Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance," published in 1965, and again in 1968 with an additional postscript, is unsettling, to say the least. I'm writing on it for a graduate seminar on the First Amendment. I initially began the project with an eye to defending Repressive Tolerance--a position that I'm not sure I can claim any longer--not without some serious revision. Instead, what I might try to do, is salvage some of Marcuse's insights into reason, consciousness (raising), community-based rule, etc. What impresses me most about RT, is Marcuse's insistence that communities have, despite the conditions of living in a one dimensional society, the capacity to decide that which they will and will not accept, based on the historically identifiable (not transcendent) category of progress: "The experience and understanding of the existent society may well be capable of identifying what is not conducive to a free and rational society, what impedes and distorts the possibilities of its creation" (p. 87). The truth is, that if they (which is to say: we) are not capable that there would be very little room for optimism. Yet, Marcuse remained, even obliquely, optimistic, or at least hopeful. His entire project depended on it.
I'm still unsettled by Repressive Tolerance. Yes, Marcuse is right: there are certain speech patterns that should not be tolerated. (He's writing with the Nazi rise to power in mind, with the historical hope that had certain speech not been tolerated, the atrocities of fascism would not have been committed. And, this, at least speculatively, speaks something to Marcuse's concept of history--something I wouldn't mind exploring.) The uptake of this claim, as scholars have noted, has been a justification of confrontation politics. And the problem with confrontation politics is that it will totally ruin your Thanksgiving Dinner. And I'm only speaking somewhat in jest. But, it is my interest of making sure the cranberry sauce doesn't land in someone's lap that seriously disrupts my ability to go full-RT.
I'm beginning to accept that I'm a hopeless moderate who sometimes masquerades as a radical. Truthfully, I'm a hopeful moderate. And that statement says something about that which makes me radical: an apparent wistfulness for utopian thinking. The belief, rooted in an ontology that posits an essential goodness of humanity; that through human labor we can create a new, better society; that the tools for the creation of said society exist already, in a material sense; that the goal to enacting that society must take place in the realm of consciousness (raising); that a correct conception of consciousness must locate the individual within the social, as a communitarian being, capable of enacting both collective and personal change.
Now, to make no-place, some-place. (And get working on this paper.)
