Marcuse’s Critical Theory Of Mass Culture-Based On The Book ’’One Dimensional Man’’

As one of the representative figures of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse also focus on the critical theory of society. The article tried to study on the critical culture from the book one dimensional man of Marcuse.The development of science and technology which cannot be separated from the popular mass culture. Because in fact they are the foundation of the development of mass culture, so in the first, science and technology are introduced in this book. With the developed industrial society, science and technology have great influence on the popular culture on one hand, science and technology creates a form of communication media: on the other hand, science and technology makes the content of the popular cultural changes a lot, the business character has been strengthened. in the end, science and technology make the product of mass culture become a problem of mind.The focus of this paper is to study Marcuse’s critical theory of the popular mass culture, mainly in the following three aspects: positive cultural criticism, criticism of the single culture, repressive culture. Positive cultural criticism is aimed at the mass culture in developed industrial society, which is lack of negative, negation and surpassing of the reality factors. And it refuses the high culture, so that the existing social lost the power of development. Single culture focus on the criticism of commodity of the mass culture, the value of culture has been ignored,instead of it, the happiness that this kind of culture can take to us is the most important thing. The repressive culture means that it is caused by the false need,which is the opposite hand of true need. The false need is still growing up in the developed industrial society.In addition, the mass culture in China at present is also analyzed in the end of this article. I also tries to analyze the relation between the culture of China and the critical theory of Marcuse. Through this kind of study, we can maybe construct a healthy mass culture of China.