Laing’s subject politics severed revolutionary change from material social conditions

Evidence

Unlike Marcuse, and like the other writers he represents here, Laing, a psychoanalyst, does not attach the potentiality for revolutionary change to material social conditions. Rather, change for Laing can come only as a result of a collective set of acts of willed individual self-liberation. This view, in effect redefining politics as a question of subjectivity (consciousness) rather than structural social change, made Laing profoundly influential for the counterculture, and for those in the New Left who believed that revolutionary social change must be preceded, or at least accompanied, by a change in consciousness, as Marcuse himself argued. For Marcuse, only a liberated consciousness could act to realize the liberatory potentiality inherent in advanced technology. For Laing, the liberation of authentic consciousness from the constraints of alienation is itself sufficient to bring about revolutionary social change. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 666

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘subject politics’/‘politics of the self’ as rede�uning politics around consciousness rather than material social structure.
• XREF: connects to: Laing’s attack on inner-outer dualism still operated within a modern paradigm — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 682; Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 218; Academic critique of cultural politics dismissed it as a substitute for practical politics — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2643 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural influence detached from popular masses lacks real political weight #expands (0.80)
• Academic critique of cultural politics dismissed it as a substitute for practical politics #corroborates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2643
• Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed #complicates (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 218
• First World subjects’ belief in postindustrial society distorts political practice. #qualifies (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 169