GR: Marcuse

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!

On Sunday, November 23, 2014, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Stephen Whitfield, "Refusing Marcuse" in Dissent:
> Marcuse’s impact went well beyond the precincts of radical politics. In
1969, Pope Paul VI condemned him by name, blaming Marcuse—along with
Sigmund Freud—for promoting the “disgusting and unbridled” manifestations
of eroticism and the “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations” commonly
known as the sexual revolution. The hostility that Marcuse aroused was
ideologically ecumenical. In Pravda, Soviet journalist Yuri Zhukov
denounced him as a “false prophet,” while the apartheid regime in South
Africa blocked the importation of all his books.
>
> Back in the United States, leading intellectuals treated him with respect
and, sometimes, admiration. In his best-selling 1969 book lauding The
Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak praised Marcuse as “one of the
shrewdest critics of the subtle technocratic regimentation which now bids
fair to encompass the whole of our world-wide industrial order.”
>
>
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/refusing-marcuse-fifty-years-after-one-dimensional-man
> Herman & Weisenbrger, GR, Domination and Freedom p. 38 (two chapters
dealing w/Marcuse influence):
> Some Gravity's Rainbow critics make strong claims for the subversive
power of sex, instead of art. Hite, for example, promotes Pynchon's scenes
of perversion or paraphilia (e.g., sadism, masochism, coprophagia) as
Marcu­sian nonreproductive sexualities used “as an expression of phantasy”
thrown against the system. Thanatz's sado-anarchism captures exactly that
sense as well, particularly if its spread in families would make the state
“wither away.” And finally the most compelling evidence for Marcuse's
influence on Gravity's Rainbow is that, in Hite's phrasing, he “aligns
nonnormative sexual desires and behaviors with the mythic figures of
Narcissus and Or­pheus.” Kathryn Hume has also shown that the Orpheus myth
provides a script for reading Slothrop's fantasy dive down Boston's
Roseland Ballroom toilet into an underworld, a foreglimpse of Slothrop's
apparent “scatter­ing” near the novel's end. The case for Marcuse's
relevance rests, for Hite, on the potential for “Slothrop's sexual
diffusion” to link with his “Orphic ten­dency toward polymorphous
perversity.” Whether this makes the character a tough survivor and an
Orphic counterculture warrior remains unclear. Yet by some kind of miracle,
anarchist or not, Slothrop does recover his long-lost mouth harp. And
whether he's polymorphously perverse or not, the novel's use of Freud's
famous phrase naming the infant's nonphallic, all-body sex­uality in a
passage about classical music does constellate Freud, Marcuse, Norman O.
Brown, and the powers, subversive or not, of art.
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