This week's reading by Marcuse, though short, had my head spinning! He wastes no time; in the very first sentence we are told that "unfreedom prevails" in advanced societies, and the remaining pages are filled with questions and statements about how and why we aren't as free as we think we are. My copy of the text is littered with question marks in the margins, and I'll try to wrap my mind around some of those questions in this blog post.
"Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates that it has reached the stage at which 'the free society' can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties, not because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too significant..." (page 4).
In this passage, I have trouble with the word significant. Even if you shift to use words that are the negation of the traditional words, your fundamental understanding still resides within those traditional words.
"The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence." (page 4)
This passage makes me think about David's "stomach ache" from last week's class. Of course, I can't speak on his behalf, but I think this is what he was talking about. If mass media has conditioned us to think we need to acquire things in our pursuit of happiness at the expense of ignoring people/situations/ideas beyond our borders, then what are we destined to become? We'll be chasing Marcuse's false needs forever.
"The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and television and with the centralization of their control. The people enter this stage as preconditioned receptacles of long standing." (page 8)
If we enter the stage of consuming mass produced radio and television (and Internet?) preconditioned, then at what stage does the conditioning actually happen? And is this conditioning happening differently in the Internet age?
These passages - and others - called to mind Plato's Apology. Like Socrates, we are on a quest to live the truth, and during that journey, we will have to confront our own treason against those ideals we are conditioned to accept and help perpetuate.
I'm looking forward to discussing this text in class to see if others have as many questions as I do. I had to read these 12 pages slowly, multiple times, and I still feel like I'm struggling with the concepts.
