Abstract
Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political.
Critical theory, as developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, does not seem to have much to offer political theory. It is true that Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, the two critical theorists of this generation whose work came closest to political theory, did contribute to state theory and constitutional thought, but much less so to a theorical elucidation of politics as an activity, as their contemporary Hannah Arendt would have theorized it. One possible reason for this striking absence can be found in the residual Marxist economism of the early Frankfurt School which prevented the step from a critical theory of society to a theory of politics, let alone a theory of the political as a constituent moment of the social. 1 A second obstacle emerged at the latest in American emigration and in view of the triumphal march of fascism: the – understandable, but nevertheless unproductive – fear of all politics that takes the form of political mobilization. Even if it would be mistaken to speak of a general anti-political reflex of all early Frankfurt School proponents, political practice, including emancipatory action, was met with scepticism, indeed in some places with open rejection. For Adorno, perhaps the most extreme proponent of an anti-political stance, truly political action under late capitalist conditions is deemed to be necessary, but nonetheless impossible. Although urgently needed, emancipatory political practice remains blocked or, as decreed at the beginning of the Negative Dialectic, postponed indefinitely (Adorno, 2003c). Any potential for political intervention has vanished, and politics has become identical with ideology. Accordingly, as he states with characteristic pathos: ‘what helps is tightly covered’ (Adorno, 2003b: 770). Under the given circumstances, practice would only be justified to prevent the worst-case scenario: solely as an effort to escape the barbarism emblematically represented by the names of Auschwitz and Hiroshima (p. 769). Only in sheer desperation is practice justified. Any other, perhaps more optimistic kind of immediate action threatens to set us back into barbarism (p. 777) as things can only be turned for the worse through practice. 2 The only remaining way out is to flee into theory, which Adorno turns into a surrogate for any practice geared toward immediate change. Only complete paralysis, one might conclude from this argument, provides the thinking person with the necessary breathing space. Moreover, for Adorno, thinking is – besides art – the only redeeming form of practice in times when political action has turned impossible. Adorno thus associates with pure thinking an almost grotesque hope of redemption. The situation can only be changed ‘if anything, by undiminished insight’ (p. 796). True resistance issues not from political actors, but from ‘uncompromisingly critical thinkers’ who do not allow themselves ‘to be terrorized into action’ (p. 798).
In the late Adorno, the passivist heroism of critical thinking can partially be explained as a reaction to the pseudo-heroism of the activists of May ’68, whose actions Adorno, despite his initial sympathies, assumes to be largely illusory (Adorno, 2003d: 398). Unable to reflect on their own powerlessness, student activists travel the path into regression. Yet, what was expressed in Adorno’s ambivalent relationship to the student movement was his deprecatory relationship to political practice eo ipso. While there is no doubt that he had a fine sense for the authoritarian aspects of anti-authoritarianism, the question is what one wants to see in a political movement like the one of May ’68: ideological stubbornness or political and cultural liberation? There is probably no emancipatory movement in which the two do not intermingle. Although, as Adorno predicted, the May revolt undoubtedly failed in its immediate political objectives, it did not fail as a long-term cultural revolution; and social movements such as feminism and the ecology movement, initiated by it, were to prove surprisingly successful. What seems illusory at the moment can produce very real effects in the long run. For this reason, there is no justification for postponing practice indefinitely, as Adorno appears to recommend.
Among the representatives of the founding generation, Herbert Marcuse, while starting out from similarly pessimistic premises, came to a much more optimistic assessment of the emancipative scope for action in the face of the protests of 1968. A critical theory of politics – if one does not understand politics so much in terms of institutional procedures as in the sense of collective action – must therefore start with Marcuse, whose position within the early Frankfurt School is truly singular in this regard. From his early Heideggerian Marxist phase onward, his works were pervaded by the double question of the possibilities of revolutionary practice and the subject of this practice, or in other words: the objective and subjective conditions of change. This two-faceted question was born not only out of a theoretical preoccupation with Marxism, but to at least the same extent out of Marcuse’s personal experience as an elected member of the Berlin-Reinickendorf soldiers’ council. Holding on to this experience – and thus to the experience of the possibility of emancipatory action – he remained in spirit the revolutionary he had become in 1918, which explains much of his later political commitment to marginalized groups and the student movement. On a theoretical level, this also explains the attraction that Heidegger’s early work, which might suggest a voluntaristic interpretation, exerted on the young Marxist. As Alfred Schmidt observed, Marcuse’s solitary position within the framework of the Frankfurt School consists in the ‘existentialist moment that has ultimately remained alive’, which allowed him ‘to evade that – to quote Habermas – “resigned abstinence from practice” that seems to emerge from the analysis of late capitalism presented by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Schmidt, 1992: 25).
In the following Marcuse’s ‘political theory’ of freedom-as-liberation will be presented as an alternative to the more passivistic strands of critical theory. Three aspects, which in my view remain highly pertinent, will be highlighted: (a) Marcuse’s account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. However, Marcuse seems to be tempted to search in concrete political utopias for an ultimate utopia. In a final step we will thus have to contrast Marcuse’s contribution with contemporary theoretical approaches to the political.
Marcuse’s Theory of Self-Sublating Action
Marcuse, it was said, would not fall into the trap of Adorno’s passivism, even as he would have agreed with the latter that, ultimately, political practice should become superfluous in a liberated society. If Adorno had decreed that ‘[t]he goal of correct practice would be its own abolishment’ (Adorno, 2003b: 762), then, for Marcuse, and in contradistinction to Adorno, the abolishment of politics in a future free society can only be the work of political practice, and not of critical reflection alone. He thus arrived at a more realistic understanding of the nature of political action. If Adorno recommends abolishing political practice even before the goal of a society that allegedly no longer needs such practice is achieved, Marcuse, in a spirit closer to Marx himself, develops an implicit theory of what we could call self-sublating action: the political practice to abolish the ultimate need for politics. Their different approaches to politics are clearly expressed in their diametrically opposed attitude towards the question of violence. In the debate on the student revolt, Adorno insists that ‘under the social and technical conditions of the present, changing practice is conceivable at all only as non-violent and certainly within the framework of the Basic Law’ (Adorno, 2003d: 399). For Marcuse, on the other hand, society is saturated with accumulated aggression, and the actual violence lies with those who led the war in Vietnam, supported dictatorial murder regimes worldwide, and unleashed the police and national guard on the revolting students (Marcuse, 1969a: 72). In the face of the violence exerted by the capitalist state, Marcuse is prepared to defend organized acts of disobedience, which are defined and condemned as ‘violent’ by the state and the media, because ‘[i]n accord with established law and order not the crimes but the attempt to stop them is condemned and punished as a crime’ (p. 73). In his famous essay on repressive tolerance, Marcuse defends intolerance ‘against the proponents of the repressive status quo’ (Marcuse, 1969b: 85). For if, according to his assertion that would be hard to refute historically, ‘democratic tolerance had been abolished when the future leaders began their campaign, humanity would have had a chance to avoid Auschwitz and a world war’ (p. 109). From this Marcuse concludes that emancipatory tolerance would therefore ‘mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left’ (p. 109). Intolerance includes the deprivation of the civil rights of today’s oppressors, since the ‘liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters’ (p. 110).
Marcuse’s Jacobin slant reveals a notion of activist politics that has no equivalent in the field of the Frankfurt School. This notion is not devoid of normative considerations. While it might be true that a super-hard normative foundation for political action is not available to Marcuse, whose theory of political practice, notwithstanding his simultaneous leanings toward a certain Marxist economism, thus borders on voluntarism, politics, for him, must nonetheless be geared toward the creation of a free society. And as long as social institutions of coercion continue to cause unfreedom, freedom must be brought about through action (Negt, 1999: 20). For Marcuse, freedom is therefore an action concept: in the political act of liberation, the principle of freedom ‘is still to be created even for the freest of the existing societies’ (Marcuse, 1969b: 87). Hence, ‘[f]reedom is liberation, a specific historical process in theory and practice, and as such it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood’ (pp. 87–8). Of course, Marcuse, despite his political commitments during the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the student uprisings, recognized that in established democracies political protest cannot tear down the pillars of the system. But protests point beyond the very society that is trying to contain them. And, in this sense, it is necessary to build ‘a realm of freedom which is not that of the present: liberation also from the liberties of exploitative order – a liberation which must precede the construction of a free society’ (Marcuse, 1969a: viii).
The Potentiality of Freedom: Prefiguration
Perhaps it is in his idea of freedom as potentiality where Marcuse’s theory proves to be most productive for today’s political thought. 3 For liberation, indeed, would not be conceivable without an idea of freedom as potentiality. In fact, every attempt at liberation would remain stuck in the actual conditions of oppression, if liberational political practices were not aimed at opening up a horizon of concrete potentiality. Freedom, just like notions such as nature, justice or beauty, belongs to a class of philosophical concepts that mark such a historically concrete potentiality. These concepts ‘synthetize experiential contents into ideas which transcend their particular realizations as something that is to be surpassed, overcome’ (Marcuse, 2002: 218). Thus, the concept of freedom comprehends ‘all the liberty not yet attained’ (p. 218). Freedom, insofar as it is based on historical experience, refers to possibilities that are buried in the here and now, indeed actively negated by the existing conditions. What is at stake is by no means a purely hypothetical possibility, such as the possibility, as Marcuse ironically comments, ‘of a man with a green hat appearing in all doorways tomorrow’ (p. 220). The conceptual synthesis achieved with the philosophical idea of freedom fuses ‘[e]lements of experience, projection and anticipation of real possibilities’ (p. 220) that are currently proving to be blocked. The utopia of freedom of which Marcuse speaks, with implicit reference to Bloch, is concrete; yet it is precisely its concreteness that makes freedom more than a purely philosophical synthesis. Freedom can only become truly concrete as a political synthesis, i.e. as a practice transcending contemporary society, which must start from the ground of historical facts, not from mere speculation. Marcuse’s conception of social ‘transcendence’, by which he understands those theoretical and practical tendencies ‘which, in a given society, “overshoot” the established universe of discourse and action toward its historical alternatives (real possibilities)’ (p. xii), points in the same direction and has the character of what Jean-Luc Nancy would call transimmanence: ‘Transcendence beyond the established conditions (of thought and action) presupposes transcendence within these conditions’ (p. 227). Potentiality is thus not merely a formal possibility, but encapsulated in actuality, just as the potentiality of freedom appears in the actuality of practices of liberation. For this reason, as Marcuse argues in clear proximity to Heidegger, Bloch, Lefebvre or Sartre, every practice of liberation must develop a transcending projection (Fahrenbach, 1992).
This projection now brings to light the potentiality of freedom-qua-liberation and pre-enacts the future of a free society in the present. With this idea, Marcuse anticipates what has been discussed in recent years under keywords such as ‘real utopia’ and ‘prefiguration’ (for the corresponding political theory of ‘pre-enactment’ see Marchart, 2019: 175–88). By real utopias, to be built in the cracks within capitalist economies, Erik Olin Wright (2010) understands institutions and practices that anticipate the world as it could be, but can be developed in the world as it is currently constituted. Participatory municipal budgets, an unconditional basic income or Wikipedia (as a non-profit offering of ‘swarm intelligence’) are examples of real utopias. Similarly, pre-figuration, an idea with anarchist roots in the 19th century that became prominent with the occupations of 2011, implies that the egalitarian and democratic conditions for the realization of protest goals should already be anticipated in the form of the protests themselves.
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A free or egalitarian society will not be created at some point of time in the future, but rather it will come into being in the present through action. This presupposes an understanding of politics that is not any longer premised on a distinction between means and ends. As Mathijs van de Sande explains: ‘Prefiguration’ or ‘prefigurative politics’ refers to a political action, practice, movement, moment or development in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualised in the ‘here and now’, rather than hoped to be realised in a distant future. Thus, in prefigurative practices, the means applied are deemed to embody or ‘mirror’ the ends one strives to realise. (Van de Sande, 2013: 230)
In this respect, prefigurative approaches differ from forms of organization such as that of the Leninist vanguard party, which, while serving the struggle for a future communist society in which all would be free and equal, was itself hierarchically organized. The idea of prefiguration circulating in the assemblies and occupations of 2011 follows a completely different logic: whoever seeks to build a democratic society must, in her current actions, anticipate the democratic procedures of such a society.
Marcuse’s position anticipated our contemporary understanding of prefiguration. In the process of building a new society, all practices that would perpetuate the conditions of unfreedom must be rejected outright. And, concordantly, the ‘end must indeed appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one’ (1969a: 88). The new way of life, which corresponds to the socialist conditions of production, possesses an existential quality that must already be revealed in the anticipatory struggle for a socialist society. Therefore, hierarchy and exploitation have no place in this struggle.
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The ‘heritage of oppression’ must disappear from the authentic rebellion: In short, the economic, political, and cultural features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those who fight for it. This ingression of the future into the present, this depth dimension of the rebellion accounts, in the last analysis, for the incompatibility with traditional forms of the political struggle. (1969: 88–9)
Marcuse’s theory of prefiguration could offer a way out of that ‘circle of emancipation’ which he himself described as well as other theorists of participatory democracy, such as Carole Pateman (1970) or C.B. Macpherson (1977). Emancipation can only succeed if it is in some way already preconfigured in the actions and thinking of the actors. Emancipation, in other words, draws us into a time loop. It presupposes what is to be achieved. In Marcuse’s words: This is the vicious circle: the rupture with the self-propelling conservative continuum of needs must precede the revolution which is to usher in a free society, but such rupture itself can be envisaged only in a revolution – a revolution which would be driven by the vital need to be freed from the administered comforts and the destructive productivity of the exploitative society. (Marcuse, 1969a: 18–19)
The conclusion is clear: the revolution itself must create the conditions that precede it. It must therefore, as it were, precede itself – in the form of revolutionary practices of subjectivation. The central question is accordingly: ‘how can the administered individuals – who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged scale – liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters?’ (Marcuse, 2002: 255). 6 How, in other words, can a submissive subjectivation be transformed into a self-liberatory one? According to Marcuse, this would require a transvaluation of values, a true revolution in morals, even a ‘moral radicalism’ that ‘might precondition man for freedom’ (Marcuse, 1969a: 10). But where would this cultural revolution come from, how would this new morality develop?
The circle dissolves as soon as revolution, as Marcuse suggests, is understood as a process, not as a singular event. An essential dimension of this process of subjective preformation is education. Only Marcuse gives this, at first glance, conventional answer, known from many republican and participatory approaches, a decidedly radical twist. For him, education means education for political militancy: ‘education which turns into practice: demonstration, confrontation, rebellion’ (p. 53). Marx had already insisted in the eighth Feuerbach thesis that human self-transformation qua education can only succeed in the process of revolutionary practice – and Marcuse emphasizes again that political education arises in political action itself. Thus, practice in Marcuse’s thinking, trained on the young Marx, is given ontological primacy. If all social life, as Marx claimed, ‘is essentially practical’ (Marx, 1969: 7), the circle of emancipation proves to be far less threatening than assumed. It may well be: emancipatory practice presupposes political education, while political education presupposes emancipatory practice. But we are not dealing with two clearly distinguishable terms. Political education is not an independent category that can be clearly distinguished from emancipatory practice, so that a dispute could break out over which category can serve as causal ground for the other. Rather, political education is an inalienable dimension of emancipatory practice. 7 For, as a process, the practice of emancipation is at the same time a practice of self-subjectivation. In other words: the revolutionization of society goes hand-in-hand with the revolutionization of subjects. Both take place simultaneously in the medium of political practice.
The Sur-reality of Freedom: Liberation
As is apparent, from a Marcusian perspective, not every practice is emancipatory or prefigurative. Such qualification only applies to a practice through which freedom is actualized. Therefore, the process of liberatory action must be oriented towards a horizon of possibility. In prefigurative practice, to be more precise, the potential of freedom is actualized in the here-and-now and thus made visible as potential. In other words, what is first and foremost activated in acts of liberation is not a particular alternative to the status quo – it is our very sense of possibility. In one fell swoop we become aware that alternatives to the seemingly alternative-free status quo do exist. That which has hegemonic validity loses approval, consensus starts crumbling, and a whole horizon of possibilities opens up. In these moments, experiential freedom, pre-enacted through practice of liberation, immerses reality in the light of the surreal, for the reality principle that governs the status quo is temporarily suspended.
This intrusion of freedom into unfreedom, of potentiality into actuality, of the future into the present and of the surreal into reality, opens a space in which the unthinkable becomes conceivable. This is where critique has its place as ‘possibility-disclosing practice’ (Kompridis, 2006). At this point, two things could be learned from Marcuse. Firstly, such a critical opening of new possibilities is not so much the task of the lonely thinker at her desk (as Adorno assumed), but the immensely practical matter of critique in a melee. What is possible, and what might not be, must be explored through experimental political practice. The cognitive abilities required for this can be summarized, secondly, and in Kantian terms, under the title ‘imagination’. Any changing practice would be hopeless from the outset if, according to Marcuse, man was not equipped with the faculty of imagination (another word for the sense of possibility) – especially with that productive facultas imaginandi which does not simply reproduce a given object of contemplation but is capable of actually producing it.
The foundation for this approach is laid in his Eros and Civilization of 1955, where Marcuse sets out to defend fantasy and imagination – defined as the human faculty by which we refuse ‘to forget what can be’ (Marcuse, 1974: 149) – against the reality principle in the service of a supposedly reasonable and individualizing status quo. Similar to Adorno, a certain redemptive quality is attributed to art as the ‘“unconscious memory” of the liberation that failed, of the promise that was betrayed’ (p. 144). Yet even in this earlier formulation in Eros and Civilization, and quite different from Adorno, Marcuse hints at a politically ‘active’ dimension of artistic practice which he finds in the surrealists’ merger of art with revolutionary politics. In his ‘Political Preface 1966’, this political dimension is brought to the fore with a self-critical gesture. ‘Today’, this new preface ends, ‘the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight’ (p. xxv). The reason for this is clear: if political objects are to be imagined, or better: political effects are to be produced, imagination must become practical. Thus, according to Marcuse, in May ’68 in Paris there was a revolution in the mode of perception qua ‘the ingression of the aesthetic into the political’ (Marcuse, 1969a: 36): the rebels ‘want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society’ (p. 37). They went in search of prefigurative practices. Even subjective attempts at liberation, for example through drug experiments (which Marcuse, however, does not concede anything revolutionary per se), anticipated social liberation, for the revolution must ‘simultaneously be a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment’ (p. 37). The May Rebellion testified to a new sensibility, which until then had only found expression in the medium of artistic fantasy, for example among the surrealists. But now the rebels collectively demonstrated that imagination can migrate into the medium of politics, since aesthetic needs, where they are not already incorporated into consumer society, must be enforced against all institutions that ignore these needs – and enforcement always means politics. More than anywhere else, the coincidence of political and artistic practices of liberation was evident in Paris, expressed in the coincidence of socialist politics and surrealist imagination, a coincidence that in itself seemed quite surreal: The graffiti of the ‘jeunesse en colère’ joined Karl Marx and André Breton; the slogan ‘l’imagination au pouvoir’ went well with ‘les comités (soviets) partout’; the piano with the jazz player stood well between the barricades; the red flag well fitted the statue of the author of Les Misérables; and striking students in Toulouse demanded the revival of the language of the Troubadours, the Albigensians. The new sensibility has become a political force. (Marcuse, 1969a: 22)
In the nonconformism of the protesting students, Marcuse recognized the surrealist thesis of the poet as the total nonconformist. 8 One of the central slogans of Paris May ’68 – ‘imagination to power’ – was literally inherited from the surrealists and refers to a wide range of possibilities, which in the bad status quo is narrowed down to what appears to be given. ‘Imagination alone’, as Breton’s first surrealist manifesto of 1924 said, ‘offers me some intimation of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the terrible injunction’ (Breton, 1969: 5). Marcuse’s observations are valuable because they remind us of the surreal nature of freedom. Freedom is not bound to the constraints of circumstances, for then it would not be freedom. Freedom exists only where compulsion is broken and reality – the bad reality principle of ostensibly alternative-less constraints – is transcended into a surreal realm of possibilities. 9
The eminently practical dimension of such a transcending projection cannot be emphasized enough, as it stands in striking contrast to Adorno’s aesthetic theory. In the Marcuse of the years around 1968, aesthetic needs raise a political claim of assertion, analogous to the claim of freedom in the form of liberation. In the end, these are social, not individual needs. Therefore they find expression in political group actions – ‘[f]rom the harmless drive for better zoning regulations and a modicum of protection from noise and dirt to the pressure for closing of whole city areas to automobiles, prohibition of transistor radios in all public places, decommercialization of nature, total urban reconstruction, control of the birth rate’ (Marcuse, 1969a: 28). The New Social Movements, which took their starting point from the experiences of ’68, proved that the leap out of the circle of emancipation cannot succeed in any other way than in the process of collective liberatory action, that is, in leaping: ‘Revolutionary forces emerge in the process of change itself; the translation of the potential into the actual is the work of political practice’ (p. 79).
This sentence of Marcuse’s is, I would assume, the gravitational centre of any theory of politics that wants to be critical of existing conditions and at the same time motivated by the desire to change them. Radical democratic politics consists in translating the potentiality of freedom into the actuality of political liberation – and vice versa: in proving the potentiality of freedom through precisely such liberatory action. For it is not enough to determine the contingency of the hegemonic order – and thus the possibility of alternative orders – by way of ‘critical thinking’, as Adorno postulates. Proof, as Marcuse taught us, must always be given in practice – and this means: by attesting, in a politics of pre-enactment, to the potentiality of freedom.
These ideas remain essential. And yet, notwithstanding the surreal and prefigurative aspects of emancipatory action, from the perspective of contemporary theories of the political we need to abandon Marcuse’s traditional Marxist longing for an entirely technologized utopia where humanity, relieved from unnecessary labour and ‘surplus-oppression’, will finally be reconciled with its inner nature. ‘Imagination’, Marcuse held, ‘envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason’ (1974: 143), yet such imaginary envisioning is not in itself directed at a truly political goal. One may even suspect that it could equally be aimed at an ideological fantasy of unity and self-identity. If this is the case, Marcuse’s argument amounts to a non sequitur. The very concrete utopia that will emerge through political practice is not to be confused with the utopian image of a self-reconciled society and ‘the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality’ (1974: 143). The liberated society prefigured in emancipatory practice should not be envisaged as a society devoid of politics. Post-Marxist theories of the political – if by the latter we understand the instituting moment of the social – have avoided this mistake by shifting the terrain of ontological reasoning. From the viewpoint of these approaches, redemption will not be delivered by technological progress and unleashed forces of production. It is the political itself that describes the primary ontological terrain on which every emancipatory project is bound to move forward. But if the political, as I have claimed in my attempts at synthesizing these approaches (Marchart, 2007, 2018), has to be attributed ontological status and, at the same time, inserts a moment of the incommensurable or ‘irreconcilable’ into society, then we will hope in vain for the time in which ‘antagonistic human reality’ will be surmounted. On the contrary, antagonism, as a political name for the ultimately irreconcilable nature of the social, attests to the ontological impossibility of ever overcoming conflict and contingency. In this regard, it is not the human faculty of imagination that will guarantee manifestations of potentiality through human acting. Potentiality is ontologically guaranteed by the insurmountable instance of the political and actualized through its ontic manifestation: politics. Therefore, Marcuse’s quite orthodox notion of politics as a self-sublating activity, paradoxically aimed at the ultimate abolishment of all politics, can only be rejected. Not only would we be strategically ill-advised to indulge in the fantasy of a society without any politics, for ontological reasons the latter can never materialize outside the realm of fantasy. It is fair to say that most of today’s social movements, many of which aim at the democratization of democracy, have given up on this fantasy. It may well be that focusing on realistic utopias makes these movements less ‘revolutionary’ in a traditional sense of the term, but it certainly does not make them less political.
Footnotes
Notes