Play, Work, and Marcuse’s Critique of Opposition

This essay investigates Herbert Marcuse’s concept of play: a collective, worldly form of solidarity. To do so, I propose that we take Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization as an occasion to rethink the affective commitments of critical theory by tracing the problem-space of his encounter with play and the critique of opposition that he consequently develops. This text on the social psychology of postwar liberal democracy repeatedly turns to play as a category of collective agency, distinct from the categories of contradiction that have animated critical theory and Marxist political theory more generally. For Marcuse, the historical circumstances of capitalist culture in the postwar period makes it difficult to see the “paralysis of criticism” and a “society without opposition” as anything but two symptoms of the same pathological commitment to negativity over solidarity. By examining Marcuse’s concept of play through his critique of opposition, this article reconstructs an alternative vision of critical theory and practice. Rather than refer to a revolutionary overturning of reality, or the wholesale “transformation of labor,” Marcuse doubles down on play’s character as work and consequently enables us to understand that solidarity is neither totally orderable nor totally spontaneous, and never quite conforms to the logic of opposition. It only ever emerges out of play’s suspension and supposition of reality. In short, when Marcuse wonders if there doesn’t exist such a thing as play, he is wondering if there doesn’t exist such a thing as democracy.