The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 18
Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 2 of 4
In this second part of his annotated reading of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” James Lindsay reads and explains the portion of the essay where Marcuse defines the “administered society” that he claims we live in. The listener will find striking parallels to today’s world, which certainly qualifies as the type of “administered society” far more accurately than the world that Marcuse inhabited in the 1960s when he wrote the essay, but paradoxically, or ironically, because it adopts the logic of this very essay as justification for its administration! This part of the series, then, raises particularly interesting questions about whether or not Marcuse would support the fruits of his own work and thus sheds interesting light on the problem we currently find ourselves in. It sets the stage for answering at the end of the series how we might go about solving this problem while avoiding the mistake Marcuse plainly made.
For those who haven’t yet heard it, listen to Part 1 here so you can understand the context for this part of the series. Part 3 is available here, Part 4 is here.
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5 comments
Take a look at the Free Speech Union movement in the UK. Their recent press statement directly addresses some of the points in Marcuse’s essay.
Highlighting the function of free speech in a democracy, group member Oliver Cray said, “Freedom of expression and democracy are inseparable.”
“I think in a system where one man gets one vote, we know that each man is endowed with reason, the capacity to think, and the capacity to make decisions for themselves,” Cray said.
To preserve freedom of expression for the future, we may need to tolerate “views that we find abhorrent or views that are illiberal.”
Hello Damon-
I think you may be making the same sort of mistake that I initially did re: CT. I once wondered why do these ideas seem overly complex?
The ideas of CT are simply poorly presented, pretentious, and written with a huge level of verbosity. I might go so far to say they are grandiose.
They’re not hard to understand once you’re able to read past all those problems.
It’s almost like a bunch of old, German, males who were smitten with Freud and Marx got together in a room and just thought up shit that sounded really profound and deeply intellectual. Surely, there was no intellectual narcissism .
It is know that German culture doesn’t have a reputation for being dour, humorless, rigid, anal, and authoritarian. Yep. the Germans typically encourage nonconformity.
CT boils down to “You must think my way or you’re bad and should be punished” It’s not authoritarian or anything like that.
If I may also add, philosophy like psych is a humanity, not a science. Sciences are based in fact, humanities are not. For example: Santa exists-belief and all humans die-fact.
James-Good Marcuse image you provided. Marcuse looks appropriately smug.
You can probably add the post-structuralists to that like Foucault. One is dazzled by these hyper-educated bibliophiles and their beautiful turns of phrase, but what lies underneath is probably just a handful of banal assertions with anti-realism a means to introduce a load of personal prejudices.
For example, I’m reading through Orientalism again by Edward Said and he probably fits into that category. I’m not absolutely sure that Facucault and the likes of Said are frauds, but it’s a distinct possibility.
It seems that many who “write” are less interested in communication than they are in posing.
Hello,
Marcuse essay: I had to read this in 2008ish as part of MA course work. Hard read. Enjoying the walk through, getting a lot out of the breakdown. Thanks for that.
Question(s):
Is the asymmetry not only the story but also a means of motivation and /or for the means to put asymmetry into practice (praxis)? Keep everything messy?
Would you be willing to do a brief walk though of dialectic and historicism? For example, the post-modernist language smuggles in massive concepts and bodies of work in one or two sentences to intellectualize their shit.
Regards,
Damon
Ontario, Canada