swinehart, and Lisa Björkman for their camaraderie. John Gibson and David Imbroscio were instrumental in navigating the twists and turns of book publishing. In my larger orbit, I extend thanks to Stan Brunn, who has continued to encourage my work many years after I was his teaching assistant. Stan provided invaluable feedback on preliminary ideas. Jamie Winders read an early draft of the proposal and helped me immensely. As always, she reminded me to highlight the relation between words and meaning. Jennie Burnet, my indispensable friend and colleague, deserves special thanks for reading multiple drafts, supplying discerning commentary, and championing the project from the start. I would vi

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also like to thank Ekram Islamul, Calvin Grant, and Danielle Rohret for their help with preparing the manuscript. Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah deserves singular acknowledgement for assistance with formatting in a pinch, ever calm amid the challenges presented by endnotes. Bristol University Press has been spectacular. From the moment I approached BUP with the idea of revisiting Marcuse from a geographical perspective, they were on board. I am grateful to Emily Watt for her initial enthusiasm and continuous support throughout the life of the project. Freya Trand has been a source of great help at every juncture. I would also like to express thanks to Angela Gage and Anna Richardson for their diligence and attention to editorial details. In addition, the anonymous reviewers offered astute and incisive comments and I thank them for their expertise and clarity of thinking. Thanks go out also to kind readers Mat Coleman and Faye Leerink who gave valuable feedback on early chapters. My family has made writing this book possible. Lalo Walker, my loyal and naughty companion for nearly 12 years, is always with me in spirit. The book could not have been completed without the help of metaphysical whispers from Lavina Kelly, Goldie Plotkin, and Ida Walker. My parents, Robert and Margaret Plotkin, to whom I have dedicated this work, are simply the best allies one could have in the world. My love and my light Chris Burns and our motley gang of creatures have inspired me throughout the writing process and provided necessary corrections to my priorities.

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Introduction: Why Not Demand the Impossible? Geography and Marcuse How can Herbert Marcuse, that most reluctant father of the 1960s New Left, whose name was once emblazoned on banners alongside Marx and Mao, help us to understand contemporary geographies? In turn, what can a geographic perspective bring to Marcuse’s work? The present offering suggests that Herbert Marcuse’s political and theoretical legacy affords sustenance in dismal times. My belief is that a Marcusean-​inspired geography, developed across this book, will sustain and renew principles that are profoundly original and significant in Marcuse’s wide-​ranging philosophies. In this work, I demonstrate how Marcuse’s lifelong struggle to adapt Marxism to changing contexts continues to have a remarkable degree of currency. When read and interpreted spatially, Marcuse’s writings provide a rich approach to politics, space, and concepts of human liberation. The time is right for staging Marcuse’s comeback. Not only have the conditions to which he initially responded intensified, but the Left is arguably in need of some collective soul-​searching. We are living in irrational and confusing times. Consider just a few contemporary contradictions: Over the past four decades, the upward distribution of income has cost American workers nearly 50 trillion dollars, making life for many an experiment in staggering inequality (Rand Corporation; see Price and Edwards 2020). In the United States, those who occupy precarious social and economic positions and arguably had the most to lose, voted against their own interests, helping to elect billionaire presidents. Worldwide, border fortification is experiencing a renaissance while data suggests that most people oppose building walls. Yet, the culture of border militarization that now extends deep into our lives and psyches continues relatively unabated. This is in spite of evidence that such constructions are ineffective (Pew Research Center 2019). As a society, we are more outraged than ever about the ways in which 1

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social realities continue to triumph without our support, but collectively we are largely failing at activism (Gay 2018). Once again freedom is on the anvil. We are surveilled and managed to an unprecedented degree, all the while being diverted by consumer goods and the seeming impasse of ideological conflict. Witness the growing unrest among world populations in response to police brutality, environmental crisis, economic inequality, and the astonishing concentration of wealth. Marcuse’s penetrating critiques are as pertinent now, when considered in relation to neoliberalism, as they were in the context of what he called ‘advanced industrial society’. From identity shaping tactics and the pre-​ emptive subduing of opposition, to governing strategies which construct human beings as sites of investment and disinvestment, Marcuse remains prescient in his writings. His insights concerning the processes whereby the superstructural spheres of daily experience, politics, and art, are steadily economized and the extent to which political-​economic imperatives penetrate culture, the environment, and space are eerily familiar. As such, there is a strategic temporality to re-​encountering Marcuse’s writing at this historical moment. There is an old joke, recounted many times, about a German worker who gets a job in Siberia. He is aware that all mail will be read by censors. He relays this message to his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, –​the only thing unavailable is red ink.’1 Marcuse’s thoughts and words, elaborated upon and extended to the real-​ world examples referenced above, help to articulate why the status quo seems to be on a winning streak. It provides the red ink, if you will. Fundamentally, Marcuse’s oeuvre is about what it means to be radical. His critiques are radical in the sense that they penetrate to the roots of alienation in existing systems of production, consumption, and social control. To be radical then, translates initially into a diagnosis of our current reality. Why, for example, do we opt for a conformism which oppresses us instead of being active agents in a world we want to live in? Rather than thwarting law-​like systems that go against our personal politics, we tolerate and succumb to them. Introjection, defined as internalizing the status quo, means that for better or worse we believe in the way things are. In other words, we capitulate to a system we perceive as delivering the goods. Marcuse’s use of the phrase ‘one-​dimensional’ captures this conundrum. It refers to social structures and behaviours without alternatives that minimize the possibilities for transcendence and alternative realities. One-​dimensionality is intricately linked with capitalism, which sets the boundaries of rationality, encouraging mechanistic thinking wherein 2

Introduction

responses are limited by instrumental logic. The social system masterfully incorporates critique and opposition and continues to proliferate, resulting eventually in the erasure of revolutionary subjectivity. Marcuse’s radical project operates in many different registers at once, effectively confronting the rigidity of Marxism. His contributions, interrogated and extended across the following chapters, are not discrete but are instead dialectical, deconstructive, and reconstructive. His work not only diagnoses how the current mode of production dampens other possibilities but draws on the potentialities of imagination to tap into what is as yet unrealized. In his multiple attempts (some more successful than others) to bridge divides between theory and practice; the ‘real’ and the metaphysical; and the individual and society, Marcuse urges a closer look at how freedom from material need has produced its own means of servitude. This book argues that an adaptation and extension of Marcuse’s philosophies provide the tools from individual to societal scales to oppose and conceivably overturn the status quo. In short, this entails a multi-​ faceted method that deconstructs the world as we know it and reconstructs a qualitatively different one. The chapters that follow deliberately unmoor Marcuse’s theories from their original spaces of engagement. On offer is a strategically constructed blueprint that seeks to retrieve elements of a critical revolutionary subjectivity. Crucially, this is not a naive humanistic approach tethered to an uncompromising Reason unresponsive to trends in social theory. Rather, this book uses Marcuse’s insights as a portal to problematize and seek a modification to the content of revolutionary subjectivity and, as a result, frees us to think about other ways to be oppositional. What I propose contributes to a long tradition of spatializing social theory in geography. Since the 1970s, geography’s project has been to recognize the imbrication of the social and the spatial.2 Marxist geography has been instrumental in the importation of social theory into the discipline, arguing against space and place as mere outcomes of other processes. Rather than a background for things to happen, a sort of ‘empty’ or ‘dead’ plane, space is produced actively through the actions of people and particular sets of relations. The spatial dimension is a force shaping social action and never external to the social world. Understood in this way, spatial practices structure the determining conditions of social life. To paraphrase Ed Soja (1980), (building on Henri Lefebvre) space is not separated from politics but is in fact brimming with ideologies. In other words, the social is the spatial and vice versa. As a result of this legacy, I argue that a central problematic within Marcuse’s work –​ the containment of social change –​is at root a spatial problematic. Digging a bit deeper, and taking a cue from the title of the book, it is reasonable to ask what exactly it means to ‘spatialize’ Marcuse? In the most succinct terms, spatializing Marcuse involves drawing on the development of geo-​spatial thought in order to recognize that space is immanent within Marcuse’s 3

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

work in some fashion. Where the individual acts against their own interests, internalizing systems of social control (what Marcuse termed repressive de-​ sublimation) narrows the mental and physical spaces of liberation. Class and identity struggles are located, scaled, and connected. Space is implicated in the distribution and actualization of power and spatiality makes a difference to the effects that power can have. Up to this point, the spatial vocabularies of Marcuse’s theories, along with their material and metaphorical contours, have remained underdeveloped. This book will develop these lines of thinking across the chapters. Viewed from a spatial perspective, Marcuse’s work engages today’s realities and brings a searchlight to debates in geography. Just as significantly, the book contributes to a minor tradition of diversifying the voices and interpretations of Marxism writ large. Many readers are likely familiar with Marcuse for his association with the Frankfurt School. As one of its founding members, and a principal architect of Critical Theory, Marcuse and his colleagues challenged processes leading to the governing value system of society. The Frankfurt School developed an apparatus to understand the times they lived through and, in the process, modernized Marxism by bringing in Freudian psychoanalysis. At the heart of their studies was an aversion to closed philosophical systems. Members opted instead for an integration of philosophy and social analysis through praxis, or the transformation of the social order. One of the distinguishing features of praxis (as opposed to mere action) is that praxis is informed by theoretical considerations. The merger of theory and practice holds the potential to overcome the contradictions of the social order and is thus a keystone of revolutionary activity. Marcuse began his academic pursuits at Humboldt University in Berlin but transferred his studies to the University of Freiburg at the edge of the Black Forest in 1920. In 1922 Marcuse would produce his first major work and doctoral thesis, ‘The German Artist-​Novel’. It was in Freiburg that he met Max Horkheimer as well as the mathematician, Sophie Wertheim, his first wife, and attended lectures by Edmund Husserl. Husserl was known for his philosophical approach of ‘phenomenology’, an intentional correlation of acts of consciousness with their objects (Feenberg and Leiss 2007). Heidegger, Husserl’s student, would go on to adapt Husserl’s method through his groundbreaking concept of ‘being-​in-​the-​world’, an analytic interpreting the activity of existence (Dreyfus 1990, Heidegger, Kisiel and Sheehan 2007). Following the completion of his doctorate, Marcuse returned to Berlin and worked in a book shop where he prepared a bibliography on Schiller. Then, according to a 1977 interview: “I read Sein und Zeit [Heidegger’s Being and Time] when it came out in 1927 and after having read it, I decided to go back to Freiburg and worked with Heidegger until December 1932, when I left Germany a few days before Hitler’s ascent to power” (quoted in Kellner 1984, 33). 4

Introduction

These early associations and influences were to leave their phenomenological and professional mark. In 1932, Marcuse corresponded with Max Horkheimer, the head of the Institute for Social Research, known popularly as the ‘Frankfurt School’, requesting an interview. Husserl sent a letter of support and, after landing the job, Marcuse moved to Switzerland3 and then on to Paris before eventually moving to the United States in 1934. In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party.4 It is in the US, where Marcuse would remain for the rest of his life, that he became widely known for his searing critique of capitalism. During the post-​war period Marcuse pointed to new forms of social control and domination by linking economic exploitation and the commodification of human labour. Many of Marcuse’s writings in these years addressed the concentration of political and economic power; the relationship between commodity production and the containment of social change; and theories of the destructive uses of rationality. He argued that the massive surplus of wealth created through economic and technological development had reduced the individual to a cog in the wheel of the larger machine of production. To understand how these concepts can be adapted to have particular relevance now, I draw on the geopolitics of bordering and recent US political events. These examples (in Chapter 2) will show how taking a Marcusean-​inspired geography seriously can explicate the stultifying relations of reality. In later years, Marcuse focused on unrealized potentialities, and the possibilities of imaginative fantasy. Some of his most creative thinking is reflected in the notion of utopia as an expression of Eros. I expand the radical potential of Marcuse’s formulation through two concrete examples: Wikipedia and Aztlán (Chapter 4). Taken as a body of work, it is evident that Marcuse’s brand of Marxism responded to European trends in thought such as existentialism and psychoanalysis. But these seemingly abstract theoretical formulations emerged to take on concrete relevance in the 1960s. Marcuse’s writings suddenly voiced resonant narratives for marginalized peoples, the working classes, and student movements. His radical credentials were certified through his teachings (his most famous student was Angela Davis at Brandeis University) and in his influence on civil rights and antiwar movements seeking to adapt his ‘power of negative thinking’ to transform existing conditions (Briggs, 1979). Throughout his long career, Marcuse became best known for the contention that progressive and regressive forces co-​ existed simultaneously. His signature integration of multiple theories across disciplines eventually earned him the label ‘Dean of the New Human Spirit’. In the context of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was exceptional for his political militancy and his commitment to the production of alternative subjectivities through praxis. Striving to preserve a radical vision contributed to an increasing estrangement from his former colleagues, Max Horkheimer 5

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

and Theodor Adorno. In a telltale sign of the rift, Marcuse wrote a letter in response to Adorno’s admonishment to place thinking above action. In the ‘more unpleasant part’ of that 1969 correspondence, Marcuse addresses Horkheimer’s public reclamation of ideas that, in his mind at least, were developed communally: ‘I gladly accept that these thoughts got “cruder and simpler” in my work. I believe crudeness and simplification have made the barely recognizable radical substance of these thoughts visible again.’ While many turned toward more conservative positions focusing on theoretical models of thought, Marcuse remained adamant that theory kept separate from praxis ‘becomes untrue to itself ’.5 Undoubtedly, Marcuse is one of the foremost theorists of opposition. Yet his name is rarely among the philosophers quoted by geographers interested in the spatial dimension of social life. To some extent we can hold Marcuse himself responsible for this elision within geographic annals. He rarely wrote directly or explicitly about space or geography. All the same, a vigilant reader is apt to notice that Marcuse wrote and thought about space and the geographical nature of capitalism in a relational way. Famously, he condemned the spread of calculation and instrumentalized reason as he expounded upon how national sovereignty works to impede the international organization of resources (Marcuse 1964). Moreover, Marcuse expressed attentiveness to the multi-​scalar connections between geopolitics and life in the United States. In an interview with a public television affiliate in May of 1968, Marcuse explained: What I do say is that a great deal of our productive forces today are wasted and channeled into destructive forces, and that indeed, these abused dimensions of technology of the productive forces could be cut out altogether. For example, planned obsolescence. The production of innumerable brands and gadgets who are in the last analysis all the same. The production of innumerable different marks of automobiles which in the last analysis does not warrant this waste of time, energy, and capital simply in order to make some slight changes in the model and the looks of whatever it is, and the incredible amount of time, [and] intelligence [that] are wasted in publicity for all of these things. … A budget with which you can, without much exaggeration, eliminate much of the poverty and misery on earth today. I only wanted to point out, I believe in this society, an incredible amount of aggressiveness and destructiveness is accumulated precisely because of the empty prosperity which then simply erupts on an international level, for example, in the war in Vietnam.6 It erupts on a very different level here at home. For example, the language of our newspapers, in the violent words and images of our televisions, and so on and so on. (Kellner 2014, 274) 6

Introduction

More generally, some of his work has been eyed with a degree of scepticism, perhaps pigeon-​holing him as a relic of the 1960s. Certainly, in hindsight, Marcuse has not escaped what E. P. Thompson has famously called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (1963, 13). This may be due to the fact that one of the most salient characteristics of his writing (along with others of the Frankfurt School) was a stress on the classical notion of Reason. In 1937, Marcuse tried to define the concept: Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under the name of reason, it conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason. As the Given world was bound up with rational thought, and indeed, ontologically dependent on it, all that contradicted reason or was not rational was posited as something that had to be overcome. Reason was established as a critical tribunal. (Quoted in Jay 1973, 60) With the commitment to reconstruct Reason came a failure to anticipate postmodern attacks on grand narratives of liberation (Schoolman, 1980; Kellner, 1984).7 Likewise, there are limitations when it comes to Marcuse’s reliance on Freudian conceptions. This aspect of Marcuse’s Critical Theory ‘presupposes a constant amount of instinctual energy that strives to maintain an equilibrium, as if the human organism was a thermodynamic, hydraulic system governed by the laws of the conservation of energy and inertia’ (Kellner 1984, 162). Such mechanistic thinking has provided cause for his work to be discarded entirely in many theoretical circles. Further contributing to his having fallen out of favour is the inaccuracy of some of his judgements. Marcuse underestimated the extent to which the economic system can continue to reproduce itself and overestimated the all-​encompassing nature of repression. Although these failings lend credibility to some of his detractors, hegemonic interpretations of Marcuse have stymied his potential. Rather than extending and adapting Marcuse’s theories, interpreters of Marcuse can fall into the category of disciples insofar as they suffer the same pitfalls as any strict adherents to singular readings of texts. This is evident within certain strands of Marxism engulfed in mild idolatry at the expense of diversity of explanation or translation. Passing judgement on brilliant thinkers is an academic pastime. Nonetheless, some scholars contend that true democracy is tied in with the sensibility found in Marcuse’s writings 7

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

(Farr 2009), solidifying his status as a philosopher of emancipation. To be fair, even Marcuse recognized that one theory would hardly suffice. After all, as he himself noted: ‘not every problem someone has with his girlfriend [sic] is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production’.8 Glibness aside, Marcuse deserves to be freed from his critics and the idea that he has little to say to present-​day society. This book is about more than rescuing the content of Marcuse’s thought from the traditional treatment to which it has been confined, although we can do that too. In the same way that Marxism is subject to revision because of its status as an historical theory (at least in the eyes of the Frankfurt School), so is Marcuse’s work malleable to current conditions. There is nothing in his thought that limits its extension to the incorporation of spatiality. It would be imprudent to be an ‘orthodox Marcusean’. Instead, I imagine his work as an accompanying modality that, like a bridge, can take us to new places. Marcuse himself was a skilled extrapolator. In a 1979 interview with Helen Hawkins for KPBS Public Radio, Marcuse described one of his most widely read books: “I call Eros and Civilization an extrapolation of Freud because I use the hypotheses of Freud but go beyond them. In other words, what I say and state in Freudian terms is not necessarily that which Freud himself would have used and approved of ” (1979b). The need is to adapt Marcuse’s work to respond to contemporary circumstances. In spatializing Marcuse, the vista before us is a panorama of objects and corridors of analysis. This project is partially about understanding the containment of social change and the deepening of the status quo. Such a story necessarily involves the eclipse of interiority, the deep penetration of the market into our private space and the increasing one-​dimensionality of global policies and practices. But what follows is not simply a tale of gloom and doom. As Marcuse himself might say: this we must reject outright. Part of his obscured legacy is the quest to assess the true nature of opposition and in the book, I take up that challenge. The roles of illusion and complicity, coupled with the call for a tangible way forward, present a jumping off point –​an invitation to infuse spatiality and empower Marcuse’s work as a relentlessly transformative geography of liberation. Mainly, the materials that sustain the argument of the chapters are based on geographical readings of Marcuse’s work from the 1930s to his polemics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Spatializing Marcuse is not a biography (of which there are many fine ones dedicated to both Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School); thus, I will not devote much time to the chronology and details of his life. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that many of his insights are likely born of personal experience. Douglas Kellner, in his book, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, chronicles how Marcuse’s political education began with the German Revolution of 1918. After joining a soldiers’ council in a northern working-​class suburb of Berlin, Marcuse 8

Introduction

witnessed what he considered to be the failure of the revolution when the soldiers elected their old officers to positions of power. In a quote from a 1972 interview with Kellner (1984, 18), Marcuse reflects: All this I did with the aim of understanding just why, at a time when the conditions for an authentic revolution were present, the revolution had collapsed or been defeated, the old forces had come back to power, and the whole business was beginning again in degenerate form. This disappointment led him in early years to Marx and eventually to the belief that Marxism as it stood had lost its efficacy as a theory of liberation. Marcuse set about challenging and transforming some of the fundamental premises of orthodox Marxism. These premises include countering Marx’s capitalist stagnation with a concept of expansion, the development of an affluency thesis over Marx’s impoverishment thesis, the notion of the integration rather than the radicalization of the working class, and (over) estimating capitalist stabilization in lieu of capitalism’s breakdown (Kellner 1984). Having seen first-​hand the cooperation between science, politics, and the military through the rise of German fascism, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, Marcuse knew that revolutions are not made solely for economic reasons. He was employed throughout his life in a variety of government-​ related positions before securing an academic post relatively late in his career. Following America’s entry into the Second World War, Marcuse and some of his Institute colleagues dedicated their efforts to the struggle against fascism. Along with Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Marcuse first joined the Office of War Information, a branch of the Office of the Coordination of Information, set up by Roosevelt in 1941, and was tasked with setting up an international secret service for the United States. Marcuse worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an agency which was ultimately absorbed by the CIA, and conceived to conduct psychological warfare against the Axis powers. There he worked first as a political analyst; later his unit was transferred to the State Department and put in charge of the Central European Division. During this time, Marcuse identified groups in Germany that could work towards reconstruction after the war and those who could not, as part of a de-​Nazification programme. When he was asked in a conversation with Habermas if any of his suggestions were taken, or if his work was of consequence, Marcuse responded: “On the contrary. Those whom we had listed first as ‘economic war criminals’ were very quickly back in the decisive positions of responsibility in the German economy”.9 The 1940s and 1950s were a difficult time for Marcuse. Unable to secure a university post, he stayed in Washington to work. To add to his isolation, many of his colleagues returned to Germany, while his close friend and 9

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

former colleague Franz Neumann took a position at Columbia University. This period was a relatively dry spell in terms of publication. In 1941, Marcuse published Reason and Revolution, his masterpiece on Hegel, Marx, and the rise of Critical Theory, but aside from a review of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it was not until 1955 that Eros and Civilization would be released. Nevertheless, in spite of personal and professional hardships, it is likely that his time in the upper echelons of power, and his position as a leading authority on Central Europe during wartime left a lasting imprint. Marcuse’s life experiences and research during this time led to developments that are now taken for granted by their widespread acceptance. One such example is that philosophical thought begins from the premise that facts do not correspond to concepts imposed either by common sense or scientific reason. From the ashes of Heideggerian Marxism coupled with intellectual influences from Schiller and Freud (among many others) would emerge a re-​scaled Marxist perspective: from the societal level to the individual scale. The characteristic themes of Marcuse’s post-​Second World War writings build on the role of technology in fortifying the decline of individuality, democracy, and freedom. Critics have sometimes characterized this period as steeped in a deep pessimism whereas subsequent books such as Eros and Civilization and The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) reveal Marcuse’s continued commitment to utopic thinking and its role in overcoming alienation. In his last essays, Marcuse retreats from optimism in the wake of the suppression of the New Left. In spite of this, Marcuse magically achieves a unity of politics, philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics. In the chapters that follow, I have sought to create lines of flight that encourage thinking with Marcuse rather than being his disciple. Marcuse’s diagnoses of society are said to be overly general, lacking firm empirical grounding. What is more, Marcuse has been both lauded and accused of dialectical writing, a style which accepts ambiguities, contradictions, and ornate language.10 I aim to provide a two-​fold corrective to those not entirely unfounded critiques. The chapters draw on a variety of diverse examples ranging from imaginative mapping techniques to contemporary politics. I highlight how adaptations of Marcuse’s work can be applied to both real and imagined spaces and places. To the latter point about his writing, I anticipate that readers will accept that complex language is part of distilling the disjuncture between appearance and reality. Nonetheless, a key element in elaborating a Marcusean-​inspired geography is the challenge of interpreting and applying his potent if complicated concepts to the world we inhabit today. Chapter 2, ‘Dimensionality Flattened’, explores how the dialectical movement towards liberation seems to have stalled by excavating how the status quo maintains its grip on society. I analyse three provocative and entangled concepts in relation to the spatial containment of social 10

Introduction

change: instrumental reason, one-​d imensionality, and technological rationality. In order to get a firmer grip on these slippery concepts, the chapter brings to light the spaces of uncritical rationality in a variety of contexts including the Border Industrial Complex. Marcuse reflected deeply on how everyday life could be the theatre of revolution, yet, in reality we so often fall short in overturning an oppressive society. This is due in part to the triumph of instrumental reason over an earlier form of rationality which took into account ends as well as means. Instrumental reason looks at how reason is enlisted in ever more pervasive networks of administrative discipline and control. One-​dimensionality, one of Marcuse’s more pessimistic –​if best-​known contributions, examines the slow process of quieting dissent, along with the implementation of conformity through economic and psychological means. What is frequently overlooked is how one-​dimensionality creates hierarchies of difference and power by re-​spatializing, condensing, minimizing, and confining options to realities that we have been conditioned to accept. As a student of Heidegger and a member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was concerned with both the destructive uses and the liberatory potential of technology. Far beyond an agglomeration of mere technical devices, technology reveals something fundamental about existence. His elaboration of technological rationality captures the ontological framework wherein domination is rationalized through technical means. One of the more compelling aspects of Marcuse’s social philosophy is that it does not remain stagnant over time. As times changed, so did his thoughts. After One-​Dimensional Man (1964), he gradually came to believe that capitalism as a social totality does not hold. Accepting capitalism’s fractured and broken character provides opportunities for transcendence. If the dual forces of constraint and freedom are the subjects of Chapter 2, then overturning the limits of possibilities is a central concern of Chapter 3, ‘Mission: Reconstruction’. At its core, Marcusean Critical Theory emphasizes the incorporation of revolutionary politics, pushing us towards different possibilities which can negate power relations. Praxis, that merger between theory and practice, simultaneously alienated him from his Frankfurt School colleagues and served to inspire global student movements. Chapter 3 explores the reconstructive aspects of Marcuse’s writings through current politics. Using ‘Twitter politics’ (which I define as the call for social change by digital means) and the Open Borders movement as examples, I assess how and whether these instances of political action enact preconditions for liberation, which include: the uses of immanent critique; the power of negative thinking; and the politics of refusal. Immanent critique is a fundamental methodological tool of Critical Theory, presupposing that those ideals or principles already present in some form in the current social order are a valid basis for social critique (Honneth 2001). This is not so distant 11

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from Manning and Massumi’s (2014, 87) take on Deleuze and Guattari’s call to inhabit the present moment ‘making it turn in the sense in which butter “turns to curd” ’. Related to immanent critique is the idea of ‘thought in contradiction’, or the power of negative thinking, which proposes that every existing state can overcome its immediate form. Breaking through what Marcuse calls the ‘administered consciousness’ (Marcuse 1968a, xx) requires the negation of false needs through individual reason and choice. The subjective conditions for radical social change begin with the ‘Great Refusal –​the protest against that which is’ (1964, 63). Marcuse was known both for his radicalism and his sense of humour, at one time announcing to a student that the more straight one’s attire, the more possible it was to speak one’s nonconformist political viewpoints (Marcuse 2005, 194). He therefore conceived of opposition and resistance as both ‘mode-​of-​doing’ and ‘mode-​of-​being’. Andrew Feenberg, a former student of Marcuse and co-​author of The Essential Marcuse reminds us that Marcuse never gave in and never gave up: ‘Marcuse never ceased reinterpreting and reconfiguring the Critical Theory of society with a single aim in mind: to track the obscure path to the socialist utopia through the latest transformations in capitalist societies in an epoch marked by an astonishing rise in material wealth’ (Feenberg and Leiss 2007, xxxix). True to the Marcusean methodology of deliberately linking theory with practice, Chapter 4 expands on the concept of utopia using examples from the digital world and subaltern mappings. By infusing topology into Marcuse’s work, I introduce dense but important theoretical concepts to new audiences by showing the utility of these theories in relation to oppositional space. The chapter reviews Marcuse’s revision of Freudian principles to fit the conditions of advanced industrial capitalism. Drawing specifically on Eros and Civilization and Marcuse’s other mature works, I conceive of Marcuse’s utopic thinking as right here, not yet, and over. This triad is a theoretical and material formation operating in various overlapping registers at once. The simultaneity afforded through topology swaps what ‘is’ for different relational modes and being-​in-​ the-​world. In this construction, utopia ceases to be aspirational but is at once a beginning point, an end point, and everything in between. The struggle for utopia lends itself to non-​instrumentality, the affirmation of fantasy, and an anti-​pragmatism with implications for a prefigurative politics. Chapter 5 stages an encounter between Marcuse and post-​foundationalist thought. One of the book’s aims is to illustrate Marcuse’s relevance and applicability within the current socio-​political milieu. That necessarily entails exploring the possible intersections of Critical Theory and poststructuralism, to the extent that the latter is a unified tradition. Because geography has narrated Marxism and poststructuralism as distant and antagonistic, it is not surprising that Marcuse’s theoretical contributions largely have been interpreted as incompatible with what is arguably a dominant paradigm 12

Introduction

within geography. While Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1944]) anticipated critiques of the subject, representation and reason, less has been written about Marcuse’s critical place within these debates. Effectively then, Chapter 5 points to the lines of connection that could be mobilized for a revival of revolutionary politics by arguing that Marcuse’s work is more nuanced, less totalizing, and more explicitly scalar than previously interpreted. Marcuse questioned the notion of closed systems and recognized contingency, openness, and disruption. He was a proponent of dogged questioning as a strategy of resistance and played imaginatively with the often elusive interconnections between the worlds of the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Instead of testing his work for commensurability, I build on insights from previous chapters to contemplate what a Marcusean perspective can offer anti-​foundationalist and ‘minor’ theories. Careful readings suggest that Marcuse anticipated versions of what we now term the ‘post-​political’, detailed in Chapter 5. In 1974, at a lecture delivered at Stanford University, Marcuse began with the following remark: “I believe the Women’s Liberation Movement today is, perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have, even if the consciousness of this fact has not penetrated the Movement as a whole.”11 While circumstances have changed and Marcuse had a complex relationship with feminism, Chapter 6 speculates on the uses of a Marcusean geography for an updated socialist feminism. It prompts us to take seriously the feminist critique of the Marxist tradition without abandoning a political economy approach and asks: what happens if those insights are then applied to the possibilities of Marcuse’s work? Marcuse also believed that disenfranchised people could be agents of revolutionary change. In the final chapter, I advocate for a ‘meso’ socio-​spatial positionality which retains the oppositional politics so crucial to Marcuse’s own work and simultaneously diversifies the Marxist project. Chapter 6 considers how Marcuse’s adapted philosophy might understand the prospects for political action through the lens of ongoing social and political struggles inspired by the Black Radical Tradition. Infusing spatiality into Marcuse’s philosophies offers a distinctive kind of thought and practice that helps us to overturn habitual perspectives mooring us in the status quo. Marcuse’s heretofore unexplored spatio-​temporal conceptions of conformity and resistance arm us against the comfort and delusion of familiarity. Marcuse’s work is relevant to geographers and social scientists because, when adapted and extended, his philosophies provide a substantially different reading of dominant Marxist and post-​political perspectives. Even more significantly, as demonstrated in the book, his work is crucial to the pursuit of a prefigurative politics. If the value of Critical Theory is how it helps us to change the world, then there is no better time to resuscitate and re-​invigorate the emancipatory thinking of Herbert Marcuse. He offers us an old philosophy for new times. 13

2

Dimensionality Flattened ‘It will either be a catastrophe, or it will get worse.’ Herbert Marcuse To map the spatial containment of social change is to be open to the many stops and starts, detours, and multiple routes that any such journey offers. For Marcuse, the possibility of liberation entails canvassing the well-​worn paths of conformity and tracking grooves that have formed over time which have left little room for alternative conception. With the publication of One-​ Dimensional Man in 1964, Marcuse developed some of his most enduring ideas. His quest to uncover the tension between truth and appearance required a strategy of honouring the entanglement of destruction and resurrection. His most famous work erred on the side of the former, but a careful reader will note that amid the ominous tone of the book are moments of veiled optimism. Those moments notwithstanding, One-​Dimensional Man remains a searing indictment of capitalism. Its power lies in its dialectical diagnosis. One-​Dimensional Man dissects an apocalyptic status quo but also sketches prospects for radical social transformation. The dialectical, or what Hegel terms, the ‘negatively rational’ (Hegel 1991 [1817], 79) is the move from restrictedness into its opposite. It is a rejection of the convention that when the premise of a position leads to contradiction, the premise must be abandoned. Instead, a new determination is driven by its own content. To think dialectically is to understand that the process itself propels distinct forms necessitated by earlier moments. Stated more concretely, at any given time it is possible to see in society the development of forces for liberation and the forces for further oppression (Marcuse 1968b). By its very nature, the present structure of society is not static but contains within itself the possibility for being otherwise. As a scholar of Hegel, and a masterful dialectician, Marcuse forcefully conveyed the contradictions that can arise in both the appearance and essence of things. 14

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More than 60 years after publication, Marcuse’s best-​known work continues to command our attention because it reminds us of where we are. Technologically, under advanced industrial capitalism, impoverishment is no longer necessary. Thus, we are generally in a place of post-​scarcity. Marcuse’s work evinces an historical turning point wherein the abolition of scarcity is a real possibility. In other words, the objective conditions now exist to eliminate want. In spite of the material reality of abundance, the ability to capture a ‘second dimension’ of life is stifled by socio-​spatial containment. At the opening Welcome talk1 of the International Herbert Marcuse Society at Salisbury University in 2015, Peter Marcuse poignantly refreshed our collective memory on the relevance of his father’s work: ‘We are at a point where the discontent and the demand for radical change comes not from the continuance of poverty, although that poverty is indeed also continuing, but comes from the nature of the American Dream itself, not only from the failure to realize it for so many but for the growing realization that it is not worth its costs, that its pursuit is fundamentally anti-​human, flattens out life into a single dimension that does not permit the realization of an alternate dimension, one comprising the richness of life that society is now capable of producing for all its members.’ Critique, in the sense mandated by Critical Theory, is perhaps all the more important at this historical juncture because long-​term change seems more remote than ever. The impetus to drill down to the underlying causes of inert conformity and blast through the obfuscating nature of the construction of ‘common sense’ is an indispensable tool of a Marcusean geographic perspective. The first part of the chapter explores the latent spatiality of Marcuse’s most provocative concepts. Readers are likely accustomed to the use of the signifier ‘spatial thinking’ but the elements of such an approach are worth delineating. These include: the recognition of patterns in ‘data’; attention to asymmetry and change over space; the role of scale; spatial concentration; mobility; and relationality. Taken together, these aspects offer an untapped reservoir of geographical knowledge. I begin by sketching the foundations of one-​dimensionality in order to comprehend how the dialectical movement towards liberation seems to have stalled. This focus necessarily includes the ‘foot soldiers’ of the status quo, which are instrumental reason, technological rationality, alienation, and commodification. I add to these allies of one-​dimensionality, the concepts of distantiation and convergence. Distantiation establishes physical and mental or emotional distance. Convergence, with its focus on movement and ‘becoming’, captures the development of similarities across spectra which culminate in uniformity. The addition of distantiation and convergence, 15

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together with the more familiar vocabularies identified above, stress the spatialized implications of Marcuse’s work because the means we use to construct and represent socio-​political spaces have direct bearing on how those same systems are configured in the material world. The second part of the chapter mobilizes Marcusean-​inspired ideas through contemporary sites of political turmoil. Marcuse is integral to understanding the long-​standing roots of so-​called ‘modern conservatism’ that have filtered through to our current predicament. This is in large part because he understood how capitalism works as a dynamic and historical process always responsive to internal and external pressures. But we would also do well to document his remarkable foresight. In 1979, Marcuse described the ‘terrible years that seem imminent’ (Sethness Castro 2018, 367) in relation to Ronald Reagan, whereas years before, in a 1968 interview with Public Radio affiliate KCET, Marcuse commented on the election of Richard Nixon as: “disastrous and as a step towards a regime in this country, which although … you should not call it fascist, would very definitely be highly repressive”. Remarkably, in an unpublished 1975 manuscript entitled ‘Why Talk on Socialism’, Marcuse foreshadows the attack on pre-​1980s Keynesianism associated with proto-​ neoliberalism (Kellner 2014, 56). In his admonition of the administration following Nixon’s impeachment, Marcuse accurately forecasted economic and social policy by detailing Gerald Ford’s break with any semblance of the welfare state. In 1975, Marcuse wrote a scathing critique published in the Los Angeles Times. The language Marcuse used to characterize the shift towards what we now think of as ‘business as usual’ could easily have been ripped from newspaper headlines nearly half a century after Marcuse’s own death. Its tone bears a bullet-​like quality presumably meant to rip into the destructive nature of the policies. Ford’s program: the logical answer of neo-​capitalism: help the rich, compel the poor to work harder. For example, Treasure Secretary Simon regarding the tax reduction ‘money must not be channeled to families earning more than $20,000 a year because they are the biggest buyers’ (Los Angeles Times January 23 [1975]). And the time-​ honored remedy: end the proliferation of such non-​profitable services as ‘food stamps, social security, and federal retirement benefits’ and cut down on education (no tax rebates). Why? In order to reverse the ‘downward slide of corporate profits’. For ‘the Administration fears drift to socialism’. (Budget Director of Los Angeles, Ash Los Angeles Times, January 26 [1975]) Marcuse effectively saw the writing on the wall: reconsolidation of wealth; corporate domination of politics; linkages between the market and social control; and even the incipient threat of American authoritarianism. Utilizing 16

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the current political and economic landscape as a window on larger processes, I show how a politics of containment has fostered massive inequality and promoted the privatization of social problems. To cast it in the language of Critical Theory, I track the weaponization of rationality. When conceived together, these ideas constitute the flattening of dimensionality manifest in uneven geographical development and the displacement of alternatives.

One-​Dimensional Man rebooted This left-​wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action. It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is generally possible. Walter Benjamin, Left-​Wing Melancholy, 1931 This excerpt from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 review essay, in which he coined the term ‘Left Melancholy’, was an excoriation of certain writers of the Weimar Republic. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin touched on many of the same themes present in Marcuse’s work. In particular, they shared a productive pessimism regarding the state of things. Returning to the quote above, we could say that to the left of what is generally possible is an unexplored dimension. To use explicitly spatial language, it is a dimension that exists off the map; a congeries of coordinates, lengths, and depths, that have not fomented into a level of existence or consciousness. Dimensionality is an overtly spatial term although it has not been analysed as such in Marcuse’s work. The continued resonance of One-​Dimensional Man is amplified through its further clarification in tandem with an extrapolative geographic reading. Marcuse’s post-​Second World War writings build on the Frankfurt School’s analyses of technology, bureaucracy, the capitalist state, consumerism, and mass media. These anchors of advanced industrial capitalism both produced a decline in the revolutionary potential of the working class, and deteriorated freedom, individuality, and democracy (Kellner 2016a). One-​Dimensional Man, which may appear as apocalyptic bricolage, sold more than 300,000 copies in its first edition. Upon closer examination, the book reveals itself as a dialectical synthesis of ‘philosophy, critical social theory, aesthetics, radical politics and the critique of ideology’ (Kellner 2016a, 11) suffused with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Ronald Aronson, a former student of Marcuse, wrote in a special issue of Radical America that One-​Dimensional Man was ‘a major step in our breaking out of that closing universe. By naming it, by helping us to get conscious of it, by conveying its overwhelming power, [Marcuse] helped us to define ourselves in opposition to it—​total opposition’ (1970, 4). 17

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Marcuse famously ‘named’ that system called capitalism in mesmerizing, if somewhat forbidding, language. He describes how a ‘smooth, democratic unfreedom’ (1964, 1) prevails; opposition is either fundamentally absent or absorbed into the logic of the system itself. One-​dimensionality describes how social antagonism is contained through widespread conformism, the deficient conditions of current society and the absence of negative thinking. The resultant ‘Happy Consciousness’, in effect a flattening of the mind, is bolstered by the promise of affluence and consumerism. Kellner’s succinct description of the atrophying of radical social change is worth quoting at length: [S]‌ociety’s prosperity and growth are based on waste and destruction, its progress is fueled by exploitation and repression, while its freedom and democracy are based on manipulation. Marcuse slices through the ideological celebrations of capitalism, and he sharply criticizes the dehumanization and alienation in its opulence and affluence, the slavery in its labor system, the ideology and indoctrination in its culture, the fetishism in its consumerism, and the danger and insanity in its military-​ industrial complex. (2016a, 12) Under these conditions, ‘one-​dimensional man’ is assimilated into external norms of existing thought and behaviour and loses sight of a critical dimension of transformative possibilities. This process occurs both objectively and subjectively. Through the internalization of the status quo (introjection), members of society become objects of administration and conformity in conjunction with the narrowing of the private space of negation and individuality. One-​dimensionality is synonymous with alienation from being a Self, that crucial ability to dissent and control one’s destiny. Here, Marcuse supersedes Marx’s analysis. For Marx, false consciousness could be repelled through elevated consciousness and rational critique on the part of the working class. In contrast, Marcuse foresees the depth of integration between culture, personality, and political economy (Agger 1988). This merger covers exploitation in material abundance and the illusions of false harmony –​what Marcuse terms the identity of the real and the rational (Marcuse 1964, cf Walker 2015). One-​dimensional thinking is solidified in multiple ways: in the banishment of speculation about deep structure; through repressive de-​sublimation or the internalization of excessive social control; and in a decrease in critical thinking about the dominant way of life. It runs in contra to ‘bi-​dimensional’ thought, characterized by an antagonism between subject and object which endows the subject with the perception of possibilities not yet realized in human practice. I would argue that this second dimension is further degenerated through distantiation and convergence. By distantiation, I am referring to the social, 18

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emotional, and physical distance of options outside or beyond the given system. Retrieving the vestigial spatiality of one-​dimensionality peels back the mask of ‘the present’ as the sum of the universe. The distance of alternatives becomes vital to the circumscription of change. Or, in Marcuse’s words: The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a ‘habit of thought’ at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. (Marcuse 1964, 15) Confined to the parameters of one-​dimensionality’s own internal logic, other possibilities are rendered metaphysical, fantastical, or out of reach. An alternative lens is deemed to be ‘too far away’ from reality with little regard for the fact that the optic through which we view the symptoms is, itself, symptomatic. In collusion with distantiation, the notion of convergence alerts us both to the closing off of social change and to the deceptive nature of what appears to be resistance. Turning again to Marcuse’s writings in One-​Dimensional Man: This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, the collusion of Business and Labor with the strong State testify to the integration of opposites which is the result as well as the prerequisite of this achievement. (1964, xii) How many times have we heard that the two-​party system in the United States offers little prospect for a changed system? Marcuse argues that in one-​dimensional society, we may have the impression that we have a say in how things work given the prevalence of dissent, debate, and cultural and political freedoms. Democracy, for example, espouses freedom, yet exploitation of nature and human labour increases. The sham of true liberty is codified in one of his more famous lines: ‘Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves’ (1964, 7). Reminding us anew of the tension between appearance and essence, convergence points to the impotence of many modes of protest. Acts of resistance founder because, at root, they are not negative; thus, they are ‘digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet’ (1964, 14). Reflecting on this ineffectuality more recently, Aronson writes: ‘There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of 19

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opposition organizations and movements trying to save animals, clean up the environment, help workers, protect children, support women, remove poisons from food—​but no significant opposition to the system as a whole and its way of life’ (2014, 8). In contemporary times, there seems to be a question of who we are talking to. Today, the medium of resistance is often technological. Social media has become a public forum in ways that Marcuse could not have predicted. A charitable reading of the political and social capacities of Facebook and Twitter might have them as challenging the existing social order in key ways. We log on, share with our friends, and, if time permits, we type in a comment expressing the urgent need to act. At the individual scale, the technological distractions of virtue signalling, and keyboard politics are masking as true opposition. From a structural perspective, a critical interpretation recognizes the market dominance and anticompetitive conduct of these monopolies. The consolidation of power ensconced in a few tech giants is troubling, especially when social media is used as a political platform. Scholars have raised the concern that social media networks create ‘echo chambers’ where users see only posts from like-​minded media sources and friends.2 Individual angst transmutes into algorithmic manipulation ensuring that we, in fact, are talking to ourselves. The influence of Big Tech and their platforms is staggering. Witness for example, the creation of propaganda campaigns by forces, internal and external, that seek to influence so-​called democratic outcomes (that is, Russia, Iran, Cambridge Analytica in the UK). Or the selling of data to advertisers that may unwittingly change our behaviours. Outside our virtual lives, political mobilization appears everywhere around us. We only have to look to Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s March, #BlackLivesMatter, and immigration rallies for evidence. But these examples of what Nathan Heller has called contemporary adhocracy (2017) are missing the scaffolding that emerges when groups work together over long periods of time. Because they are fleeting and respond to immediate threats, many movements fail on multiple fronts. The message is often distorted by the media and/​or protests fail to address the complex nature of deeper structural issues. As a result, solutions to big problems are confined to reformist rhetoric or we opt for the lesser of two evils, unconsciously agreeing to the terms of a debate which we did not set (Livni and Kozlowska 2019). Returning to One-​Dimensional Man, much rings true, but Marcuse’s analysis requires serious qualification. The all-​encompassing administrative apparatus he so brilliantly described has largely been transposed to unproductive financial speculation (Aronson 2014). We are no longer in a golden age of growth where the standard of living is growing for the vast majority. The threat of the Cold War is a distant memory, and the welfare/​warfare state has been replaced by the neoliberal state. The labour movement has receded while the 20

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gains of capital have been captured to an alarming degree by their owners (Aronson 2014; Kellner 2016a). And, although Marcuse espoused capitalism’s contradictions, he failed to expand on where the fissures might break out. Undoubtedly, One-​Dimensional Man bears a date. Nevertheless, Marcuse’s updates to Marxist categories remain largely intact. Capitalism has managed to overcome Marx’s predictions of massive crisis. ‘Integration’ in the realm of the conscious and unconscious has had significant effects on prospects for resistance. Marcuse describes how the proletariat ceases to be an oppositional force: ‘Assimilation in needs and aspirations, in the standard of living, in leisure activities, in politics derives from an integration in the plant itself, in the material process of production’ (Marcuse 1964, 29; Aronson 2014). After clearing away some of the more obvious antediluvian debris, we are left with uneasy feelings of déjà vu. The market remains the meaning and content of everything. Contemporary times are characterized by what Bourdieu called flexploitation, a ‘mode of domination of a new kind based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission into the acceptance of exploitation’ (Bourdieu 1998, 85). In much of the United States as well as other places in the world, the majority of people face stagnant wages, rising rates of inequality, and tattered social safety nets resulting from the neoliberal undoing of labour unions and the welfare state. This flexploitation is exacerbated by corporate domination of the political and legislative process. The Left, in response to increasingly bitter political divisions, offers up a subdued pluralism promising change without transformation. Part of Marcuse’s obscured legacy is the quest to figure out the true nature of opposition. I argue that we can best come to grips with such a problematic if we insinuate a geographical extrapolation from his work. If we accept the premise that containment (and we can add to that inertia and the status quo) is fundamentally socio-​spatial, then it follows that oppositional energy must possess a similar character (discussed more fully in Chapters 3 and 4).

Operation containment Information about ‘how things are’ comes from our mind and society. Critical theory emphasizes that both are open to deception. Always questioning avenues that have the mark of the realistic, Marcuse stresses the limitation of thought brought about by the increasing proximity between what is and what can be. The confinement to what appears right before us results in a whittling down brought about by: a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it. In this society, 21

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the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian3 to the extent which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus obliterates the opposition between the private and the public existence, between individual and social needs. (1964, xlvii) Marcuse is, in effect, sketching out the manifestation of instrumental reason, the triumph of which Morelock, paraphrasing Martin Jay describes in this way: ‘Conceptual thought is shrunk and closed down, eclipsed by the spread of pure calculation’ (Jay 1973; Morelock 2018, xxi). To understand the historical structure that makes difference possible, we must fully conceive the achievements of one-​dimensionality. Its closing of the universe of possibilities confines us to the ‘real’, a space of uncritical rationality. Struggle and resistance occur within the accepted conditions through the unification of opposites. Any army standing in defence of territory requires soldiers. In this case, the infantry supporting the status quo consists of instrumental reason, technological rationality, alienation, and commodification. For readers of the Frankfurt School, the concept of instrumental reason is terrain that has long been tilled (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1944]; Hohendahl 1985). Drawing on Weber, members of the Frankfurt School famously developed an argument against the generalized societal means-​ends rationality that failed to interrogate the ends themselves. Reason had been stripped of humane ends, reducing it to a tool of the powerful (Feenberg and Leiss 2007). Utilizing the technique of immanent critique, which uses Reason to probe the categorical reason of the Enlightenment, Marcuse examines how the latter form is conscripted into more and more pervasive networks of administrative discipline and control (Kellner 1984). Stepping back further historically, Marx (building on Aristotle) differentiates between two kinds of human activity: instrumental and non-​ instrumental. Instrumental activity serves as a tool for a purpose outside of itself, ‘a necessary mediator between the subject and its purpose’ (Zilbersheid 2008, 408). Non-​instrumentality is captured in the oft-​used phrase ‘for its own sake’. In other words, the activity itself is the purpose. In Marcuse’s view, instrumental reason, which had prevailed over an earlier form of rationality enveloping ends as well as means, is a perverted reason. Its main criterion is efficiency. Furthermore, a purposive epistemology has taken root in the very structure of our experience and our relation to the world. Body, soul, and the environment are tools and material for achievement.4 In this way, exploitation develops as social reality. Instrumental reason relates to one-​dimensionality in its drive for what Marcuse calls ‘operational’ thinking. Terry Maley, in a publication for the International Herbert Marcuse Society, writes that this thinking, so often couched in an ideology of progress: ‘had become so culturally pervasive that 22

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it had successfully neutralized the glaring contradictions between “growing productivity and its repressive use”, between the perpetuation of scarcity and an over-​abundance of standardized consumer goods’ (Marcuse 1964, 256; Maley 2017, xiii). More broadly, the quest to render social scientific knowledge and existing institutional arrangements more efficient and effective becomes a momentous force motivating action that has lost control of what it has motivated. Such propulsion is captured in Marcuse’s concept of technological reason,5 an extension and historicization of instrumental reason. He first published his perspectives on the individual in industrial society in the 1941 article ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ but would go on to further refine these ideas in One-​Dimensional Man and later, in the essay ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in Max Weber’ (1968d). In an early iteration he writes: We do not ask for the influence or effect of technology on the human individuals. For they are themselves an integral part and factor of technology, not only as the men [sic] who invent or attend to machinery but also the social groups which direct its application and utilization. Technology … is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination. (1941, 138) Technical efficiency, or the ‘fetish’ of technique has come to replace the commodity fetish of classic Marxism (Kellner 1984). Reason now inhabits the system of production, consumption, and standardized control. Where Marx neglects the enabling aspects of technology (MacKenzie 1984), Marcuse seeks to attend to their productive capacities. He does this by tracking technological reason’s claim to universality and necessity. Crucially, and in addition to keeping critical reason on a short leash, technical reason accrues ontological status in the sense that it forgets its own history. It relinquishes the ability to reflect upon itself. According to Samir Gandesha, ‘technology has now appropriated the role of relating the sensible content of experience to concepts’ (2014, 190). It is not enough that the technological process affects the ‘the entire rationality of those whom it serves’ (Marcuse 1941, 141). Under the impact of the apparatus, false needs that sustain consumer society result in the affirmation instead of the negation of the established system. Moreover, there is something fundamentally irrational about this kind of reason which operates: as frantic development of productivity, conquest of nature, enlargement of the mass of goods (and their accessibility for broad strata of the 23

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population); irrational because higher productivity, domination of nature, and social wealth become destructive forces. (Marcuse 1968d, 155) The attitude of rational compliance where all aspects of life are arranged to be useful, resonates more deeply than we may care to admit. Take for example, the current trend of Dataism, which declares that the universe is made up of data flows whose value is determined by their contribution to data processing. In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Harari writes: According to Dataism, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a stock-​exchange bubble and the flu virus are just three patterns of data flow that can be analyzed using the same basic concepts and tools. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition. (Harari 2016, 372) Dataism is the technical reason for our times. The transformation of heretofore unquantified aspects of life, such as emotions and interpersonal connections, ‘has nestled into the comfort zone of most people’ (van Dijck 2014, 198). We regularly arm corporations and governments with extraordinary power to surveil and track our lives by signing off on digital contracts and data-​sharing agreements. In effect, we are complicit in our own digital repression. The concepts thus far described are intertwined but none more deeply so than alienation and commodification. As an important player in the decline of individuality, alienation is a philosophically complex concept. To some degree, it is an ambiguous heuristic that raises enduring questions of its definition. Kellner points out that there are two quite different strands of thought operating across the humanities and social sciences related to alienation. The first is rooted in the Marxian Hegelian critique of domination. The second departs from Durkheim’s analysis of anomie which speaks of the alienation of the individual from society. In the sociological sense, ‘there is usually a psychological component in which one “feels alienated”, and the condition is usually contrasted with a healthier situation of conformity and adjustment’ (Kellner 1984, 247). Marx’s own understanding, first put forth in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx and Engels 2009 [1844]; also referred to as The Paris Manuscripts), links the structural organization of the modern labour process with its trenchant effect on human beings. In these posthumously released series of notes, Marx asserts that the worker experiences multiple forms of 24

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alienation in the capitalist workplace. First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour because they do not own the object they are producing. Second, the worker is alienated because the labour producing act is not meaningful. Third, workers are alienated by atomization and competition. Fourth is the loss of humanity that accompanies the separation of the worker from their ‘species-​being’. The degradation of people into the status of objects is famously described in this passage: The worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-​against himself. … The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (Marx and Engels 2009 [1844], 29) In contrast to the sociological tradition referred to earlier, Critical Theory presupposes the human being as alienated from human needs and potentialities through repression, coercion, or submission to social domination. In this view, the very condition of conformity is part of the problem (Kellner 1984). For Marcuse, alienation is deepened through commodification and is far more pervasive than in Marx’s time. Marcuse is concerned with the new aspects of alienation consisting in the total absorption of the personality into the processes and practices of capitalist commodity production. Thus, Marx’s theory requires a revision in order to attend to the manipulation of needs by vested interests. The spheres of consumption and leisure, in addition to production, must be accommodated because they contribute to the ‘mutilated, crippled and frustrated human existence: a human existence that is violently defending its own servitude’ (Marcuse 1968b, 182). Geographic attention to alienation has been infrequent, in spite of its fundamentally spatial nature (cf Clarke 1991; Bondi 2005; Binnie et al 2007; Chatterton and Pusey 2019). This limited engagement is somewhat surprising, given that alienation turns on practices of distantiation, disconnection, estrangement, and blockage. Perhaps most significantly, alienation is experienced unevenly. In these times, it is strongly linked to what David Harvey calls the progress of ‘real subsumption under the power of capital in general’ (2018, 452). Bodies, flexibly exploited, sometimes indispensable and at other times superfluous, are at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of structures outside of themselves. A spatial understanding of alienation emphasizes the spasmodic and asymmetrical distributive effects of structures and social relations fomenting myriad divisions. When the subject 25

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of alienation is paired with a Marcusean sensibility, there arises a clarity to the concept in a different register. Marcuse merges the structural and psychological by attending to the embodiment of objective and subjective conditions. It is not just the system that is the problem but the internalization of its edicts. The complicity of the individual in their own containment has implications for socio-​spatial relations, struggles, conflict, and the generation of inequalities. The latest restructuring of capitalism and its ensuing alienation can be found in the gig economy, sometimes referred to as Taylorism 2.0. Much like its predecessor, the newer iteration is founded on the principle of the division of labour into ever more specialized tasks paired with precise measurements of productivity. Taylor writes in 1911: ‘This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it’ (Wood and Wood 2002, 345). Taylorism 2.0 takes this logic to the next level, integrating new virtual technologies. Using internet technology to source digital and material contributions allows for the creation of hyperflexible and highly scalable workforces and represents a familiar twist on an old formula. The upending and reconfiguration of traditional physical workplace environments during the COVID-​19 pandemic cast this accelerating and frequently deleterious transition into even higher resolution. Now the platform is the factory. Work is characterized by decomposition, standardization, automated management, and surveillance. Altenried (2020) argues that the global on-​demand workforce of digital Taylorism is spatially untethered and deeply heterogeneous. Gig work, whether place-​based or remote, has generated new divisions of labour including deepening chasms between the Global North and South, enlisting those previously inaccessible to wage labour and complicating binaries of work/​home (Anthes 2018). As a result, alienation is heightened in novel ways. Amir Anwar, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, writes: Alienation is ever more present in the way much of the global gig economy is organized and controlled. Job descriptions on platforms are often vague and unspecified; the client is looking for workers with the lower rates rather than a certain skill set. Workers do not know who their client is. The fact that workers are competing for short-​term gigs like these means they have less incentive to know what they are creating, for who and to what purposes. Thus, the more work they do, the more alienated they become. (Anthes 2018) A counterargument by mainstream economists celebrates the new flexibilities of working on your own schedule and the value of extra autonomy as compared to salaried workers.6 While not categorically untrue, such 26

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depictions cannot come to grips with the fact that workers without a workplace who are increasingly managed by an algorithm will struggle for collective agency and representation.

Freedom: unavailable by popular demand If the final protector of the status quo is the concept of alienation, then the full force of alienation cannot be understood without its close collaborator, commodification. It is a keystone in the denial of true needs and the possibility of freedom. Marx’s commodity fetishism is widely known yet its exact nature bears paraphrasing: A commodity, therefore, is a mysterious thing simply because in it the social character of men’s [sic] labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason why the products of labor become commodities. (Marx 1867, Chapter 1) There is a rich tradition of studying commodification and consumption within the Frankfurt School and the social sciences generally. Veblen, a favourite of Marcuse, introduced the notion of conspicuous consumption in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994). He considers the display of discretionary economic power to provoke envy in others a waste of time and money. Such affectations are meant to signal status and power and fail to cover the real needs of the consumer. Later, Walter Benjamin famously located the shift to modernity in the commodification of things and in the figure of the flaneur, an embodiment of alienation in the modern city (Birkerts 1982). These and other works ushered in an ideological shift which saw consumption and commodification as key drivers of social change. Marcuse’s strong position on the economization of life sets him apart from earlier thinkers because he links commodification with anti-​revolutionary tendencies. He argues that this vulgar alliance functions to uphold capitalist structures of society. Commodification feeds directly into one-​dimensionality through its reproduction on the concrete level of individual need. Our propensity for ‘things’ is a balm for the anxiety of exploitation. Marcuse writes in One-​Dimensional Man: ‘The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-​fi set, split-​level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced’ (Marcuse 1964, 9). 27

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The freedom to buy a new car, house, gadget, and so on signals individualism and freedom in the consumer society. For Marcuse, capitalism, or what he alternately refers to as the system or the administrative apparatus, deals in counterfeit. Kellner expertly grasps these contradictions in his book Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism: In Marcuse’s view, the system’s widely championed individualism is a pseudo-i​ ndividualism: prefabricated, synthesized and administered by the advertising agencies, corporations and media manipulators. Further, the individual’s freedom is a pseudo-​freedom that fails to see bondage to the system is the price of its being able to ‘choose’ to buy a new car and to live a consumer lifestyle. This freedom and choice is illusory because the people have been preconditioned to make their choices within a predetermined universe that circumscribes their range of choices to the choice between Ford or General Motors, Wheaties or Cheerios. (1984, 248) The prescience of Marcuse’s analysis has been unwittingly elaborated in the new geography of consumption. In this extensive literature (cf Goss 2004; Leslie 2009), the commodity form is a key factor in how human beings engage with space; a kind of adhering logic. Much of this research excavates what Marcuse foresaw: the entanglement of consumption and production; the false dualism of culture and economy; and the ties between commodification and alienation. A contemporary example is illustrative. The philosopher Robert B. Talisse (2019) argues that in the United States, Liberals and Conservatives not only differ politically, but they physically inhabit separate worlds. First inspired by The Big Sort (Bishop 2009), a look at the way Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities at the neighbourhood and city levels, Talisse documents how political opponents systematically favour different communities, lifestyles, brands, and different home décor. Liberals tend to shop at Target and decorate their homes with art and maps, making purchases that establish their individuality. Conservatives prefer Walmart and Dunkin’ Donuts over Starbucks, decorating their homes with flags and clocks. Consumption patterns point to items that signal social status. Liberals prefer walkable and diverse communities while Conservatives veer towards areas with larger houses and more private land. In effect, these patterns suggest a physical echo chamber, a point highlighted by Talisse. An extractive reading of Marcuse would imagine an environment (physical and mental) where one is immersed with little regard for what is external to it as the new one-​dimensionality. Although the spatialization of echo chambers as a form of one-​dimensionality has not been taken up explicitly, the idea incorporates notions proposed by urbanists. 28

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Richard Sennett (2018) has long expressed the difference that difference makes in his writings on the betrayal of cosmopolitan ideals. Sennett warns of the physical and psychological dangers of retreating to places where people are just like themselves. The fortification of conformity through space is a valuable extension of Marcusean thinking that is all the more poignant in these political times where ‘the other’ is deemed threatening.

Spaces of uncritical rationality The discussion thus far has tracked how conformity maintains its steadfast grip. Prior to transitioning from the abstract ways that dimensionality is flattened into specific contemporary contexts, this section explicates how the development of forces for liberation is stunted through the production of what I term ‘spaces of uncritical rationality’. This extrapolation is anticipated in Marcuse’s 1941 essay ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, where he writes: ‘The coordinated masses do not crave a new order but a larger share in the prevailing one’ (151). This inciting statement may contain some wrong assumptions (for example, it conflates the individual with the masses), but retains kernels of truth. Concretely, these words alert us to how we have, to great degree, abandoned critical rationality in favour of ‘ductility and adjustment’ (1941, 152). Below, I further develop the concept of uncritical rationality, arguing that spatiality is integral to its present-​day function. For Marcuse, the principle of critical rationality is both the source of individual liberation and society’s advancement. Ensconced within it is an oppositional attitude borne of unrestricted liberty of thought and conscience. As such, individualism is defined by autonomous thinking and differentiates rational self-​interest from immediate self-​interest. The individual is less susceptible to the encroachment of external authority under these conditions: The individual, as rational being, was deemed capable of finding these forms by his [sic] own thinking and, once he had acquired freedom of thought, of pursuing the course of action which would actualize them. Society’s task was to grant him such freedom and to remove all restrictions upon his rational course of action. (Marcuse 1941, 140) Critical rationality creates mental space for denial, reflection, and an intolerance for destructive ideas by uncovering the substantive domination in the organization of life. Some of these truths have been preserved under technological rationality but have been significantly eroded by market interests and the process of commodity production. Uncritical rationality broadens Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality by articulating the spatial manifestation of instrumentalism and the relational nature of domination. This heuristic returns our attention to the progressive mathematization of 29

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our life-​worlds through the creation of common frameworks of experience. Rationality now extends into the phenomenological realm. Different aspects of life, heretofore uninterpellated, are ascribed equivalence and exchange value.7 The validity of our surroundings is defined by what is useful with less attention devoted to how use is exercised. It is against this deeper background that the spaces of uncritical rationality are best conceived. An important insight emerges when we consider the pairing of convergence and social impotence. An emblematic example is the merger between business and politics in the capitalist state. After the election of Donald Trump, a group of scholars and public intellectuals at The Brooklyn School for Social Research hosted a podcast on the unification of the political landscape. Commentators noted how unsurprising it is that a businessman is in charge, given that the government is run like a business. What is more, political debate is remarkably akin to a public relations marketing campaign, permeated by business logic. Faculty member and participant Suzanne Schneider went so far as to label the government a ‘neoliberal bros club’ infused with CEOs of major American corporations. The interwoven interests of corporate, military, and political elements of society translates into what Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin calls ‘an agenda that nobody voted for’, a reminder that in 2016 Trump lost by 2.5 million votes, but still became president. The solidification of the power elite (Mills 1956) or the cooptation of democracy by the altogether different regime of technocracy, cannot be penetrated by outrage alone. Marcuse’s reminder is ever pertinent: ‘Rarely has a society been subjected to so much radical criticism, with such wide publicity, with such a high degree of freedom and legitimacy, and never before has such a radical criticism been so easily absorbed, blunted, bought and sold and enjoyed. Here too: futility in freedom!’8 The illusion of bi-​partisanship and political alternatives, which are at root indistinguishable from one another, turn on convergence. But central to our troubles is another spatial construct: geographic unevenness. An extension of Marcuse’s thinking would include an analysis of how mechanisms and practices of inequality stretch through space and place to ‘deliver the goods’ disproportionately to some over others. The differential allocation of resources and value is a socio-​spatial phenomenon. Judith Butler describes life on the margins thusly: ‘the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks … becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (Butler 2009, 25). Prospects for critical thought and opposition must consider the structures maintaining the spaces of uncritical rationality. In the following sections, I elaborate the aforementioned ideas through two examples: a particular form of governance branded as a rupture from the past, and the longer durée of neoliberalism. 30

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What’s old is new again: navigating an American meltdown In an interview with Stuart Jeffries, author of Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016), the interviewer, Sean Illing, commented on former President Trump’s 2016 election as an indictment of our broader culture, nurtured by the instruments of control that the critical theorists worried about. Jeffries elaborated: From the perspective of Critical Theory, Trump is clearly a product of a mass media age.9 The way he speaks and lies and bombards voters –​ this is a way of controlling people, especially people who don’t have a sense of history. I saw the same thing in the months leading up to the Brexit vote … the lying, the fearmongering, the hysteria. (Illing 2019) Although the much-​touted rhetoric of ‘draining the swamp’ was undoubtedly meant to present Trump’s candidacy to the masses as something new –​a kind of anti-​capitalist break from an ‘old’, ‘corrupt’ democracy that served only elites –​a closer examination reveals its failure to represent a substantive rebellion or a ‘revolution in consciousness’ (Illing 2019). Populism, or ‘plain people in rebellion, organizing themselves to go up against the reigning powers’ (Greider 2015), promises deep structural reform in politics and government. Some years on, we now know that the posture of such a shift has resulted in nothing of the sort. Trump and his broad coalition of promoters, who ranged from loyal employees, Fox News television personalities, Republican party operatives who seized the moment to push their own agenda, to white nationalists, succeeded in promoting his brand by emphasizing disunity and fracture within American society. His bluster masked the structural and ideological underpinnings of what Marcuse so long ago had designated ‘the closing of the political universe’ (1964, 19). In the Age of Commodification, Trump’s brand may have been paramount, but billing his ascendance as an aberration or rupture belies continuity hiding in plain historical sight. There is no question that the Trump administration brought great harm. However, its policies and practices unfurled upon the scaffolding of convergence and complicity, both of which have a long history. That legacy, which some commentators and political scientists have seen as overlapping with American authoritarianism (Stenner 2005; Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Taub 2016), was identified decades ago by the Frankfurt School. After the Second World War, academics in Europe and the US set about figuring out how the Nazis, fuelled by such blatantly hate-​filled ideologies, had won widespread support. Many German intellectuals saw clear lines of connection between aspects of society in Germany and the period leading up to McCarythism in the United States. For example, in 1949, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit analysed techniques of psychosocial 31

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deception for political ends on the part of populists, authoritarians, and idealogues. The authors believed that in the 1940s fascist tendencies were as yet underdeveloped, but a time would come when Americans could and would be ‘susceptible to … [the] psychological manipulation’ of a rabble rouser (Löwenthal and Guterman 2021). In 1950, Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues compiled The Authoritarian Personality based on interviews with American subjects. Although the volume was criticized for questionable methodological rigour, its case studies did manage to shock in their portrayals of racism and anti-​democratic sentiments (Ross 2016). The continued relevance and value of critical rationality is its ability to pinpoint how modes of governance accrue the one-​dimensionality of inevitability. Rather than framing the rise of a figure like Trump as a departure with historical precedent, critical rationality urges a dialectical understanding of liberalism. His ascent and the driving forces behind it have implications that extend well beyond a few election cycles. This perspective acknowledges the intersection of liberal democracy, neoliberalism, and yes, even fascism. Liberal democracy has set in place practices of depoliticization nurturing anti-​democratic tendencies. Tracing these out reveals their latency within the contemporary context. Through a Marcusean lens, we are able to see how complicity and alienation operate in the flattening of dimensionality. Although 2016 was annus horribilis in the United States, Right-​wing populist, ethno-​nationalist, and authoritarian platforms gained victory across the globe from Hungary, to Brazil, to India, to the UK Brexit vote. The attack on liberal norms was not confined to electoral politics. Extra-​parliamentary atrocities have included a surge in white supremacy, the corporealization of domination in migrant detention centres, and assaults on secular education, to give just a few examples. However shocking these movements and events might be, reading contemporary politics as a schism easily distinguished from liberalism obfuscates the convergent terrain which enacted current conjunctures. Here, US immigration policy as practised under Trump is instructive. Most of his efforts including, escalating deportations, detention of people awaiting immigration or asylum hearings, prosecuting undocumented migrants with federal crimes and then rapidly deporting them, and detaining children and families, started under the Obama administration (and are likely to continue without significant modification into the foreseeable future). Trump extended the most xenophobic aspects of policy and deliberately fuelled racist and divisive rhetoric (Aronson 2016). A number of scholars in geography have noted the danger in narratives that trumpet a ‘break from liberalism’. This scholarship emphasizes how the rollout of economic liberalization has facilitated dispossession (Blomley 2003; Correia 2013); and the ways in which market logic has been naturalized in every sphere. Casting liberal norms as under attack both denies the anti-​liberal/​irrational tendencies of liberalism and idealizes the US as its archetype (Koch 2017). 32

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What is underplayed is one of the most famous messages of the Frankfurt School: how liberal-​democratic societies move toward fascism. Trump’s half-​baked populism, or what James Martel refers to as the promotion of mythic groupthink, functions through distantiation and the spatialization of alienation. Trumpism as a broader politics is about alienation in material and spatial terms. Crucially, it is also about distance from the centres of power, distance from the American Dream, and distance from elites. But let us not be misled: Trump’s bizarre appeal goes beyond simple class and economic arguments. White, evangelical voters have long endured a sense of estrangement from the prevailing political system. Conservative megadonors thus embraced Trump’s insistence on enacting the agenda of the religious right at the state rather than the federal level10 (Waldman 2017). For others, Trumpism resonated with those who felt that their America had been lost. The socially liberal values of cosmopolitan culture were not only alienating but fraught with messages that other ways of seeing the world were outdated and bigoted (Carney 2019). Trump’s rhetoric acts as a kind of Faraday Cage against displacement for those who feel most threatened. In 1934 Marcuse presciently wrote: ‘The wish to overcome alienation and anxiety can lead to authoritarianism, fascist mythologies awaiting the demoralized.’11 Part of Marcuse’s lasting legacy is an explanation for how populations, in spite of the facts, identify with powerful leaders. In Trump’s case those facts are as follows: an administration that was brimming with former lobbyists and corporate executives, a president who was personally profiting from the presidency, and the use of taxpayer dollars to subsidize Trump’s lavish lifestyle (Reich 2020). Yet, mimesis, or how we internalize the values of the masters by accepting the terms of reality as inevitable, continues to hold sway to a considerable degree.12 Still, it is only in scaling up and intertwining the structural landscape with the prevailing epistemological mode of reason that we understand how the ground was prepared for extant forces to rise. In short, the convergence of political thought revolves around the Left’s embrace of market thinking. Progressives did not become dutiful children of the status quo overnight. The defeat of alternatives to unregulated capitalism took root in the notion of personal responsibility, present from the beginning but today appearing in atrophied form. The intellectual and emotional refusal ‘to go along’ appears increasingly neurotic and impotent (Marcuse 1964, 9) amid what Aronson calls ‘the privatization of hope’. This compelling framework refers to: political, economic, and ideological projects of the past two generations, including the deliberate construction of the consumer economy and then the turn toward neoliberalism. We have not lost all hope over the past generation; there is a maddening profusion of personal hopes. Under attack has been the kind of hope that is social, the motivation 33

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behind movements to make the world freer, more equal, more democratic, and more livable. (Aronson 2016, np) The displacement of expectations and responsibilities to the individual transforms both the singular body and society. This deviation to ‘biographic solutions for systemic contradictions’ (Aronson 2016, np) is relatively recent, becoming de rigeur only in the 1970s. Recall that Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon both embraced the welfare state. On the whole, there was bipartisan support for social safety nets and investment in, rather than withdrawal from, state programmes. Since then, there has been what Aronson calls ‘the desocialization of social pain’ (2016, np), or, in a word, neoliberalism. This mode of reason stretches far beyond economics and seeks to make people less dependent and more willing to take responsibility for themselves. The notion of collective problems and common solutions is one of the first casualties of this form of rationality. Individual well-​being is no longer linked to the well-​being of society. By the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, both Republicans and Democrats had converged on Reagan’s path. Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill was so dedicated to principles of neoliberal self-​help that they were included in the name. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act transformed a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, into block grants, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, effectively giving states more authority over how they spent welfare money. The Act also requires recipients to be employed at least 30 hours per week and prohibits assistance for more than two consecutive years or for more than five years over the course of a lifetime (Nadasen 2016). Carolyn Gallaher (2019) writes: ‘Unlike earlier periods when the two parties debated whether to cut or expand social services, deliberations in the ’90s focused on how much to cut them. Republicans advocated for eliminating programs wholesale, while Democrats countered weakly by supporting limits on the amount and duration of aid.’ Over the past 30 years, there has been ideological agreement on the role for government institutions in our society. That role is significantly different today than it was during the New Deal when government programmes took a bottom-​up approach. Following the Great Depression, resources were provided directly to unemployed workers and banks were restricted from risky investments. In contrast, regulatory policies under neoliberalism pander to Wall Street and the financial sector. For example, during the 2008 financial crisis, credit first went to banks and large corporations under the principle of ‘trickle down’ economics. Instead of lending money to homebuyers and small businesses, banks prioritized themselves. Shockingly, corporations borrowed to buy their own stock, pushing up valuation levels. A lasting result is ever-​increasing economic disparity (Lin and Neely 2020). 34

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Shoring up the financial sector reflects the triumph of individualization. Now, morals and personal responsibility work as an alternative to the social and political. Market mechanisms stand in for traditional institutions and key elements associated with the welfare state. Margaret Thatcher’s famous words continue to echo loudly: ‘there is no such thing as society’.13 The political theorist Wendy Brown understands the Right-​wing’s incursion into the very idea of society as a project that seeks to swap the price system for more collective forms of decision-​making (Brown 2019). Although the story may be a familiar one, Marcuse’s inspiration advises a recollection of the Left’s complicity in the acceptance and spread of the marketization of everything. The slow and steady acquiescence to one-​dimensional political behaviour outlined above awakens us to the link between the general interest and particular vested interests. ‘On this ground, the transcending political forces within society are arrested, and qualitative change appears only as a change from without’ (Marcuse 1964, 49). Returning to Marcuse’s 1934 writings for a moment, he argues that the Nazi fascist state framed itself as having a direct and authentic relationship with supporters. Characterized by decisionism at the top, refusal to adhere to bureaucratic convention and a general disregard for ‘truth’, Marcuse considers fascism to be a stage in capitalist development, rather than a break from it. Trump was, by and large, the outcome of Marcuse’s prediction. My point is not so much to cast Trump as a fascist as to follow Aronson’s (2019) lead in freeing ourselves from ‘the prevailing fixation on Trump himself as the explanation for Trumpism’.14 Nor would I deny the important differences between Obama’s audacity of hope and Trump’s shameless audacity. Nevertheless, to understand the flattening of dimensionality, we must highlight structural factors, money in politics, voter apathy, as well as the processes of convergence and complicity fomenting the landscape of uncritical rationality. This chapter has emphasized how conformity can come to replace brute force as a new form of social control. In particular, I have highlighted how Marcuse’s notion of one-​dimensionality, when spatialized, can attend to contemporary realities. What has been explicated is not unlike Marcuse’s own quest to update Marxian theory. Although a re-​reading of One-​ Dimensional Man reminds us that the historical context in which the book was produced circumscribed both its achievements and its shortcomings, we continue to be surrounded by the triumph of techno-​rationalism and the logic of efficiency. Mind and body are mobilized in support of the status quo, everywhere confining us to the eternal present. By the same token, as a society we tolerate and even encourage the permeation of market instruments into every facet of life. In order to elaborate a distinctively Marcusean geographic perspective, the chapter has advanced the latent spatiality of Marcuse’s best-​known concepts and developed others. Distantiation, convergence, and the role 35

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of complicity, elucidate how socio-​spatial containment unfolds. In tandem with Marcuse’s original concepts, my extrapolation constitutes the flattening of dimensionality evident in uneven geographical development and the displacement of alternatives. Each theoretical concept has been paired with a real-​world example, grounding Marcuse’s abstractions in the everyday. Extending those concepts and examples, critical reason is understood as antithetical to the current mode of rationality. Such a starting point provides an explanatory framework for navigating ‘the spaces of uncritical rationality’. This modality aids in mapping the lopsided distribution of advantage and disadvantage and highlights the obstacles to transformation both in and through space and place. Updating Marcuse’s insights by confronting key themes of neoliberalism and the rise of Trump illuminates anew the prescience of Critical Theory. If this chapter has diagnosed the seemingly immalleable relations of reality, then the following two chapters embark on a project of reconstruction. At its core, Marcusean Critical Theory emphasizes the incorporation of revolutionary politics, pushing us towards different possibilities which negate present-​day power relations. In what follows, I take up the possibilities for radical subjectivity in the quest for liberation. The fractured and contradictory character of capitalism signifies that there are openings, or spaces in between, where resistance can flourish. How and whether these enactments of opposition can prosper is the subject of Chapter 3.

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Mission: Reconstruction In a 1969 letter to Theodor Adorno, Marcuse, wrote: ‘I do believe that there are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis –​ situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself ’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999, 134). Marcuse was referring to the development of the US student movement, but the longer correspondence documents the philosophical tensions between the former colleagues. Over the next eight months, letters exposed deeper fault lines in the two men’s relationship. The protracted communication followed the publication of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, a key text for Adorno’s followers and students who aspired to transform society through the use of Critical Theory. Although a committed Marxist, Adorno rejected Leftist political activism by his own students on several grounds (Freyenhagen 2014). He believed that there was a misconfiguration of critical thought within the movement which required further reflection. A telling event was the series of protests that had taken place in Frankfurt at the Institute of Social Research in December of 1968. Sociology students, largely from the German Socialist Student Alliance (SDS), had boycotted lessons and were protesting university reforms. Adorno and another faculty member, Hans-​Jürgen Krahl, eventually called the police on the student strike, culminating in the arrest of 76 students (Adorno and Marcuse 1999). In a now famous quote symbolizing the gulf between continental Critical Theory and political practice, Adorno purportedly responded to the incident thusly: ‘I proposed a theoretical model for thought. How could I suspect that people would want to realize it with Molotov-​cocktails?’ (Adorno and Marcuse 1999, 118). The Frankfurt School supposedly longed for transcendence. However, a fissure would emerge with Marcuse around the production of a reflexive and critical materialism. At issue was the question as to whether theory should become practice. In contrast to his colleagues who eschewed praxis, Marcuse was committed to the back door becoming the front of the house. He writes in An Essay on Liberation: 37

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[T]‌he struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and turmoil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself. (1969, 25) Key to this passage is ‘negation’, a philosophical tradition which exploits openings and fissures in the pursuit of liberation and freedom. Negation has, of course, taken many forms across different historical periods, therefore the interests of this chapter are deliberately focused. Thus, the aims are threefold: (1) to highlight the reconstructive aspects of Marcuse’s theories, which are neither cohesive nor easily explicated; (2) to elucidate the link between negation and different ways of being-​in-​the-​world; and (3) to contemplate how Marcuse’s own brand of reconstruction (be it immanent critique, negative thinking, or the politics of refusal/​The Great Refusal) are applicable in contemporary context. The premise of both the chapter and Marcuse’s body of work is that alternatives are exigent. Perhaps there has been no greater barometer of our political order’s failures than the 2020 global pandemic. The COVID-​ 19 virus may be a biological threat, but its proliferation exposed our social vulnerabilities as a society. David Harvey notes in a series of podcasts1 that ‘the economic and demographic impacts of the spread of the virus depend upon pre-​existing cracks and vulnerabilities in the hegemonic economic model’. The magnitude of the pandemic is ever more astonishing if we consider the intersection with the poly-​crises that continue from Marcuse’s own time. These crises –​inequality on a global scale; climate change;2 a loss of faith in political institutions; and a culture of violence –​all pose formidable challenges. However, we can perceive glimpses of light flashing through the cracks. In spite of public health concerns, and repressive responses, protests against police brutality and racial inequality found a broader activist body in the midst of the pandemic. Support for #BlackLivesMatter3 around the globe challenged us to project the extent to which our geographical imaginations could go beyond our current reality. Marcuse’s writings following One-​ Dimensional Man concern what lies beyond. In them, he searches for a new subject of radical change. After the publication of his most famous book, Marcuse continued his trademark dialectical method of identifying repression on the one hand, and prospects for emancipation on the other (Kellner 1984). Post 1965, Marcuse supported various positions and tactics devoted to systemic change. At different points, he advocated for militant confrontation politics, eventually 38

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becoming a strong proponent for political education modelled on workers’ councils. In the 1970s, Marcuse championed the politics of a United Front, which led to an adherence to German activist Rudi Dutschke’s Gramscian-​ inspired ‘long march through the institutions’ (Kellner 1984). This strategy involved establishing counter-​institutions but also considered radical change from within, that is, becoming part of the machinery. Although Marcuse’s critics could barely keep up, he remained committed to praxis, all the while attentive to societal contradictions capable of creating new spaces for radical change. In a 1979 interview with Helen Hawkins, Marcuse states his definitions and objectives clearly: “[W]‌hat I mean by Marxist is somebody who still takes Marx’s idea of a socialist society as a free and democratic society seriously. And that is what I’m trying to do. And to find out whether there are any tendencies which point in this direction today.”4 Freedom is about overcoming alienation, which as I demonstrate throughout the book, is fundamentally spatial. In order to resist the status quo, we must transcend historical separations (nature/​culture, self/​other, material/​ representational, and so on) that have worked to disable the preconditions for liberation. Chapter 2 outlined a diagnostic of repression in advanced industrial capitalism, interwoven with updates for contemporary times. This chapter builds on those insights by taking on the reconstructive aspects of Marcuse’s work. Part of Marcuse’s legacy is to synchronously elucidate how deeply the system (for example, capitalism) is broken, while at the same time focusing attention on the dialectics of resistance and transformation. Chapter 3 contemplates radical relational solidarity extrapolated from Marcuse’s writings. The first part of the chapter reviews some of Marcuse’s best-​known concepts, beginning with the preconditions necessary for individual and societal change. This is followed by an excavation of negative thinking and a discussion of Marcuse’s Great Refusal. I then elaborate the preceding theoretical foundations to consider the socio-​spatial political valence of Marcusean concepts through concrete examples such as borders and digital media.

Liberatory imperatives What prospects exist for the concretization of social hope today? Andrew Feenberg recalls that in the 1960s, rather than predict the revolution, Marcuse elaborated ‘the conditions of its possibility’ (Miles 2012, 2). David Cooper, in the introduction to The Dialectics of Liberation explains: ‘If we are to talk of revolution today our talk will be meaningless unless we effect some union between the macro-​social and micro-​social, and between “inner reality” and “outer reality” ’ (Cooper 1968, 2015, 10). A year later, in 1969, Marcuse wrote similarly in An Essay on Liberation: ‘[T]‌he exemplary force, 39

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the ideological power of the external revolution, can come to fruition only if the internal structure and cohesion of the capitalist system begin to disintegrate’ (1969, 82). From these foundations, we garner the necessary conjuncture of an alignment between the inner and the outer, or the objective and the subjective. Although not explicit, this connection espouses a relational understanding; an interdependence that can lead to new ways of living in the world. More specifically, Marcuse’s language regarding the preconditions for liberation provides a theoretically rich way of thinking about socio-​spatial change for three reasons. First, he merges materialist and idealist approaches.5 Materialism does not identify in advance the path forward. The agents of change are formed only in the process itself. For Marcuse –​and this is where elements of idealism appear –​the transformation may contain aspects of the metaphysical, fantasy, and that which has not yet been imagined. Second, where there is oppression there is potential for the development of revolutionary forces. Those who are oppressed6 can provide the subjective conditions (the inner) for radical social change. What is more, the contradictions of capitalism can foment critical consciousness, ‘liberation by forces developing within such a system’ (Marcuse 1968, 175). The third reason remains the most enduring contribution of Marcuse’s work for many philosophers. Contemplating the individual in universal terms is an error of slippage perpetrated by Kant, Hegel, and even Marx.7 As a result, unrevised Marxism fails to reckon with the needs of the subject. For Marcuse: ‘The individual is the first battleground of transformative practice. Marcuse thus does not choose between individual self-​transformation and class activism but suggests that the latter begins with the former’ (Kellner 1984, 327). Marcuse advocates for the subjective element of revolutionary agency while furthering the process of emancipatory struggles based on a fundamentally different relation between humans and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations. From my perspective, this radical critique is, in effect, a re-​scaling of Marxism. Marcuse’s heretofore untapped brand of relational thinking entails yoking together the biographical and historical (that is, the experience of the individual) with apparatuses of dominance without conflating the two. In order to change the system, we must first change ourselves. The distance from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is starkly depicted for the 21st century by the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: [Then Minority Leader and later Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer will take a knee in kente cloth, but he isn’t likely to pass a major reparations bill, the white liberals buying up the works of Ibram X. Kendi aren’t going to abandon private schools or bus their kids to minority neighborhoods. (Douthat 2020) 40

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Douthat’s commentary is eye-​opening because although plucked from a moment in time, the sentiment vocalizes the failure of so-​called liberals and allies to manifest alliance on a deeper level. The experience of the individual can come to be taken seriously as a countervailing power when the seeds of dissent are planted from within. A brief detour to An Essay on Liberation is helpful in this regard: The change itself could occur in a general, unstructured, unorganized and diffused process of disintegration. This process may be sparked by a crisis of the system which would activate the resistance not only against the political but also against the mental repression imposed by the society. … Its insane features, expression of the ever more blatant contradiction between the available resources for liberation and their use for the perpetration of servitude, would undermine the daily routine, the repressive conformity, and rationality required for the continued functioning of society. (Marcuse 1969, 83) For Marcuse, radical social change cannot be separated from praxis, but the relation between theory and practice is always historically mediated. Because transformation is determined by historical conditions, it is not productive to have a trans-​historic theory of revolutionary praxis. However, instead of opting for ‘not knowing what must be done’ (Adorno, quoted in Tischler Visquerra et al 2018, 1624), Marcuse confronts the quest for change both subtly, with the use of immanent critique, and more grandly, in his writings on the power of the negative dialectic and the Great Refusal. I describe each in turn, noting however that immanent critique has appeared throughout other chapters and will be elaborated only briefly here. Marx first referenced what many Marxist and post-​Marxist critical theorists would come to identify as immanent critique in a letter: ‘[I]‌t means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world’ (Marx 1992, 208). An underlying assumption of this form of social critique is that it draws on the unrealized potential inherent in existing social practices. The present social order serves as a basis for critique, yet transformation can transcend the current shape of what is presently before us. According to David Harvey: Provisionally accepting the methodological presuppositions, substantive premises, and truth-​claims of orthodoxy as its own, immanent critique tests the postulates of orthodoxy by the latter’s own standards of proof and accuracy. Upon ‘entering’ the theory, orthodoxy’s premises and assertions are registered and certain strategic contradictions located. These contradictions are then developed according to their own logic, and at some point in this process of internal expansion, the one-​sided 41

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proclamations of orthodoxy collapse as material instances and their contradictions are allowed to develop ‘naturally’. (David Harvey 1990, quoted in Harcourt 2020) Immanent critique is an exercise in dialectical thinking. There is no need to resurrect an opposition between the ‘before’ of alienated society and the ‘after’. It is a relational undertaking which begins with an intervention into the contradictions of the existing society and reconstructs from the present social order.

Positive negativity and Marcuse’s Great Refusal The driving power of dialectics is negativity and thoroughgoing change demands it. Marcuse explains negativity in a 1979 KPBS (National Public Radio) interview: “Negative thinking in the sense that not everything is accepted at face value, that conformity can be a very repressive attitude, and that negative thinking in the form of a critique, a real critique of existing conditions is itself a progressive force or can be a progressive force” (1979b). More expansively, negation is integrally connected to freedom in philosophical thought; the liberating function lies in its recognition as a positive act. In a Note on Dialectics, Marcuse writes that when we begin to deny that the facts are all the facts, and that these same facts do not correspond to concepts imposed by common sense and scientific reason, we can begin the process of truly comprehending and mastering our own alienation. ‘The effort to break the power of facts over the word, and to speak a language which is not the language of those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the facts’ (Marcuse, 1960 [1941]) precipitates what Christian Garland has termed the ‘negation of that which negates us’ (Garland 2013). Quite practically, the praxis of radical opposition entails rejection in thought as well as action. Marcuse asserts the path of our resistance in An Essay on Liberation, worth quoting at length: But these new modes can be indicated only in negative terms because their affirmation is the negation of the prevailing modes of freedom. Thus, economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy, that is, man’s freedom from being determined by economic forces and relationships: freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control –​ the disappearance of politics as a separate branch and function in the societal division of labor. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought after its absorption by mass 42

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communication and indoctrination –​abolition of ‘public opinion’ together with its makers. (1969, 51) The conception of the negative, largely a taboo in geography, re-​centres refusal as opposition and openness. As a result, renunciation does not foreclose possibility, nor does it press too soon for solutions which unwittingly instil the internal inadequacy of the present. Negative thinking takes on new significance in 1968, the year of the Great Refusal, when it moves from an abstract tradition into a lived consciousness of ‘thinking-​against’. Although somewhat elusive, The Great Refusal can be defined as the politicization of the psyche enacted through a total opposition to the social and material mores of consumer capitalist society. The term was inspired by the French writer and poet André Breton who abjured bourgeois society (Kellner 1984). It was to become Marcuse’s own articulation of negation. First appearing as an expression of the politically momentous times in which it was delivered, the Great Refusal has important contemporary political and theoretical implications. The deep turmoil and divisiveness that is facilely, if at times crudely,8 compared to present times, demands the same sort of disavowal today. Political division, racial unrest, climate degradation, economic and social inequality, may be shape-​shifters, but these manifestations remain rooted in our ecosystem of capitalism. As Douglas Kellner has written: [The Great Refusal] seems to be at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary era: refusal of all forms of oppression and domination, relentless criticism of all policies that impact negatively on working people and progressive social programs and militant opposition to any and all acts of aggression against Third World Countries. (Kellner 1990, 22) The Great Refusal, coined on the last pages of One-​Dimensional Man, and developed more fully in An Essay on Liberation, is the escape plan. Always attentive to aesthetics, literature, and the power of mythology, Marcuse holds up Orpheus and Narcissus as images which refuse to accept separation from the libidinous object (or subject) (Jeffries 2016) extending this form of consciousness into ‘the protest against that which is’ (Marcuse 1964, 63). Anti-​behaviour, anti-​images, anti-​language are hallmarks of a critical methodology that reject unnecessary repression in the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom: ‘to live without anxiety’ (Marcuse 1974, 149–​150). Marcuse’s advocacy of revolutionary potential becomes all the more pressing when revolution is not on the immediate agenda. In order to change the structures of our needs, we as a society must practise being able to see through the blinders that society throws over our eyes. If structures remain intractable, then all must be accomplished outside of those edifices. 43

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Although on the surface blunt, Acosta García and Farrell (2019) reaffirm, in the context of the Colombian Embera community’s actions, that refusal is not a counter-​proposition but instead a rejection of the terms of engagement. They go on to elucidate the nuance of the Great Refusal by stating its implications for severing social relations and serving as a means to rearrange new ones. ‘Refusal can take various and unexpected forms, giving many Yeses to alternative paths, including the path of protest in favor’ (2019, 4). What remains glossed over to a degree are the subtleties of scale and connectivity embedded within emancipatory efforts. The rejection of the structure of domination focuses on the material regime but, as Marcuse continually expresses, so too must transformation focus on the cultural and symbolic regime. Thwarting the internalization of false needs, that is, self-​transformation, is intricately connected to antipodal liberation. The interplay of the micro and macro is itself a precondition for a politics of refusal. There is much to take from Marcuse’s ambitious and tangled aspirations for reconstructing an ‘other’ world. The aim is to mine his work for such prospects and unlock/​develop their latent spatiality because, above all, freedom matters are spatial matters.

Openings I: unbordering The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated by the courts and by the police, is not only the voice but also the deed of suppression. This language not only defines and condemns the Enemy, it also creates him. … This linguistic universe, which incorporates the Enemy into the routine of everyday speech, can be transcended only in action. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 1969 Angela Davis writes that Marcuse (in the quote heading this section) was referring to the way Nixon’s rhetoric of law-​and-​order conflated criminals, radicals, and communists in the context of the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba (Davis 2014). Indeed, there is no shortage of instances where the deed of suppression defines the Enemy, but none is more apparent in contemporary times than the Border Industrial Complex. The term refers to the present-​day adaptation of Dwight Eisenhower’s definition of the military-​industrial complex –​that informal alliance between the military and defence industries which together influence public policy (Ledbetter 2011). Scholars and journalists alike have devoted significant attention to what Michael Dear has defined as much more than a wall: ‘In the fortifications’ shadows lie the armies of law enforcement, equipped with state-​of-​the-​art weaponry and advanced surveillance technologies. Behind them lurk an archipelago of detention, prosecution and deportation facilities, all part of 44

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a justice system pressed into service for the “Border Industrial Complex” (BIC)’ (Dear 2015). In Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World, Todd Miller traces border policy over decades to highlight the vested interests involved in the militarization of US borders. Miller brings to the fore the ways in which the border and immigration apparatus is a landscape maintained through bi-​partisanship, bolstered under the previous 25 years of leadership. For example, when Donald Trump took office in 2017, there were already 21,000 Border Patrol agents, 250 immigration detention prisons, 650 miles of border walls and barriers, and unprecedented annual budgets for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (Miller 2019a). Unsurprisingly then, there is a close connection between border security and government.9 Some of the biggest campaign contributors to members of the House Appropriations Committee, the congressional body that regulates expenditures of the federal government, came from border security corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, among others (Miller 2019b). The skein of border security reaches beyond the physical boundary and deep into the US interior and into Mexico and Central America (Walker 2015; 2018). Given the complicity between administrations, policy makers and powerful corporations, the Border Industrial Complex presents a formidable impediment to immigration reform, further entrenching the status quo. Stepping back from the picture of flagrant collusion momentarily, it is worth thinking critically about the epistemological work of bordering and border fortification. This is, after all, the path to refusal. We must first get to the root of what we are seeking to resist. Obviously, there is a huge literature on borders (cf Johnson et al 2011; Wilson 2017; Walker 2018) and so I will emphasize key elements to be understood in order to operationalize effective opposition. To begin with, borders are fundamentally about spatial manipulation; they produce ‘illegality’ and manifold other categories through the external creation of boundary making and the political organization of space. Alex Sager (2020) has argued that border controls are one of the most significant causes of global inequalities, resulting in unequal access to resources. We have come to accept that borders are a ‘natural’ and necessary reality in our political economy. This unquestioned part of our social and political fabric leads to an anaemic concept of borders where we often equate security with securitization (Walker and Winton 2017). To this end, the Border Industrial Complex is often portrayed as a neutral instrument not overtly associated with militarism. Its reach is tolerated in ever wider zones of everyday life (Molotch 2014). Researchers have described the worldwide process of sorting bodies across territorial boundaries as ‘the forever border’ (Longo 2019), a ‘fortifying global border regime’ (Miller 2019b) tied in with violent geographies (De León 2015), and the rise of surveillance and 45

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Big Data (Amoore 2006). Much of what has been written about borders and bordering in recent years has been influenced by poststructuralism (Walker 2018), pulling attention away from borders as the perpetuation of the ‘geographical expression of the contradiction inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital’ (Smith 1991, xiii). Marcuse did not examine the subject of borders as such, but he did treat what might be called ‘unjust geographies’, devoting serious attention to the lengths that the United States would go to in order to protect its interests. He writes in Counterrevolution and Revolt: [N]‌ow, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. To impose its system and order so as to protect its vested interests, the counterrevolution ‘practices the horrors of the Nazi regime’. … Abroad, this means US support of military dictatorships, police states, reactionary governments who maintain the status quo and protect US interests, counterinsurgency and the suppression of national liberation movements, use of the US military in an attempt to police the world and contain Communism, and imperialist destruction of countries who dare to resist the will of the capitalist superpower. (1972, 295) Faced with the perverse power of these architectures of confinement, what tendencies, if any, point towards another direction? The promise of refusal is exemplified in the concepts of open borders and no borders, which, respectively, engage the negative, if not in its full spectrum, then certainly more robustly than the current manifestation of the Border Industrial Complex. Both open borders and no borders negate the contemporary condition of closed and controlled borders; ‘practices of constraining human mobility and creating associated subjectivities’ (Bauder 2014, 77). The case for open borders has been made most convincingly (at least to liberal audiences) by the economist Bryan Caplan. Caplan argues that fewer restrictions would dramatically improve the well-​being of the world, resulting in ‘the rapid elimination of absolute poverty on earth’ (Caplan 2019). The statement is akin to Marcuse’s proposition that we have at our disposal the absolute means to eliminate misery. The argument goes that, if organized differently, our material resources are sufficient to solve the most pressing inequalities we are faced with as a society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a relatively limited literature on open borders in the social sciences. A primary goal of this research has been to call into question laws restricting freedom of movement, with a clear emphasis on the removal of immigration and border policing (Sharma 2003; Burridge 2019). As a normative idea, ‘open borders’ represents resistance to the Western democratic nation-​state bound by territorial borders. 46

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According to the geographer Harald Bauder, the open borders scenario could be interpreted as an ‘ideological legitimation of the acceleration of capital accumulation’ (2014, 80), a kind of reformist middle way, accepting of elements of the status quo, including the large role played by the state. The call for open borders recognizes that traditional thinking is ill-​equipped to tackle issues of ‘global apartheid’ and other forms of exclusion, reflecting only the beginnings of an ‘anti’ dialogue confronting borders. Ultimately, it is a ‘no borders’ framing which brings forth the more forceful tradition of Critical Theory, that of refusal. Marcuse would likely consider the ontologies underlying the ‘no border’ worldview as praxis towards the conquest of immediate familiarity. The concept of no border does not rebel against one border or another but against the ‘border’ itself. In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse writes about the political potency of rejection in relation to art, but that strategy is just as applicable in the case of borders. In this instance, it is the traditional meaning or the ‘border-​form’ of borders, which must be refused. The deeply rooted nature of negation would oppose how borders are enlisted in the formation of oppression and ‘reveal the moral and material flaws of the world in which we live’ (Carens 2000, 643 quoted in Bauder 2014). True to a Marcusean perspective, the no-​border project10 at once refuses and reconstructs in its emphasis on alternative forms of citizenship (constituted through collective practices) beyond the nation-​state. Under the no-​border rubric, no one is illegal; the constructed political subject identities of migrant, refugee, and so on, are denied in an attempt to carve out spaces outside of and beyond state power. Authors such as Natasha King and Harsha Walia, in their respective books, No Borders (2016) and Undoing Border Imperialism, (2013) write from the standpoint of those experiencing the domination of the border. King in particular, homes in on the everyday politics that never declares itself publicly, eventually coming to the realization that the activism associated with this philosophy need not be intentional in order to be effective. In the face of domination, open borders and no borders reflect an entry point in their refusal to go along with unjust geographies. Writing in the era of Civil Rights demonstrations, Marcuse held out hope that negation would come to be embodied by ‘the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders’ (Aronson 2014, np). Today, we see traces of a Marcusean impulse in the multi-​dimensional nature of the Central American migrant caravans travelling northward towards the US–​Mexico border. The caravans received widespread attention in 2018 when nearly 7,000 immigrants precipitated the US Administration’s plans to deploy troops to the US southern border (The Washington Post 2018). However, they have a longer history rooted in the Roman Catholic tradition of re-​enacting the Stations of the Cross, adapted secularly in the 1980s when Guatemala and El Salvador waged civil wars and members formed to travel north in order to apply for asylum in the 47

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United States (Thornton 2019). Early on, caravans consisted of mothers of disappeared migrants or smaller groups whose journey would begin every spring during Holy Week in hopes of symbolically bringing attention to the plight of Central American migrants (Frank-V ​ itale, 2018). Scholars have noted that these first iterations of the caravans helped to propel the Sanctuary Movement in the United States, a religious and political movement in response to US immigration policies which made obtaining asylum difficult for Central Americans (Perla and Coutin 2009). For the last 15 years, organizations such as Pueblos Sin Fronteras (Villages Without Borders) have been accompanying and organizing migrants in caravans across Mexico with the assumption that there is safety in numbers (Wurtz, 2020). Although cross-​border solidarity has been an animating factor from the beginning, the participation of transnational actors has caused some commentators to question the autochthonous, ‘organic’ nature of the caravans. Others have challenged the authenticity of their membership. Certainly, these groups have at various times been infiltrated by bad actors and intermittently plagued by misinformation (Correa-​Cabrera and Nava 2011). Nevertheless, such mobilities should be considered as both a prolonged riposte to longer standing crises and as the embodiment of opposition. Undeniably, the conditions that many in the migrant caravan are fleeing are deplorable. Tragically, many end up facing further hardship en route elsewhere, encountering hostile environments at their eventual destinations (Brigden 2018). In spite of such outcomes, the migrant caravans have disrupted the strict clock of security at different junctures, if only momentarily, by turning who is waiting on its head. In November 2018, 5,600 military troops were deployed inside the United States along the south-​west border and ordered to wait for the migrant caravan (Gibbons-​Neff and Cooper 2018). Later, in October of 2020, Guatemalan officials found themselves scrambling to suspend constitutional rights in certain provinces while waiting for a caravan of Hondurans to pass through (Perez 2020). This sudden if fleeting ‘script flipping’, in this case when waiting and delay were propagated by unexpected actors, exposes the time schedules and predictive, calculative temporal logics through which mobility is managed. As significant are the multiple temporalities bound up with the everyday transgressions enacted by the migrants themselves. Each footstep undertaken reflects a plurality of actualization and promise, a politics of hope accomplished through the temporal work of coordination, solidarity, and juxtaposition. Although those travelling in the caravan are often seeking asylum and may not always see themselves as taking a political stance, the migrant caravan is an iteration of praxis thwarting both the materiality and theoretical abstraction of the border; a direct action borne of necessity. Existential threats such as climate change are felt exponentially in agriculturally dependent regions, a legacy largely indebted to US involvement in the region. The externalization 48

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of border security ensures the journey is fraught with checkpoints, dangerous routes, and illicit actors.11 If we are paying attention, we can see the roots/​ routes of geopolitics in the weaving together of places through footsteps. The migrant caravans are transforming movement into legibility, reminding the world that the violence and insecurity they are fleeing are the residual effects of US-​backed wars in Central America. The everyday transgressions of those enacting Refusal evince a desire for self-​actualization at all costs. In the process a struggle emerges against a transnational regime seeking to impose borders and inequalities are made visible at multiple scales. Refusal and negation both in concept (open borders/​no borders) and in action (the migrant caravan) force a reckoning with how borders become mythic violence exposing the fallacy of their ontological basis.

Openings II: #TwitterPolitics Equally suited to the Marcusean praxis of Refusal is the rapidly changing realm of technology. Marcuse devoted much of his academic life to studying the history of technology, a theme covered in Chapter 2 of this book. His understanding centres on how the mastery and transformation of nature extends into its own rationality, upholding an entire system of domination. However, in true dialectical fashion, the ensuing technological rationality is open to, and indeed creates, the conditions for transformation. Marcuse took technology to be a social process which, on its own, possesses no inherently regressive or progressive function. Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil. … Technology is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination. (1941, 139; 138) The neutrality of technique (and by extension technology) allows for a multiplicity of possibilities including a resistance to hegemony. By the same token, technology carries with it the potential to blunt ‘the chance of the alternatives’ (part three of One-​Dimensional Man), a new concept of reason longing for the recovery of a two-​dimensional universe. Christian Fuchs (2017) has updated these contradictory tendencies for the era of digital capitalism. He warns against the facile narrative that users of technology always subvert its dominant purpose. Fuchs writes that networked digital technologies create new forms of commodification and exploitation but are, nonetheless, an important arena of class struggle containing features that resist commodification. It is easy to imagine that Marcuse would 49

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have had a field day with the advent of social media. In this section, I am interested in pairing the inherent antagonism of dialectical thinking with a spatial sensibility to situate Twitter, arguably the most political of digital platforms, as an agentic force in contemporary context. In an interview with The New York Times podcast ‘The Daily’ in August of 2020, Twitter’s then CEO, Jack Dorsey is asked a series of ‘instrumental’ questions. The host of the show probes Twitter’s founder about the purposes of the social media platform, the plans involved in its conception, and whether Dorsey believes he is one of the most powerful people on earth. Unsurprisingly, Dorsey responds in the negative to the last question, elaborating in the following way: ‘If it’s [whether I am the most powerful person on earth] a reference to the power that Twitter has, I think that power is ultimately in the hands of the people that use it every single day. Everything that has made Twitter powerful has come from the people using it. The people really push the direction of where the service goes, and what it is and what it wants to be. It wasn’t something we invented, it was something we discovered. We kept pulling the thread on it. We didn’t have any specific intent around what it should be or what it shouldn’t be.’ Dorsey covers a lot of ground in the conversation, reflecting on some of the mistakes associated with having incentivized particular aspects of the technology early on. He ultimately resists the interviewer’s efforts at decisive categorization, insisting that ‘there are multiple Twitters happening in parallel all the time’. The multi-​faceted nature of Twitter is precisely what imbues it with power. As a technology it can be deployed distinctively by different users. For one group, it may function as a tool of virtue signalling, for another it may be a watch dog where institutions have failed. Zizi Papacharissi (2015) writes that social media can make people feel engaged, re-​animating them about what it means to be political. In connecting our stories, we invariably feel closer to some and more distant to others. Enlisting the Marcusean tenets treated in this chapter can endow Twitter with the capacity to disturb and question instruments of political closure. In this way, Twitter holds the potential to be a force for transformation. A well-​known example of digital activism is the anti-​austerity Indignados movement that emerged in Spain in 2011. In response to economic crisis, bloggers and online activists declared ‘Real democracy now! We are not merchandise for bankers and politicians’, a manifesto calling for demonstrations (Anduiza et al 2014). Thousands would heed the call on 15 May, lending the movement its shortened moniker 15-​M. The culminating event reverberated across Spain’s borders to inspire solidarity and political 50

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action, planting the seed for the Occupy Movement (Castañeda 2012), but significant groundwork had been laid prior to that day. At its inception, Indignados relied on the appropriation of multiple digital media platforms to create and disseminate content. Similar to the Arab Spring, 15-​M refined previous mobilization tactics such as Movement for the Right to Housing (2006) and relied on digitized decentralized coordination tactics. In addition to utilizing opensource software and advocating for technological infrastructure sovereignty, activists produced a website, an alternative social media platform, and more traditional communication materials, such as printed newspapers (Fuster Morell 2012). Emiliano Treré (2018) has written that one of the most effective strategies pursued by the Indignados was the creation of trending topics on Twitter. Internal communication tools were used to generate successful hashtags (for example, #SpanishRevolution) in order to build a protest narrative which would gain traction rapidly. The movement’s mastery of viral politics is impressive in its own right, manifesting a ‘radical media education’ (Coslado 2015, quoted in Treré 2018), and acting ‘as a techvanguard that applied their tech expertise not only for the creation of radical alternative media, but above all for the appropriation and cyber-​material détournement12 (Galis and Neumayer 2016) of corporate social media’ (Treré 2018, 376). Indignados has been described by scholars and activists alike as the epitome of technopolitics, wherein the technology itself becomes a dynamic site of struggle. Here, technological knowledge is used for radical political ends. Although resonant throughout, one of the places the Marcusean moment bubbles to the surface is in the second part of the protest slogan –​‘We are not merchandise for bankers and politicians’ –​which reflects the movement’s non-​instrumental stance. Through technopolitical practices, everyday people refuse the continued privileging of the elite against the backdrop of deteriorating living conditions, government cutbacks, and sky-​rocketing unemployment rates (Anduiza et al 2014). Online collective action (and resultant offline engagement) was effectively a refusal of the economic and political status quo. Twitter is the medium for breaking historical patterns of tyranny, networking its way to future revolutions. In the process, the platform is exposed as a fundamentally spatial technology which exudes space in myriad ways. As my colleague and I have argued elsewhere, Twitter engenders spatial communities through the enactment of horizontal linkages; ‘a pollinator which contains or carries exogenous ‘material’ re-​mapping zones of contact’ (Walker and Frimpong Boamah 2020, 3). Another site of transformative potential is in the digital practice known collectively as Black Twitter. However, its significance is not straightforward. According to media scholar André Brock (2018), Black Twitter uses cultural referents and discourse conventions drawn from African American culture to narrate identity and structures of everyday life. It can be playful (Tully 51

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and Ekdale 2014) or run the risk of reproducing stereotypes (Sharma 2013), yet also reflect implicit and explicit political action (Mpofu 2019). Meredith Clark, an early scholar to name the phenomenon, defines Black Twitter as a network of culturally connected communicators using the platform to draw attention to issues of concern to black communities. It’s the culture that we grew up with. It’s the culture that we experienced in our lives and school, in the workplace, with entertainment –​and you see conversations coalesce around specific cultural moments.13 In her research, Clark positions Black Twitter as Refusal; a source of digital counter-​narrative to mainstream depictions of black people. She explains that the platform is a real-​time way ‘to speak back to depictions and to really offer an alternative way of seeing black lived experiences’.14 In a more overtly political example, Marc Hill (2018), focusing on the post-​Ferguson Missouri protests and reactions, examines Black Twitter as a ‘digital counter-​public’ that contests the erasure of marginalized groups within the Black community. In his rich intervention, he documents how surveillance technologies used to criminalize Blackness are now repurposed to resist techniques of state power though ‘new surveillances’. The platform becomes a mechanism to surveil and document abuses by the powerful. Black Twitter, facilitated by the algorithmic proximity that comes with the production of new connectivities, seeks to dismantle damaging hegemonic representations. A host of other oppositional cultural and political movements have gained momentum via Twitter. The power of the #MeToo movement,15 the social media sensation that shed light on widespread sexism and sexual abuse, became both a rallying call for solidarity and a nodal point for communication. Moira Donegan (2018) writes about how #MeToo revealed cracks and fissures in the feminist movement around issues of individualism and self-​sufficiency and the collective mentality of #MeToo. Although some critics derided the movement as ‘Twitter feminism’, giving the impression that actions lacked depth or were an effect of social media-​ obsessed millennials, Donegan believes it to be much more. She argues that #MeToo is focused on community and relationality (and notably runs contra to capitalist thinking where personal responsibility trumps all else), making it somewhat incompatible with mainstream feminism. #MeToo is both a social movement and a personal gesture that identifies one woman’s suffering as women’s suffering. Solidarity emerges in the claim that all women have been harmed by the forces of sexism. Networked clusters of people coalesce, and messages/​narratives are amplified exponentially via Twitter. A negation of silent victimhood is an important aspect of #MeToo, as is the refusal to allow powerful perpetrators to get away with criminal behaviour. In this case, Twitter politics resulted in concrete action offline. 52

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One example is that of states banning nondisclosure agreements that cover sexual harassment (Perman 2018). It is not just the medium that espouses Refusal but also the method. This can be seen in the practice of ‘shitposting’, a political and aesthetic technique deliberately aimed at undermining and disparaging particular causes. Shitposting consists of the production of lo-​fi montage memes suggesting disdain for mass-​produced images and mainstream media depictions. Watson (2019b) describes its countercultural value: The leftist shitpost meme is a series of 0s and 1s fired through internet cable or across wireless networks and assembled upon a screen via a technological process that directly links to the data economy. Yet all the while it appears to transcend the stifling conditions of capital through its refusal to play along with the injunction to pump out ever better, ever slicker products. These outrageously poor contributions, which may include spam, jokes that are not funny, and illogical conclusions, are meant to hijack dominant dialogues and are considered especially powerful when applied to politics.16 To ask a most obvious question, what might Marcuse have theorized about Twitter? Would he consider the medium a form of Refusal? A negation of capitalist society? Or would he look upon it as a frivolous and fleeting example of how opposition is digested into entertainment, similar to what Fredric Jameson in Marxism and Form describes as ‘assimilation of revolt … the disappearance of the negative in the abundant society of postindustrial capitalism’ (Jameson 1974, 110)? Given Marcuse’s optimism and his penchant for dialectical thinking, these technologies of viral reproduction are likely to be taken as tools for detonating the present moment out of complacency while concurrently posing great risks to society. The politically progressive uses of Twitter can just as easily coevolve with processes promoting domination, alienation, and the extension of consumer capitalism (Best and Kellner 2001). As Fuchs rightly points out, communicative power within stratified societies tends ‘to be asymmetrically distributed, which puts alternative noncommercial uses and designs of technology within capitalist society at a disadvantage’ (2017, 254). At its most extreme, Twitter can be (and on occasion already has been) weaponized –​metastasizing into a powerful vector of disinformation. These ‘darker’ elements of the social media platform blunt what Marcuse saw as ‘the chance of the alternatives’. As I write this, there have been a series of glossy documentaries and ‘tell-​ alls’ from tech-​insiders on some of the more egregious practices of Big Tech, ruminating on how platforms that were meant to bring people together are now tearing us apart.17 Investigative reporters have uncovered a plethora of nefarious linkages with social media including ties to military defence 53

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contractors (Glaser 2020), and the use of disinformation campaigns (Conger 2020). In a well-​publicized example, Russia’s Internet Research Agency spread fake news via a sustained, carefully coordinated Twitter campaign, an archive eventually released by the platform in 2017. The company’s data showed that the tweets were ‘actively working to undermine’ healthy discourse (Harrison 2019). Scholars like Margaret Roberts (2018) have examined how the Chinese government uses ‘flooding techniques’ to curate domestic stability. Rather than outright censorship, they plant public debate with distraction and counter-​arguments, making it harder for opposition to accrue and coalesce. Others have focused on political astroturfing, propaganda-​driven disinformation campaigns propagated by powerful actors which mimic grassroots activity. On these Twitter accounts participants pose as ordinary citizens acting independently. These strategic agendas have been shown to influence electoral outcomes and political behaviour (Keller et al 2020). Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, paints a bleak picture: ‘It seems undeniable that social media must bear some of the blame for the descent into neo-​fascism’ (2019, 35). Truth and politics have always had a strained and uneasy relationship. From this vantage point, social media seems to have complicated that connection further. As Samantha Rose Hill writes in reference to Hannah Arendt: ‘Truth is always expressed in terms of proximity, distance and nearness; we approach and depart from truth; “come close to it” or say that “nothing is further away from it.” ’ (Hill 2020). For Marcuse, the deepening of technological rationalities that continue to reconfigure our common understandings are subject to ever more distortions when these technologies seek to destabilize, monetize, quantify, and capitalize every aspect of human life. Yet, the uses of technology and technology itself are not pre-​ordained. These same technologies can form the basis of a revitalized public square accelerating spatio-​temporal solidarities previously unimaginable. In this chapter, I have followed Marcuse’s own lead, as put forth near the conclusion of One-​Dimensional Man, and suggested that one-​dimensionality is not total. Instead, the preceding sections have explored the reconstructive openings extrapolated from Marcuse’s writings by probing the unrealized relationality of his abstract theories of negation. The promise of solidarity more clearly emerges when Refusal, in its many manifestations, becomes spatialized. The contemporary examples of borders and Twitter highlight the renewed validity of Marcusean concepts. Although the examples are specific to our own time, assessing the role of diverse technological movements and their possibilities for progressive social change and new modes of social control is part of a Marcusean legacy. In detailing the form and function of these mobilizations and technologies, I gauge how they confront the existent, the accepted, and the given. 54

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Ultimately, their material and political composition along with their anti-​ power stance attack the tentacles of repression through a relational solidarity. However, only time will tell if these forces will leave the overall political body intact. Capitalism thrives on distance and separation; driving the atomization of every sphere of life. I expect that Marx and Marcuse knew this all too well, although neither expressed capitalism’s dependence in explicitly spatial terms. The recognition of the relational nature of oppression, itself a geographical undertaking, is integral to liberation from the status quo.

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Topologies of the Right Here, Not Yet, and Over They saw that idea made real right here in Selma, Alabama. They saw that idea manifest itself here in America. … We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won. We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth. ‘We are capable of bearing a great burden,’ James Baldwin once wrote, ‘once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is’. Barack Obama, Commemoration Address, 2015 When truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as utopia. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, 1968c [1937] During these tumultuous political times, President Obama’s March 2015 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches offers a sober assessment of race relations and perhaps, ironically, a sense of hope. His language conveys the spirit of patriotism, as presidential speeches tend to do, but his remarks also celebrate the need to be self-​critical in the ongoing quest to remake the nation. The gains of the era were real, Obama said, yet we should be wary that the work is now complete. The first quote contains within it a connection to Herbert Marcuse’s concept of utopia. The words resonate with Marcuse’s political philosophy because they suggest a plurality of latency, actualization, and promise necessary for the achievement of the literal meaning of utopia, that of ‘good place’.

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The second quote, slightly more dour, bears the imprint of Ernst Bloch and Karl Marx in its implicit reference to existing and emergent tendencies laced with potential but subverted by objective and subjective conditions. Marcuse was heavily influenced by Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1986 [1885]), particularly the idea that the process of attaining utopia is a self-​generating one rather than a pre-​existing ideal state to strive for. The three-​dimensional temporality of Bloch’s ‘concrete utopia’ fits well with dialectics, the methodology of Marxism. It urges an analysis of the past and the present in the move towards a liberated future. Marcuse’s connection to utopia, exhibited in his unwavering commitment to the possibility of a better future, sets him apart from other Frankfurt School thinkers. Never content with pure abstraction yet always reticent of instrumentalist designs, he goes so far as to outline the contours of a non-​repressive society. Integral to resisting the oppressive forces within capitalism –​and along the way transforming ourselves from within –​is what he calls a new sensibility. The idea is, in some sense, an accumulation of many of Marcuse’s most poignant critiques all rolled into one. A new sensibility would include the introduction of non-​alienated labour, the breakdown of the binary between work and play, open sexuality, and the privileging of freedom and happiness. These elements coalesce in a transformed instinctual energy, or sensibility, ending the incompatibility between reason and gratification; overcoming the conflict between the pleasure principle and reality. A philosophical consistency within Marcuse’s work is the co-​existence of deconstructive and reconstructive forces within society. Portions of this book, and in particular Chapter 2, have emphasized the former to highlight the role of illusion and complicity. I argue that illusion and complicity are enlisted in the containment of social change, preventing the retrieval of a critical revolutionary subjectivity. This chapter continues the tone set in Chapter 3. Here, the aim is the projection of a path forward, a loosely constructed blueprint through which complacency can be undermined. If the whole book has been about grounding and spatializing Marcuse’s work, the aim of what follows is to show how utopia is not just aspirational but is at once an end point, a beginning point, and everything in between. Chapter 4 sets out Marcuse’s utopia as a provocative theoretical and material formation operating in various overlapping registers. Critical theorists (see, for example, Lefebvre 1991; Benhabib 1986) have too often narrated utopia as out of reach entirely or useful until the point of translation.1 In contrast, the approach elaborated in this ­chapter –​what I call a triadic topology –​translates Marcuse’s utopia as right here, not yet, and over. Because geographers have rarely engaged directly with Marcuse, the topological possibilities have remained unrealized. Topology, with its language of folding and openness, jolts us out of the ‘is’ into multiple planes of plenitude. Read in this way, utopia is 57

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at once a powerful instrument of indictment, an antidote to rationality, and an onto-​epistemology that explodes spatio-​temporal boundaries. While this may at first seem to be a complicated assertion, it is in fact quite direct. I am simply saying, with the help of Marcuse, that utopia is not a singularly stable entity nor is it an ideal out of reach. Rather it is a process comprised of simultaneity which swaps ‘givenness’ for different modes of relations and being-​in-​the-​world. The infusion of spatio-​temporal plurality is precisely what imbues utopia with power; at times translating into elusiveness and in other instances appearing right before us to combat pessimism and defeatism. What is more, the struggle for the attainment of utopia, provoking the possibility of its obsolescence, has an important political dimension. Marcuse’s yearning for an emancipated society is an ever-​present concern across his works but, quite famously, he has been critiqued for not engaging in the kind of empirical work that the Frankfurt School envisioned (Jay 1996). In order to concretize Marcuse’s abstractions and consider how we can read and think about his work at this historical juncture, I present three provocations of a triadic topology. This chapter is aimed at audiences who are both familiar with and new to Marcuse. The first part traces the historical foundations of Marcuse’s concept of utopia, anchoring its context and providing definitions of relevant terms. Incidentally then, the chapter also serves as a reference for some of his most important writings on the subject. The second part explores the possibilities of the right here, not yet, and over. This is the triad that drives us towards multi-​dimensional thinking, while retaining plausibility within the context of our 21st-​century reality.

The foundations of Marcuse’s utopia This section traces the genealogy of utopia across Marcuse’s thought. Marcuse’s brand of utopian socialism is a patchwork of influences, the most significant of which are described here. A sustained expression of the utopian element appears in Eros and Civilization (1955). In the first half of that book, Marcuse explains why repression prevails and in the second half he develops a theory of liberation. Kellner writes in Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism: he sought a new ontological foundation for reason and revolution in nature that would obliterate ontological dualisms between nature and history, the individual and society, and the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’. Such a foundation he discovered in Freud’s instinct theory and in Schiller’s merging of the senses and reason which overcame the antagonism postulated by Kant and others. (1984, 179)

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In Eros and Civilization and later in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse’s writings are marked by the rejection of the alienated world through a fusion of philosophy, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. There is some similarity in Eros and Civilization with Marcuse’s earlier tactic of providing important complements and correctives to the work of leading theorists. Early on this involved an application of Heidegger (who established the significance of time in relation to the individual human being) to conventional Marxism. In the 1950s Marcuse sets out to amend the missing themes of Marxism by utilizing and breaking with Sigmund Freud. His strategy is to focus on the individual, always with attentiveness to the specificity and potentialities of the human experience, while remaining true to Marx. In this impressive achievement, Marcuse is operating in the recursive interstices of the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. The opening of Eros and Civilization interrogates the accepted wisdom that civilization is founded upon a repression of the instinctual structure necessary to satisfy needs. Instead, Marcuse suggests that the principle of civilization is the result of a specific historical organization of human existence. In dislodging the naturalized interrelation between freedom and repression by reconceptualizing the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Marcuse projects modifications to Freud. Not only do the accomplishments of repressive civilization contain the preconditions for the abolition of repression, but the recognition that civilization is produced within particular historical contexts allows for ‘a non-​repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man [sic] and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations’ (1955, 5). Before we can understand Marcuse’s re-​calibration of grand Freudian narratives of civilization and how these concepts are modified under conditions of advanced industrial capitalism, let us revisit briefly the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Freud’s interpretation of the mental apparatus exists largely in terms of its repression. The pleasure principle, which more or less corresponds to the unconscious, must be truncated in conformity with the reality principle, akin to the conscious. This change requires a shift in the governing value system. So, immediate satisfaction is transformed into delayed satisfaction; pleasure into the restraint of pleasure; joy moves into toil; receptiveness becomes productiveness; and the absence of repression translates into security. In the Freudian tradition, the ensuing renunciation and restraint is conceived in positive terms. The reality principle, equivalent to the subordination of sensuousness to reason, is essential to the functioning of an immutable society with a capital ‘S’. For Marcuse, however, the replacement of the pleasure principle with the reality principle is traumatic, because it signifies a division of the mind which henceforth will shape its development. He writes in Eros and Civilization:

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The reality principle enforces not only a change in the form and timing of pleasure but in its very substance. The adjustment of pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibility with the established societal norms, and relations and by that token, implies transubstantiation of pleasure itself. (1955, 13) Marcuse goes on to describe subsequent ontological ramifications of adjustments to the reality principle: Thus conditioned, this part of the mind obtains the monopoly of interpreting, manipulating and altering reality –​of governing remembrance and oblivion, even of defining what reality is and how it should be used and altered. … Whereas the ego was formerly guided and driven by the whole of its mental energy, it is now to be guided only by that part of it which conforms to the reality principle. (1955, 141) Torn asunder and subsumed, the result is a conflation of reason and reality. The reality principle, materialized in a system of institutions and passed onto the next generation, now sets the objectives of truth, rationality, norms, and judgement. That which falls outside remains but is considered ‘unrealistic’ or untrue. Marcuse argues that the process is far from neutral, that society’s motive in the modification of the instinctual structure is economic: ‘since it has not means enough to support life for its members without work on their part, it must see to it that the number of these members is restricted and their energies directed away from sexual activities on to their work’ (1955, 16). Put differently, the developed consciousness is circumscribed by the repressive modification or sublimation of freedom and happiness. Marcuse argues that the reality principle takes historically specific forms. Advanced industrial society is characterized by surplus-​repression which Kellner (1984, 163) describes as the restrictions impelled by social domination. Surplus-​repression goes beyond the modifications of the instincts necessary to perpetuate human civilization and functions as a mechanism to internally diminish the pleasure principle. In contemporizing Freud, Marcuse updates the historically contingent form of the reality principle, (that is, the one prevalent under advanced industrial capitalism) as the performance principle. Although Marx is never mentioned in Eros and Civilization, the performance principle is related to Marx’s critique of capitalism and alienation. Under its rule, society is arranged according to the competitive economic performance of its members. Marcuse writes: The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposes 60

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a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social labor now reproduces society on an enlarged scale and under improving conditions. For a long way, the interests of domination and the interests of the whole coincide: the profitable utilization of the productive apparatus fulfills the needs and faculties of individuals. For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men [sic] do not live their own lives but perform pre-​established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienation. (1955, 45) The detriment of the performance principle lies in its reductive functionalism. The subsequent loss of understanding of significant aspects of the lifeworld (Feenberg and Leiss 2007) means that the performance principle is ill-​disposed towards the senses, valuing instead profit, efficiency, and the internalization of instrumental rationality. Introjection, or the process through which domination is embodied and rationalized (further developed in One-​Dimensional Man) is an effective Freudian explanation of how capitalism maintains itself. The concept helps to explain the evacuation of critical revolutionary subjectivity through the maintenance of the status quo. Marcuse’s dialectical roots implore a mild optimism however, because the present contains within it the seeds of its own undoing. Freedom from the oppression of the performance principle is possible. There are, to be sure, cracks in the system. This statement requires elaboration. A premise within Marcuse’s extrapolation of Freud is the ‘present-​ness’ of the reality principle. By that I mean to signal the restraint placed upon the cognitive function of memory; or an ontological confinement of reality to the ‘right here’. While at first this seems limiting, opportunity lies beneath in the psychoanalytic liberation of memory. In other words, the unconscious retains the motivations of the conquered pleasure principle. To put it in Marcusean terms: ‘Regression assumes a progressive function. The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present’ (1955, 19). The oscillation between the (loosely defined) conscious and subconscious connotes the need to continually re-​establish the reality principle, indicating the incompleteness of its triumph. Marcuse uses one mode of thought in particular, that of phantasy (imagination), to illustrate the potential for overturning the mental apparatus that has up to this point been dominated by the reality principle. In a 1937 essay entitled ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, written for the Institute’s Journal for Social Research,2 Marcuse explains: 61

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[phantasy] would point less to the eternal bliss and inner freedom than to the already possible unfolding and fulfillment of needs and wants. In a situation where such a future is a real possibility, phantasy is an important instrument in the task of continually holding the goal up to view. (1968c [1937], 155) The continuity of Marcuse’s thought is evident when later in Eros and Civilization he explains: ‘As a fundamental, independent mental process, phantasy has a truth value of its own, which corresponds to an experience of its own –​namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality’ (1955, 143). Phantasy has fundamental value in that it preserves tendencies of the psyche prior to its organization by objective and subjective conditions. Through abandoning dependence on real objects, we are free to tap into emancipatory potential and imagine the possibilities of pleasure and gratification. In a 1979 interview with National Public Radio,3 Marcuse describes this thinking as an expression of Eros: ‘I think I use the term Eros in agreement with Freud, in a much wider sense. Eros is not identical with sexuality. Sexuality, according to Freud is a partial and local drive, whereas Eros actually activates the entire human organism and the entire human personality. He identified Eros with the life instincts, and I think that is a very good explanation.’ The struggle to produce a new way of feeling based on the restoration of Eros (desire) to its rightful place, alongside rather than subjugated to Logos (reason, the rationality of the universe), is to become one of the central underpinnings of Marcuse’s utopia. The other is the influence of the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch.

The influence of Bloch’s tripartite utopia While Marcuse’s utopian impulse was germinated from the seeds of Marx, Freud, German Idealism, and utopian socialism, the present concern is with crucial resonances between Ernst Bloch’s writings and Marcuse’s utopia. Bloch’s role in Marcuse’s development of utopia is rarely referred to directly. His influence can be detected in Marcuse’s articulation of the struggle for qualitative difference which prefigures a non-​repressive society. It is beyond the scope of this book to fully treat Bloch’s three volume oeuvre The Principle of Hope (1986 [1885]). Leaving that challenge aside, there are four strands of Bloch’s influence worthy of attention which carry forward into Marcuse’s own project. Described throughout this section, they include: a predilection for the concrete over the abstract; militant optimism; the anticipation of the unexpectedly new; and a three-​dimensional temporality. 62

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I will not recount the history of utopian modes of thought except to say that treatments from early works like Plato’s closed republics and Thomas More’s Utopia to more recent scholarship on everyday utopias,4 have embraced both the process and the form of utopia. Bloch too incorporates this duality in his description on the uses of daydreaming, phantasy, and the elusive affective notion of hope. He believes an undefined awareness of need and potentialities awaits us in daydreaming and desiring. Armed with the ‘distant goal of a society without alienation’ (Kellner and O’Hara 1976, 32), Bloch forgoes ‘abstract utopias’ –​compensatory fantasies that make the present tolerable –​in favor of ‘concrete utopias’. Concrete utopia ‘stands on the horizon of every reality; real possibility surrounds the open dialectical tendencies and latencies to the very last’ (Bloch 1986, 223). In plainer English, the society we end up with is the product of the process of getting there. A significant contribution of The Principle of Hope is the chipping away of the stigma Marx had assigned utopia. Although Marx and Engels criticized utopian socialists in the Communist Manifesto, Kellner and O’Hara remind us that the attacks were aimed at certain groups believed to have surrendered their demands for radical change in accommodation to existing conditions. Kellner and O’Hara explain concrete utopia explicitly in relation to Marxism: ‘Concrete utopia does not impatiently leap into an ideal beyond but explores the present situation to discover real possibilities for radical change’ (1976, 32). The concept encompasses immediate goals (a cold current) and the final goal, that of theory and practice (a warm current). For Marcuse and Bloch, the distant and near goals cohere around a revolutionary subjectivity activated towards the struggle for socialism. I would contend that concrete utopia and the second strand of influence, militant optimism, are akin to the ‘right here’ in Marcuse’s triad described in later paragraphs. Aimed at political and revolutionary activity through the recovery of latent possibilities and the transformation of subjective conditions, militant optimism is an epistemological orientation towards the emergent. The emergent is committed to surpassing real material conditions but does not require a transcendental realm outside of material reality. To put it in Bloch’s terms, utopian imagination has a correlate. Bloch’s perspective is explained in the distinction between the cognitively or objectively possible and really possible: Objectively possible is everything whose entry, on the basis of a mere partial-​cognition of its existing conditions, is scientifically to be expected, or at least cannot be discounted. … Whereas really possible is everything whose conditions in the sphere of the object itself are not yet fully assembled; whether because they are still maturing, or above all because new conditions –​though mediated with the existing ones –​arise for the entry of a new Real. (1986, 196) 63

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The Real-​Possible embodies the attitude of militant optimism: ‘And as long as the reality has not become a completely determined one, as long as it possesses still unclosed possibilities, in the shape of new shoots and new spaces for development, then no absolute objection to utopia can be raised by merely factual reality’ (Bloch 1986, 196). The commitment to hope beyond what appears right before us primes us for the unexpectedly new. This third element of influence –​what I term the ‘not yet’ in Marcuse’s topological utopia –​enfolds the anticipatory strains contained within reality itself into an imaginative ontology of the Not-​Yet-​ Conscious. In the preface for Volume One of The Principle of Hope (1986), Plaice et al interpret the Not-​Yet-​Conscious as the preconscious dimension inherent in the past and future, effectively synthesizing Kant’s German Idealism with Marx and Engel’s materialist philosophy. Bloch engages the individual psychological dimension (en route disrupting Freud’s confinement of the unconscious to the past) in tandem with societal expression, the residue of which is eloquently enunciated in the opening lines of Eros and Civilization: ‘This essay employs psychological categories because they have become political categories’ (Marcuse 1955, xi). Permeating Bloch’s philosophy of ‘calling for what is not’ (Kellner and O’Hara 1976, 23) is a three-​dimensional temporality manifest in the categories of Front, Novum and Matter, the fourth influence of Marcuse’s utopia. These concepts are developed at length in Bloch’s work but for our purposes it is sufficient to think of them in terms respectively as, the segment of time where what proceeds is determined; the real possibility of the not-​yet-​known; and the capacity of matter to become manifest. While all three categories are charged with a revolutionary energy, the Novum has been particularly compelling for thinking through a prefigurative politics. This allure is presumably due to how: the essential open-​ness of the world-​process is confirmed by the periodic irruption of the radically new in to the apparently stable. … It is the appearance of the novum, however fleeting or obscured, which negates the resistance to the new perpetrated by modes of static thinking, and it fuels what [Bloch] terms the ‘principle of hope’. (Gardiner 1992, 36) The destination in this dialectical transformation whereby a new social self can materialize is what Bloch terms heimat. The German word is often translated as ‘home’ or ‘homeland’ but has no easy English equivalent. Heimat captures the positive relationship a human being has towards a spatial unit replete with an absence of social alienation and a sense of familiarity not necessarily borne of previous worldly experience.

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If Bloch’s metaphysical classifications seem murky, art can serve as an explanatory vehicle. Bloch believed in the power of art (and religion and philosophy) to bring about metamorphosis in subjective and objective realms. Art is not the imitation of the world but its revelation (1986, xxxii); the process of moving the Not-​Yet-​Conscious into consciousness. Kellner and O’Hara discuss Expressionism in relation to Bloch, arguing that the style operates in terms of portraying what is not. In drawing forth images, there lies a recrimination of the status quo and an incorporation of ‘dream-​content’ infused with revolutionary potential. Such a processual understanding where the interstitial is paramount to conceptualization becomes a useful vehicle for praxis.

Three-​dimensional utopia The question of how freedom and happiness can emerge outside the value framework of capitalism is to occupy many of Marcuse’s writings from 1955 onwards. He proposes an alternative ontology of human life which demands the rejection of the capitalist mode of production. Integral to the non-​repressive culture discussed in Eros and Civilization but further developed until the end of his life, is a consideration of how utopia is consistently thwarted in advanced industrial society. He writes: ‘The relegation of real possibilities to the no-​man’s land of utopia is itself an essential element of the ideology of the performance principle’ (1955, 148). Therefore, utopia’s revival hinges on the reconfiguration of the relationship between instincts and reason, the culmination of which is a new sensibility: The new sensibility has become, by this very token, praxis: it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and turmoil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself. (Marcuse 1969, 25) Rather than a blind utopian vision, Marcuse suggests that the resources for creating a qualitatively better life (akin to, if not equivalent to, a new sensibility) are within reach through the fusion of Logos and Eros. He refers to this fusion as the ‘rationality of gratification’ (Marcuse 1955, 224). Crucial to Marcuse’s utopian longing is the expansion of categories central to the affirmation of life, particularly those of labour and sexuality. For example, he argues that the modern economic concept of labour as

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wage labour has constrained our view of work. In order to retrieve the possibilities of productive human activities beyond the realm of the economic, Marcuse advocates an erotic tendency toward work. Shaped by the pleasure principle, the newly imagined category of work would surpass mere material production and reproduction. Put differently, necessity would become the realm of freedom due to the disintegration of strict binaries between work and play. While there is much more to say about the particulars described above, the main point is that Marcuse’s vision aligns with that of a critical utopia –​a synergistic construct at once rejecting instrumental rationality and revitalizing the emancipatory function of imagination. It is against this framing that I draw out the topologies of utopia in their three interrelated dimensions. The choice of topology is purposeful because it conjures a congeries of association, that is, location, objects in space, and events in space-​time. In human geography, the term has a dense and complicated genealogy, having become an object of analysis in its own right (cf Martin and Secor 2014). An important insight from this literature is that interpretations have diverse histories relying on varying degrees of definitional precision. Topology complicates assumptions about past/​present and distance/​proximity in the elevation of juxtaposition over linearity. Rather than hierarchical formulations –​often deployed through the vocabulary of scale –​topologies conceptualize space-​times as enfolded into one another. The stasis of permanence is replaced with a fluid immanence of structure and being. A useful if well-​worn example is that of topological equivalence where a circle, a triangle, and a square can all be contorted into one another without additions or subtractions to the figures. That a quantified set of surfaces can launch a series of shapes gives rise to considerations of how relations can manifest manifold possibilities. Perhaps less obvious is the epistemological transition of emphasizing transfiguration over stability. Instead of what is, our attention is redirected to the movement into what could be. A Marcusean utopian topology pushes through the promise and reality (themselves related and enfolded into one another) of a world qualitatively different from the current one. A captivating and overlooked aspect of Marcuse’s method of analysis on overcoming repression is its relationality; the horizontal interconnectedness of space and time. In what follows, I suggest that Marcuse’s utopia is a relentlessly transformative mode-​of-​being and mode-​of-​doing relishing subversion, escape, and the importance of becoming. Utopia is not just another kind of place, but a challenge. In this way it resonates deeply with minor theory, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari by the geographer Cindi Katz (1996), to call attention to the conscious refusal of ‘mastery’ or ‘the way things are’. Minor is invoked not in opposition to major, nor is it ‘smaller than’ in any way. The minor strives to change theory and practice through the production of renegade mental and material cartographies. It is 66

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a transformation of the objects and relationships which have been shaped by the organization of the performance principle. Viewed from this perspective, utopia is conceived as oppositional space; a different way of working with material through the legitimation of non-​instrumentality, the affirmation of fantasy, and an anti-​pragmatism which refuses to disguise the future as past.

Utopian topologies I: right here Marcuse championed utopian thought, at times explicitly and at others implicitly. A linchpin of the alternative society he envisaged was the stubborn negation of facts billed as immutable truths. Marcuse categorically rejected narrow matter of fact conceptualizations of what is possible. One of the most powerful achievements of impossibility is the evocation of temporal and spatial delay. The impossible defers realization in that it cannot exist now in this space. Therefore, to understand utopia triadically as right here, not yet, and over is to undermine the mechanism of delay. ‘Right here’ refers to the unrealized potentialities that are lurking in the present, more or less akin to Front in Bloch’s dialectical process. There are a variety of ways to characterize it. For instance, the right here may be construed as the space of dialectical thought whose function it is to break down common sense and the power of facts. ‘The liberating function of negation in philosophical thought depends upon the recognition that the negation is a positive act: that-​which-​is repels that-​which-​is-​not and, in doing so, repels its own real possibilities’.5 The shorter version is that utopian possibilities are inherent in capitalism. So, for example, the forces which have helped produce alienation contain within them capabilities for the elimination of alienated labour. Or, to abstract from the real world: we possess the technical capacity and imagination to create a good society insofar as we have the resources to terminate poverty or reverse the impacts of climate change. Marcuse explains: [M]‌en and women themselves, who do the work in a producing society, would have the responsibility for their work, and would determine what to produce, how to produce, and how to distribute the product. What may have appeared as utopia at the time Marx wrote, is today a very real possibility because we have all the resources to do it. And that is precisely why the entire establishment is mobilized against it. (Marcuse 2004, 160) The function of the right here allows us, by way of negation, to grasp the moment of truth of what is. In an interview conducted in 1968, Marcuse recalls powerful writing on a wall: ‘there is a graffiti which I like very much which goes, “Be realists, demand the impossible.” That is magnificent’ (2004, 113). The graffiti’s rhetorical device evinces the reintegration of 67

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theory and practice by infusing the imaginary into reality, the latter of which is distinct from the established reality, one perpetuated through false needs. The power of the right here –​urging the unveiling of that which is obscured –​lies in the movement or oscillation between the concrete and the abstract. For example, any concept (freedom, society, and so on) is first conceived in thought, an interplay between abstract analysis and synthesis. Abstraction entails movement away from the immediately given, reaching instead for the potential of the given, blocked or distorted under current conditions. Kellner and Pierce distil the retrieval process involved in this vacillation plainly: ‘The universality of the concept contains the message of concretization: the “ought” is implied in the “is” ’ (2011, 170). Thus, right here signifies the impulse to rupture by pointing to the cracks and fissures of the limited perspective of the present and disrupting the fallacy of the inevitability of the status quo. It is the socio-​spatial conquest of immediate familiarity, the back and forth of actualization and imagining, and the exposure of surplus authority in all realms of life. The right here appears in a variety of socio-​spatial formations in everyday life. These multiple enactments contain within them the utopian impulse because they actively reconfigure what is, agitating the status quo. Consider the topic of technology from the standpoint of Marcuse’s process-​oriented utopia. In 1941 Marcuse began his well-​known indictment of technology when he posited that the decision to incorporate technological advances into society transforms what is considered rational. Although he proposes that contemporary society has produced a technological world wherein technology has replaced ontology (Marcuse, 1960), Marcuse never abandons a dialectical approach urging us to acknowledge the liberatory potential of technology in the pursuit of individual fulfilment. He notes in the essay ‘Some Implications on Technology’: ‘Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil’ (1941, 139). Later, in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse describes how the newly configured rationality would result in new sciences and technologies where people would adopt a playful attitude towards ideas and techniques. The Neo-​Frankfurt sociologist, Ben Agger, in his book Texting Toward Utopia (2015), takes up the emancipatory possibilities espoused by Marcuse in his discussion of smartphones. Agger argues that these devices may currently serve to extend the work day or narrow or distract the focus of the user, but other applications and opportunities exist at our fingertips. New connections and realities are molten in our midst and need not been drawn from unreal content of another world. Jameson (2004) has noted that even a ‘no place’ must be put together out of existing images. Given that technology allows for the obliteration of distance and the emergence of horizontal interaction, is it not possible to model a future in the present in which the time and space of social power is reconfigured? 68

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The formulation of alternatives in the right now is codified contemporarily in discussions of Wikipedia, the large internet encyclopaedia. This massive global resource is characterized by voluntary, unpaid contributions, free access, open participation, interactions among contributors, and democratic governance. Prophesied (by some) as a technology of emancipation powered by the ‘electricity of participation’,6 theorists and commentators alike have praised its potential. In his book, The Wealth of Networks (2006, 60), Yochai Benkler discusses how ‘commons-​based peer production’ is indicative of a cooperative enterprise that produces information goods without prices or commands from managers. For Erik Olin Wright (2010), Wikipedia encompasses the anti-​capitalist potential of information technology, privileging an economy animated by social empowerment over one driven purely by profit. Wikipedia is an existing utopia which he defines as ‘ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible way stations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’ (2010, 6). In eschewing the traditional utopias of spatial form and enacting egalitarian visions for a different world, it might seem that the search for utopia is at an end with the surfacing of a material referent. This is, of course, not the case, as all of us who have logged on to the internet and particularly Wikipedia can attest. There are numerous flaws and imperfections including serious concerns about the reliability of entries. Geographers in particular have devoted significant time to researching the uneven production and consumption of Wikipedia (cf Warf 2012). The founder of Wikipedia himself, Jimmy Wales, has spoken about the unintentional ‘lopsided geographies’ produced through the site (Friedman 2016). These stem from issues of access to broadband and extend to the dominance of certain languages over others. In addition, certain users, especially in Africa and Asia, rely more heavily on their phone to make entries than in the countries of the Global North. This further inscribes inequalities around representation because contributing lengthy text with footnotes can be more arduous when using phones versus computers (Friedmann 2015). Apart from those very real issues are the philosophical debates simmering around the ‘commune’. Nicholas Carr writes of the ‘Wikipedian Crackup’ (2016) wherein different sects –​from inclusionists to deletionists and everything in between –​battle it out over the contours and significance of entries. Despite criticisms, Wikipedia retains its function as a utopian force. Digital artefacts always carry the potential to be public goods. At issue is that we live in an age where public goods are provided privately. To paraphrase another economist, the digital economy has agency (Gruen 2017). It is already social and human, replete with everything that this entails. The promise of digitality may be circumscribed by pragmatism, a middle way of partial change built 69

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upon a foundation which remains unquestioned. Subsequently, we may not like the current results. Nevertheless, in Wikipedia’s quest to produce informed e-​citizens and democratize knowledge, we are able to tangibly grasp a different world in the present. Wikipedia is at once a critique of existing hierarchies and a transformational geography opposed to both the exclusivity and the commodification of information. Returning directly to Marcusean analysis: resident within Wikipedia is a weapon against the structure of authority and domination with glimmers of a non-​repressive culture. The promise (perhaps subverted) is the destruction of epistemological subordination related to conventional categories (for example: producer/​ consumer, expert/​novice) which have historically bolstered repressive reason. In dissolving these sites where the performance principle resides, we bring into view new modes of being-​in-​the-​world. The right here is crucial in the scaffolding of oppositional space but it is most powerful as part of a multi-​dimensional plane of interaction. Conceived in this way, the entanglement of the imagined and the material forges connections between things that may appear to have none in the moment. Perhaps these undisclosed linkages are under erasure –​crossed out but legible (a palimpsest of sorts) –​or as yet unknown. Marcuse’s utopian perspective plays subtly with such a multiplicity of possible spaces both in his insistence on the pairing of countervailing forces with radical potentialities and in a vision of a non-​repressive society. The latter is, at root, a transformation in relations through the extirpation of ontological dualisms between the individual and society and the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’. The former can be recognized in the imagination and in the production of art, a point he continually emphasized from ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ (1937) to ‘Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era’ (1998 [1945]), to the ninth chapter of Eros and Civilization, on through the last book he published, The Aesthetic Dimension. The following section excavates the radical potential of the not yet in the mythical nation of Aztlán through the pairing of imagination and artistic production.

Utopia topologies II: the not yet In the previous section, I used the example of Wikipedia to illustrate the latent and untapped possibilities already at hand. Below, I draw on the mythical homeland of the Nahuatl-​speaking peoples, as a tangible instance of how different modes of being (even those not yet in existence) can shape the way that ‘being’ is revealed. Refracted through our topological prism, Aztlán strives to locate aspirations and quintessence in worldly experience; a glimpse of an emergent sensibility just out of reach. In March of 1969, Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales convened a National Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado. The event was to become an 70

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ideological crux for the construction of Chicano identity. The conference formulated a philosophy of cultural nationalism formally encapsulated in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Mexican Americans were to unite and mobilize under the banner of Chicanismo. Many view this as a moment during which the political imagination of Chicano consciousness was crystallized. A powerful preamble to the manifesto, written by the well-​known Chicano poet Alurista, set the tone for the challenges ahead in the psychic struggle for liberation. A central pillar in the three-​part Plan was that nationalism was to be considered ‘a key organizing force’ (Gonzales and Urista 1969) because of its ability to transcend class, religion, politics, and economics. The vehement call for ideological nationalism was followed by a pragmatic list of organizational goals. Most prominent was the call to strive for economic autonomy. Although the blueprint to achieve such a lofty goal did not appear specifically, an emphasis on education relevant to Chicanos, and the maintenance of cultural values were foremost among the instructions. In the manifesto, Chicano activists and their supporters advocated for what they called proposed actions. These included publicizing El Plan, walk-​outs on Mexican Independence Day, and the eventual construction of an independent nation characterized by a separate economy and political system. Under the rubric of organizational goals was the explicit inclusion of artists, writers, and musicians who were deemed integral to political activism. As a result, the doctrine was adopted by many Chicano/​a activists who abandoned individual careers to produce art in service to the community (Gómez-​Quiñones and Vásquez 2014). The late 1960s were a time of renaissance for art related to the movement. Political struggle and self-​determination appeared in visual form across various modalities. Pictorial and graphic practices mapped ancestral territories, documented low-​r ider subculture, and represented the struggles of the immigrant and native-​born Chicano experience (Miner 2014). Here, Chicanos were the generators of culture, finding strength in public art and the vernacular aesthetic known as rasquachismo, the elevation of kitsch espousing an underdog perspective. If, as Adorno said, art redeems what is beyond objective reality (Hellings 2014, 4), then it is at the margins that the system reveals itself. As such, many Chicano activists embraced a politics of difference, rejecting rhetorics of assimilation in favour of an oppositional consciousness (Sandoval 2000). Read in this way, ‘the political advantage in looking at peripheries and extremities is that power is exposed in what it drives from the center of life to the edges, and in what it incites as its own antitheses’ (Cocks 1989, 4). Crucial to Marcuse’s utopia, and for that matter his entire oeuvre, is a re-​evaluation of the classical opposition between individual happiness and social organization. Aztlán is a draft of a theoretical concept beyond 71

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the performance principle, in part because it hinges upon individual autonomy amid hegemonic domination. In other words, philosophy has become concrete through the retrieval of private space or freedom from the established reality. In a lecture on Freud given in 1956 Marcuse says: It is as though the free space which the individual has at his disposal for his psychic processes has been greatly narrowed down; it is no longer possible for something like an individual psyche with its own demands and decisions to develop; the space is occupied by public, social forces. (Kellner 1984, 238) Let us for a moment unfold this proposition through Aztlán’s political project: We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows and by our hearts. Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Further along, El Plan specifically addresses the realm of the aesthetic: We must ensure that our writers, our poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood.7 The intersection of mapping and imagination through the lens of the mythical nation of Aztlán clearly delineated how the status quo had been secured, maintained, and reconciled within the established system(s) but also envisioned an alternative. Discourses, practices, and artefacts sought to imagine what could be. At the heart of Aztlán was a contestation over sovereignty, executed in literature, protest, and visual and performative art. As such, the rejection of state-​sponsored nationalism through a seditious expression of social change enacts a new sensibility, perceiving that which is not yet by displacing what is, that is the status quo. The concrete acting out of the utopian impulse uproots domination in favour of visions of popular sovereignty. Phantasy thereby deploys topological thinking to new ends. The boundary of Aztlán –​an aesthetic dimension where practical reason is suspended –​connotes relations of crossing and transformation. The real existing world is negated, traded in for movements and relations operating under its own laws. The freedom embodied in Aztlán serves as a means of unifying separate levels of existence into a single construct. The right here and 72

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the not yet unite to confront prevailing conditions and limitations signifying a radical ontological politics. The political provocations ensconced within the mythical nation complicate introjection –​the internalization of alienation or the way the ‘outer’ is transposed to the ‘inner’ (for a reminder see Chapter 3). The duality of phantasy and imagination refuses to let go of what can be, while affording a practical apprenticeship for future freedom. An inner transformation is spurred on by the critical function of imaginative space resulting in an autonomous zone unshackled from what we as a society have been predisposed to accept. Aztlán’s promise of oppositional consciousness was fulfilled in its redemption of what lies beyond objective reality. As a political movement meant to be the bearer of revolution, it was less successful. The emergence of a sovereign nation, always hovering within and between the right here and the not yet would perhaps have meant the end of utopia.

Utopian topologies III: over The lure of utopic thinking (elaborated across the right here, the not yet, and now the over) lies in the possibility of emancipation from the status quo but not in the sense of some forward-​pushing motion propelling political beings from here to there –​this is precisely the type of onto-​epistemological thinking this chapter intends to disrupt. Utopia as triadic topology demands the breaking up of linearity, the rupture of progression and sequence. Renewal and transfiguration come through juxtaposition and simultaneity rather than transition from an anterior state. Armed with this comprehension, we are able to disengage from the circular debates of whether utopia can be realized. The inquiry of the viability of realization, rehearsed over the years, misses the premise at hand. Our task instead is to inquire how utopia is always already at play in service to liberation. Its value is not in an arrival to a destination, nor in utopia’s substantive content, but in spatio-​temporal vacillation and the critique of its absence. Utopia’s seeming impossibility is affirmative. On first reading Marcuse’s 1967 essay ‘The End of Utopia’,8 I recall feeling its potency without having the ability to articulate the depth of its meaning. After further reflection it has come to inspire not just the over but the entirety of the triadic topology. There is a famous photograph of Marcuse, hand in the air at a podium, delivering a lecture to a surprisingly large crowd given the academic tenor of the message. In dialectical fashion, Marcuse is referring to the process of turning utopia –​realizable in principle –​into manifest reality. Beginning with the double entendre of that text, I read it here specifically against the argument of this chapter. In the opening paragraphs of his lecture, Marcuse observes: ‘Today any form of the concrete world, of human life, any transformation of the technical 73

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and natural environment is a possibility, and the locus of this possibility is historical.’ And further on: ‘Today we have the capacity to turn the world into hell, and we are well on the way to doing so. We also have the capacity to turn it into the opposite of hell.’ Neither a reference to an impossibly perfect state nor a quiet surrender to existing conditions, the end of utopia instead refers to manifold visons and challenges of genuine freedom. Like most of Marcuse’s writings, there is a complex interplay between positive and negative readings of his proposition. On the negative side: the current state of affairs militates against our ability to grasp potentialities even though we possess all of the resources to transcend the context in which we find ourselves. Sadly, a broad spectrum of realities in advanced industrial society point to the absence of subjective and objective conditions necessary to denounce the world as we know it. Some of these circumstances have been recited in previous chapters but include the identification of the individual with the apparatus and the cooptation of critical truth. Turning again to Marcuse’s words: But in my opinion there is one valid criterion for possible realization, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organization of the forces of production. And, in this sense, I believe, we can today actually speak of an end of utopia. If we look to utopia as a continuation of the now (that is, a linear project), social change remains out of reach. Turning the world into ‘the opposite of hell’ (1970, 62), however, is coincident with, ‘the refutation of those ideas and theories that use the concept of utopia to denounce certain socio-​historical possibilities’ (1970, 63). Marcuse demands that the capitalist mode of production be rejected and that a new human being be produced.9 Breaking with the historical continuum, overcoming philosophy by obliterating the need for Critical Theory, negating what exists (utopia realized), renders it an empty signifier. This total opposition and disarticulation of the ‘is’ renders utopia an unnecessary artefact of the ideology which constructed it in the first place. The paradox of Marcuse’s double meaning might be explained in this way: that there is no power in utopia. With the falling away of the drive towards self-​interest and exploitation, utopia is characterized by the absence of power relations which are now rendered superfluous. Yet, at the same time there exists an indictment that the possibility of achieving utopia is more distant than ever. No longer holding political efficacy, utopia is divested of its power. Previously I have grounded the right here and the not yet in concrete everyday socio-​spatial formations. However, as set forth above, the 74

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cataloguing of utopia’s commonplace existence must be thought alongside its inability to be outlined. Or in Fredric Jameson’s words: ‘it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it’ (2004, 46). Marcuse was often asked to elaborate on the scandal of qualitative difference reflective of a new sensibility. His response: ‘Here I come back to the beatnik and hippie movement. What we have here is quite an interesting phenomenon, namely the simple refusal to take part in the blessings of the “affluent society”. That is in itself one of the qualitative changes of need.’10 And, in line with the explication in this chapter, Marcusean utopic thinking is about difference rather than progress: ‘My objection is only that in no existing society, and surely not in those which call themselves democratic, does democracy exist. What exists is a kind of very limited, illusory form of democracy that is beset with inequalities, while the true conditions of democracy have still to be created.’ So, in this final elaboration, I forgo the pinpointing of examples in order to re-​centre this conceptualization as a genesis.11 Utopia is a slippery construct that is difficult to illuminate in advance of its creation. Once it has found its voice, it disappears. To extend the scope of politics and the political is not to tell utopia how to be, but to stretch its spectre beyond the limits of known forms and common sense functions. Defying example. Striving. Knowing that it can be identified but cannot be located. This is the trace of the triad. The end of utopia returns upon us as a diagnostician. This chapter is at once a less rigid reading of Marcuse that attends to the nuances across his body of work on utopia and a topological reformulation of Marcusean concepts deployed to new ends. I have argued that the concepts of right here, not yet, and over are a dense entanglement of actualization and imagining that must be thought through together. Sketching the development of utopian thinking across Marcuse’s writings provides a rich platform to revive and unfurl the political capacities of the transformative mode-​of-​being and mode-​of-​doing outlined here. Thus, this triadic topology delivers a clearer picture of what Marcuse can contribute to geographic thinking. Against this framing, there are multiple micro insights that we can take forward with us. To the uncritical eye, the right here, not yet, and over appear to actively bring the future into the present. Although not untrue (and not unimportant) that picture holds only under our current onto-​epistemology. Less jejune is how the triad unseats dichotomies of being and becoming by playing subtly with different registers of realism and fantasy. This conception collapses temporality. My intention is to show that an expansive dialectics is not hermetically sealed nor is it as mutually exclusive as some might have us think. As a means of recombining separate levels of existence, the importation of topology into Marcusean readings facilitates a more radically open thought in action. Utopian topologies mean casting away predefined forms that have occupied heretofore separate planes within our conceptual 75

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grid. Regeneration commits to the possibility of new sensibilities in excess of predefined stabilities. By grounding some of Marcuse’s more complex ideas in real-​world examples, my intervention is more than simply an intellectual exercise. Every extension of politics involves an expansion of the world to imagination; the impetus to see something other than what is. To keep utopia in practice is to explode the conformism of the now. Rejecting instrumental rationality means that fugitive considerations with varied and unknown ways of affording themselves come into view. In the summer of 1930, the famous American photographer, Edward Weston, shot a series of bell peppers within a tin funnel. ‘Pepper No. 30’ (Figure 4.1) was said to be one of his favourites, in part because it made the commonplace unusual. An excerpt from his diary12 describing the photograph traces beautifully what I am seeking to illustrate across this chapter: ‘It is a classic, completely satisfying –​a pepper-​but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter … this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind’.

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Figure 4.1: ‘Pepper No. 30’, 1930, Photograph by Edward Weston

Collection Center for Creative Photography, © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

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False Binaries Then the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 appeared [in 1932]. That was probably the turning point. This was, in a certain sense, a new … practical and theoretical Marxism. After that, Heidegger versus Marx was no longer a problem for me. Herbert Marcuse, Theory and Politics: A Discussion, 1979a Like many long-​term commitments, Marcuse’s relationship with Marxism was complicated. Both his loyalty and his labyrinthine entanglement to Marxian ideas are evinced in the Preface to Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, where Marcuse writes: ‘Perhaps no other theory has so accurately anticipated the basic tendencies of late industrial society –​and apparently drawn such incorrect conclusions from its analysis’ (1958, 98). At the time, Dunayevskaya aimed to re-​establish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called ‘a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism’ (Dunayevskaya 1964, np). Yet, it was the generally understood definition of Marxism –​more often than not a conflation with orthodox Marxism –​that Marcuse, along with his Frankfurt School colleagues, would grow openly hostile towards. Orthodox Marxists, positivist in outlook, tend to prioritize being over consciousness, are objectivist insofar as historical forces outweigh human agency, and dialectically materialist in their worldview (Marcuse, Kellner and Pierce 2014). Marcuse, who unreservedly taught Marx at Columbia and was known as ‘Marxist-​in-​Residence’ at Harvard (Dunayevskaya 1964, np) early on rejected reductionistic materialism associated with certain strands of Marxism, opting instead to confront and modify its foundations. As we have previously seen, Marcuse disavows ahistorical conceptualizations of a human essence drawn from economistic social totalities. Consequently, he continually works to ‘re-​scale’ political economy in order to grasp a vision of emancipated sensibility, stressing the continuity of ‘philosophy, political economy, and revolutionary practice’ (Marcuse, Kellner and Pierce 2014, 26) 78

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throughout Marx’s writings. The approach in this chapter is similarly disruptive in some respects. It takes as its object the antagonism between Marcuse and more recent thinking framed under the broad heading of ‘post’. Geography has been no exception in its narration of Marxism against poststructuralism (Dixon and Jones 1998; Springer 2012). It is not surprising then that Marcuse’s contributions have largely been interpreted as distant and incompatible. For that reason, translating Marcuse for current theoretical conjunctures is warranted. In some circles, it may be sufficient that Marcuse is an interesting figure who offers important insights to contemporary issues about politics and space and their relation without fitting into a neat typology. For others, certain Marcusean commitments1 continue to grate against anti-​ essentialist tendencies, resulting in his work having been dismissed. Even so, it is worthwhile to multiply interpretive paths. By delving into what may seem on the surface as rather detailed theoretical intricacy, this chapter sets the stage for how Marcuse can be redirected and translated to audiences with post-​foundational sensibilities, paving the way for a broad spatial politics. The battle over philosophical foundations has made for good academic copy over the years and the fights have perhaps been so vicious because according to Sayre’s law, the stakes are so low.2 However, given the multitude of global challenges we face, there is renewed urgency for robust praxis. And, although there are deep-​seated divergences –​even fundamental ruptures –​across the various traditions, there are also continuities and moments of encounter. In lieu of antimony, I elect pluralistic synthesis, demonstrating that the best way to read Marcuse is not in opposition or contrast to the ‘post’ but instead together, as Marcuse and post-​foundationalism.3 Therefore, it is my position that we can retrieve a new critical revolutionary subjectivity replete with the gains of the most productive elements of more contemporary theoretical developments. Put otherwise, we still require a locus for struggle that can grapple with agentic forces of transformation as necessarily contingent as those may be. Such an endeavour requires a decidedly different conceptual placement of Marcuse’s oeuvre in relation to other prominent theorists. Marcuse sits at the pivot points of Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, subaltern studies, and post-​foundationalist thought but the intersections of these diverse bodies of thought remain largely unacknowledged. This chapter tracks some of the major tensions separating Marxism and poststructuralism including the major characteristics which define them. I then go on to trace the lines of connection between and beyond these paradigms in order to appreciate Marcuse’s underrecognized foresight within post-​foundational debates. In the final portion of the chapter, I disassemble and reinterpret dominant readings of Marcuse’s writings to argue that Marcuse articulated versions of what we now term the post-​political. In this section, I problematize the interpretation of Marcuse as a conventional Marxist, a recurrent positioning which has arguably led to premature dismissals of his 79

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work, at least with respect to particular theoretical traditions. The work of troubling his placement is done in part by tracing out how Marxism itself butts up against the greater milieu of structuralism and poststructuralism. Such a framing facilitates a reconsideration related to the perceived limitations around elements of Marcuse’s broad body of writings.

Marxism in crisis From his earliest published works, Marcuse expressed his desire to modify Marxist thought. Later in life, he put this driving impulse in razor-​sharp language with the categorization of his assessment of the New Left as a Marxist analysis, ‘if indeed Marxism means more than regurgitating concepts that were elaborated a hundred years ago’ (Marcuse 2004, 142). Prior to that lecture, Marcuse had given an interview on the danger of reifying the concept of the working class, by which he meant: The Marxian proletariat carries the features of the English industrial workers of the middle of the 19th century. The rising level of wages, the increasing power of the unions and the workers’ parties have transformed that proletariat into a working class which corresponds to late capitalism. The class is oppressed just as before, but not in the explosive and brutal forms which Marx describes. When today someone talks of a proletariat without carrying through a precise class analysis, without analyzing the changes in social being, they are reifying the Marxian categories. (quoted in Kellner 1984, 302) As an instrument of critique, Marxism had become too positivist, failing in multiple arenas including not having kept pace with advanced currents in contemporary thought. In an effort to avoid the scientific, economic, and political determinism associated with the Marxism of the Second (1899–​ 1914) and Third (1919–​1934) International, Marcuse sought to renew the dialectical vein in Marx’s writing and revive human subjectivity by attending to the role of consciousness, all of which would necessarily operate against the backdrop of changing historical conditions. Marcuse’s recalibrations eventually meant dislodging foundational aspects of (the interpretation of) Marx in the form of acknowledging intersectionality in Marxism. Coincident with Marcuse gaining an activist following, distant relatives of Critical Theory were beginning to take hold in intellectual circles. Gramscian and Lacanian-​ inspired readings of Marx and Poststructuralism were gradually flourishing, leaving structuralism, existentialism, and Classical Marxism adrift. Tim Cresswell has argued that writers like Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams were ‘proto-​poststructuralists’ as they attempted to hang onto Marxist insights while casting off structuralism (2012, 208). The implication 80

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is that poststructuralism responds to structuralism and must be considered in relation to its precursors. Structuralism is itself a diverse body of thought, held together through its dedication to ‘scientific’ approaches which seek to uncover the structure undergirding the world of appearances (Dosse 1997; Woodward et al 2009). To further complicate any notion of a clean break, many celebrated theorists associated with poststructuralism initially contributed to the French structuralist movement. At the same time, these thinkers were influenced by tendencies that they would later react against, summarily embrace anew, or reject altogether. For their part, both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze resisted classification, continuing to speak of themselves as Marxists (Springer 2012). In contrast to the universalist ambitions associated with a systematic critique of capitalism (replete with binary abstractions such as nature–​ culture, mind–​body, human–​non-​human), poststructuralism 4 offers an array of diverse ideas exploring difference, united solely by the fact of its anti-​foundationalism (Wenman 2017). Beyond this initial characterization, definition is elusive insofar as the major figures have as many differences as they do commonalities. Nevertheless, elements cohere in a distaste for grand narratives and include deconstruction, interrogations of discourse and power, tenacious questioning, and differential ontologies (Howarth 2013; Woodward 2017). Poststructural theorists are variously grouped in differing camps; for example, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray have as their focus theories of knowledge and language, whereas Michel Foucault, Jean-​François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard5 emphasize theories of society, culture, and history (Agger 1991). Craig Lundy, drawing on James Williams, warns against reducing the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault to the problem of poststructuralism: Poststructuralism, in his view, is rather defined by these great works (Williams 2005: 25–​6). An understanding of poststructuralism, in other words, can be accumulated through an investigation of Derrida’s method of deconstruction, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and so on, but poststructuralism must not be presumptively deployed as a means for constructing an understanding of those thinkers. (Lundy 2013, 88) The decidedly anti-​foundationalist exercise of locating the origins of poststructuralism would place it in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University where Jacques Derrida delivered a talk, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. In that now celebrated lecture, Derrida developed the ‘metaphysics of presence’, questioning the tendency to centre concepts like the sign or Being that stabilize a system and ignore difference and absence (Woodward 2017). Deconstruction is to become an epistemological building block enlisted in the destabilization of hierarchies of meanings, 81

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knowledges, and entrenched assumptions (Springer 2012; Phillips 2013). Reductionism and equivalence are antithetical to poststructuralism and its associated thinkers, urging us to take seriously the various unspoken mandates around the indeterminacy of reference. The instance that cannot be absorbed by a coherent system of categorization is itself an exemplary earmark (Benhabib 2018). Even the most ardent critics will acknowledge the wildfire-​like spread and deep impacts of poststructuralism across the humanities and social sciences (Wenman 2017). In comparison, Geography’s uptake of the paradigm was relatively late and somewhat uneven. The delayed engagement is in part a result of the availability of published translations. Fixations have changed over the years with early interest devoted to the ‘crisis of representation’, the complexity of space, and the plurality of identity categories. In the 1990s, performativity, the realm of the non-​human, and the manifold iterations of political economy gained traction. During this same period, poststructuralism intersected with critical race theory and feminism presenting serious challenges to white/​masculinized readings of space and place. More recently, problems of nonrepresentation and affect have taken centre stage (cf Jones 2013; Simpson 2017; Theodore et al 2019).

Stakes of the game If this admittedly truncated review yields the main contours of poststructuralism, namely that reality is mediated through concepts and linguistic structures; relations and difference provide the possibilities for engagement with the world; and a main object of inquiry is the ‘material “effects of truth” generated by various historically contingent forms of knowledge’ (Wenman 2017, 135), then a corollary purpose is to provide context for what is at stake in larger debates between foundationalism and its ‘others’. As previously mentioned, Marcuse has been read as ‘past his sell by date’ in some instances, or altogether overlooked, a fact that is not unrelated to interpretations of Marxism and poststructuralism as a tale of either/​or. The nuance of Marcuse’s writing can at once be understood and further developed if the terrain of contention is plotted out. To fully take on the robust nature of the exhaustive disputes would entail delving into the history of philosophy, so I confine my analysis to three aspects that have been held up as evidence of incommensurability. Superficially, the preceding discussion may appear somewhat internal to a small set of debates across several disciplines. However, the perceived irreconcilability of these two strands of thinking (Marxism and poststructuralism) is very likely a cause for Marcuse’s premature renunciation among more recent thinkers.6 Therefore, it becomes all the more necessary to carefully revisit the pressure points of disharmony. 82

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The first of these is the struggle over the stability/​existence of ontological categories. Poststructuralists exhibit a general scepticism towards objective truth claims summed up economically by Richard Rorty’s reading of Nietzsche: ‘truth is made and not found’ (quoted in Wenman 2017, 135). To elaborate, ontological assumptions overlook the inner workings of epistemology regarding how we come to know what the world is like. Dixon and Jones (1998, 250) are worth quoting at length here: [T]‌h e analysis of ontology invariably shows it to rest upon epistemological priors that enable claims about the structure of the real world. For example, the ontological divisions between physical and social phenomena, or between individual agency and sociospatial structure, to mention just two that are prevalent in geographic thinking, is the result of an epistemology that segments reality and experience in order to comprehend both. But how do we draw the boundaries of nature, or, for that matter, of the individual? And when and where did these categories emerge? In throwing open the genealogies of pre-​g iven categories, issues of validity, representation, essence, existence, and a host of other long-​standing preoccupations are troubled. Instead of the capacious ontological security of Marxism, always accompanied by the systematic critique of capitalism, poststructuralism offers ambivalence and contingency. No longer having any purchase on the Real, forced stabilizations under the guise of fixity can now be opened up to differential relations. Marcus Doel writes in particular about poststructuralist geography as ‘interminable dislocation, distortion, and contortion. It effects becomings that are otherwise than being’ (2000, 120). In other words, concepts are in a continual state of transformation. If meaning is always related to context, then a singular, final meaning cannot be rendered (Dixon and Jones, 2005). Simultaneously, the socially constructed nature of meaning is also always already spatial because space is produced by and through our political, economic, and social relations. A second7 arena of contention frustrating a Marcusean renaissance is the concept of subjectivity. According to Kellner, ‘the past decades have witnessed a relentless philosophical assault on the concept of the subject, once the alpha and omega of modern philosophy’ (2014, 81). At one point, Marxism was one of the casualties left in the wake of the assault. Marxist interpretations have mostly sought a corrective to the idealist and essentialist offerings of more traditional philosophy by grappling with questions of human freedom and agency8 (Cleaver 1993; Dinerstein 1997). Whether it’s the early, late, scientific, or ‘other’ Marx, many strands of Marxism contain traces of a ‘revolutionary subject’, armed with class consciousness and a willingness to act politically (Sinha and Varma 2017). Embedded within is an explicit 83

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or tacit link between ideology and subjectivity. Famously, in his renewal of Marxist thought, Louis Althusser elaborated a theory of how human beings become self-​conscious subjects through ideological interpellation. Althusser suggested that individuals are ‘hailed’ by a variety of apparatuses (the church, police, and so on) that call them into being. This process of subjectification naturalizes subjects’ positions within the social structure and allows for the reproduction of existing social relations. To counter the Ideological State Apparatuses (which are productive of the bourgeois subject) a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary (Althusser 2014). Another thread connecting Marxism with conceptions of subjectivity is the class relation. Marx’s own writings on the definition of class reveal huge gaps (Cohen 1979). What is generally agreed upon is that capitalist society is fortified through the buying and selling of labour power wherein capital extracts unpaid surplus labour from direct producers. There are infinite variations in the make-​up of classes, riven by different historical circumstances and internal divisions. Marx himself did not reduce his discussion to simplified caricatures of class stratification. Instead, it is the class relation which retains priority in the formation of subjectivity (see Marx and Engels 1978, 133–​136). Excerpting from the geographer Kevin Cox (2005, 11): ‘people entered in relations of inequality so that an exploiting class could emerge opposite the immediate producers. … So long as the dependence of immediate producer on capitalist is reproduced, exploitation can continue.’ It is the eventual awareness of exploitation, borne out of collective struggle, that will lead to concrete political action. Because Marxism assigns social classes objective identities and interests, there is an underlying assumption of a unified subjectivity at work. Poststructuralism approaches subjectivity quite differently. Under this loosely defined tradition, ‘the subject’ is neither fully autonomous nor unified. Congruent with earlier discussions related to the reluctance to make prior assumptions about the nature of the world, agency does not originate in the intentions of its author. The reconfigured subject, no longer the source and founder of all knowledge, is characterized in multiple ways depending on the theorist. For Judith Butler (1990), subjectivity is synonymous with performativity, or practices of reiteration continuously constituting and destabilizing identity. Ernesto Laclau relates subjectivity to society’s inability to manifest a sutured totality. Agency arises in moments of ‘dislocation’ of the socio-​symbolic order (Laclau 1990; Wenman 2017). Discourse has been key to poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity and nowhere has this been more celebrated or contested than in Foucault’s writings. In a well-​known quote, Foucault argues: ‘the individual is not a pre-​given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces’ (1972, 1980, 84

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73–​74). How the subject is constituted is both a function of historically specific discourses, that is power–​knowledge relations, and technologies of the self, or the ways in which individuals constitute themselves. The emphasis on discourse does not deny the materiality of the body nor does it reduce agency to an effect of linguistics. Foucault insists that wherever there is power there is resistance. Instead, subjectivity surfaces within disciplinary frameworks (Foucault 1990). The third facet of contention between Marxism and poststructuralism is, in fact, an effect of the first two. As a result of the struggle over the stability/​existence of ontological categories and differing conceptions of subjectivity, there are deep fissures over the political path(s) forward, or, even, for that matter, what ‘the political’ might be. Although I will argue, as others have, that there are productive lines of connection to be explored, the antagonism of the preceding traditions have sometimes been situated as difference versus dialectics or class versus contingency. The emphasis on difference over contradiction has had considerable influence (Holloway et al 2009). However, this influence has come at the expense of an overtly class-​ based analysis whose power stems from organizing the working class against capital. Here, politics and solidarity are clearly defined. Where Marxism calls attention to the political nature of economic relations, poststructuralism proceeds by exposing the contingency and exclusions in discourses that shape our identities (Howarth 2013; Thomassen 2017). Under such a framing, the notion of ‘the political’ is broadened; politics can now be found everywhere, prompting some critics to cry relativism or wonder about the fate of collective action. Gerald Posselt and Sergej Seitz (2020, 134) review some of the more potent admonitions from the Critical Theory camp: Jürgen Habermas argues that Foucault reduces ‘validity claims … to the effects of power,’ which leads to a self-​refuting relativism insofar as ‘truth claims [are] confined to the discourses within which they arise’ (Habermas 1987, 276, 279). Moreover, poststructuralism is said to imply a form of ‘ethical indifference’ (Honneth 2007, 99) and to confine itself to exhibiting the constructed and perspectival character of certain positions without providing normative criteria for an effective critique of ethical and political problematics. (Jaeggi 2009, 281) Without too much of a detour, I will note that the accusation of relativism founders in its conflation of poststructuralism with postmodernism in tandem with its failure to take seriously the decidedly political application of poststructuralist thought. There is a notable tradition of studying political questions within poststructuralism, from the ‘68 generation’ to the publication of such aforementioned works as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) up to more recent treatments of political 85

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rhetoric emerging from the ‘Essex School’ (see Wenman (2017) for a fuller review of the three generations of poststructuralist thinkers on politics).

Longitudinal lines The project of emancipation in a globalized world—​one in which many different civilizations and life-​worlds are continuously confronting one another, in which new subjectivities represented by women, gender, and sexual minorities and ethnic and racial groups are expressing themselves through competing narratives—​cannot ignore the lessons of genealogy, postcolonialism, and feminist theory, or neglect the ethical meaning of deconstruction. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach’, 2018 Benhabib’s comments point to what she terms the ‘illuminating pluralization of critical theories’, an important move in resisting dominant narratives of Critical Theory and Marxism as incompatible with post-​foundational theoretical frameworks. Following the call to take seriously the multiplicity of a critical epistemology, the all too frequently emphasized differences across paradigms are treated to a distinctive reading in this section, where I provide instead an overview of their connections. A central aim is to tease out the subtle alignments that have gone overlooked in the rush to categorization. Embracing a catholic reading of ‘deconstruction’ is a starting point. Derrida, for example, employs a method of immanent critique in his analysis of text. Turning again to Benhabib: The idea that there is always something more than we grasp in thought is transformed by Derrida into a teaching about texts. Derrida shows that the silences and gaps of a text are indices of the repressed subjectivity of others who haunt the footnotes, the appendices, and the marginalia. (Benhabib 2018) In divulging textual margins and examining authority in language, Derrida ultimately launches a critique on Western rationality. This is not so far afield from Critical Theory’s own deconstruction of positivism or the dismantling of capitalism through an interpellation of its fractured, contradictory, and ruptured character. Going further, in deconstructing the universal reason of the Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School shows how science is not simply a technical apparatus but a whole philosophical onto-​epistemology with political implications (Agger 1991). Equally plausible, if not controversial, is Critical Theory’s openness towards matters surrounding subjectivity. Kellner (2014) posits that if a mainstay of poststructuralist subjectivity is the social and historical construction of the 86

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subject in language, then Critical Theory is not antithetical to this tradition, drawing attention as it does to subject formation in specific historical contexts. Amy Allen (2011) notes Foucault’s own stated appreciation for the Frankfurt School in her articulation of Foucault’s resonance with the project of critical social theory. The conditions of possibility for subjectivity are consistent with the rejection of transcendental subjectivity and the ahistorical rational subject. She writes: As Foucault conceives it, the subject is constituted by forces that can be analyzed empirically in the sense that the discursive and socio-​cultural conditions of possibility for subjectivity in a given historically and culturally specific location can be uncovered through an analysis of power-​knowledge regimes. But the subject has always to take up those conditions and it is in the taking up of them that they can (potentially) be transformed. (Allen 2011, 48) That question that is so central to Critical Theory –​how the self is constituted by power while still being self-​constituting –​(Allen 2011) is given a distinctive but recognizable tenor in David Harvey’s oft quoted phrase about ‘the fundamental Marxist conception, that people –​both individually and collectively –​make their own history, but that they do so under material conditions that are given not made by them’ (1987, 367–​368). The fact that human nature is not essentialist, nor is human nature determined unilaterally by a single set of factors, further discloses compatibilities. Fredric Jameson articulates a nuanced and useful opening to such a multi-​perspectival reading: Marx’s is a structural diagnosis, and is perfectly consistent with contemporary existential, constructivist or anti-​foundationalist and postmodern convictions which rule out presuppositions as to some pre-​existing human nature or essence. If there has been not just one human nature but a whole series of them, this is because so-​called human nature is historical: every society constructs its own. (2004, 37) Exfoliating dogmatic separations entails recognizing that poststructuralism need not be separated from questions of materiality. The geographer Simon Springer argues that such an interpretative bifurcation is not a given if we understand materialism as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ which merges discourse and practice. While acknowledging that Foucault himself often rejects Marxism as a theory of the mode of production and a critique of political economy, Springer suggests that Foucault nonetheless forwards a critical view of domination which, like historical materialism, recognizes all social practices as transitory, and 87

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all intellectual formations as integral with power and social relations (Poster 1984). Thus, although often critical of Marx, by Foucault’s (1988) own admission, his approach also bears striking parallels to Marxism. (Springer 2012, 140) Reading carefully, we are able to see other unexpected alignments across philosophically discordant landscapes. Stuart Hall, as early as 1985, writes of how Althusser enabled him to live in and with difference, that most flagrant symbol of poststructuralism. In Hall’s rich discussion, he praises Althusser’s courage in breaking with what he terms monistic conceptions of Marxism. By highlighting the many determinations which move abstractions to the concrete-​in-​thought in Marx’s own work, Hall9 points to moments of convergence opened up in Althusser’s advances: [T]‌he recognition that there are different social contradictions with different origins; that the contradictions which drive the historical process forward do not always appear in the same place, and will not always have the same historical effects. We have to think about the articulation between different contradictions; about the different specificities and temporal durations through which they operate, about the different modalities through which they function. (Hall 1985, 92) Much of the analysis compiled here has sought to pull away from the deterministic, linear, and teleological elements of the foundationalist end of the Critical Theory spectrum. At the core of Critical Theory is the quest for an ontological revolution. In asserting such a position, I am not proposing that diverse traditions be released from their discordance. On the contrary, the Marcusean way forward would be dialectical, cautioning against the institution of simple opposites and, instead, working through difference. We may even extrapolate and say ‘you are both right’ picking up on what Susan Ruddick has called a ‘dialectics of the positive –​understanding their encounter, not as the negative of each other, but reading each in terms of their own adequate truth’ (Ruddick 2008, 1).

Prescient visions Equipped with the larger landscape of how particular traditions have intersected and diverged, there can be little doubt as to how the conventional narration of oppositions impacted Marcuse. The disenchantment associated with foundationalist theories likely contributed to Marcuse’s perceived irrelevance. Certainly, some of Marcuse’s own problematic concepts –​ especially the ones reliant on ‘biological’ drives –​could also be to blame. However, the focus on Marcuse’s missteps ignores the ways that he anticipated 88

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anti-​foundationalism and his prescience around what geographers are calling the ‘post-​political’. I detail aspects of these foresights below, emphasizing tendencies within his philosophy which warrant reassessment. Like other members of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse rejects rationalist notions of subjectivity in favour of an embodied subject. Kellner, in his re-​reading of Eros and Civilization, suggests that Marcuse’s subjectivity is a ‘bodily, erotic, gendered, socialized and aesthetic subjectivity that overcomes mind-​body dualism, avoids idealist and rationalist essentialism, and is constructed in a specific social milieu’ (Kellner 2004, 82). Over his long career, Marcuse refined and reformulated his thinking on subjectivity. Early on, he posits ‘libidinal rationality’, a new form of reason which does not repress the senses, but instead acts in harmony with them. ‘Repressive reason gives way to a new rationality of gratification in which reason and happiness converge’ (Marcuse 1955, 224). The dominant order defined by the mind–​body split is slowly replaced with a ‘sensuous order’ as we enrich the life instincts that have been suppressed by a totalitarian reason. Emancipation becomes a reconciliation between body, environment, and unconscious pleasure. In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse outlines a ‘new sensibility’ built around the renewed organization of individual perception.10 Although both are deeply problematic, I do not consider this fatal to Marcuse’s attempts to reconstruct agency in pursuit of political transformation.11 Marcuse’s early syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Marxism traverse territories that would later be celebrated in the works of Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri (Kellner 2014). Marcuse pointed to the role of the body and desire well before the affective turn (cf Clough 2008; Amsler 2011; Anderson 2014). He links both the body and desire with the possibilities of shaping the intimate structures of social life and emergent forms of refusal. This is evident in what Marcuse once called the ‘education of desire’ (Marcuse 1955; White 2015), the recognition of the affective and imaginative conditions of action. Associated with the merits of utopianism, the term references the fact that not all means of transformation and resistance exist in the realm of consciousness. Another area of remarkable forethought relates to the reach of the capitalist mode of production into the concept of life at every scale. Marcuse presumes that the circulation and exchange processes of capital are enfolded in the genetic and molecular components of life to such an extent that we must refuse capitalism at a biological level (that is, an instinctual revolt) (Marcuse 1955, xix). Although this line of inquiry has fallen out of fashion, it is possible to accept portions of Marcuse’s thought without digesting the whole serving of biological determinism. For example, Kellner and Pierce (in Marcuse 2014) have interpreted aspects of Marcuse’s work as an early signalling of ‘biocapital’, that congeries of capitalist imperatives, technological development, and interconnection between science and markets. 89

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Going a bit further, there is even an understated connection with a posthumanist perspective, a diverse body of theoretical positions put forward by scholars in philosophy, Critical Theory, science and technology studies, and communication studies, among other fields (for examples see: Barad 2003; Panelli 2010; Wolfe 2010; Bolter 2016). A binding claim across this scholarship is that our species is not the only body that matters. However, posthumanism goes further afield in designating a new understanding of the human subject’s relationship to the natural world, breaking with the Cartesian dualism and upending firm boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. Along the way, the hierarchical hold that language and representation has held over materiality is scrutinized. Although not explicitly developed in the posthuman vein, Marcuse’s call for a new sensibility considers human beings as biologically, physically, and chemically enmeshed and dependent on the environment. A new sensibility, a medium of inter-​scalar social change mediating between praxis and cellular liberation (as problematic as that may be) is effectively a relational understanding of what constitutes the ‘human’. Marcuse could be read as decentring the anthropocentric view whereby other dynamic forces not only have a role to play in the formation of the world but are co-​constitutive of life-​worlds.12 Finally, prior to moving into discussions of the ‘post-​political’, it is worth recalling Marcuse’s strategy of interstitial vacillation, a theme covered in the previous chapter. I have argued that through his commitment to imaginative modifications of Western Marxism, Marcuse deftly manoeuvres between the worlds of the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Both the critique of political economy, as well as some of the more deconstructive strands of poststructuralism, fail to track down the links connecting individual experience to the ways and means by which society operates as a whole. Marcuse seeks to transform Marxism into a multi-​scalar theory of liberation (for example, by attending to the intimate nature of alienation and the mechanisms of societal repression). His work is largely read as ensconced firmly in one tradition or another, but I would argue is more precisely and valuably understood as straddling oppositions.

Spectres of post-​politics In turning to a discussion of post-​politics, I want to be cautious in my proposition. My argument is that Marcuse articulated a version of the post-​political through his emphasis on varied forms of techno-​managerial governance as a substitute for emancipatory politics. Initially generated by the philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, and elaborated by many others, the notion has been widely taken up by geographers (cf Dikeç 2005, 2012; Swyngedouw 2011; Ruez 2013; Bassett 2016; Dikeç and Swyngedouw 2017; Doucette 2020). Because post-​politics 90

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is sweeping in its scope of thought, there are only certain points of propinquity. A guiding premise is that because there is no natural foundation for political order, the political is an arena of dispute and antagonism open to everyone. Consequently, disagreement is both integral and definitive because agitation helps to achieve social change. Post-​politics is informed by post-​foundationalism and navigates broadly around the concepts of absence and difference. The idea of absence holds that no necessary political consequence ensues due to the lack of any transcendent grounding through which the functioning of politics is claimed to be derived. The idea of difference emphasizes the distinction between politics and ‘the political’13 (Swyngedouw 2009). Wilson and Swyngendouw summarize the positions of prominent theorists associated with this approach, noting that each has slightly different political projects: ‘Mouffe is concerned with the post-p​ olitical as the repression of antagonism, Rancière with post-​democracy as the disavowal of equality, and Žižek with post-​politics as the foreclosure of class struggle’ (2014, 14, emphasis in original). Žižek’s description as it relates to contemporary times is particularly illuminating: Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political, postmodern post-​politics, which no longer merely ‘represses’ the political, trying to contain it and pacify the ‘returns of the repressed’, but much more effectively ‘forecloses’ it. … In post-​politics, the conflict of the global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion specialists …) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. (2000, excerpts 187–​190) Žižek is describing the process of de-​politicization where the political domain is systematically narrowed and funnelled into consensual governance; that is to say, politics is reduced to social administration. The core of a politics proper (as theorists in this tradition sometimes refer to it) escapes modalities of management and instead changes ‘how things work’.14 The problem of the post-​political is that, returning again to Žižek, the definition of politics continues as the ‘art of the possible’ when authentic politics is ‘the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible –​it changes the very parameters of what is considered “possible” in the existing constellation’ (2000, 199). The underwhelming discursive and policy framings operating in the above context propagate a post-​ideological veneer, ripe for cooptation by those in any part of the political spectrum (Lees 2012). Geographers, in particular, have written about how constructs such as urban renaissance and creative 91

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neoliberalism become difficult to mobilize against because they are couched in effervescent terms that mask their pursuit of free market logics (Peck 2010). In these instances, the post-​political manifests as the suspension of the political. Marcuse’s signature theoretical frames broach the post-​political in their sustained scrutiny of techno-​managerial governance despite not having been interpreted as such. Techno-​managerial governance implies an entanglement with market technologies, a façade of impartiality and neutrality, and is bound up with systems of measurement and control (Knio 2010). Governance denotes the de-​linking of practices from the authority of government, meaning that patterns of governing are flexible, de-​centred and employed by multiple actors (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Keeping in mind that Marcuse overestimated the repressive nature of capitalism, resonance with the ‘one-​dimensional’ and ‘technological rationality’ nevertheless require a closer look. Under the reign of one-​dimensionality, ideology and facts are merged to the degree that oppositional operations are absorbed or denounced as unrealistic (Marcuse 1964; Walker 2015). We come to accept the given as the real and the rational, similar to the tether between good ideas and ‘ideas that work’ (Žižek 2000). Uncannily, instead of the politicization of predicaments, action is confined to certain pathways. Possibilities for transcendence are minimized, offering little beyond the established state of affairs. With respect to technological rationality, the two ideas are related.15 The capacity of technological rationality pivots around value-​free objectivity, often masking an ethos of efficiency and profit maximization. What is more, its denial of alternatives serves as justification of the present (Marcuse 1964; Walker 2018). I have argued elsewhere that Marcuse’s technological rationality is a: pervasive rationality oriented towards the performance principle wherein every technical item is given a mission furthering competition and production. Comprising operational definitions, formal logic, and the objective order of things (Marcuse, 1941) truth becomes defined by measurement, calculation, internal coherence, and the reduction of experience to practice organized by technology. Because technological society tends toward the annulment of its foundational conditions, social relations of domination are mystified and oppression can occur without physical domination. (Walker 2018, 950) In a post-​political world, political formations are precluded by the rejection of ideological divisions in favour of consensual management. Subsequently, compromise, technical arrangements, and annulling dissensus eliminate genuine political spaces (Swyngedouw 2011). It is hard not to read the 92

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aforementioned mechanisms of reduction as recalibrations of Marcuse’s ‘smooth democratic unfreedom’ (1964, 1). The referents are different of course, Marcuse is describing capitalism and does not spend much time on the question of democracy with a capital D. However, how social antagonism is contained through the absorption of opposition into the logic of the prevailing politics has haunting reverberations. I would venture to take an even wider view and suggest that Marcuse’s astute comprehension of truncation twinned with the ways it dulls the scope of potential is a valuable precursor in how we have come to theorize aspects of the post-​political as a modality. Not only does his focus on the body and sexuality (mentioned earlier) represent a novel shift for its time, but the attention to sublimation emphasizes the rigid reduction of the erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction. This passage from One-​Dimensional Man is illustrative: Compare love-​making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized. Libido transcends beyond the immediate erotogenic zones –​a process of non-​repressive sublimation. In contrast, a mechanized environment seems to block such self-​transcendence of libido. Impelled in the striving to extend the field of erotic gratification, libido becomes less ‘polymorphous,’ less capable of eroticism beyond localized sexuality, and the latter is intensified. Thus diminishing erotic and intensifying sexual energy, the technological reality limits the scope of sublimation. (1964, 73) Marcuse identifies how an entire dimension of life is de-​eroticized. Though the example is distinctive, the process of impoverishment remains intact. In other words, the epistemological framing of ‘whittling down’ has been set in motion. The post-​political, brimming with technologies of government that privilege agreement, is undoubtedly compelling. It aligns best with a Marcusean optic if we think of the post-​political as governing through consensus. After all, Marcuse long ago offered up a lesson on governing through conformity. His writings dissect how capitalism does not simply manipulate the subject but encourages, inculcates, and suggests activities connoting a wealth of choices: buy whatever you like; vote for whomever you want. Crucially, he goes on to theorize how individuals become integrated within the instrumental rationality of capitalist systems of domination and control by internalizing the status quo, effectively de-​weaponizing resistance. Conformity, like consensus, becomes a sort of disciplinary regime stifling emancipatory politics. 93

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Some scholars have identified the relentless pessimism of the post-​political turn, lamenting the failure to investigate actually existing forms of governance and polyvalent political formations which seek alternatives. Wendy Larner, for example, suggests that the continued focus on ‘enlightened experts and political elites’ tends to reinforce at the outset the post-​political hypothesis (Larner 2014, 191). Others, such as Mitchell et al (2015), have argued that what passes as post-​politics is in fact achieved hegemony. En route, a whole range of processes outside of ‘politics proper’ are overlooked. Regardless of one’s perspective, I contend that we cannot, nor should we want to put the genie back in the bottle. Marcuse remains visionary in his anticipation of the ‘flattening of politics’, an assessment that can be read dialectically. We should therefore seek to enfold the post-​foundationalist knowledges (of which post-​politics is a part) that we bring to the current moment in an optimistic and reconstructive return to the political. This chapter has crystallized the tensions between Marcuse and post-​ foundationalist traditions while asserting an alternative reading of his work. I emphasize the latent compatibilities present across Marcuse’s writings that have gone unrecognized in dominant renditions. In contrast to hegemonic interpretations that have Marcuse as ‘merely’ a Marxist, this chapter has attempted to unravel the spaces where Marcuse looks to micro-​processes, multiplicity, and vacillation, to forecast some of the defining features of post-​foundationalist scholarship. To faithful followers of Marcuse, this chapter may seem the most disconnected from Marcuse’s original writings. Admittedly, re-​readings almost always entail embarking on philosophical adventures. However, enhancing the legibility of Marcuse’s contributions across paradigms remains crucial to his regenerative ascent. By stressing the narrow apertures of Critical Theory and post-​foundationalism, I have reconceived Marcuse’s relationship to long-​standing scholarly traditions as they relate to a host of concepts including ontology, subjectivity, and scale. In the next, and final chapter, I contemplate –​in a grounded way –​what happens if we legitimate non-​instrumentality; privilege Eros over Logos; and take seriously the metaphysical. Chapter 6 prompts an exploration into how the contributions of the previous chapters cohere in a re-​envisioned Marcusean-​inspired geography.

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New Sensibilities Helen Hawkins: Well, I think you are going a little too far. Herbert Marcuse: Yes, definitely. Interview with KPBS Public Radio, 1979 In the summer of 1968, having become a major figure of the New Left, Marcuse gave an interview to the French journal Express. The interviewer begins the conversation by recounting how Marcuse came to prominence in connection with the student revolt in Berlin, later with the student demonstrations in the United States, ultimately rising to even greater fame with the May demonstrations in France. While being pressed on whether the students had chosen his work as a doctrine for their revolt, Marcuse shies away from direct influence but describes his oeuvre in remarkably plain language: I have tried to show that contemporary society is a repressive society in all its aspects, that even the comfort, the prosperity, the alleged political and moral freedom are utilized for oppressive ends. I have tried to show that any change would require a total rejection or, to speak the language of the students, a perpetual confrontation of this society. And that it is not merely a question of changing the institutions but rather, and this is more important, of totally changing human beings in their attitudes, their instincts, their goals, and their values. (Marcuse 2005, 101) In this quote, Marcuse alludes to a revolt at the biological, psychic, and political levels. Marcuse’s attempts to reform the senses and exonerate erotic drives may be construed as misplaced or naive, but the impulse for revolutionary resistance remains a powerful political choice with a lasting theoretical legacy. Rather than evaluating Marcuse’s body of writing strictly on its own terms, I have suggested that the salience of his animating ideas –​ solidarity, resistance, and freedom –​are best considered in the context 95

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of extrapolation. We can best appropriate Marcuse if we extend, stretch out, extract, convert, and emplace his work. The epigraph intimates the unbounded horizons of such an exercise.1 The overarching and dual concern of the book has been the distillation of what Marcuse can offer geography and, complementarily, the promise of a geographic reading of Marcuse. Each chapter has excavated particular theoretical or empirical routes along a many-​ sided and multi-​scalar trek in the development of an explicitly Marcusean geographic sensibility. The journey culminates in this final chapter. In this concluding chapter, I consider what would happen were we to legitimate non-​instrumentality; privilege Eros over Logos; take seriously the metaphysical; and put Marcuse into conversation with anti-​foundationalist theoretical frames. The exploration of the connections between Marcuse’s philosophical thought and geographical concerns contemplates how the contributions of the previous chapters coalesce with a re-​envisioned Marcusean-​inspired Marxist geography. Here, I advocate for a ‘meso’ socio-​spatial positionality which retains the oppositional politics so crucial to Marcuse’s own work and simultaneously diversifies the Marxist project. The articulation of the meso or the medial refuses to see Marxism in hyberbolic terms as either totality or nothing. Instead, I propose that this framing operates between the two extremes. Such an observation is not whimsical but is borne from Marcuse’s own theorizations. For example, Marcuse individualizes Marxism through an attentiveness to the psychological aspects of the insidious nature of capitalism (see Chapter 2). At the same time, Marcuse suggests opportunities for transformation at the collective scale (as discussed in Chapter 3). Marcuse agrees that we must pay attention to class, but he also understands that economics is not the only factor that drives societal change. Extending Marcuse’s scaffolding, I am concerned with constructing a language of a less totalizing Marxism that foregrounds possibility as well as the formulation of a more inclusive tradition that is less wedded to the authority of male voices. Towards the end of his career, Marcuse saw that feminist movements were crucial sites of political and psychological transformation, a space he had always held open for what were then termed Third World movements. Following a discussion of meso-​Marxism and a ‘troubling of the canon’ associated with Marxism writ large, the last section of the chapter contemplates examples of transnational solidarity, and socialist feminism, an approach that centres the connection between the oppression of women and other oppressions in society, in order to consider new spaces of socio-​ spatial political action.

Prelude to transformation As late as 2016, five of Marcuse’s lectures were discovered in the Frankfurt Marcuse Archive by Peter-​Erwin Jansen, a former student of Jürgen 96

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Habermas. The writings cover the period from Marcuse’s Inaugural Lecture at the University of California, San Diego in 1966 to 1977, two years before his death (Marcuse 2017). The lectures include: ‘The Rationality of Philosophy’ (2017), ‘Protest and Futility’ (2017), ‘Art and the Transvaluation of Values’ (2017), and ‘The Radical Transformation of Norms, Needs, and Values’ (2017). Marcuse delivered the lectures against the backdrop of multiple forms of organized efforts, including the New Left, the Women’s Movement, gay liberation movements, and the Ecology Movement, as well as counterrevolution efforts from global elites against the welfare state (Reitz 2018). What is clear from these writings is that Marcuse deepens his earlier critiques on the new forms of social control and domination while proposing multi-​dimensional ways forward. In particular, Marcuse argues for a ‘transvaluation of values’, wherein the competitive values and ideology of the capitalist system of economic production and consumption require complete transformation both at the root and internally in our relationship to ourselves (Maley 2017, ix). Because this reformulation acknowledges the internalization of our own domination, it carries with it an indictment of Marxism’s neglect of the individual subject. Or, in Marcuse’s striking language: We introject the atmosphere of decay and destruction, waste and misery, brutality and deception, with any merchandise we buy, every program we watch, every pleasure we have … in this way too we are responsible. Our Ego, even our consciousness, is shaped by these features of our society. (Marcuse, quoted in Maley 2017, xix) Marcuse continues: ‘To be sure, the subversion within, the subjective emancipation from repressive needs, attitudes, behavior patterns is determined by the objective conditions, but it is up to the individual to find in these given conditions the external and the internal means to change them’2 (Marcuse 2017, 46). Along the way, Marcuse implores the negation of the performance principle (taken up in more detail in Chapter 4), based on ‘efficiency and prowess in the fulfilment of competitive and acquisitive functions’ (Marcuse 1974, 279) in favour of ‘gratification, care, feeling, which could not be displayed in the work world of capitalism without undermining its repressive foundation, namely, the functioning of human relationships as relationships of things: exchange values’ (Marcuse quoted in Maley 2017, xxvii). In these essays, Marcuse also rejects conventional ways of organizing, anticipating horizontal social movements. This commitment to leaderless and prefigurative forms of activism is one of the reasons that his work has experienced a bit of a revival in certain circles (Lamas et al 2017). My plan is not to pick apart and analyse each of the newly discovered essays, although 97

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that would doubtlessly be a useful exercise. Instead, I want to point to how the ‘transvaluation of values’ and Marcuse’s later writings on feminism and revolution more generally, are simultaneously consistent with the project outlined in the introductory section of this chapter, yet further enriched through anti-​foundationalist thinking and extrapolation. Anti-​foundationalism yields to the historical origins of our worldview, insisting that the language we employ to grapple with our challenges is imposed from somewhere. We must recall also that we cannot think without ‘spacing’ (Doel 2002) because all sociality secretes space. Consequently, we can grasp the social and the spatial as the concrete and the abstract together. Marcuse’s work contains the ingredients for a new way of thinking/​being, but its vital capacity cannot be retrieved without putting the mixture on to boil, that is, extrapolation. Or to make a similar point, we can use the obscure if somewhat imperfect analogy of cathodoluminescence, the process of bombarding material with light to see what elements are generated or ‘answer back’. In this case, what reverberates most strongly from the approach suggested –​the properties that matter or what answers back, so to speak –​is a meso-​Marxism that is diversified in its very foundation. I explain both in more detail in the following sections.

Towards meso-​Marxism Enabling new perspectives is a large part of Marcuse’s legacy. Marcuse has taught us that Marxism is a living philosophy that is most valuable when looked upon for its malleability and understood in relation to daily life struggles. When we orient our thinking to the current moment, we can consider the work of Marx and Marcuse as a theory of liberation and an indictment of capitalism while shifting away from grand theoretical treatises in search of a master ontology. It is possible to retain and reformulate resonant material, re-​scaling towards a more modest Marxist framing that centres the interstitial space between the micro and the macro. The interlocking relations sustaining ‘what is’ are defined through insubordinate particularities understood when woven together in collective view and as more than a sum of their parts, putting into tension the great revolutionary narrative. From my perspective, there is a move in contemporary Marxism emanating from Marx’s own writings as well as his interpreters towards the meso-​scale, the less omniscient space of reconstructive readings. What I call ‘meso-​Marxism’ recognizes that contextual theories of the lifeworld involve competing interests and intersectional forces that develop new ways of understanding liberation. Many scholars have done careful readings of Marx3 and those arguments will not be rehearsed here. Instead, I will point to several examples that evoke the kind of meso-​Marxism I am referring to. George Henderson, in Value in Marx (2013), disrupts the singular connection 98

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between value to capital arguing that value is multivalent. Henderson does this by re-​reading both Capital and Grundrisse and recomposing value as more than capitalist which recognizes the non-​economic, or social aspects of value. Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober (1994), much earlier, focused on ‘weak historical materialism’, sidestepping the inevitable societal march through fixed stages from capitalism to socialism. These authors argue for ‘the material possibility of epochal historical transformations’ (54) and the viability of non-​economic explanations for properties within society. In addition, they consider the idea of ‘totality’, that most sacred of Marxist terms, not in its strictest sense, but in the way that parts interact with one another. These breaks with monistic conceptions are themselves articulations of the meso, the modest, and the medial but offer more resources when supplementarily diversified. One route to diversification is effectively the argument of this book. Namely, that Marcuse is one of the great theorists of opposition for our times but cannot stand in isolation. To this purpose, we must add to his work an acknowledgement (as geographers have done for some years) that the social and political are always already spatial and that social transformation is synonymous with spatial transformation. I have charted that territory through the preceding chapters. As a reminder, Chapter 2 maps the spatial containment of social change; in Chapter 3, the inherently spatial aspects of Marcuse’s reconstructive project are elaborated; Chapter 4 unfolds a topological understanding of Marcuse’s writings; and Chapter 5 explores the anti-​foundationalist aspects that have remained latent, at the same time putting Marcuse into conversation with more contemporary theoretical frameworks. The other pathway to heterogeneity is to think more critically about the constituency of Marxist authorship. Who ‘speaks’ on behalf of a Marxist agenda? Or, to put it in a slightly more polemical register, who is afforded the authority to ‘rhapsodize Marx’ (Springer 2018), too often a concert dominated by the single score of Great Marxists? It is no secret that academic philosophy is overwhelmingly white and male (Maldonado-​Torres et al 2018), but I am referring to an ongoing project that perhaps Marcuse, albeit indirectly, was a part of. Specifically, I reference the reconceptualization of Marxism which recognizes important and overlooked contributors seeking to bring about a less rigid account that transforms canonic readings through a cacophony of voices. The monopolistic hold of conventional tradition within Marxist accounts is implicit in Marcuse’s call for a more inclusive and pluralistic resistance in meeting the challenge of increasingly oppressive social structures. He famously noted that we must look to ‘the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders’ (MacIntryre 1970, 87) as vanguards of change. His former student, Angela Davis, who was a member of the Black Panthers and joined an all-​Black branch of the Communist party as a young woman, 99

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was part of Marcuse’s own political education around Black liberation. He writes in a 1970 ‘Letter to Angela’: ‘But, you fought for us, too, who need freedom and want freedom for all who are still unfree. In this sense, your cause is our cause’ (Marcuse 2005, 50). In spite of the fact that the Marxist tradition is capable of thinking through the specific dimensions of race and racism in the advancement of an anti-​ racist agenda, some of its most ardent representatives have been ignored or confined to a small circle outside of normative interpretations. It is therefore critical to call attention to vital contributions that are too often confined to the periphery of the mainstream. For example, the interconnections between capitalism, racism, and the class struggle on political, historical, and theoretical levels have been taken up under the rubric of racial capitalism (Robinson 2021 [1983]) and outside North America by scholars such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon among many others. The influence of these works, devoted in some form or another to the expansion of capitalist society and its racial direction, is gaining more attention under the current political climate. Front and centre is the conjunctural entanglement of racialism, white supremacy, and the de-​valuation of Blackness. Ruth Wilson Gilmore outlines some of the linkages between capitalism and race: Capitalism [is] never not racial. … Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-​motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-​making monarchs. [Racial capitalism] requires all kinds of scheming, including hard work by elites and their compradors in the overlapping and interlocking space-​economies of the planet’s surface. They build and dismantle and reconfigure states, moving capacity into and out of the public realm. And they think very hard about money on the move. (Gilmore 2017, quoted in Burden-​ Stelly 2020, 13) Just as capitalism is never not racial, so is it never not spatial. The act of accumulating –​central to the definition of capital –​requires moving through relations of differentially positioned human groups in order to capitalize on difference. Effectively, capitalist relations require some to be ‘out of place’. Jodi Melamed writes: ‘These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’ (2015, 77). Although Marcuse did not use the term racial capitalism or grapple deeply with Black Radicalism and its variations, I will take up aspects of these political and theoretical movements later in the chapter. Marcuse did, however, devote attention to the feminist movement in later writings. In 100

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the next section, before turning to Marcuse’s own writing on feminism, I offer a brief elaboration of feminist and Marxist feminist interventions. MacLeavy, Fannin, and Larner (2021) recently considered debates on feminism in academia from the perspective of geography. They write in response to a number of provocations, including the continued location of certain gendered oppressions as outside of political economy. Their observation builds on Judith Butler’s 1997 critique that there continues to be a distinction between the ‘material’ and the ‘cultural’ where heteronormativity is seen as central to the reproduction of capitalism, but other genders are remanded to the ‘cultural sphere’ and thereby seen as somehow less essential to contemporary capitalism. As importantly, MacLeavy et al assert the need to denaturalize customary narratives of feminism’s generational ‘waves’. A focus on waves provides limited recognition of how feminism’s past, present, and future continue to shape politics. Disengaging from successive narrations lays bare the complex relationship of continuity and discontinuity across and between different articulations of feminist horizons. The explanation provided is detailed and instructive: The notion of feminism’s waves also tends to identify a generation’s feminism with a singular focus, for example, in viewing suffrage and access to the formal political sphere as primarily a first-​wave feminist concern, or reproductive rights as primarily a preoccupation of the second wave (e.g., Eisenstein, 2009; Fraser, 2009). These commonplace depictions of each wave’s political struggles also ignore practices of gendered resistance by Black and indigenous women, constructing a white-​centric genealogy of feminism that also obscures how abolitionist and anti-​racist political movements informed white feminist political strategies and tactics. (Springer 2002, quoted in MacLeavy et al 2021, 3) I begin the discussion by drawing on this recent scholarship for two reasons. It permits an alternative conceptual frame that opts out of the re-​telling of first-​, second-​, third-​, and perhaps even fourth-​wave feminism. And, as the authors, who draw on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, go on to note, ditching the narrative of distinct and discrete stages of feminist development opens up ‘a more nuanced and radical notion of both time and space in which “dislocating space and disjointed time enable multiple histories, loyalties and modes of acting to exist simultaneously” ’ (Anzaldúa 2011, 164 quoted in MacLeavy et al 2021, 3). The second reason is that their work highlights the relational and intersectional dynamics of capitalist oppression. Resisting linear genealogies of progress is part of the anti-​foundationalism that can be so useful for reconceptualizing emergent forces of transformation. Nevertheless, setting out some common orientations around a Marxist-​inspired feminism 101

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will help to navigate important contributions that can be taken up in relation to the themes of the chapter later in the section. A major breakthrough of feminist scholarship is that a purely economic perspective is insufficient for overcoming the capitalist system, nor is such a framing up to the task of developing alternative forms of socio-​spatial organization in the face of capitalism’s continual reinvention (Benhabib and Cornell 1987; Bargu and Bottici 2017). The feminist critique has been crucial to advancing work beyond a class-​based politics to encompass the wider domains of relationships and identities perpetuating and reproducing exploitation and extraction (cf Fraser 2014; Vogel 2014). We are all too aware that patriarchy and capitalism make excellent allies. Furthermore, feminist contributions have put front and centre that gender is imbricated with multiple other identity categories such as sexuality, race, class, religion, and so forth (Hancock 2016; Brodkin 2000). Analyses go beyond an ‘add women and stir’ approach, not limited to surveying the ways that women are exploited in capitalism. Bargu and Bottici, in Feminism, Capitalism and Critique which honours the work of Nancy Fraser, write that Fraser early on highlighted that ‘the oppression of women, and thus the cause of feminism that opposes it, is not simply a woman’s question, but rather an inevitable step in any form of social critique’ (Bargu and Bottici 2017, 5). Feminists and geographers alike have been at the forefront of centring how the production and reproduction of labour power are not only gendered but fundamentally about separation, difference, and distance. Capitalism relies on the separation of the realm of production from the sphere of reproduction in tandem with the differential valuation of bodies across and between geographic locales. As an economic system, capitalism exploits free labour, precarity, and difference, in the continued quest for the extraction of surplus value. Therefore, from its inception, a capitalist social order is racialized, gendered, and reproduced through socio-​spatial difference. The cogent position of socialist feminism is worth examining anew partly because it responds to what I have outlined above but also because activists and scholars were formulating social reproduction theory in the time period where Marcuse was grappling with issues of gender. The term socialist feminism was increasingly used in the 1970s and signifies a mixed theoretical approach to achieving women’s equality. Socialist feminist theory recognizes the interrelated and multi-​faceted nature of oppression, such as women’s oppression, racism, and economic injustice brought about by capitalism. Scholars in this tradition have related the scale of the intimate to the global for decades (cf Winders and Smith 2019). According to the theory, social-​reproductive activity is essential to the accumulation of surplus value, the existence of waged work, and the reproduction of capitalism. Child-​raising, schooling, affective care, housework, and all manner of duties necessary to sustain paid work must be understood not as a background but 102

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as an indispensable condition for the perpetuation of economic relations. Marx implied a theoretical framework for such an understanding but did not pursue it fully. He writes: The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relations of rulers and ruled. … It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers … which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it … the corresponding specific form of the state. (Marx 1967, 791) These issues were eventually taken up in what became known as the domestic-​labour debates of the late 1960s around how to understand household labour within Marxist/​socialist feminist terms. Lise Vogel, who played a key role in the movement, has commented that: Most feminists eventually rejected the domestic labor literature as a misguided effort to apply inappropriate Marxist categories. Most Marxists simply disregarded the debate, neither following nor participating in it. Neither potential audience fully grasped the ways that socialist feminists were suggesting, implicitly or explicitly, that Marxist theory had to be revised. (2000, 9) Although wrought with a complicated history, socialist feminism is not merely a relic of the past. Barbara Ehrenreich (2018) describes it in today’s terms at length: But if you put together another kind of socialism and another kind of feminism, as I have tried to define them, you do get some common ground, and that is one of the most important things about socialist feminism today. It is a space free from the constrictions of a truncated kind of feminism and a truncated version of Marxism —​in which we can develop the kind of politics that addresses the political/​economic/​ cultural totality of monopoly capitalist society. We could only go so far with the available kinds of feminism, the conventional kind of Marxism, and then we had to break out to something that is not so restrictive and incomplete in its view of the world. We had to take a new name, ‘socialist feminism,’ in order to assert our determination to comprehend the whole of our experience and to forge a politics that reflects the totality of that comprehension. Ehrenreich’s words capture how a singular paradigm wedded to normative rigidity fails to account for how capitalism manifests in and through 103

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gender relations. At the same time, feminism falls short when it comes to the pervasiveness of capitalism, and what necessitates resistance from the perspective of differentially positioned subjectivities. The imbrication of gender, class, and capital should be central to Marxist theorizations. With each iteration of any totalizing theory of freedom we learn of its limitations and possibilities. I turn to Marcuse’s own engagement with these issues below.

Meso-​Marxism I: feminism and Marcuse On 7 March 1974, Marcuse delivered a lecture at Stanford University entitled ‘Marxism and Feminism’ where he noted that the text was written and re-​ written after many discussions related to the largely neglected problems of socialism and the subversive potential of the Women’s Movement (Marcuse 1974). This was not his first consideration of feminism. Marcuse expressed his views in ‘The Emancipation of Women in a Repressive Society’ in 1962 (Marcuse 2011, 161), but the later lecture is his most sustained engagement with the topic. Marcuse agrees with feminist theorists that patriarchy underpins the capitalist system, advocating for a feminist socialism. He sees in the feminist movement a radicality that is necessary for the ‘transition to a better society for men and women’ (1974, 287). Margaret Cerullo, in comments made in 1979 for a Marcuse memorial service, and later published in New German Critique, voices what many feminists were, in all likelihood, thinking both then and now: Not the least of the ironies and interesting paradoxes that constitute the significance of Marcuse for us is the fact that as an 81-​year-​old man and product of one of the most deeply patriarchal and authoritarian of modern cultures, he turned and returned consistently in his late writings to the subject of feminism. (1979, 21) Cerullo takes Marcuse’s engagement with feminism as a ‘testament to his enormous historical openness, his refusal of political resignation, and also as a moving gesture of respect and solidarity’ (21). Even more substantial for Cerullo is the encapsulation of many of Marcuse’s thoughts and aspirations in the Women’s Liberation Movement. She puts it beautifully and is therefore worth quoting at length: [H]‌is vision in Eros and Civilization of love as revolution; his insistence on the possibility of a new reality principle as the promise of a socialism which could no longer be understood as a change in social institutions, but had to be deepened to include a vision of a change in consciousness and the very instinctual structures of human beings deformed by exploitation and domination; his understanding of socialism as a 104

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qualitative leap to a new system of needs which are sensuous, ethical and rational in one. (1979, 21) In spite of this recognition, Marcuse has been roundly criticized for his take on gender. He came ‘late to the game’ so to speak, only broaching the subject in his seventh decade of life. Biological essentialism, a theme that punctuates many portions of Marcuse’s writings, is not entirely escaped in his 1974 essay, making his intervention even more uncomfortable. Last, some critics mention that Marcuse only identifies males and females in his address, neglecting the full spectrum of gender categories. The content of these attacks is not without merit. Nevertheless, I suggest that we can salvage some aspects of his thinking by re-​reading ‘Marxism and Feminism’ as an instance of feminist socialism which seeks to reimagine, re-​scale, and revolutionize Marxist theory. This exercise speaks to the larger project of opening up how we read Marcuse along with dislodging Marxism from a singular exegesis. From the outset of ‘Marxism and Feminism’, Marcuse exceeds normative Marxist interpretation through an intersectional view of oppression and a relational understanding of subjectivity that stretches beyond mere class dynamics. In somewhat anachronistic language, Marcuse uses a questioning manner to remark upon how the woman is key to the reproduction of the Performance Principle and therefore vital to wholesale societal change: And the working woman continues, in ever larger numbers, to suffer the double exploitation as worker and housewife. In this form, the reification of the woman persists in a particularly effective manner. How can this reification be dissolved? How can the emancipation of the woman become a decisive force in the construction of socialism as a qualitatively different society? (1974, 285) The answer, to the extent that there is one, lies in realizing that women are oppressed not just by patriarchy but also by capitalism, a system that will never yield anything ‘beyond equality’. After all, what is the sense in bringing the Performance Principle to more people? Marcuse writes: But equality is not yet freedom. Only as an equal economic and political subject can the woman claim a leading role in the radical reconstruction of society. But beyond equality, liberation subverts the established hierarchy of needs –​a subversion of values and norms which would make for the emergence of a society governed by a new Reality Principle. (1974, 285) This quote contains the revelatory idea of the distinction between equality and freedom –​in this case, equality could be the effort to make the system 105

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run more effectively with the participation of those who have up to now been excluded. More directly, Marcuse sees feminist socialism as a welcome revision to Marxist socialism (and a gateway to a new Reality Principle in this essay). It is in that modification that I find promise because feminist socialism represents an eschewal of a strict economism as well as an avowal of the individual and collective scales necessary for human emancipation. In the 1974 essay he writes how Marxist socialism retains elements of the Performance Principle and its values: ‘I see these elements, for example, in the emphasis on the ever more effective development of the productive forces, the ever more productive exploitation of nature, the separation of the “realm of freedom” from the work world’ (286). In contrast, the feminist version of socialism would emerge as qualitatively different and: not only use the productive forces for the reduction of alienated labor and labor time, but also for making life an end in itself, for the development of the senses and the intellect for pacification of aggressiveness, the enjoyment of being, for the emancipation of the senses and of the intellect from the rationality of domination: creative receptivity versus repressive productivity. (1974, 286) This passage is clearly a continuation of particular aspects of the new sensibility outlined years earlier and expanded upon throughout Marcuse’s life: ‘The cultivation of a new sensibility would transform the relationship between human beings and nature as well as the relationships among human beings. The new sensibility is the medium of social change that mediates between the political practice of changing the world and one’s own drive for personal liberation’ (Marcuse 2007, 234). The statement can also be read as a nod to the multi-​scalar factors involved with overturning the status quo. We cannot rely solely on outward forces of political revolution. A psychic change must take place. Our individual practices must undergo transformation in addition to continuing collective struggles. Moreover, the intimate and the global scales cannot be separated. Marcuse acknowledges this with a rather outdated and somewhat masculinist turn of phrase: ‘I stressed that liberation cannot be expected as a by-​product of new institutions, that it must emerge in the individuals themselves. The liberation of women begins at home, before it can enter society at large’ (1974, 288). A slightly charitable but nonetheless accurate reading is that identity and oppression are, at root, relational: ‘By virtue of its own dynamic, the Movement is linked with the political struggle for revolution, freedom for men and women. Because beneath and beyond the male-​female dichotomy is the human being, common to male and female: the human being whose liberation, whose realization is still at stake’ (1974, 281).

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Marcuse doubtless ascribes questionable characteristics to the figure of the female throughout the essay which I will not recount here. The work can certainly be read for essentialism, although there are passages where Marcuse refutes such an interpretation.4 However, several elements stand in perpetuity. For one, there is the deep militancy committed to toppling hetero-​patriarchal capitalism and the state. Second, is a renewed Marxist vision that opens up strict class analyses. Less obvious, and perhaps only through extrapolation, is the hint of anti-​foundationalist thinking in relation to gender. Under the cover of feminist socialism, Marcuse argues that women would achieve full equality. Following the all-​round development of women’s faculties, ‘specifically feminine’ qualities, such as sensitivity and non-​ aggressiveness, would be universalized. At that point ‘the masculine-​feminine antithesis would then have been transformed into a synthesis –​the legendary idea of androgynism’ (1974, 287). With this re-​channelling of aggression comes a society that revolts against capitalism, left to develop its ‘own morality’. Undeniably, there is much to recoil from in this formulation. While Marcuse’s efforts in matters related to gender require serious qualification, it is possible to glean from the argument that feminine categories are social constructs, that gender is constituted as much by the Performance Principle as by culture, psyche, and history. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that Marcuse’s endorsement of androgyny indicates a favourable attitude toward the trans world (Mieli 1977; Sethness Castro 2018). Far from any theory of gender, what should be retrieved from Marcuse’s essay is a more detailed rendering of Marxism that underscores liberation as relational. Without using contemporary signifiers, Marcuse states in no uncertain terms the intersectional nature of oppression. To pull on Marcuse’s original thread of a relational conception of freedom, we can expand this notion to include ‘the spatial imperative of subjectivity’ (Probyn 2003); how bodies and a sense of self interact with how and where they are placed. Rather than a private affair, wherein subjectivity is bounded and contained within us, who we are is in fact a very public affair mediated by relations of power. In the next section, I continue analyses of Marcuse’s pursuit for agents of revolutionary change that revitalized Marxist thought, this time through the struggle for Black liberation.

Meso-​Marxism II: revisiting the Black Radical Tradition The radical opposition is very much limited to minority groups. The liberation struggle of the blacks, as one of the minority groups, understands itself as being in the same anti-​capitalist front with the student movement, the younger workers, the women. Marcuse, ‘Item about Angela Davis’, 19725

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Marcuse saw prospects for widespread liberation among members of all minority groups, and along with the Women’s Movement, he considered Black liberation struggles as vanguards of social change. In the summer of 1967, a year before giving the interview to Express, Marcuse had been invited to participate at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation held in London. The convenors sought to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Marcuse was selected as one of four intellectuals reflective of the theoretical pole. The prominent political figure Stokely Carmichael, ‘an activist in the most real sense of the term’ (Cooper et al 2015, 9) was also there. Carmichael, who was later known as Kwame Ture, was a key leader in the Black Power movement, first with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and then with the Black Panther Party and the All-​African People’s Revolutionary Party. As the title suggests, the theme of the Congress was liberation, but also the constitutive elements of revolution, and the aversion of destruction. Talks were devoted to affecting some union between ‘inner reality’ and ‘outer reality’ (Cooper et al 2015, 10), in tandem with contemplations on structural factors and individual transformation although not always within the same speeches. Stokely Carmichael famously delivered his polemic, ‘Black Power’, thunderously claiming that the individual was not his territory: ‘I think it’s a cop out when people deal with the individual. What we’re talking about around the US today, and I believe around the Third World, is the system of international white supremacy coupled with international capitalism. And we’re out to smash that system’ (Carmichael et al 2015, 150). Carmichael draws on one of his ‘patron saints’, Frantz Fanon, to elaborate the concept of institutionalized racism as opposed to individualized racism. These terms are now part of contemporary lexicon. I bring up these details because Marcuse’s inclusion at the Congress is a testament to his credibility among political activists and intellectuals of the late 1960s, a period of deep social unrest. It is also a time when Marcuse, who through his talk, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, continues his focus on ontological questions of how freedom and happiness can be reconstructed outside of capitalism. Later, in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) Marcuse tackles questions more directly tied in with Black liberation. In that book, Marcuse sombrely recalls the Black militants martyred: Martin Luther King, Jr, Fred Hampton, Malcom X, and George Jackson. These tragedies are matched abroad in the 1968 Tlaltecloco Massacre in Mexico, and other murderous horrors in the Congo, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where ‘a constant flow of arms from the rich countries to the poor [ones] helps to perpetuate the oppression of national and social liberation’ (1972, 1). Marcuse details how monopoly capitalism has developed a reservoir of violence: The forces of law and order have been made a force above the law. The normal equipment of the police in many cities resemble that of the 108

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S.S.-​the brutality of its actions is familiar. The full weight of suppression falls on the two centers of the radical opposition: the colleges and the black and brown militants. (1972, 24) Recounting a disconcerting context wherein vast prison populations are brutalized, and war crimes are normalized, an ‘effectively organized radical Left’ is deemed to be our only hope. The analysis of Counterrevolution and Revolt extends prior arguments around the multi-​scalar aspects of revolutionary potential. Marcuse continues in the vein that self-​transformation can emerge within the process of struggle itself. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, an oppressed or subordinated population will be radicalized by ‘extirpating to the last root its old habits of obedience and servility’ (Marcuse 1972, 39). Counterrevolution and Revolt could easily be the subject of an entire chapter in this book. It is controversial for its perceived endorsement of counterviolence. For our purposes however, the discussion thus far serves as an entry point into questions of contemporary Black liberation and ‘the political’.

Transnational solidarities There is a celebrated 1969 photograph of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian delegation seated at a table surrounded by press at the first Pan-​African Cultural Festival in Algiers. The festival was a mandate of the Organization of African Unity, which had encouraged Algeria to bring together Black and African populations in anticipation of a post-​imperial world (Murphy 2018). Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Angela Davis, spoke with Nikita Dhawan and Gayatri Spivak about ‘Planetary Utopias’. The conversation migrated towards current links between Black Lives Matter and Palestine: Palestinian activists on the ground in Palestine were the very first to contact the Ferguson protesters through social media and not only offered solidarity but provided advice to the protesters as to how to deal with tear gas. Interestingly, they noticed, from visual images of the protests in Ferguson, that the tear gas canisters –​made by Combined Tactical Systems in the US –​were the same tear gas canisters which were used in occupied Palestine. (Davis et al 2019, 72) Davis notes that these events spurred further research by activists into how Israel influences policing in US Black communities through the propagation of ‘anti-​terrorist’ training and weaponry exchange. She goes on to speak more broadly about Black struggle: Discussions of anti-​blackness often center on pain and injury, which although not unimportant, can create barriers to developing solidarity, 109

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to developing the kind of empathy [we were talking about]. And if, from where I stand, the importance of black people’s histories … resides precisely in the fact that there has been an ongoing freedom struggle for many centuries, the centrality of black struggles is much more about freedom than it is about blackness. (Davis et al 2019, 73) This quote offers a glimpse into trace elements of Marcuse’s influence, however faint, in the suggestion that freedom is a collective endeavour forged through struggle. Davis’s words likewise evoke contestations around how best to conceive of Black Radicalism. David Scott (2013) stresses the multiple frames through which a Black Radical Tradition can be defined by offering different ways to undertake inquiry. He asks, for example, what discursive work has the term performed over time? Should we focus on its ‘uses’ or its ‘meanings’? Is there a singular vantage point from which to narrate the idea of a ‘Black Radical Tradition’? In tracking the discontinuous uses to which the term has been put, he comes to several conclusions. The first of these is the recurrence of the tropes ‘Africa’ and ‘slavery’. Second, is the assertion that Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (2018) should be considered key reading. Third, is the conclusion that the Black Radical Tradition is dynamic and unstable, and dependent upon how we define the individual words in the formulation. Put otherwise, ‘Black’, ‘radical’, and ‘tradition’ produce their own conceptual spaces ‘in which to think the anti-​imperialist and socialist implications of Europe’s exploitation of Africa and its transplantation and enslavement of its people in the New World’ (Scott 2013, 4). In viewing the words associated with the Black Radical Tradition both separately and together, Scott diversifies Black political thought. The glue that binds may be its radicalism, which seeks to overturn the racist social and political order, grasping an idea at the root and ‘rejecting the fundamental principles that govern society’ (Andrews 2018, xviii) or an ‘ontological totality of Blackness’, an oppositional consciousness ‘for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between racial identity, [and] racial capitalism’ (Cheng 2013, quoted in Pulido and De Lara 2018, 80). Certainly, Cedric Robinson’s, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021 [1983]) is an indispensable, defining text on how Black Radical theorists have linked social and cultural histories to political praxis. The terms ‘Black Radical Tradition’ and ‘racial capitalism’ are both associated with Robinson. He describes the Black Radical Tradition as ‘an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle’, defining it as ‘the ideological, philosophical, and epistemological natures of the Black movement whose dialectical matrix … was capitalist slavery and imperialism’ (Robinson 2021 [1983], 167). Black Marxism develops the notion of racial capitalism to accentuate that capitalism and racism 110

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emerged from feudalist orders. Rather than a refutation of feudalism, as Marx had written, capitalism came into being within that order and as Robin D. G. Kelley notes, ‘flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization thoroughly infused with racialism’ (Kelley 2017). Ultimately, the Black Radical Tradition is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide swath of philosophies, movements, praxes, revolts, and Black resistance against racial oppression (Andrews 2018). When paired with the Black Radical Tradition, a Marcusean approach might consider the co-​ mingling of ‘Marxism’ and ‘Black Marxism’, the imbricated nature of racism (oppression) and capitalism, and the necessity of dismantling the repressive social order to contemplate an authentic freedom. In addition, the twinning of these approaches would foreground the role of state violence, mass incarceration, and violent racist structures propagated by imperialist powers that transcend national boundaries. Insurgent internationalist movements inspired by the Black Radical Tradition generate precisely the kinds of encounters Marcuse advocated, and serve as a reminder of the viability of a revitalized Marxism, both as a method, and as an object of criticism. I argue below that Black Radical Tradition-​informed transnational solidarity is a site of struggle enacting and concretizing meso-​Marxist praxis. This final section, which takes up Black–​Palestinian solidarity, reflects the larger themes of the book including: the quest for liberation, extrapolation, contradiction, and rethinking Marxism. I mention these themes, in particular, because there is evidence that in spite of Marcuse’s lifelong commitment to human freedom, he was not summarily opposed to Zionism. In 1971, in a meeting with General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defence Minister during the Six Day War,6 Marcuse and his wife, Inge did not come out against Israel’s military action in 1967. Marcuse later broke with his perceived Zionism in recognition of the many injustices done to the Arab people by the founding of the Jewish State. Marcuse eventually developed a critique of Israeli policy towards Palestine. In spite of these acknowledgements, Marcuse and Inge maintained a complicated relationship with Israel, supporting its right to exist, while opposing the oppression of Palestinians and participating in salons with Palestinian militants and Israeli academics (Tauber 2012; Sethness Castro 2018).

Renewed radical geographies Black activists and intellectuals from the United States have long compared their plight to that of Africans, Arabs, Asians, and others subjected to colonial and imperial rule7 (Carmichael 2007; Lubin 2007). From W. E. B. Du Bois to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, the Black American struggle for freedom has well-​established links with Palestinians. In a special issue of The Journal of Palestinian Studies, Maha Nassar documents how Palestinian 111

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intellectuals with anti-​colonial views have intersected with Black American mobilizations against racism and decolonization. Using the example of the Palestinian essayist and poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who, in 1966 was a citizen of Israel, Nassar narrates a letter detailing James Baldwin’s resonance with Darwish’s own experience. He writes: ‘I felt as if James were writing about me personally, about the “Negroes” in Israel, making only minor adjustments to the details in the picture’ (Nassar 2019, 17). The connection between distant populations was reflected in Black internationalism more generally following the First and Second World Wars. In fact, for more than 50 years, some Black internationalists had identified with Zionism but colonial aggression in the 1950s and 1960s set the stage for transnational kinship. According to Rickford: ‘As Black liberationists came to see Israel as an imperialist outpost, they increasingly viewed Palestinians as ideological peers—​subjects of state violence and occupation whose resistance offered a valuable model for African Americans’ (2019, 53). In addition to a steady stream of delegations of Black radicals travelling to the region, several occurrences fomented Black–​Palestinian transnational solidarity during the 1960s. Malcolm X met with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in Gaza in the autumn of 1964, later writing his essay, ‘Zionist Logic’. In the essay, Malcolm X painted Israel as the epitome of global capitalism and an enemy of the oppressed (Rickford 2019). Another watershed moment for Black Radical solidarity with Palestine was 1967, during the Six Day War. Delegations to the region continued through the 1980s including not only Black Radical activists but also Black moderate politicians. These delegations and relationships enacted what Maytha Alhassen has called ‘Palestinian geographies’: spaces where radical interventions are produced. Part of this process has included a new era of what Alhassen terms Black ‘engaged witnessing’ of Palestine. One example is the way that politicians are able to experience Palestine without visiting Israel or being pressured to invoke a ‘both sides’ narrative (Abuznaid et al 2019). Although the Golden Age of Black internationalism may have subsided, delegations continue. Today, these delegations are no longer organized in collaboration with the official organizations of the Palestinian national movement. They now occur outside official channels, between social justice organizations or individuals. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the epistemic legacy of the Black Radical Tradition in relation to Palestine. The Washington Post noted that the rise of Black Lives Matter ‘has starkly changed the Israeli-​Palestinian debate in the United States, shifting it for many liberals from a tangled dispute over ancient, often-​confusing claims to the far more familiar turf of police brutality and racial conflict’ (Sullivan and Wootson 2021). In 2015, members of the Black Lives Matter organization joined other activists on a ten-​day trip to the Palestinian territories and Israel. They met with members of the 112

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PLO and an artist who had lost his home to Jewish settlers. Upon returning, Black Lives Matter issued a statement of solidarity with Palestinians.8 While critics have argued that a comparative perspective is not perfect because the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is not the same as conflicts between White and Black Americans, a core insight is not the politics of analogy but an emphasis on the denial of rights under a repressive state apparatus. Activists flag the way that Israeli police brutalize Palestinians and the similarity with American treatment of unarmed Black people in the United States. The shared internal logics of oppression of the US and Israeli governments are based upon different hierarchies yet the manifestation of subordination of some populations over others remains a glaring parallel. Taking inspiration from the Marcusean seeds planted at the outset of the chapter (and throughout the book), Black Palestinian Transnational Solidarity epitomizes aspects of anti-​foundationalist meso-​Marxist praxis. To begin with, the affective power of joint action indicates how territorialized oppression can foster deterritorialized solidarity. By sending delegations back and forth to Palestine, cultivating public discourse around similarities between the US and Israel, and drawing on histories of Black Radical ties with Palestine, a ‘worlding beyond borders’ comes to the fore. The reconfiguration of relational context through analogy and displacement –​ deterritorialization –​alters familiar structures, relationships, and points of reference. To elaborate, the delegations, now occurring outside of official political channels, are no longer unidirectional. Palestinians and other activists from the African continent and the Middle East come to the United States and vice versa (Abuznaid et al 2019). Black Lives Matter with its anti-​imperialist tenor, has grown in political force, extending its reach into foreign policy with national implications. Commentators have noted that the Democratic Party has adopted a different approach to the Israel–​Palestine conflict as part of a reckoning on race inspired by Black Lives Matter (Sullivan and Wootson 2021). Horizons of change are operating beyond the confines of the nation-​state in an expanded ‘blowback’ geography. The use of the term blowback is intentional. Blowback refers to the process in which gases expand or travel in an opposite direction to the usual one, either through combustion or escaped pressure. Although support for Palestine has had its political price9 for some supporters in the past, anti-​racist movements open up reconstitutions, a key feature of deterritorialization. Rather than social change in the form of voting as body count –​a formal act, or a focus on normative scales of participation –​these oppositional engagements prompt shape-​shifting interrogations. Matter, ideas, and energy travel along surprising paths. These non-​traditional flows ask us as a society to consider questions like: What is Blackness? Where is Palestine?10 Furthermore, the unofficial capacity of the delegations and grassroots solidarity reflect unexpected recursivities evincing the generative power of 113

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refusal. These oppositional instantiations also disclose something Marcuse considered throughout his life: where true resistance takes place. Following on from the previous chapter, and developing Marcuse’s own latent anti-​foundationalist leanings, Black Palestinian Transnational Solidarities exemplify how ‘the political’ operates at a spatial distance from politics. Instead of perceptible forms of institutionalization, there is a shift away from state-​sanctioned politics and a move towards acting-​in-​common. To further unpack this point, here is Karaliotas and Swyngedouw: ‘The political manifests itself, therefore, as a site open for occupation by those who call it into being, claim its occupation and stage “equality”, irrespective of the “place” they occupy within the social edifice’ (2019, 374). In the case of Black Palestinian Transnational Solidarity, the political is constituted outside of politics in new stagings of emancipation. These encounters may happen through awakenings of historical continuity with the Black Radical Tradition, support for the Palestinian-​led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or in the prioritization of praxis as right here, not yet, and over simultaneously.11 The negation of politics, a contradictory stance in which staid dynamics of conventional legitimacy are imagined as separate and apart from the political, is itself an articulation of new emboldened arrangements. If anything, this protracted example has urged a rethinking of collective mobilization. Additionally, the vantage of a Marcusean meso-​Marxism centres the scale of the micro as well as the macro, that middle plane that focuses on changing ourselves from the inside out. In a roundtable discussion on solidarity delegations, scholar activists reflect on their own life-​changing experiences as a result of these travels. One participant, Phillip Agnew, remarks that he has been transformed on ‘every level’. From his personal standpoint, the trips opened up the manner in which repression in the US had become a banal fact of life, often going unnoticed in his own backyard, so to speak. But in displacing his individual experience through transnational context, came an ability to see actions on the ground in a different way. Agnew saw the seizure of large swaths of land by settlers with state backing as a capitalist form of dispossession. He comments: ‘To me, that was analogous to what in the United States is benignly called “gentrification.” When I reflected on the trip, I was really struck by the power of language and its ability to rebrand brutal realities as seemingly anodyne or less egregious facts’ (Abuznaid et al 2019, 94). In a sense, these reflections elicit, albeit indirectly, a less essentialist way of thinking about the transvaluation of values that Marcuse found to be so crucial for social change. In order for transformation to occur, we must remove the blinders confining us to repressive-​conformist thought and action, opening up ‘a consciousness capable of breaking though the material as well as ideological veil of the affluent society’ (Marcuse [1968b] 2015, 114

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183). Granted, Marcuse formulated his dialectic of liberation in this instance on an instinctual theory, yet aspirations for a qualitatively different society retain promise for present-​day contexts.

Conclusion This chapter serves as a salvo into thinking through how Marcuse’s work, through extension and extrapolation, can provide hope for social and political transformation. It has taken seriously Marcuse’s commitment to Marxism as-​a-​theory-​in-​process (Kellner 1984), one that must be reconstructed, modified, and updated. By turning attention to meso-​Marxism, a less dogmatic, richer, radical project can emerge. Consequently, the hermetically sealed, progressive march of orthodox interpretations sometimes associated with Marx, is cast aside without losing the solidarity accrued through anti-​ capitalist visions. At the same time, the immanent critique of Marxism provided throughout is mindfully aware of the urgent need to diversify who speaks on behalf of this tradition. Two extended empirical sections embark on reconceptualizing Marxism from the perspective of socialist feminism and the Black Radical Tradition. Socialist feminism underscores Marxist diversification through its intersectional view of oppression and the push to re-​scale capitalism through the inclusion of social reproduction, among other spaces. The Black Radical Tradition operates similarly in opening up the transnational and the political to new ways of imagining anti-​capitalist solidarity. In a roundabout way, this chapter is also a more conventional conclusion in that it reflects a culmination of some of Marcuse’s most important intellectual contributions. In every chapter of the book, Marcuse’s theories are laid out and then spatialized, reminding us that although space remained an untapped resource throughout his work, the containment of social change is always a spatial endeavour. Marcuse is too often conceived of in terms of his early ‘Heideggerian Marxist’ phase (1928–​1933), his ‘Critical Theory’ stage through his association with the Institute for Social Research (1933–​ 1941), or the pessimism of some of his post-​Second World War writings. In addition to these castings, we should consider the heterogeneous and anticipatory nature of his work. Marcuse affords a multi-​dimensional view of human liberation by tracing how capitalism in its myriad guises diverts the promise of social and political change. As perhaps the most radical theorist of opposition of our time, Marcuse resists domination and oppression at every scale, from the mind’s own efforts to thwart absorption into the status quo, to the praxis embodied through collective struggle. In his characteristic style of contemplating destructive and reconstructive forces simultaneously, Marcuse’s statements remain prescient these many years later: ‘You could have a decent and better society already 115

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today were it not for the fact that the whole system is mobilized against it’ (Marcuse [1978] 2014, 372). Marcuse became a legend in his own time, yet his work has the potential to transcend the era of its writing. His maverick Marxism, and his potent and sometimes shocking propositions compel us to see and imagine the impossible. In doing so, we glimpse another present.

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Sarahana (2013) ‘Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript’. 17 September. www.imposemagazine.com/​bytes/​slavoj-​zizek-​at-​occupy-​wall-​street-​transcript. It also appears in in Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real (pp 1–​2) and in Patrick O’Brien’s 2013 thesis ‘Herbert Marcuse: Liberation, Domination and the Great Refusal’. There is a significant literature related to the spatial turn and spatiality more generally including: Smith and O’Keefe (1996 [1980]). Members of the Institute, many of whom were Jews, had moved their money out of Germany before the Nazi seizure of power. Marcuse maintained a complicated relationship to Heidegger, at one point observing that ‘[Heidegger’s] work remains “true”, even though it contains a considerable amount of error’ (quoted in Wolin 2015, 146). Marcuse communicated with Heidegger through a series of letters beginning in August of 1947. In them he expressed that he, like many of Heidegger’s former students, had long awaited a statement from his once esteemed teacher renouncing the Nazi regime. This exchange was translated by Richard Wolin and is published in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume 1. Letter to Theodor Adorno, in Adorno and Marcuse (1999). Marcuse remained a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, continuing to link ‘the complete terrorism of late monopoly capitalism’ (Marcuse quoted in Sethness Castro 2018, 250) across territorial boundaries. Following Angela Davis’s acquittal in June 1972, he addressed a large crowd in Frankfurt outside the Opera House, which he took as an opportunity to reiterate themes from his 1965 essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’. Marcuse spoke of how extreme violence in Vietnam is effectively an outer limit of what is considered ‘normal’ violence in the United States and therefore mutually reinforcing (Marcuse 1965; Sethness Castro 2018). Although, in Chapter 5, I make the argument that Marcuse and poststructuralism are neither entirely incompatible nor mutually exclusive. Herbert Marcuse, The Listener [magazine], 1968. A conversation with Habermas and others, in Marcuse (1979a, 130) and quoted in Kellner (1984, 149). See, for example, Peter Marcuse’s foreword in Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. The lecture was later published in 1974 in Women’s Studies 2(3): 279–​288.

Chapter 2 1

Sarah Surak, and Peter Marcuse, Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Conference Society, November 12–​15, 2015 at Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD.

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‘Blue Feed, Red Feed’, The Wall Street Journal (2019) https://​graph​ics.wsj.com/​blue-​ feed-​red-​feed/​ [Accessed 1 December 2020]. In describing capitalist societies as totalitarian, Marcuse has in mind ‘the total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality’. By this he means that the Cold War global political and military situation brought corporations and unions together to serve ‘national security’, enlisted all cultural institutions from Hollywood to the universities, marked the boundaries of tolerable and unsafe discourse, and generated spontaneous as well as organized policing mechanisms (Aronson 2014, 5). A modern manifestation might be affluent Americans’ sociocultural obsession with self-​improvement and personal optimization. How to take care of ourselves more often than not translates into a market for purchasable experiences. See for example: ‘When Did Self-​Help Become Self-​Care?’, The New York Times, 10 August 2019. [Accessed 10 January 2021]. The terms technical reason and technological rationality/​rationalism are used interchangeably. Technology refers to the instrumentalization of nature and humans. Technological reason goes beyond technology as a set of devices to explore the process of the rationalization of domination. Further elaboration appears in Walker 2018, 951: Technological rationality is a pervasive rationality oriented towards the performance principle wherein every technical item is given a mission furthering competition and production. Comprising operational definitions, formal logic, and the objective order of things (Marcuse, 1941) truth becomes defined by measurement, calculation, internal coherence, and the reduction of experience to practice organized by technology. Because technological society tends toward the annulment of its foundational conditions, social relations of domination are mystified and oppression can occur without physical domination. (Farr, 2009)

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The Economist (2018) ‘How Governments Should Deal with the Gig Economy’. www. economist.com/​leaders/​2018/​10/​06/​how-​governments-​should-​deal-​with-​the-​r ise-​of-​ the-​gig-​economy [Accessed July 2021]. For example, governance is determined by electability whereby someone’s value is reduced to a numerical calculation. Or, in the context of refugee crises, death and suffering are normalized in the language of efficiency. A common objection to allowing entry to vulnerable populations is deployed through ‘capacity’, a reference to an unspoken quantification. Inaugural Address to UCSD 1966. Re-​published in New Political Science (2016), Volume 4, 476–​484. Douglas Kellner (2016b, 3) has also looked at Trump through his work on the concept of the media spectacle, which he developed in the 1990s to help explain ‘the O.J. Simpson murder case and trial, the Clinton sex scandals, and the rise of cable news networks’. Trump’s predilection for state power took a macabre turn in his management of the COVID-​19 pandemic. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who served for eight years on the Homeland Security Task Force of the National Governors Association criticized the administration for its political response to a global health crisis. He said: ‘That is a Darwinian approach to federalism; that is states’ rights taken to a deadly extreme. The better read of federalism is that the states and federal government work together when the US is attacked, whether it is by imperial Japan or a pandemic.’ www.politico.com/​ news/​2020/​03/​31/​governors-​trump-​coronavirus-​156875 [Accessed 7 May 2020]. This appeared in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (the Institute’s journal) in the article ‘Der Kampf gegen denin der totalitaren Staatsuaffassung’. 118

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The reasons for this are complicated and long debated. The question can also be posed in these terms: why do people vote against their own interests? Mimesis captures the phenomenon but may be inadequate in terms of underlying causes. Those must undoubtedly involve racial politics, an arena where Marcuse and the Frankfurt School were remarkably understated. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction on the forfeiture of real power and material well-​being in return for the ‘psychological’ returns of whiteness is informative here. Boris Johnson has sought to reclaim the phrase showing that it remains a powerful frame of reference: www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2020/​mar/​29/​20000-​nhs-​staff-​return-​to-​ service-​johnson-​says-​from-​coronavirus-​isolation [Accessed 16 August 2020]. Ronald Aronson, ‘Solid Trumpism’, Boston Review, 25 July (2019): http://bostonreview. net/race-politics/ronald-aronson-solid-trumpism [Accessed 7 June 2020].

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Podcast: ‘Anti-​Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-​19’. 19 March 2020: http://​ david​ harv​ ey.org/​2020/​03/​anti-​cap​ital​ist-​polit​ics-​in-​the-t​ ime-o ​ f-c​ ovid-1​ 9/# ​ more-3​ 209 [Accessed 8 January 2020]. In Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse writes that overcoming productive destruction is necessarily at odds with the importance of ecology: ‘the violation of nature is inseparable from the economy of capitalism’ (Marcuse 1972, 61). Marcuse could be considered a proponent of radical ecology emphasizing aspects of eco-​socialism in his later essays. In one of his last writings before his death, ‘Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society’, which was delivered to a wilderness class in California, Marcuse begins his lecture with sarcasm, noting that preservation may no longer be a subject worth considering because President Carter had recently designated nearly 40 million acres of wilderness land to commercial development (Kellner 1992). These writings suggest that Marcuse would have much to say to the accelerated trends associated with climate change. It is also likely that Marcuse would have mounted a searing critique of mainstream sustainability discourse, because as Peter Marcuse has pointed out: ‘No one who is interested in justice wants to sustain things as they are now’ (1998, 105). Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives. https://​black​live​smat​ter. com/​about/​ [Accessed 16 November 2021].

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‘Interview with Herbert Marcuse’ (1979): www.youtube.com/​watch?v=​XhzKyvLbY8M [Accessed 12 January 2020]. This fusion is taken up more fully in Chapter 4. Recall that to be materialist in the tradition of Critical Theory is to be oppositional; engaged in social and political struggles and guided by the goal of social emancipation (Tischler Visquerra et al 2018). Douglas Kellner writes in Herbert Marcuse and The Crisis of Marxism: Those oppressed people who are not totally integrated into the system, who do not identify with the system, may develop needs or consciousness that might provide the subjective conditions for radical social change. These needs are not necessarily borne out of poverty, Marcuse stresses. They 119

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might grow out of oppression at work, sexual oppression, racial oppression or simply the experience of living in an oppressive society whose way of life is no longer tolerable. (1984, 303) 7

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To paraphrase Marcuse across several of his writings: equipping the whole of society with the properties of the individual leaves the individual disempowered without experiential grounding (1941, 1955). Several commentators including James Fallows of The Atlantic and David Von Drehle of The Washington Post have made important distinctions between Marcuse’s time and our own, although I would argue that the root conditions remain intact. Although it is too soon to comment definitively, profound change is unlikely under the Biden administration given early indications. Then President-​elect Biden stated before entering office: “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-​tech capacity to deal with it” (Rainey, R. and Bender, B. ‘Biden will stop the border wall and loosen immigration again’. Politico, 7 November 2020). I refer here to both the transnational social movement called No Border Network, activists collaborating with migrant groups and struggles within and outside academia that have no formal association. For a review of the migrant caravan and the externalization of border security see Walker (2020), Walker and Frimpong Boamah (2020) and Menjívar (2014). Détournement, in the sense used by Galis and Neumayer (2016) describes how social movements turn something aside from its normal course or purpose. ‘BLACK TWITTER 101’, UVA Today: https://​news.virgi​nia.edu/​cont​ent/​black-​twit​ ter-​101-​what-​it-​where-​did-​it-​origin​ate-​where-​it-​hea​ded [Accessed 23 May 2021]. ‘BLACK TWITTER 101’, UVA Today: https://​news.virgi​nia.edu/​cont​ent/​black-​twit​ ter-​101-​what-​it-​where-​did-​it-​origin​ate-​where-​it-​hea​ded [Accessed 23 May 2021]. The MeToo campaign, a forerunner of the hashtag, was founded ten years ago by Tarana Burke in order to help women talk about sexual assault. Tactical assertions of web-​based opposition are by no means restricted to the Left. There is a significant literature on how the alt-​right have used online material to proliferate disruption and claim virtual space (see for example, Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir (2020) and Graham (2016)). See for example the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

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David Harvey’s utopian essay, ‘Edilia, or “Make of it what you will” ’ in Spaces of Hope (2000) is a recent example of the difficulty of grappling with the idea and form of utopia. Harvey critiques ‘the romanticism of endlessly open projects’ (p 174) arguing instead for a dialectical utopianism. The essay is a powerful one. The point of dispute from my perspective is Harvey’s re-​fashioning of utopian possibilities in terms of universal rights. This is now contained in the 1968 book Negations. Interview, 25 April 1979 [sound recording]: Herbert Marcuse, interviewed by Helen Hawkins. Some examples include an interpretation of Plato by David Roochnick (2008), More (1965), and current works like Davina Cooper’s Everyday Utopias (2013). In 1941, Herbert Marcuse published Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. In 1960, he added a new preface. ‘We are the Web’: www.wired.com/​2005/​08/​tech/​ [Accessed 3 January 2020].

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Both excerpts are taken from Preamble and Program to Plan de Aztlán: http://​latino​pia. com/​lat​ino-​hist​ory/​plan-​de-​azt​lan//​ [Accessed 18 November 2019]. Later published in the 1970 book Five Lectures, published by Beacon Press. For Marcuse that necessarily entails a new form of socialism articulated quite differently from the socialist ideal of his time. This appears in the question and answer section following the essay on page 69 of the 1970 published version. Although lurking in both the examples of Wikipedia and Aztlán is the implicit suggestion of the end of utopia. As an explicit reminder in the case of the former: the potential to renunciate power structures through the struggle to realize open-​source knowledge production and consumption is at our fingertips. And, the latter: if Aztlán is positioned within the established system yet also envisioned as an alternative, Chicanos are simultaneously living in their homeland while being subjected to the hegemony of white supremacy. This entry appears on 8 August 1930 and is reprinted in the 1975 volume Edward Weston, the Flame of Recognition: His Photographs, accompanied by excerpts from the daybooks and letters.

Chapter 5 1

An example is Marcuse’s reference throughout his writings to the instinctual or biological level of social transformation. For example, the following excerpt from Counterrevolution and Revolt states: In An Essay on Liberation, I suggested that without a change in this dimension, the old Adam would be reproduced in the new society, and that the construction of a free society presupposes a break with the familiar experience of the world: with the mutilated sensibility. Conditioned and ‘contained’ by the rationality of the established system, sense experience tends to ‘immunize’ man against the very unfamiliar experience of human freedom. The development of a radical, nonconformist sensibility assumes vital political importance in view of the unprecedented extent of social control perfected by advanced capitalism: a control which reaches down into the instinctual and physiological level of existence. Conversely, resistance and rebellion, too, tend to activate and operate on this level. (1972, 63)

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On 20 December 1973, The Wall Street Journal attributed the quote to the American political scientist Wallace S. Sayre although Henry Kissinger is often credited with the phrase. There is extensive debate on the differences between anti-​foundationalism and post-​ foundationalism. I use post-​foundationalism here, defined by Marchart below. In addition, I take from these deeply philosophical discussions the following: post-​foundationalism does not ‘prop-​up’ foundationalism in the same way that anti-​foundationalism does; anti-​foundationalism is sometimes equated with postmodernism; my own examination of poststructuralism is more in line with a post-​foundationalist conception. Post-​foundationalism is a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation-​such as totality, universality, essence and ground … a post-​ foundational approach does not attempt to erase completely such figures of the ground but to weaken their ontological status. The ontological weakening of ground does not lead to the total absence of all grounds, but rather to the assumption of the impossibility of a final ground, which is 121

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something completely different as it implies an increased awareness of, on the one hand, contingency, and on the other, the political as the moment of partial and always, in the last instance, unsuccessful grounding. (Marchart 2007, 2) 4

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There is both significant overlap and an extensive literature on the relationship between poststructuralism and postmodernism (cf Sarup 1989; Harvey 1989). The ‘postmodern condition’ was used by French writers such as Lyotard (1979) and Baudrillard (Kellner 1994), and Frederic Jameson’s declaration of postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ (1991) instigated widespread popularity for the term. A neat separation between the two is impossible, with a general rule being that both function as critiques of the Enlightenment. I understand postmodernism to be quite a bit broader and less specific in scope than poststructuralism. For this chapter, I focus on poststructuralism with the acknowledgement that the categories are intermittently blurred. These examples are suggestive rather than exhaustive. Douglas Kellner addresses the issue in Volume One of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse on Technology, War and Fascism (1998, xiv): [W]‌hile there has been great interest in recent years in the writings of French ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’ theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, Marcuse did not fit into the fashionable debates concerning modern and postmodern thought. … Rather, Marcuse subscribed to the project of reconstructing reason and of positing alternatives to the existing society –​a dialectical imagination that has fallen out of favor in an era that rejects revolutionary thought and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction.

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All three areas of contention are related to the larger issue of stability/​existence of ontological categories although I treat them distinctively here. In addition, the argument presented is not meant to function as a comprehensive overview of either Marxism or poststructuralism. See Chapter 2 of this book for a discussion of alienation. Hall’s larger argument is that we cannot think of difference in isolation but need to think about unity and difference together. Hall puts forth his own theory of articulation which is beyond the scope of the argument laid out here. My point is to expose the false artifice of insurmountable irreconcilability across critical theories. This is more fully detailed in Chapter 4. Christopher Holman’s (2013, 626) interpretation of Marcuse’s politics as nonidentitarian is helpful: The principle of nonidentity Marcuse affirms points always toward the permanent discrepancy between appearance and potential, toward the immediate’s inability to exhaust the actuality of the object. As that being striving always toward the supersession of immediacy, the human being is that which affirms through its life-​activity the negative and nonidentical. All political struggle should thus be oriented toward the production of a world in which individuals are able to express their essential powers as actors, as doers who self-​consciously shape themselves and the world through spontaneous processes of creation. Successful political intervention, then, does not result in the actualization of a static condition of existence or order of things. Marcuse is quite explicit on this point: ‘The institutions of socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve 122

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all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual.’ 12

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I am not suggesting that Marcuse developed a robust posthumanist ontology nor is my intent to engage in an overextension of concepts. The goal is to subject his works to a more critical reading and recognize the ways he anticipated anti-​foundationalist framings. Swyngedouw sums up this perspective as not only the refusal to accept the social as the foundation of the political, but, more profoundly, the view that the absence of a foundation for the social (or, in other words, the ‘social’ being constitutively split, inherently incoherent, ruptured by all manner of tensions and conflicts) calls into being ‘the political’ as the instituting moment of the social’. (2009, 604)

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Although it may seem jarring to speak of consensual governance in the midst of a heightened state of disunion, the post-​political can acknowledge hyper-​polarization, while also suggesting that differences veil deep-​seated similarities. A return to borders, a topic of Chapter 3, is illustrative. Former President Trump and President Biden both cracked down on migration between Mexico and the United States. Trump used the stick –​the threat of tariffs, while Biden used the carrot of COVID-​19 vaccines, which the US provided in exchange for Mexico’s support in containing migration. The tactics may have been different, but the instrumental logics were the same. Both measures eschewed more robust conceptions of borders and bordering, whittling down the political possibilities to processes of management (The Washington Post, 18 March 2021). I treat one-​dimensionality and technological rationality in depth in Chapter 2.

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KPBS, 1979: Interview, April 25, 1979 (sound recording): Herbert Marcuse, interviewed by Helen Hawkins. Audio version of interview done as part of the Viewpoints television program produced by KPBS Television, San Diego, CA; recorded at KPBS Television, San Diego, CA. It is available in UCSD special collections, Listening copy SPL-​1337. ‘The University and Radical Social Change’, delivered at Kent State in 1976. There are too many to name here, but a sample includes: J.K. Gibson-​Graham (1993), Andrew Jones (1999), and Enrique Dussel (2001). Even earlier of course, was György Lukács’ work, an innovative and celebrated challenge to orthodox Marxism. The concept of ‘meso-​Marxism’ fits well with his concept of mediation, the concern for the interaction between subject and object. Meso-​Marxism is not so much a new concept to be named and claimed as it is a heuristic device. Here, a word on the question whether the ‘feminine’ or ‘female’ characteristics are socially conditioned or in any sense ‘natural,’ or biological. My answer is: over and above the obviously physiological differences between male and female, the feminine characteristics are socially conditioned. However, the long process of thousands of years of social conditioning means that they may become ‘second nature’ which is not changed automatically by the establishment of new social institutions (1974, 280). Available in Marcuse et al (2014, 215). When Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights. There has been less attention to the intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans. See for example: Mays (2013). 123

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8

9

10

11

There are numerous stories covering the linkages between BLM and Palestine including Davis Bailey (2015). See the Special Issue of The Journal of Palestinian Studies referenced throughout for details on former Florida state senator Dwight Bullard, details of Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum, and others. This discussion is not meant to deny the importance nor the complexity of territory (see for example, Elden (2005)). Instead, place and space retain their significance albeit their calculus is activated in distinct ways. For example, as previously noted, the lopsided distribution of advantage and disadvantage inscribed in gentrification is clearly illuminated from afar through displacement. See Chapter 4 on utopian topologies.

124

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145

Index References to figures appear in italic type. References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (123n14). A absence  91 Acosta García, N.  44 Adorno, Theodor  6, 13, 32, 37, 41, 71 advanced industrial society  2, 17, 19, 60, 65, 74 Aesthetic Dimension, The (Marcuse)  10, 59, 70 Africa, European colonialism and exploitation of  110 Agger, Ben  68 Agnew, Phillip  114 Aid to Families with Dependent Children  34 Alhassen, Maytha  112 alienation  15, 18, 22, 24–​27, 28, 33, 39, 61 All-​African People’s Revolutionary Party  108 Allen, Amy  87 Altenreid, M.  26 Althusser, Louis  84, 88 Alurista  71 American authoritarianism  16, 31 American Dream  15, 33 androgyny  107 anomie  24 Anthes, E.  26 anti-​foundationalism  13, 81, 89, 96, 98, 99, 101 antiwar movement  5 Anwar, Amir  26 Anzaldúa, Gloria  101 Arendt, Hannah  54 Aronson, Ronald  17, 19–​20, 33–​34, 35, 47 art  70 Aztlán (El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán)  5, 70–​73 B Badiou, Alain  90 Baldwin, James  112 banks, financial support during the financial crisis, 2008  34–​35 Bargu, B.  102 Bauder, Harald  47

Baudrillard, Jean  81, 122n4 Being and Nothingness (Sartre)  10 being-​in-​the-​world  4, 38, 58, 70 Benhabib, Seyla  86 Benjamin, Walter  17, 27 Benkler, Yochai  69 Biden, Joe  120n9, 123n14 Big Tech  20, 53–​54 ‘biocapital’  89 Black Lives Matter  20, 38 and Palestine  109, 112–​113 Black Marxism  110–​111 Black-​Palestinian transnational solidarity  96, 109–​115 Black Panther Party  99, 108, 109, 111 Black Power movement  108 Black Radical Tradition  13, 100, 107, 110–​115 Black Twitter  51–​52 Bloch, Ernst  57, 62–​65, 67 ‘blowback’ geography  113 body, the  89 Border Industrial Complex  11, 44, 45, 46 borders  1, 5, 44–​49, 123n14 Bottici, C.  102 Bourdieu, Pierre  21 Breton, André  43 Brexit  31, 32 Brock, André  51 Brooklyn School for Social Research, The  30 Brown, Wendy  35 business, convergence with politics  30 Butler, Judith  30, 84, 101 C capitalism  40, 55 and feminism  102–​103, 104 Marcuse on  5, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20–​21, 27–​28, 89, 92–​93, 98, 108–​109 and racism  100

146

Index

spatial nature of  100 and violence  108–​109 Caplan, Bryan  46 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture)  108 Carr, Nicholas  69 CBP (Customs and Border Protection), US  45 Central America, migrant caravans  47–​49 Cerullo, Margaret  104 Chicano identity  71–​72 China  54 civil rights movement  5, 47 see also Black Radical Tradition civilization  59 Clark, Meredith  52 class  84 Clinton, Bill  34 Cocks, J.  71 colonialism  110, 111–​112 commodification  15, 22, 25, 27–​29 commodity fetishism  23, 27 concrete utopia  57, 63 conformity  11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 24, 25, 29, 35, 59, 93, 94 repressive  41, 42 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation  108 conspicuous consumption  27 consumer society  23–​24, 27–​28, 33 containment  21–​29 of social change  3, 5, 8, 10–​11, 14, 19, 57, 99, 115 convergence  15–​16, 18, 30, 35 Cooper, David  39 Counterrevolution and Revolt (Marcuse)  46, 108–​109, 119n2, 121n1 COVID-​19 pandemic  26, 38, 118n10, 123n14 Cox, Kevin  84 Cresswell, Tim  80 critical race theory  82 critical rationality  29, 32, 36 Critical Theory  13, 25, 31, 36, 37, 47, 74, 80, 85, 88, 90, 94 and poststructuralism  12–​13 and subjectivity  86–​87 D Darwish, Mahmoud  112 Dataism  24 Davis, Angela  5, 44, 99–​100, 107, 109–​110, 117n6 Dear, Michael  44 deconstruction  81–​82, 86 Deibert, Ronald  54 Deleuze, Gilles  12, 66, 81, 89 democracy  7, 19, 30, 31, 32–​33, 75, 93 and Big Tech  20 Derrida, Jacques  81, 86 desire  89

Dhawan, Nikita  109 dialectical thinking  14, 38, 42 dialectical writing  10 dialectics  57 difference  88, 91 discourse  84–​85 distantiation  15–​16, 18–​19, 33, 35 Dixon, D.  83 Doel, Marcus  83 Donegan, Moira  52 Dorsey, Jack  50 Douthat, Ross  40–​41 Du Bois, W. E. B.  111, 119n12 Dunayevskaya, Raya  78 Durkheim, Emile  24 Dutschke, Rudi  39 E echo chambers  20, 28 ecology  2, 119 Ehrenreich, Barbara  103 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  34, 44 El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Aztlán)  5, 70–​73 El Salvador  47 Embera community, Colombia  44 Engels, Friedrich  25, 63, 64 Eros and Civilization (Marcuse)  8, 10, 12, 58–​59, 59–​61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 89, 104–​105 Essay on Liberation, An (Marcuse)  37–​38, 39–​40, 41, 42–​43, 44, 47, 65, 89, 121n1 ‘Essex School’  86 everyday utopias  63 existentialism  5, 40, 59, 80, 87 Expressionism  65 F Facebook  20 fake news  54 false consciousness  18 Fannin, M.  101 Fanon, Franz  100, 108 Farrell, K. N.  44 fascism  32, 33 Feenberg, Andrew  12, 39 feminism  82, 101 and capitalism  102–​103, 104 feminist socialism  105, 106, 107 generational ‘waves’ of  101 and Marcuse  13, 96, 98, 100–​101, 102, 104–​107 Marxist feminism  101–​104 socialist feminism  96, 101–​104, 115 Women’s Liberation Movement  13, 104 financial crisis, 2008  34–​35 flaneur  27 flattening of dimensionality  17, 32, 35, 36 flexploitation  21 Ford, Gerald  16

147

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

Foucault, Michel  81, 84–​85, 87–​88 Frankfurt School  5–​6, 8, 11, 17, 22, 27, 31, 33, 37, 57, 58, 78, 86, 87, 89 see also Institute for Social Research Fraser, Nancy  102 Freud, Sigmund  4, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 72 Front (Bloch’s three-​dimensional temporality)  64, 67 Fuchs, Christian  49, 53 G Gallaher, Carolyn  34 Gandesha, Samir  23 Garland, Christian  42–​43 gentrification  114 geography  12–​13 and alienation  25–​26 ‘blowback’ geography  113 and feminism  101 geographic unevenness  30 Marxist  3 and the post-​political  91–​92 poststructural  82, 83 unjust geographies  46, 47 German Revolution, 1918  8–​9 gig economy  26–​27 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson  100 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘Corky’  70–​71 Gramsci, Antonio  80 Great Depression  34 Great Refusal, The  12, 38, 39, 41, 42–​44 Guatemala  47, 48 Guattari, Félix  12, 66, 89 Guterman, Norbert  31–​32 H Habermas, Jürgen  9, 85, 96–​97 Hall, Stuart  88 Hampton, Fred  108 Harari, Yuval  24 Hardt, Michael  89 Harvey, David  25, 38, 41–​42, 87 Hawkins, Helen, KPBS Public Radio interview, 1979  8, 39, 42, 62, 95 Hegel, G. W. F.  40 Heidegger, Martin  4, 5, 10, 11, 59 heimat  64 Heller, Nathan  20 Henderson, George  98–​99 Hill, Marc  52 Hill, Samantha Rose  54 Horkheimer, Max  4, 5–​6, 13 Humboldt University, Berlin  4 Husserl, Edmund  4, 5 I ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), US  45 Illing, Sean  31

illusion and complicity  8, 57 immanent critique  11–​12, 22, 38, 41–​42 Indignados movement, Spain (15-​M)  50–​51 individual, the  40–​41 individualism  29 pseudo-​individualism  28 Institute for Social Research  5, 115 see also Frankfurt School institutionalized racism  108 instrumental activity  22 instrumental reason  11, 15, 22–​23 Internet Research Agency, Russia  54 internet, the  and the gig economy  26 see also social media introjection  2, 18, 61, 73, 97 Irigaray, Lucy  81 Israel  109, 111–​113 J Jackson, George  108 James, C. L. R.  100, 122n2 Jameson, Fredric  68, 75, 87 Jansen, Peter-​Erwin  96–​97 Jay, Martin  7, 22 Jeffries, Stuart  31 Johnson, Boris  119n13 Jones III, J. P.  83 K Kant, Immanuel  40, 58, 64 Karaliotas, L.  114 Katz, Cindi  66 KCET Public Radio interview, 1968  16 Kelley, Robin D. G.  111 Kellner, Douglas  4, 7, 8–​9, 12–​13, 18, 24, 40, 43, 58, 60, 63, 65, 68, 80, 83, 89 keyboard politics  20 King, Jr., Martin Luther  108 King, Natasha  47 Kirchheimer, Otto  9 KPBS Public Radio interview, 1979  8, 39, 42, 62, 95 Krahl, Hans-​Jürgen  37 Kristeva, Julia  81 L Lacan, Jacques  80 Laclau, Ernesto  84, 85 Larner, Wendy  94, 101 Lefebvre, Henri  3 ‘Left Melancholy’  17 Left, the, and markets  33, 35 Leiss, W.  12 Levine, Andrew  99 liberal democracy  32, 33 liberation, preconditions for  11, 39–​40 ‘libidinal rationality’  89 Löwenthal, Leo  31–​32 Lundy, Craig  81

148

Index

Luxemburg, Rosa  109 Lyotard, Jean-​François  81, 122n4 M MacLeavy, J.  101 Malcolm X  108, 111, 112 Maley, Terry  22–​23, 97 Manning, E.  12 Marcuse, Herbert  5, 7, 95–​96, 115–​116 academic career  4–​5 The Aesthetic Dimension  10, 59, 70 An Essay on Liberation  37–​38, 39–​40, 41, 42–​43, 44, 47, 65, 89, 121n1 and anti-​foundational theory  96 and Black Liberation  100 and the Black Radical Tradition  107–​109 on capitalism  5, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20–​21, 27–​28, 89, 92–​93, 98, 108–​109 Counterrevolution and Revolt  46, 108–​109, 119n2, 121n1 and Critical Theory  4, 7, 11, 12 critiques of  6, 7–​8 Eros and Civilization  8, 10, 12, 58–​59, 59–​61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 89, 104–​105 and feminism  13, 96, 98, 100–​101, 102, 104–​107 and Freudian psychoanalysis  4, 5, 7, 8, 12 KCET Public Radio interview, 1968  16 KPBS Public Radio interview, 1979  8, 39, 42, 62, 95 and Marxism  1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 18, 21, 40, 59, 78–​79, 80, 82, 88–​90, 96, 107, 115 Note on Dialectics  42 One-​Dimensional Man  11, 14–​15, 17, 19, 20–​22, 27, 38, 43, 49, 54, 61, 93 ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’  56, 61–​62 political education  8–​9 and post-​foundational thought  12–​13, 79, 88–​90, 94 and the post-​political  90, 92–​94 post-​war period  5–​6, 9–​10, 17, 115 radicalism of  2, 3, 5 Reason and Revolution  10 Second World War activities  9 “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”  23, 29, 49, 68 spatialization of  3–​4 on subjectivity  89 on technology  10, 11, 23, 29, 49, 68 Transvaluation of Values and Radical Social Change: Five New Lectures, 1966–​1976  96–​97 on utopia  5, 56–​62, 63, 64, 65–​76, 89 and Zionism  111 Marcuse, Peter  15, 119n2 Martel, James  33 Marx, Karl  22, 40, 57, 60, 63, 64, 84 on alienation  24–​25 commodity fetishism  23, 27

false consciousness  18 immanent critique  41–​42 Marxism  8, 10, 86, 97 Black Marxism  110–​111 feminist critique of  13 and Marcuse  1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 18, 21, 40, 59, 78–​79, 80, 82, 88–​90, 96, 107, 115 Marxist feminism  101–​104 Marxist geography  3 and poststructuralism  79, 80–​86 and subjectivity  83–​84 and ‘the political’  85 white male dominance of  99 see also meso-​Marxism Massumi, B.  12 Matter (Bloch’s three-​dimensional temporality)  64 media spectacle, concept of  118n9 Melamed, Jodi  100 meso-​Marxism  96, 98–​104 Black-​Palestinian transnational solidarities  109–​115 Black Radical Tradition  13, 107–​109 feminism and Marcuse  104–​107 ‘meso’ socio-​spatial positionality  13, 96 #MeToo movement  52–​53 migration  Central America, migrant caravans  47–​49 migration policies  32 see also Border Industrial Complex; borders militant optimism  63–​64 military-​industrial complex  44 Miller, Todd  45 minor theory  13, 66–​67 Mitchell, D.  94 Morelock, J.  22 Mouffe, Chantal  85, 91 N Nassar, Maha  111–​112 National Youth Liberation Conference  70–​71 Nazi Germany  31, 35 negation  38, 49 negative thinking  11–​12, 18, 38, 39 positive negativity  42–​44 Negri, Antonio  89 neoliberalism  2, 32, 33, 34, 36 Neumann, Franz  9, 10 New Deal  34 new sensibility  57, 65, 72, 75, 89, 90, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich  83 Nixon, Richard  16, 34, 44 no borders  46, 47, 49 non-​instrumental activity  22 nonidentity  122n11 Not-​Yet-​Conscious  64, 65 not yet (Marcuse’s triadic topology of utopia)  12, 57, 58, 64, 67, 70–​73, 74, 75

149

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE

Note on Dialectics (Marcuse)  42 Novum (Bloch’s three-​dimensional temporality)  64

psychoanalysis  4, 5 Pueblos Sin Fronteras (Villages Without Borders)  48

O Obama, Barack  32, 35, 56 Occupy Movement  51 Occupy Wall Street  20 O’Hara, H.  63, 65 One-​Dimensional Man (Marcuse)  11, 14–​15, 17, 19, 20–​22, 27, 38, 43, 49, 54, 61, 93 one-​dimensionality  2–​3, 11, 15–​16, 17–​21, 28, 32, 35, 54, 92 ontological categories  83, 85 open border  11, 46–​47, 49 ‘operational’ thinking  22–​23 Organization of African Unity  109 over (Marcuse’s triadic topology of utopia)  12, 57, 58, 67, 73–​76

R race and racism  Black Lives Matter  20, 38, 109, 112–​113 Black Marxism  110–​111 Black-​Palestinian transnational solidarity  96, 109–​115 Black Radical Tradition  13, 100, 107, 110–​115 Black Twitter  51–​52 and capitalism  100 institutionalized  108 in Marxism  100 white supremacy  32, 100, 108, 119n3, 121n11 Rancière, Jacques  90 Reagan, Ronald  16, 34 reality principle  59–​60, 105, 106 Reason and Revolution (Marcuse)  10 Reason, classical concept of  7 reconstruction  11, 38, 39, 47, 54, 57, 98, 99, 115 refusal  11, 38, 47, 49 see also Great Refusal, The repression  58, 59 repressive conformity  41, 42 repressive desublimation  4, 18 resistance, technological  20 Rickford, R.  112 right here (Marcuse’s triadic topology of utopia)  12, 57, 58, 61, 63, 67–​70, 72–​73, 74, 75 Roberts, Margaret  54 Robinson, Cedric  110–​111 Rodney, Walter  100, 110 Rorty, Richard  83 Ruddick, Susan  88 Russia, Internet Research Agency  54

P Palestine, Black-​Palestinian transnational solidarity,  96, 109–​115 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)  112 Pan-​African Cultural Festival, Algiers  109 Papacharissi, Zizi  50 ‘Pepper No. 30’ (Weston)  76, 77 performance principle  60–​61, 65, 67, 70, 72, 92, 97, 105, 106, 107 performativity  84 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act  34 phantasy (imagination)  61–​62, 72, 73 phenomenology  4, 5, 30 ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ (Marcuse)  56, 61–​62 Pierce, Clayton  68, 89 Plaice, S.  64 planned obsolescence  6 pleasure principle  59–​60 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 112 ‘political, the’  85–​86 politics, convergence with business  30 populism  31, 32, 33 positive negativity  42–​44 Posselt, Gerald  85 post-​foundationalism  79, 91, 94 post-​political, the  13, 79–​80, 89, 90–​93 posthumanism  90 postmodernism  85 poststructuralism  46 and Critical Theory  12–​13 and subjectivity  12–​13, 84–​85 and ‘the political’  85–​86 practice, merger of with theory in praxis  4, 11 praxis  4, 11, 41 pseudo-​freedom  28 pseudo-​individualism  28

S Sager, Alex  45 Sanctuary Movement  48 Sayre, Walter S.  79, 121n2 scarcity, abolition of  15 Schiller, Friedrich  4, 10, 58 Schneider, Suzanne  30 Scott, David  110 SDS (German Socialist Student Alliance)  37 Seitz, Sergei  85 Sennett, Richard  29 sexism  #MeToo movement  52–​53 see also feminism sexuality  62 ‘shitposting’  53 Six Day War, 1967  112 Smith, N.  46

150

Index

Sober, Elliott  99 social change, containment of  3, 5, 8, 10–​11, 14, 19, 57, 99, 115 social media  and resistance  20 #TwitterPolitics  11, 49–​55 social reproduction  102–​103 socialist feminism  96, 101–​104, 115 Soja, Ed  3 “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” (Marcuse)  23, 29, 49, 68 space  3–​4, 6 spatial nature of capitalism  100 spaces of uncritical rationality  29–​36 Spivak, Gayatri  109 Springer, Simon  87–​88 status quo  2, 3, 8, 10–​11, 13 introjection of  2, 18, 61, 73, 97 structuralism  80, 81 Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee  108 student protests, Frankfurt  37 subjectivity  83–​85 and Critical Theory  12–​13 Sunkara, Bhaskar  30 Swyngendouw, E.  91, 114

U United States  1, 5 American authoritarianism  16, 31 border policies and practices  45, 46, 47, 48 flexploitation  21 McCarthyism  31–​32 migration policies  32 political separation  28 Second World War  9 welfare state  34 University of Freiburg  4 unjust geographies  46, 47 utopia  12, 56–​57, 89 Bloch’s tripartite utopia  62–​65, 67 everyday utopias  63 foundations of Marcuse’s utopia  58–​65 Marcuse’s triadic topology of  12, 57–​58, 61, 63, 64, 65–​76 militant optimism  63–​64 Wikipedia  69–​70

T Talisse, Robert B.  28 Taylorism 2.0  26 technological rationality  11, 15, 22, 23–​24, 29, 92 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families  34 Thatcher, Margaret  35 theory, merger of with practice in praxis  4, 11 Thompson, E. P.  7 ‘thought in contradiction’  12 see also negative thinking, power of Tlaltecloco Massacre, Mexico, 1988  108 topology  66 Marcuse’s triadic topology of utopia  12, 57–​58, 61, 63, 64, 65–​76 transnational solidarity, Black-​Palestinian  96, 109–​115 ‘transvaluation of values’  97, 98, 114 Transvaluation of Values and Radical Social Change: Five New Lectures, 1966–​1976 (Jensen)  96–​97 Treré, Emiliano  51 Trump, Donald  30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 45, 123n14 Ture, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael)  108 Twitter  20 #TwitterPolitics  11, 49–​55

V Veblen, T.  27 Vietnam War  6, 117n6 Villages Without Borders (Pueblos Sin Fronteras)  48 violence, and capitalism  108–​109 virtue signalling  20, 50 Vogel, Lise  103 W Wales, Jimmy  69 Walia, Harsha  47 Watson, W.  53 Weber, Max  22 Weimar Republic  17 Wenman, M.  83 Wertheim, Sophie  4, 5 Weston, Edward  76, 77 white supremacy  32, 100, 108, 119n3, 121n11 Wikipedia  5, 69–​70 Williams, James  81 Williams, Raymond  80 Wilson, J.  91 Women’s Liberation Movement  13, 104 see also feminism Women’s March  20 Wright, Erik Olin  69, 99 Z Zionism  111, 112 Žižek, Slavoj  90, 91

151

Stuart Elden, University of Warwick

Margath A. Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Geographic and Environmental Sciences and School of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville.

This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century. Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics, and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure, and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.

S PATI A L I ZI NG M A RC U SE MARGATH A . WALKER

“Moving clearly between philosophy, social theory, and a range of contemporary examples, this is a compelling political and geographical account of why Herbert Marcuse’s work remains of enduring importance today.”

Walker demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1110-8

9 781529 211108

B R I S TO L

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

SPATIALIZING MARCUSE C RI T I C AL T HEORY FOR CON T E MP ORARY T I ME S M A RG ATH A . WA L KE R