One-dimensional management discourse replaces structural wage grievance with a singular case, defusing critique.

Evidence

Marcuse uses two contrasting statements to make his case that one-dimensional discourse, in substituting the particular for the universal, suppresses or eliminates the critical force of the universal: ” ‘Wages are too low,’ ” and ” ‘B’s present earnings, due to his wife’s illness, are insufficient to meet his current obligations’ ” (112–13). The divergent implications of these two formulations are clear. The first statement implies an amelioration that must be significantly socially transformative, because it ”transcends [the] individual experience” of the worker who utters it and ”refers to universal conditions for which no particular case can be substituted” (112). The second statement, on the other hand, has as its subject only a single worker, ”B,” whose particular case does not transcend its immediate circumstances: ”the ‘transitiveness’ of meaning has been abolished; the grouping ‘wage-earners’ has disappeared together with the subject ‘wages,’ and what remains is a particular case which, stripped of its transitive meaning, becomes susceptible to the accepted standards of treatment by the company whose case it is” (113). This failure to transcend the particular toward the universal deprives particularity of all critical, oppositional potentiality. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 174

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who thinks through HR/management discourse erasing class claims via individualization.
• XREF: connects to: Right-wing corporate critique mirrors left critique while serving opposite ends — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 402; Economization and governance replace political contestation with managerial consensus. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 409

Broader Connections

• Economization and governance replace political contestation with managerial consensus. #expands (0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 409
• Right-wing corporate critique mirrors left critique while serving opposite ends #complicates (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 402