Abstract
In a 1967 lecture, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” Herbert Marcuse describes a novel challenge facing then-contemporary efforts at political resistance.1 Originally delivered at the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation in London, Marcuse’s address outlines the rise of what he terms “the affluent society,” a social configuration brought about by the emergence of late capitalism wherein inequality and repression occur coextensive with a dramatically increased standard of living for the majority of the population.2 Within this context, he explains, any demand for liberation had to be articulated against a socioeconomic apparatus that, despite clearly exploitative effects, was largely succeeding in stultifying the subjective need for opposition among the traditional agents of historical change. This need was being suppressed not only by the widespread satisfaction of vital necessities, but also by the affluent society’s distinctly new facility for manipulating needs themselves, or for penetrating the deepest realms of human experience—from consciousness down to the unconscious—and subordinating them to the dictates of capital. Both the critical workings of the intellect and the psychical, emotional, and instinctual impulses comprising the “soul” had been fully assimilated within the reigning social order. For Marcuse, this remarkable deepening of control demanded a complete rethinking of existing strategies of liberation, as the possibility of resistance seemed to depend on a transformation of the inner, “organic” disposition of the individual, essentially presupposing the emergence of an entirely “new type of man, with a vital, biological drive for liberation…”3
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Notes
Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” in Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Three: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005).
For more on this congress, see David Cooper, ed., To Free a Generation: The Dialectics of Liberation (New York: Collier, 1969).
Marcuse, “Liberation,” 81. For more on his understanding of the “biological” register of these needs, see Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1969) 10, n. 1.
See, for instance: David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950);
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951);
William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956);
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. pp. 38–40, 57–59.
ZZ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1991), 10, 26.
Jonas Mekas, “Cinema of the New Generation,” Film Culture 21 (Summer, 1960): 19.
See Jonas Mekas, “New York Letter: Towards a Spontaneous Cinema,” Sight and Sound 28 no. 3–4 (Summer–Autumn, 1959); Mekas, “A Call for a New Generation of Film-Makers,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000); Mekas, “Cinema”;
and Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–1972 (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
See: Gregory Battcock, “Introduction,” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967);
Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins, “Introduction,” in The American New Wave, 1958–1967, ed. Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins (Buffalo, NY: Walker Art Center, 1982);
David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 85–87;
and Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), esp. 73–81.
Stan Vanderbeek, “The Cinema Delimina: Films from the Underground,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Summer, 1961): 6; Brakhage quoted in Mekas, “Notes,” 103;
Ron Rice, “Ron Rice: Diaries, Notebooks, Documents,” Film Culture 39 (Winter, 1965): 113; Allen Ginsberg, “America’s Nervous Breakdown: Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs,” Village Voice, August 25, 1959: 1, 8.
Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xii.
Nelson refers to this as the “governing paradox” of the Cold War (Pursuing Privacy, xiii). For related analyses of suburban domesticity during this period, see: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), esp. ch. 2;
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007);
and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, esp. xlvii, 10; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1966), esp. ch. 13; and Arendt, Human Condition, esp. ch. 2.
Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 43.
ZZ Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 32, 33.
James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 73.
Lionel Rogosin, Come Back, Africa: Lionel Rogosin—A Man Possessed (Johannesburg, South Africa: STE 2004), 22.
Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 206.
Edward Bland, “On ‘The Cry of Jazz,’” Film Culture 21 (Summer, 1960), 31.
Michael Renov, “Newsreel: Old and New. Towards an Historical Profile,” Film Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Autumn, 1987): 22.
ZZ Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” in Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Four: Art and Liberation, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2007), 122.
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© 2014 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison
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Guilford, J. (2014). Turning Inwards: The Politics of Privacy in the New American Cinema. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_5
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