One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Society and people’s thinking are “one-dimensional” because advanced industrial society is totalitarian. There are no critiques, or negative thinking, that exist outside of this totalitarian regime. What might look like negative thinking is actually only masquerading as negative thinking and is, instead, part of the fabric of totalitarianism. Marcuse believes that the totalitarianism of industrial society is so great that all are engulfed by it. Unlike Marx, who argues that the proletariat suffers under totalitarianism, Marcuse insists that all are unable to escape the ideology of advanced industrial society, though the proletariat may of course suffer more materially. He differs from Marx in this insistence on all being ideologically repressed, as this is a different kind of alienation than the alienation Marx discusses in relation to labor and production. For Marcuse, all are alienated in their one-dimensionality.

“Rationality” refers to the pursuit of production, efficiency, and profit. This pursuit results in oppression, which is irrational. We oppress ourselves, and destroy our potential not as efficient producers but as creative, social beings. This irrationality causes misery.

This irrational system insists on infinite growth in a finite world and is destroying many forms of life. Rather than creating a livable system, we turn to technology to tech our way out of this destruction and often insist that destruction is beneficial (drop a nuclear bomb, go to the moon, etc.). Our technics are rooted in this irrational system of technology and, thus, cannot get us “out” of this irrationality. Instead of working within the system to create change, Marcuse argues that we need to destroy and create the system anew.

Marcuse draws on Freudian thinking in which “sublimation” is the means by which an unacceptable desire is redirected to something larger and deemed societally acceptable. In “desublimation,” the reverse occurs. Thus, the desire itself, rather than being channeled into an acceptable activity, is experienced in and of itself. Immediate gratification is available and constantly experienced.

While Freud is interested in sexual desires, Marcuse is interested in instinctual desires to challenge the status quo, which are also repressed. Thus, protest, for example, only results in “merch” and is commercialized, incorporated into advanced industrial society. People are “free” to protest, but they are oppressed because their protest has already been incorporated into the very structure they think they are protesting. Once everything is desublimated, the world is contracted to the self rather than the self being extended out into the world. In the case of the erotic, eroticism is now limited to the sexual act rather than the world itself being experienced as having erotic (not sexual) energy.

For Marcuse, technology is a social process. "Technology” is a discourse that dictates what counts as a tool and how that tool is to be used. “Technics” refers to actual technological objects, such as TV, radio, and today’s cellphones and laptops. Technology thus includes technics but is ultimately about the ideology in which technics exist.