Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 93

The Astro-Turf Garden

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world, a world in which "Nature is taken not as an object of
domination and exploitation but as a 'garden' which can grow while
making human beings grow. It is the attitude that experiences man
and nature joined in a nonrepressive and still functioning order.” The
garden is, he insisted (1962, p. 198) the foundation not only of the
prehistorical and precivilized past, but "of a fully mature
civilization."
Marcuse also argued that history is moving towards a dialec
tical reversal that would shatter the industrial structure, that
though things seem to be getting better, they were actually getting
worse; modes of negation were succumbing to the process of "tech
nological rationality." A measure of the increasing repression was
man’s altered relationship to nature. The environment, Marcuse
(1964, p. 105) wrote:
from which the individual could obtain pleasure
which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an
extended zone of the body—has been rigidly reduced.
Consequently, the universe of cathexis is likewise
reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction
of libido, the reduction of erotic and sexual exper
ience and satisfaction.
Civilization, Marcuse argued, has realized some liberation in its
gardens, parks, and reservations, "but outside of the small protected
areas," he (1964, p. 240) noted, "it has treated Nature as it has
treated man—as an instrument of destructive productivity. For
Marcuse the technology of modern society appeared not as the
foundation of erotic liberation, but rather the principal support of an
increasingly irrational and repressive organization of people’s lives.
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by
Chief Bromden, an Indian exiled from his tribal land, who plays at
being deaf and dumb in a mental ward to protect himself from the
white world. An expatriate from the Indian reservation, he is quite
literally a representation of the garden in the machine. Retreating
from reality in a mental hospital, Bromden (1964, p. 228) describes
the hospital ward under the control of the "Combine", an
omnipresent, omnipotent oppression that is the controlling force in
society: