Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'roll

[Paul Mackin]

On Aug 20, 2006, at 5:10 AM, Paul Nightingale wrote:

>
>
>>
>> Herbert Marcuse was far from pleased with what he saw of the sexual
>> revolution, which his 50's writing  had seemed to promote.
>>
>> He spends many pages  in One Dimensional Man (1964) talking about
>> such things as repressive desublimation.
>>
>
> In the 30s and 40s Marcuse was a member of the group known the  
> Frankfurt
> School, including Adorno, Benjamin and Reich. Adorno in particular  
> adopted a
> critical view of the 'culture industry', so called, within capitalist
> societies: one of his essays compares popular music to automobiles  
> coming
> off the conveyor belt. Marcuse shared some of those concerns. In  
> ODM he also
> echoes the ideas of convergence theory, which argued that  
> capitalist and
> communist societies were gradually becoming alike in their  
> dependence on
> technology and bureaucratic structures (and communist societies would
> necessarily become more like their capitalist counterparts). The  
> cover of my
> 1972 pbk version of ODM includes praise from the Daily Mail, a  
> right-wing
> newspaper (to put it mildly). Marcuse isn't pro-revolution here, to  
> put it
> crudely, but pro-individualism.
>
> Medovoi's essay simply describes the way sex and politics were linked
> discursively.
>
> And Cleaver ended up as a born-again Christian supporting Ol'  
> Raygun in the
> 80s.


And Marcuse himself expresses in one of his  sixties books a  
preference for traditional Christian sexual morality over what he was  
seeing the trend to be.

Yet he never really gave up entirely on Eros, only wanted to give the  
Death Instinct its due.

And there was the  political preface to the second edition of Eros  
and Civilization which ends up with a  paragraph that's anyone's   
guess as to where he wanted to stand.

Found "Make love not war" quite puzzling.



p.


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