Herbert Marcuse’s Critique of Technological Rationality:

An Exegetical Reading

By Marcelo Vieta

March, 2006 Draft

“[W]hen technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes

“In the exigencies of thought and in the madness of love is the destructive refusal of
the established ways of life. Truth transforms the modes of thought and existence.
Reason and freedom converge.”
~Herbert Marcuse, 1964, One-Dimensional Man, p. 127
 1

I. Introduction: Technological Rationality within One-Dimensional Society

For Herbert Marcuse, “technological rationality” is a rationality of domination and social control

characteristic of advanced industrial societies. Underpinned by a formal rationality that overrides the more

substantive, values-laden forms of reason distinguishing pre-industrial societies, technological rationality

fashions everyday life into a “technological reality” that encloses the subject’s perceptions, experiences, and

thoughts by projecting the world’s objects and nature as a “ a world of instrumentalities” (Marcuse, 1964, p.

218). Sharing intellectual ground with Horkheimer’s (1974) critique of “instrumental reason” (p. 97) and

Adorno and Horkheimer’s (2002) notion of “technical rationality” (p. 95), for Marcuse a technologically

rational world “predefines” the very “form” of the appearance of objects for the subjects that apprehend and

manipulate them as empirically “value-free” materials – detached, fungible, and orderable things that are

emptied of any transcendent meaning beyond perhaps their exchange-value (Marcuse, 1964, p. 219). At the

disposal of willful subjects operating in a world without objective limits, objects now enter into the

abstracted realm of equivalencies, differentiated only by a competitive rationale and the predetermined and

stunted choices of the marketplace.

The critique of technological rationality woven throughout One-Dimensional Man also draws from

and parallels Marx’s critique of the commodity form and the rationality of capitalist markets (Feenberg,

2002). Technological rationality both makes up and drives the social control of a society subdivided into

hierarchical social divisions of production, ownership, and aggressive competition under the profit motive.

Moreover, Marcuse’s dialectical and historically materialist diagnosis of technological rationality reveals that

technocratic social control in modern advanced industrial societies is practiced diffusely under the

assumption that social hierarchies are extrinsic to “neutral systems and machines” (Feenberg, 2002, p. 66).

Marcuse’s materialist analysis in One-Dimensional Man sets out to question and lay bare the contradictions

in this assumption. Subsequently supported by myriad social and historical studies of technology,1 Marcuse’s

dialectical reflection reveals that in actuality the systems and machines of control are not neutral but

politically inscribed in their very structures:

[T]he notion of the ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as

In this paper I set out to exegetically work through Marcuse’s dialectically enfolded and historically

materialist concept of “technological rationality” as it is presented in One-Dimensional Man. In the process, I

will first continue to outline what Marcuse means by “technological rationality” and clarify how he situates

the concept within his broader critique of the ideology and practices of advanced industrial society. Second, I

will sketch out Marcuse’s complex dialectical sojourns that diagnose how we have become “preconditioned”

to think one-dimensionally (Marcuse, 1964, p. 8) and how this technologically rationalized preconditioning

both differs from its roots in “pre-technological rationality” and yet is presupposed by this genealogical

inheritance. And lastly, I will attempt to articulate how Marcuse’s “post-technological rationality” envisions

civilizational change not only depending on redirecting the goals and ends of technological systems but,

more vitally, on transforming the very rationality that permeates technology’s logic and advanced industrial

society’s technological base.3

II. The Modes of Technological Reason

Marcuse’s critique of technological rationality is fundamentally an ideology critique of advanced

industrial society that, in part, springboards from Adorno and Horkheimer’s (2002) seminal work in

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Feenberg, 2002). In the technologically rationalized reality of advanced

industrial society, alienation from our work and each other extends beyond Marx’s industrial nightmare of

the factory and now permeates every nook and cranny of life. Our alienation, however, propagated by the

cultural industry’s manipulation of thought, is now veiled by the ideology of efficiency and the promises of

affluence that permeate one-dimensional society. “The efficiency of the system,” writes Marcuse, “blunts the

individual’s recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the

whole” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 11). Saturated in abundance and a cultural imaginary of wellbeing, alienation as a

concept “seems to [now] become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence

which is imposed upon them and have in it their own development and satisfaction,” Marcuse continues (p.
 3

11). But these satisfactions, he clarifies, are false ones, actually belonging to “a more progressive

stage of alienation” (p. 11).

Herein lies the sophistication of a technologically rationalized system that both provides abundantly

to individuals yet, to use Heidegger’s term, “enframes” their thoughts and controls their behaviours and

practices by “prescrib[ing] attitudes and habits” (p. 12). By accepting this material abundance we

paradoxically submit to endless servitude as workers and consumers that have had our time, experiences, and

consciousness captured by advanced industrial society’s technocratic means. Moreover, individuals now

tacitly uphold the totalizing and alienating tendencies of the system by actively and even earnestly

participating in the means of production and consumption that, on the one hand, deliver them the goods ever

more efficiently while, at the same time, extending and reproducing the repetitious, numbing patterns and

behaviours of the workplace into their everyday lives. In our technologically rationalized society, autonomy

and the subversive capacities of thought and the imagination are mollified and contained by the closed

“universe of discourse” (p. 23). Instead, in their tacit collusion with the system, technologically rationalized

people find empty solace in the glimmering but vapid products of the marketplace. Our manufactured

patterns of thought and experience further alienate us within the “technological veil that conceals the

reproduction of inequality and enslavement” (p. 32). Alienated and not aware of our alienation, unfree in our

freedom, living “euphor[ically] in unhappiness” (p. 5), submission to our technologically mediated reality, it

seems, is a Faustian bargain.

This technological structuring of society – its “technical necessity” and its logic of technology

(Marcuse, 1968, p. 212) – is historically prefigured by the development of formal and deductive logic that

paved the road for the emergence of “scientific thought – the first step only, for a much higher degree of

abstraction and mathematization” that modified reason and the experiences mediated by it for technical

means (p. 137).4 As a result of this historical materialist diagnosis, Marcuse shows the contradiction inherent

in the claim that technical-scientific reason is neutral. Under Marcuse’s scrutiny, technologically rationalized

society is revealed for what it is: a hegemonic ordering driven by technocratic means.
 4

Indeed, despite the claims of current technical-scientific discourse, our contemporary

technological enclosures are not neutral but rather political and socio-historically determined, burdened with

the values of control, hierarchic order, and capitalist logics of production and accumulation. Further, it is not

technology per se which is the problem but a technology shaped by the dominative, operationalist, and

instrumentalized rationality that undergirds society’s technological base and that falsely deems this

technological base to be a deterministically evolutionary given of “progress.” For Marcuse, it is the “project”

of industrialization and the logic of a society administered from above that has captured the technical into a

system that perverts technological means. Once applied, this technology embodies the politics that underlies

it within its very structures and takes on a “logic of its own independent of the goals it serves” (Feenberg,

2004, p. 98). Consequently, merely changing the goals of technology would not transform its dominative

logic. Rather, Marcuse believed that a move towards a new civilizational project that was more sensitive to

the affirmation of life; the reduction of “toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice” for all (Marcuse, 1964, p.

5); and the possibilities for self-actualization, depended on qualitatively changing the very rationality that

drove the technological base by transforming it into another kind of rationality. This new, “post-

technological rationality” (p. 239) would be one that both recognized the capacity for science and technology

to “[translate] values into technical tasks – the materialization of values [ – ]” (p. 232) while also

recognizing the need to transform technical-scientific logic and “break with the prevailing technological

rationality” (p. 231).

Marcuse’s proposal for a post-technological project was not a call for a regressive return to a pre-

modern state of nature, nor was it a resignation into quietism. Rather, it called for a reworking of the

technological base. This, for Marcuse, would be a “completion of the technological project” (p. 231,

emphasis added). It would also see a transformation of modernity’s project that had paradoxically “rendered

possible the satisfaction of needs[,]…the reduction of toil,” and the escape from myth while in the process

also capturing nature and human experience within the technical-scientific concept of a “universally

controllable nature” projected “as endless matter-in-function,” a “technological universe…of mental and

physical instrumentalities,” pure means (p. 168). A project towards a post-technological rationality was the
 5

“transcendent project” (p. 220) that Marcuse attempted to lay out – provisionally and in

fragmentary form – in the last half of One-Dimensional Man. This transcendent project called for a “higher

rationality” that would: 1) unveil the current state of domination; 2) strive to “falsify this established reality;”

and 3) demonstrate its own higher rationality by “preserving and improving” the achievements of civilization

for reducing the toil and suffering in the struggle for existence – what Marcuse viewed as an accomplishment

of modern civilization – but that would also set the stage for the “pacification of existence” from its

dysfunctional, perverse capture within the current technocratic framework (p. 220). To accomplish this,

Marcuse believed that the new rationality he was calling for required the rending of reason away from the

value-neutrality of pure science, which had prefigured and entered into current modes of technocratic

institutions. In Marcuse’s transcendent project, rationality was to be re-entrenched with the sort of value

judgments that more traditional societies upheld – albeit now materialistically contextualized. This new

technological rationality would be able to assess the “truth” of this transcendent civilizational project

according to life affirming values. These values would be arrived at through the subversive power of an

aestheticized rationality guided by a negative dialectics; the desublimated and oppositional forces of artistic

expressions and sensuous life; and, broadly, the “productive imagination” (p. 227-246). Marcuse’s

“normative conception of truth” (Feenberg, 2004, p. 102) and his call for the materialization of values were

thus grounded in a project that proposed the optimization of “the free development of human needs and

faculties” (Marcuse, 1964, pp. 220).

Marcuse’s proposal for a post-technological project and the new technological reason that was to

undergird it would see the transformation of the means of technology, not just its ends, and would be rooted

in new values disclosed and affirmed by the oppositional power of aesthetics and erotics to put into relief the

inauthenticity of current societal conditions. This technological change cannot, however, be merely a moral

one – i.e., simply changing the ends of current technocratic systems while leaving its structures intact, such

as the “welfare state” or the current management trends of open-concept workspaces. Moralistically driven

changes within the current system would leave in place the linchpins of domination within capitalist power:

intuitional hierarchies and their technocratic frameworks. For a true alternative, Marcuse believed that not
 6

only the technical base needed to be change, but also the institutional “superstructures” (Feenberg,

2004, p. 98). A post-technological society must create a different kind of science and a new type of

technology. Further, these new rational dispositions and redesigned technical structures must not conflict

with nature but be in harmony with it; they must “treat nature as another subject instead of as mere raw

materials” (p. 98). Our untapped societal and individual potentialities – i.e., the possibilities that lay beyond

the already exhausted potentialities of routinization, domination, and the profit motive – must be the new aim

undergirding human life. Thus, Marcuse was not advocating ridding ourselves of the technological base and

structures tout court. Indeed, freedom from the toil of constantly provisioning for our necessities depended

on technical progress. Science and technology could still be vehicles of freedom. Rather, science’s and

technology’s means, directions, and goals would have to change. Technology must be liberated from its

current forms of technics and must be transformed into a “technology of liberation” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 19).

In doing so, our very reality would also be transformed through a new technical-scientific imagination that

would be “free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (p. 19).

But what could Marcuse possibly mean by freedom in technical progress? How can we have a

“technology of liberation”? If it was the ideology of technical progress that dominated and enframed

humanity in the first place, how could it also provide liberation? His view for a new rationality, a post-

technological one, lay with what he implicitly considered to be the ambiguousness – or in Feenberg’s (2002)

terms, the “ambivalence” (p.79) – of technological rationality. Inherently ambivalent, then, Marcuse saw the

possibility to root technological rationality in the soil of different values. By reason being ambivalent,

Marcuse is thinking of something akin to the “ambiguous” and “open horizons” of the Platonic dialectic

(Marcuse, 1964, p. 131) (see next section). In particular, the ambivalence of reason – its underdetermined

openness to comprehend and imaginatively move beyond the given and begin to realize other “potentialities”

to the given – could transcend the given’s ideologically congealed contingencies by returning value

judgments into the realm of the rational. Thus, reason, particularly a negatively dialectical one, could also be

subversive. As such, the possibility for a technology of liberation also rested with the potentialities that a

subversive reason could reveal. Marcuse believed that this new, subversive, and dialectic rationality would
 7

be able to keep the tension between subject and the object open and that, borrowing from Hegel

while also echoing Adorno, the object would no longer be feared. A new, post-technologically rationalized,

two-dimensional thought would replace a one-dimensional one. Finally, the capacity for reason to re-

conceptualize reality with the help of the productive imagination would lead us to another type of

technology, wresting it away from “the metaphysics of domination” and tapping it into “the metaphysics of

liberation” (p. 167).

III. From Pre-Technological Rationality to Technological Rationality

Before “technological man” could take flight and sore above “technological nature” (Marcuse, 1964,

p. 138), the mind had to first be made to think a certain way. For Marcuse, to think of nature in an abstracted

way that allowed us to calculate, dissect, capture, and control it was an historical project. The beginnings of

this project were dictated by necessity – humans need to control and take from nature to some extent in order

to survive. Our rational capacities have helped us do this. But, all thinking tends towards universalizing and

identifying (pp. 138-139), towards comprehending reality by grasping and knowing what appears through the

concepts we give it. Here, Marcuse discloses his Frankfurt School inheritance. Marcuse posits that “all

objects of thought are universals” (p. 139). In a similar vein, Adorno (1973) writes that “[t]o think is to

identify” (p. 5). “Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend” (p. 5). In further

agreement with the rest of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse (1964) contends that universal concepts, however,

are never “merely…formal” but are rather materialistically contextualized and constituted “in the

interrelationship between the (thinking and acting) subjects and their world” (p. 139). Moreover, there is for

Marcuse a fundamental difference between the ways moderns and ancients apply universals; modern,

instrumentally rationalized ways of satiating necessity and comprehending the world differs from the pre-

technologically rational ways of the Greeks – Marcuse’s exemplars for pre-modernist thinking. What we

could learn from the Greeks, Marcuse thought, were the ways in which they continued to respect the objects

they engaged with by not tearing them away from the meanings and values bestowed on them by a greater

objective realm. But paradoxically, the formation of “technological man,” Marcuse argues, also begins with

the Greeks.
 8

Techné vs. Modern Technological Reason. Implicit in Marcuse’s discussion of pre-

technological rationality and its links to a post-technological one is the notion of the Greek concept of techné

and its role in the process of bringing things forth from nature rather than challenging nature in the processes

of making (Marcuse, 1964, p. 238). To the ancients, techné was one way of bringing things into existence

and closer to their essential forms. Technai are the activities and skills of craft work and represent the arts of

both mind and hand that act within a mode of “truth revealing” linked to creative making, poiesis

(Heidegger, 1977, pp. 13, 21). Since the concept of techné finds art and technique in kinship, it would help

Marcuse begin to ground his proposed post-technological project (Marcuse, 1964, p. 238; also see: Feenberg,

2004, pp. 1-20). While the word techné does not appear anywhere in One-Dimensional Man,5 it is clear that

he is discussing this notion of Greek revealing while contrasting it to modern technics in at least two brief

passages in One-Dimensional Man (see for example: pp. 153-154, 239). Notwithstanding the absence of the

term, the appeal of the concept of techné for Marcuse implicitly rested in its potentiality for reconciling art

and technology within the value judgments that are intrinsic to the concept. What was most promising for

Marcuse was that techné intimately involved homo faber in the movement of things from existence into their

essences within a greater telos, entrenching human-made things within a greater finality that did not privilege

humans but found them co-responsible with nature in the movement towards the essential. Modern

technological reason, on the other hand, elides any kind of such finality and bestows on the human sole

responsibility for controlling nature.

Pre-Technological Rationality vs. Technological Rationality. Unlike the willful, masculinist forms

of modern control over socio-economic life and nature, and the abstractive, congealing tendencies of

technical-scientific rationality, the “pre-technological rationality” of the Greeks also showed that humans and

nature, subjects and objects, were all infused with “modes of Being” already-always in “movement” (p. 127).

For the Greeks, “[f]inite Being,” Marcuse reminds us, was already-always incomplete, “subject to change”

(p. 138). Things for the Greeks were never static but a Dynamis, filled with an energy and a striving towards

some higher form of essentialness beyond what merely appears (Feenberg, 2004, p. 86). These movements of

Being showed the ancients: 1) that subjects and objects were already-always united in a tension and
 9

antagonism between existence and a becoming essence; 2) that objects are possessed by the

potentiality to become other than what they appear; 3) that humans are not separate from nature but

intimately ensconced within it; and 4) that values and objective meanings are essential aspects of things that

can begin to be logically and imaginatively comprehended by subjects. In other words, pre-technological

rationality was grounded in “a philosophic quest [that proceeded] from the finite world to the construction of

a reality which is not subject to the painful difference between potentiality and actuality, which has not

mastered its negativity” (p. 126). For the ancients, then, the struggle of Being striving towards the essential,

which things-as-givens never attain but always aspire towards, was evidenced negatively in experience, in

our suffering and our striving (Feenberg, 2004, p. 86). The “is” of things possessed the implicitness of an

“ought” in the struggle and movement towards the essential (Marcuse, 1964, p. 138).

The discovery of the tensions of reality between “is” and becoming, Marcuse continues to remind us,

was for the ancients “the work of Logos and Eros,” the two principal concepts that assigned the “two modes

of negation” (p. 126) to thought. These two modes of reason – logic and erotic cognition, what gives order

and what gives pleasure – served to “break hold of the established reality and strive for a truth incompatible

with it” (p. 126). Consideration of reality for the Greeks was thus mediated by these two modes of thought

that, together and in tension with each other, revealed those “untrue and unfree” modes of existence that do

not aspire to realize their potentialities. These “untrue” modes of existence were embodied by individuals

that spent their entire life, or a fair part of it, “procuring the prerequisites of existence” (pp. 127-128).

For Marcuse however, the “real dividing line between pre-technological and technological

rationality” was not one based on freedom and unfreedom. Like our one-dimensional society, ancient Greek

society also had social classes whose entire lives were spent procuring a living for themselves or for others,

blocking the possibilities for a vast number of people from accessing a free human existence and arresting

the opportunity for self-actualization (p. 128). The difference between the projects of pre-technological and

technological societies for Marcuse rested rather with “the manner in which the subordination to the

necessities of life – to ‘earning a living’ – is organized and, in the new modes of freedom and unfreedom,

truth and falsehood which correspond to this organization,” (p. 128, emphasis added). Thus, as long as there
 10

is enslavement of any kind – pre-capitalist slave ownership, capitalist wage-slavery, our

contemporary unhappy euphoria of consumerism, or our capture within a closed universe of discourse –

thinking about the good and the beautiful, corralled by the privileged few, remains inaccessible to most.

Indeed, thought is unfree when it is horded by “the master[s] of pure contemplation” (p. 128). In a world

where haves and have-nots exist side-by-side, and where the “free” enjoy their freedom off the backs of

those that remain captured, freedom is merely an illusion.

Thus, while the reason of the ancients showed the vestiges of a more truthful relation between subject

and object, existence and becoming, humanity and nature, they nevertheless also remained unfree because, in

Marcuse’s materialist definition, the truthfulness of human existence lies in the degree of “freedom from

material necessities” (p.128-129). On the one hand, the Greeks underscore for Marcuse that the quest for

truth and the comprehension of reality are two-fold; Being is in constant tension with its becoming, the given

with its potentiality. For the Greeks, as for Marcuse, this two-foldedness to reality was the “ontological

condition” (pp. 125, 129, 130). On the other hand, any “societal division of labour” made up of inequality

and injustice – plaguing us and the ancients – becomes an “historical barrier” blocking our “quest for truth,”

arresting the potentiality for “the reduction of toil,” and elevating truth “safely above the historical reality”

(p. 129). Hence, within one-dimensional society, the given hierarchical power structures inherent with

advanced industrial divisions of labour become barriers for coming to realize their historical contingencies.

The result: Objective meanings that for the ancients still shaped value judgments now get separated out from

reason, and the intimate relationship between reason and objective values are forgotten. To rationalize the

world with both Logos and Eros is two-dimensional thought. The rupture of Logos from Eros that takes root

with the first articulation of the Western tradition gets us well on our way to one-dimensional thinking.

Why, then, have we become one-dimensional thinkers, where a logos of the “universal valid,”

abstracted from individual instances and historical conjunctures, was constituted in order to then blanket all

particulars, where logical reason won over erotic reason, where “material content” was “neutralized” (p.

137), where the “principle of identity” was torn away from the “principle of contradiction,” and where

contradictions were rendered invalid as a form of “incorrect thinking” (p. 137)? Why was the struggle for
 11

truth – for the just, the good, and the beautiful – divorced from “the value of Reason” (Marcuse,

1964, p. 220)? Because, answers Marcuse, the technologically rationalized mind had to be “made susceptible

to abstract generalization” (p. 138) and “truth” limited to factual qualities. For the Greeks, truth and

falsehood are not merely about propositions as they were to later become for analytic philosophy. The true

and the false were about the disclosure of Being before statements about Being. The separation of the logical

from the erotic, of “is” from “ought,” and the potentiality afforded by the idea of the thing from its given, is

rooted, however, in the first days of formal logic where the “distinction was made between the universal,

calculable, ‘objective’ and the particular, incalculable, subjective dimension of thought” (p. 138). This

sundering began to take its deep roots with Aristotle’s Organon and its advocacy of formal universals and a

deductively logical world over the substantive Ideas and universals of Plato.6

We thus come to Marcuse’s implicit question woven throughout One-Dimensional Man: What

happens when an entire culture is shaped by formal universals (Feenberg, 2004)? His answer: Things lose

their potentiality beyond mere human will and preference. For Marcuse, the transition from substantive to

formal universals resulted in a shift in the project of reason from “‘What is…?” to ‘How…?’,” establishing a

“practical (though by no means absolute) certainty” which pulls reason away from any commitment to the

object (Marcuse, 1964, p. 151). Not beholden to any extrinsic meaning within which the object resides,

besides its mere categorization, operation, and function, things are freed from any consideration of the social-

historical contingencies that also layer into their reality. Now, with techno-scientific rationality, Marcuse

tells us that “the transformation of man and nature has no other objective limits than those offered by the

brute factuality of matter” (p. 151), and humans and nature lose all other meaningful objective limits to the

quantitative facts of thing observed. Thus, for Marcuse, formalist thinking begins the extraction of all

extrinsic values from cognition’s practices. With modern technological rationality, matter is now nothing but

a “(hypothetical) system of instrumentalities” predetermining experience by projecting onto nature these

instrumentalities and transforming things into abstracted qualities and quantities. At the same time the

abstractive instrumentalist move “organizes the whole,” framing our entire world-view (p. 154). Scientific-

technological reason’s abstractive and neutralizing tendencies excuse it from the realm of judgment (ethics)
 12

because it shuts out any value-laden understanding of the myriad potentialities of the thing being

considered. “Being-as-such” gives way to “Being-instrument” (p. 152). Everything can now be dissected,

manipulated, and controlled to our own ends. As Feenberg writes, things are now “simply there,

unresistingly available for human use” (Feenberg, 2004, p. 87). This, for Marcuse, is the original violence of

modern reason: the “abstention from any judgment as to what is accidental and what essential,” placing

reason at the service of the status quo while canceling out whatever values sit outside of neutral science as

irrational (p. 87; see also: Marcuse, 1964, pp. 146, 148). Essentiality gives way to preferentiality, the sacred

to the scientific, becoming to congealment..

IV. Conclusion: Towards a Post-Technological Rationality

“However,” writes Marcuse, “another alternative seems possible” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 47). Marcuse’s

way out of technological domination and its invalidation of true freedom is to reclaim technological

rationality and the means it inscribes onto an entire society for other means and ends rooted in other values.

The redemption of technology would for Marcuse begin with a negatively dialectical form of reason. This

would give us a new disposition through a new form of reason that could also begin to reveal the

contradictions inherent within contemporary one-dimensional, technocratic society. Firmly ensconced in the

tradition of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse appeals to the subversive power of a negative dialectics to counter

the “scientific subversion of immediate experience” (p. 140). A negative dialectical mode of reason would

reconstitute the concrete and the experiential as oppositional forces (Feenberg, 2004, pp. 89-98). The

reclaimed subversive power of reason would in turn drive the development of new concepts “which carry in

themselves the protest and the refusal” to the established ways of life (Marcuse, 1964, p. 140). For Marcuse,

as for Adorno and Horkheimer, dialectic reason contains “the judgment that condemns the established

reality” (p. 140). Scientific-technological reason merely affirms it (p. 140).

Marcuse’s call for a dialectically rationalized “technological logos” (p. 236) is the cornerstone of his

“transcendent project.” Such a project would rupture scientific rationality and technologically mediated

practices from their dominative projects by reworking the technical in order to place it into the service of the

pacification of nature and the eradication of surplus labour, toil, and injustice. Thus, with the goal of re-
 13

materializing the values that uphold life over those that contain and arrest it, values would have to

be placed firmly within reason. His “post-technological rationality” (Marcuse, 2004, p. 238) was to be a new

logos (p. 236) – a “new direction of technological progress” that would be the “catastrophe of the established

direction” of advanced industrial society (p. 228). A post-technological rationality would allow for new

“essential potential[ities]” (p. 132) that would blanket the rationality of the technical with new values, now

directed towards the reduction of “toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice” (p.5) and the affirmation of

self-actualizing modes of life. This new technological rationality was to be redirected towards the perfection

of objects rather than their domination (Feenberg, 2004, p. 89), resonating with Adorno’s notion of

reconciling the subject with the object by giving the object its due primacy within experience (Adorno,

2002). Most crucially, materialized values ensconced within a post-technological rationality would be

focused on the reduction of labour time, the creation of more disposable time, and would strive towards the

restructuring of the “productive apparatus” from the logics that administered people (Marcuse, 1964, p. 250).

Marcuse at one point calls post-technological reason “the technological rationality of art” (Marcuse,

1964, p. 238); post-technological rationality was to also be an astheticized reason. Experience would now be

comprehended by converging the subversive capacities of reason and aesthetic expression (p. 238). For

Marcuse, as for Adorno, artful ways of living possessed elements of “determinate negation” (p. 228)

whereby the aesthetic dimension would offer an oppositional force to the current forms of instrumentalized

control. With the unleashing of “free play and even the folly of the imagination” (p. 228), Marcuse believed

that passionate and joyful practices would render the ugliness of contemporary, one-dimensional existence an

offense to the “life instincts” (Feenberg, 2004, p. 93). An “aestheticized reduction” would peel away the

immediate contingency of objects and societal conditions that arrest and contain objects and experience

(Marcuse, 1964, p. 239). For Feenberg (2004), Marcuse’s notion of aesthetic reduction was to help us “[strip]

away the contingent aspects of objects…to get at what they could be if released to their free development”

(p. 97). The aesthetic reduction thus holds a translational power for Marcuse that would, on the one hand,

violate the oppressive tendencies of the current “natural” order – which would be the aesthetic reduction’s
 14

negative dialectical moment – while, at the same time, mapping different potentialities for objects,

events, and situations (Marcuse, 1964, pp. 239-240).

But not only art had this reductive, oppositional power for Marcuse. So too did the cultural practices

of marginalized groups. Marginal practices could also challenge the givens of the status quo and show us

ways through to another world because both the aesthetic and the marginal operate on another plane of

reason and imagination that place into relief the ugliness of established reality. Like artistic practices, the

practices of marginalized groups also make us aware of different horizons to life. For instance, as the May

Events of 1968 and the New Left had shown Marcuse, the cultural and political practices of myriad

contemporary social justice movements around the world are providing countless examples of how

alternative cultural expressions can merge with and uphold rematerialized values of love, joy, resistance, and

direct democracy. As such, the “newest social movements” of today (Day, 2005, p. 8) are offering viable

alternatives to and communal freedom from neoliberal forms of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion

(McNally, 2002).

In a post-technologically rationalized universe, logos and eros would once again be reconciled within

particular conjunctures and socio-cultural contexts. Immanent needs under an ethics of care for one another

would undergird a new rational paradigm. The “Logos of technics” would be guided by values striving for

the pacification of existence. The enframing logic of modern technology would be contained via the

legislation of these new values. “[B]y virtue of [technology’s] own method and concepts” (Marcuse, 1964, p.

166), a liberated society would render to technological apparatuses the technical capacity to reduce the

struggle for the provisioning of the necessities for life. This technology already does well. A liberated society

would rend technical devices from their dominative projects. At the same time, a “technological eros” would

unleash our capacities for redesigning technological existence and the means and ends of technology via the

capacities of our “productive imagination” to choose from an array of possibilities for our own liberation,

and to strive for the “art of life” and freedom (p. 230) rather than the art of war and domination. In other

words, a post-technological rationality would ground itself in and aspire towards values focused on the

“affirmation of life.”
 15

Endnotes
1
See, for example: Feenberg, 1999, 2002; Noble, 1977; 1984; Winner, 1986.
2
See also: Marcuse, 1964, p. 158.
3
For Marcuse, changing technology’s ends while leaving its means untouched would be a futile task
given the non-neutrality of technology. Thus, attempts to reconfigure the direction of technology
must always include the consideration of technical means, as well. I will clarify this throughout this
paper.
4
Crucially for Marcuse, technological rationality’s logic – “techno-logy” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 156) – is
grounded in a project of social domination for the benefit of the private ownership and control of the means
of production. Technologically rationalized existence solves in part capital’s conundrum of the variable costs
of “necessary labour time” that always remains in tension with the capitalist’s drive for increasing surplus
value (Marx, 1967, pp. 312-321, 359-368, 508-518). As such and at core, the drive of “technological
reason…in modern industrial society” presumes for Marcuse “the separation of the workers from the means
of production…[as]…a technical necessity… [and as a]…highly material, historical fact of the private
capitalist enterprise” (Marcuse, 1968, p. 212, quoted in Feenberg, 2002, p. 66). Modern industrial society’s
drive for accumulation is thus an “historical project” that “organizes matter” and its subjects as a “choice”
among a “range of possibilities” that “precludes alternative possibilities incompatible with it” (Marcuse,
1964, p. 219). For Marcuse, then, the historical project of techno-logy is the “new rationality” which
“projects and responds to a technological reality,” a reality whereby scientific practice and discourse is
deemed “neutral” and is neither structured toward nor has a telos itself (pp. 167, 169). This reality, Marcuse
points out throughout One-Dimensional Man, carries with it the ideological bias of one-dimensional society.
I will be discussing what Marcuse means by the logic of technology in the following pages.
5
Perhaps this was because the concept of techné was so closely associated with his teacher, Martin
Heidegger, with whom he had distanced himself personally but, in many ways, not philosophically
(Feenberg, 2004).
6
On the other hand, with the Platonic dialectic, concepts like Being/Non-Being, Movement, the One and the
Many, Identity and Contradiction, are kept methodically “open and ambiguous, not fully defined,” Marcuse
reminds us (1964, p. 131). They have “an open horizon” and a “universe of meaning…which is never
closed” (p. 131). The movement towards the truth of forms is a struggle, never fully attained but always
palpable within the horizons of the given. In the struggle for truth Platonic propositions are worked out via
dialogue where the usually unquestioned aspects of the universe are put in question in order to “go beyond
that which is given” to the philosopher (p. 131). Concepts have multifold meanings and their logical
unfolding “responds to the process of reality;” that is, reality is processual (p. 131). Truth and falsehood are
not merely about propositions as they were to later become for analytic philosophy. The true and the false
were about the disclosure of Being before statements about Being.
 16

References
Adorno, T.W. (1973). Negative dialectics. New York: The Continuum Publishing Group.

Adorno, T.W. (2002). “Subject and object.” In A. Arato & E. Gebhardt (Eds.), The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader (pp. 497-511). New York: Continuum.

Adorno, T.W. & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.

Day, R.J.F. (2005). Gramsci is dead: Anarchist currents in the newest social movements. Toronto: Between
the Lines / New York: Pluto Press.

Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology: A critical theory revisited. Oxford: University Press.

Feenberg, A. (2002). Heidegger and Marcuse: The catastrophe and redemption of history. New York:
Routledge.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper & Row.

Horkheimer, M. (1974). Eclipse of reason. New York: Seabury Press.

McNally, D. (2002). Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism. Winnipeg, Canada:
Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston:
Beacon Press.

Marcuse, H. (1968). “Industrialization and capitalism in the work of Max Weber.” In Herbert Marcuse,
Negations: Essays in critical theory (pp. 201-226). Boston: Beacon Press.

Marx K. (1967). Capital, volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy: A critical analysis of capitalist
production. New York: International Publishers

Noble, D.F. (1977). America by design: Science, technology, and the rise of corporate capitalism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Noble, D.F. (1984). Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.