Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2002 17:25:53 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: intellectuals and fashion


I don't believe there has been heated debate on Marcuse per se, but rather 
on other issues that took off on a tangent from the enquiry into 
Marcuse.  So returning to the main topic .... You are on to something about 
the change of intellectual climate (whether in academia or among the 
literate public at large).  I do remember Norman O. Brown, Marcuse, and 
some of these other folks, and times have changed.  Speaking as a member of 
the (semi)educated public: the stuff that is out there to read (that people 
other than specialists would know about) has changed drastically from the 
1970s.  (Much more Frankfurt stuff is available though, much much more.)  I 
can also remember reading Freud and Jung: is this still done?  Something 
has changed.  In some respects it is a vast improvement: it is possible to 
become much more sophisticated at much earlier an age now.  You can be sure 
I'm not nostalgic.  At the same time something has been lost.  I posed the 
question: why no more discussion of conformity?  Christian Fuchs has begun 
to explore the issue, but much more needs to be said.  The answer to the 
dilemma you pose is in this question.  Bound up with this is the question 
of individuality.  That too has disappeared as a concept.  One must be 
suspicious of all this talk of hybridity and so on: it is a mask for 
incoherence and dissolution.  It shows in grad student syndrome--the 
inability to think coherently and the obsession with citation behavior, 
resulting in a fetish for the coding of texts combined with an extremely 
fragmented reasoning capacity.   The commodity fetishism of 
theory.  Certain fundamental problems are being occluded as the individual 
is dissolved into an incoherent association of social forces.  Didn't 
Barthes advocate the death of Man long before it became a cultural 
reality?  And isn't this in fact just another bourgeois intellectual 
conceit: living dangerously, theoretically only, that is?  Marcuse, Brown 
etc. represent the struggle with a different cultural formation.  Again, 
comparing then and now will be very revealing.

At 01:08 PM 09/08/2002 -0400, Lou Caton wrote:
>I've been following the sometimes heated debate regarding the status or
>value of Marcuse's insights for the 90s and beyond.  It struck me that
>if Marcuse isn't studied much anymore, it may have to do with current
>cultural factors rather than his ideas.  Is Adorno, for example, studied
>that much more than Marcuse?  Isn't it the case that numerous other
>important thinkers of the past are slowly becoming forgotten?  Who
>reads/teaches R.D. Laing?  Norman O. Brown?  Sartre?  Sure, one sees a few 
>books devoted to these writers occasionally each year, but their
>influence seems to be diminishing.  I wonder if many will read de Man in
>twenty years.  I had an advisor ten or so years ago in grad school who
>said that the academic climate made it all but impossible for someone to
>write a serious dissertation on existentialism any more. That doesn't
>seem right somehow.  It seems to me that the demise of an interest in
>Marcuse is part of the American cultural marketplace of ideas.  Now we
>want to hear from Lacan, Derrida, and Zizek.  There's only so much room
>on a bookstore shelf, I guess.
>
>cheers,
>Lou Caton
>Westfield State College
>lcaton-AT-wisdom.wsc.ma.edu

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