Technology, Technological Domination and the Great Refusal: Marcuse’s Critique of the Advanced Industrial Society

s oeuvre is driven by the recurring theme of "emancipation"-that is, the attempt to liberate man from social exploitation and the projection of an alternative society, a socialist society which Marcuse describes as "free, happy, and non-repressive." 1 This suggests that Marcuse saw the existing society as pathological and therefore it needs to be diagnosed and remedied.His readings on Marx led him to his initial findings that the capitalist social order is the primordial cause of these pathologies, and, hence, it is the transformation of this social order that can bring emancipation to fruition.Inasmuch as this struggle for emancipation requires an active political agent, a critical theorist is, therefore, bound to seek for this agent.This is precisely what concerned Marcuse in his pre-World War II writings.His theory of historicity, which straddles Heidegger, Hegel, and Marx, is a search for that viable political agent who can be the hope of emancipation.Thus, Marcuse's theory of historicity is premised, among other things, on the attempt to develop a theory of emancipation, and I call this "Marcuse's first theory of emancipation."Now, we may observe that after Marcuse devised a philosophical model of history that would secure the possibility of such agent of emancipation, his next task is to enunciate how this active political agent can actualize the project of liberation.But after World War II, Marcuse was faced with a huge difficulty: the integration of the proletariat into the status quo as can be seen in the two defining events in contemporary German history, i.e., the defeat of the socialists in the German Revolution of 1918-19 and the support the German proletarians had for Hitler.These events further convinced Marcuse (and the rest of the first generation of critical theorists like Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno) that Marx's proletariat is no longer the primary agent of emancipation.In his analysis, Marcuse realized that the integration of the proletariat into the status quo had something to do with the advancement of technology that contributed to the dawning of the advanced 1 See