Pacified Existence

This phrase--Pacified Existence--is the major arrival point for Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man.  When this phrase first shows up in the book, it seems like it had to be a preliminary step in the argument as a demonstration of another form of false consciousness that Marcuse will eventually go past.  Given that the book was from 1964, "Pacified Existence" made me picture Robert McNamara standing around a work table with a bunch of analysts in close-cropped hair and dark frame glasses. But no, this is the arrival point, for Marcuse vision of freedom from pervasive, administrative repression of freedom, a state where existence is no longer a matter of pain and struggle. 

I'm re-reading Marcuse after many years, and reading it much more closely than before.  The first time through, years ago, I remember being alternately frustrated by it and seeing it as sort of obvious.  So many of his ideas seem to have been absorbed into the counter-culture of the 60s, that by the time I was reading, it seemed old hat.  It is also idealistic, and while it comes on hard (and on point) with its critique of modern societies, it seemed detached from concrete alternatives. I also find myself argumentatively backsliding, asking if I'm sure modern society isn't delivering benefits of comfort and ease on a wide-enough scale to convert the criticisms into idle whining.  It also has dense analyses of technical philosophy in its middle section that are not exactly my strong suit. 

But at the end, the idea is there.  That one should resist the one-dimensionality that does not allow for reason to critique the current order, and the unquestioned assumptions of the modern order that great levels of pain and fear are part of a necessary exchange for the benefits of modern technology and society.  This results in the unreason Marcuse fingered in phenomena like a complex social and political order premised on the imminent threat of global devastation through mutual nuclear annihilation, rather than applying resources to make that impossible. Utopian thinkers in ages past envisioned advanced technology allowing for a huge expansion of leisure.  The opposite has occurred, but the universal speed-up required to achieve ever higher levels of per capita productivity is established ideologically as inevitable--the lack of critique is the one-dimensionality in question.    

I still look for specifics of what form this resistance takes.  To some extent, much of the later 60s demonstrated it.  Marcuse himself stresses the goal of providing for solitude and privacy, for unmanaged time that allows consciousness to pursue its own devices.  Die Gedanken sind frei. But rolling the clock ahead 50 years to today, social media makes this much more problematic.  The continuous, pervasive signaling of social media, reflecting a cacophony of voices striving for control and influence, have the effect of polluting free thought.  Can you even trust those thoughts in private time not to reflect ideas and sentiments planted there?  Even more perniciously, for so many people the moment of solitude now leads to a reach for the cell phone and a dive into streams of messages from Twitter, Tik-Tok or the New York Times.  Or this blog post.   

One pathway to finding instances of this self-possessed thinking, of "practical freedom," might be through the idea of "self-determined incentives" which he mentions one time late in the book (page 236).  This is the sort of thing that one might be able to identify through research on Identity Work.  One can ask interview subjects to describe their incentives and look for cases that seem to depart from management and organizational demands, and from socially imposed expectations.  Alvesson and Willmott (2002) offered the idea of "micro-liberation" in the workplace.  While I did not feel like they were able to give it as concrete form as I wanted, the phrase resonates for me. In discussions of alternate identities in the Organizational Identity research I am looking for cases that really deviate from the predominant repressive consciousness--in many cases in workplace studies, resistance is in the service of another way of serving the same ideology with different means.  To put it in the words of an article by Sandberg and Catlaw (2018) that I will be getting to, "We can see these efforts to forge a personal space—a space within which living becomes a phenomenon to be experienced and, in a sense, savored rather than merely a sequence of one anonymous, ephemeral moment after another."

At the end of the day, it may be the case that in the socially constructed characteristics of consciousness, we'll find no pure freedom.  I doubt purity is necessary to validate Marcuse's logic, but I want to find cases that deviate from the one-dimensional order, and consider what gets you more of this.    

Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2002). Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual. Journal of Management Studies, 39(5), 619-644

Thomas J. Catlaw & Billie Sandberg (2018) The Quantified Self and the Evolution of Neoliberal Self-Government: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2017.1420743

Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Beacon.