Herbert Marcuse

An Aesthetics of Liberation

Malcolm Miles

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783714995
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

When capitalism is clearly catastrophically out of control and its excesses cannot be sustained socially or ecologically, the ideas of Herbert Marcuse become as relevant as they were in the 1960s. This is the first English introduction to Marcuse to be published for decades, and deals specifically with his aesthetic theories and their relation to a critical theory of society. Although Marcuse is best known as a critic of consumer society, epitomised in the classic One-Dimensional Man, Malcolm Miles provides an insight into how Marcuse's aesthetic theories evolved within his broader attitudes, from his anxiety at the rise of fascism in the 1930s through heady optimism of the 1960s, to acceptance in the 1970s that radical art becomes an invaluable progressive force when political change has become deadlocked. Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation, in which art assumes a primary role in interrupting the operation of capitalism, made him a key figure for the student movement in the 1960s. As diverse forms of resistance rise once more, a new generation of students, scholars and activists will find Marcuse's radical theory essential to their struggle.

1
Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Society

In the opening words of The Aesthetic Dimension, first published in German in 1977 and in English in 1978, Herbert Marcuse admits a note of despair:

In a situation where the miserable reality can be changed only through radical political praxis, the concern with aesthetics demands justification. It would be senseless to deny the element of despair inherent in this concern: a retreat into a world of fiction where existing conditions are changed and overcome only in the realm of the imagination.¹

A number of ideas are fused here. There is an assertion of dark times which I read as the miserable reality of the 1970s, when the optimism of the 1960s faded into history. Yet there is a continuity between Marcuse’s work from the 1960s and the 1970s. In the 1960s he looks to a new sensibility as prerequisite for a new society; and in the 1970s he argues that, while art cannot change the world, it contributes to an awareness from which appropriately informed political action – praxis – changes the conditions which produce (and reproduce) the miserable reality. The term praxis is a key concept in Marxism, and means more than the fusion of theory and practice. One definition would be the gaining of appropriate insights into past and present conditions in order to imagine future possibilities for change. By invoking the notion of ‘radical political praxis’ Marcuse confirms his position within successive re-groupings of the Left since the 1960s, and within a re-visioned Marxism. So, if at first reading the passage above implies that aesthetics is a substitute for politics in a period of despair, I think that Marcuse argues, on the contrary, that aesthetics is politics, taking a world of fiction – or imagined reality – as an oblique route to real change. In later parts of the book he argues that art has a potential to rupture the codes and categories of how the world is seen, to imagine the world not as it is but as it might be. There is an alternative to the way things are. It begins in imagination; the problem is how imagined worlds become material reality.

DREAMING SOCIAL CHANGE

Dreaming is involuntary and daydreaming is only vaguely intentional, but aesthetics involves consciousness and judgement. It introduces an imaginative reconstruction of society (a phrase I borrow from Ruth Levitas),² which I locate at the core of Marcuse’s project for a critical theory of society. Hence the theory articulated in The Aesthetic Dimension is not defeatist but presents a viable strategy in the circumstances of the 1970s. I would argue that it remains viable today, though the frameworks through which the conditions of unfreedom need to be analysed have changed, following feminism and post-colonialism, and the interrogation of power in post-structuralism. Marcuse was aware of feminism, and often alluded to struggles for national identity in ex-colonial countries; he planned a series of essays on Marxism, feminism and the failure of the Left, some of which were published in German.³ But the English edition planned for Beacon Press in Boston never appeared; instead Marcuse completed the essay which became The Aesthetic Dimension, describing it in a letter to the publisher as ‘a very responsible text, not a lecture, but a larger essay’.⁴

Douglas Kellner, introducing the fourth volume of Marcuse’s Collected Papers, Art and Liberation, argues against some reviews of the book which took it to mark an inward turn after a life of political engagement. Kellner accepts that ‘Marcuse never developed his aesthetic theory into a comprehensive volume such as is found in the works of Adorno, Lukács, and in more fragmentary form in Sartre, Goldmann, and Benjamin.’⁵ He notes that Marcuse’s insights on the writers Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, contained in his essay on French literature under the German occupation, were not included in The Aesthetic Dimension. Kellner concludes that perhaps Marcuse was ‘too old to put in the sustained work to finish his aesthetic’.⁶ But he also notes that Marcuse remained politically and philosophically engaged, giving a lecture in 1979 in which he stated that ‘art can enter, as regulative idea, the political struggle to change the world’.⁷ Marcuse contends that art acts against consumerism, and re-presents humanity as freed from alienation while enshrining a past remembrance of a utopian realm as a precondition for liberation.

I think Kellner is accurate when he writes that ‘Marcuse’s work on art and aesthetics is best contextualised in the trajectory of his critical philosophy, social theory, and radical politics.’⁸ The political, social and aesthetic intersect in The Aesthetic Dimension, but in such a way that art is not treated as ideological illustration or the representation of a political stance – as was the case with Socialist Realism (the officially sanctioned art of the Soviet Union). Kellner reads this as consistent with Marcuse’s work since ‘he began seriously writing about art in the 1960s’.⁹ For example, he says, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension is a sustained attack on reductive Marxist aesthetics, criticizing notions that revolutionary art should be proletarian art.’¹⁰ That engagement began, I would say, in the 1930s with Marcuse’s essay on affirmative culture (see Chapter 2). The point remains that there is a continuity throughout his work ensuring that the later work is not a recantation, more a consolidation of his earlier thoughts on culture modified only to reflect a shift in the conditions in which he wrote.

In the opening section of The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse lists six points from a conventional Marxist aesthetic, such as the link between art and class, and that a class in decline – the bourgeoisie in a Marxist trajectory – produces only decadent art. He questions what he reads as a no-longer tenable split between the material base of a society and the social and cultural structures built, as it were, upon it, arguing that to relegate culture to the margins is to miss the point (central to Marx) that ‘radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence and their passions’.¹¹ Without the subjective factor of human imagination (as in the imagination of another world), there is no prospect for radical political change even when objective factors (such as are provided by technology) are present. This means that art has an indirect agency for change, which is not distracting but involves the occupation of a liminal zone of criticality, a positive dreaming. The circle which needs to be squared is one in which critical distance relates to intervention within the conditions analysed.

There is one further point I would like to make here: although Kellner writes that the insights from Marcuse’s essay on Aragon are omitted from The Aesthetic Dimension, they do resurface in the final sentence of the Preface to the English edition: ‘there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire than in the didactic plays of Brecht’.¹² At the time – 1978 – this may have sounded extraordinary, given Brecht’s status among the Left, his association with the German Marxist milieu of which Marcuse was a member in the 1930s, and Walter Benjamin’s comment that Brecht articulated a revolution of the relations of production in literature.¹³ Almost a throw-away line at the end of the book, not included in the German edition a year earlier, this sentence reaffirms that art carries the latent memory of freedom – and does so almost regardless of other factors, as if inherently, as if beauty itself is a protest against an unfree world.

This passing remark nonetheless locates Marcuse as a revisionist in a Marxist realm. In keeping with the project of critical theory, he reconstructs Marxist theory from within. Marxist theory was never strong on art, and part of Marcuse’s aim was to address its aesthetic deficit – which is my focus in this chapter, contextualised by a brief outline of the model of dialectical materialism in which Marcuse’s Marxian aesthetics fit.

ART IN ACTUALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM?

Marcuse gives a succinct expression of his aesthetic theory in a book which is seldom read today: Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (first published in 1958). Before the optimism of the 1960s, and as a philosophy professor at the University of California at San Diego, Marcuse gave a detailed critical account of the socio-political formation in which art had the function of representing ‘the established social reality as the final framework for the artistic content, transcending it neither in style nor in substance’.¹⁴ That is, if the Soviet Union was the state produced by actually existing socialism, then Soviet art had no further need to be critical (as in the bourgeois era) but could instead convey that actuality as it was, in straightforward representations. The approved style for this was Realism, which Marcuse notes could be ‘a highly critical and progressive form of art, confronting reality “as it is” with its ideological and idealized representations’.¹⁵ He does not mention French Realism in the 1840s – the work of Gustave Courbet in particular – but it would exemplify this. He does mention Brecht – then working in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – as producing a literature which implements state policy carefully. But Marcuse’s main objection to the culture of the Eastern bloc is that the actually existing socialism claimed for it did not actually exist, so that art’s role remains, in theory, to negate that reality. He writes, ‘But art as a political force is art only in so far as it preserves the images of liberation’, and hence, in a society which disallows this by classifying it as dissidence, art preserves a memory of freedom only by negation.¹⁶ Art is the ‘refusal of everything that has been made part and parcel of reality’.¹⁷

The same, I would add, is the case in the affluent society called the West. To say this is obviously polemical, and involves a stark separation of art from life that contrasts with Friedrich Engels’ assertion in The Dialectics of Nature that the great artists of the Renaissance were engaged in other areas of production: ‘Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician and engineer’, and ‘Albrecht Dürer … invented a system of fortifications.’¹⁸ In the 1930s, Benjamin had argued that the committed writer must situate writing within the relations of production, so that writers would become readers, readers would write for publication (as in the Soviet press), and the division between writers as specialists and readers as passive consumers would be collapsed.¹⁹ Benjamin cites the Soviet writer Sergey Tretyakov, who joined the Communist Lighthouse collective farm to spend his time, as a writer still,

calling mass meetings; collecting funds for down-payments on tractors; persuading private farmers to join the collective farm; inspecting reading-rooms; launching wall newspapers and directing the collective farm newspaper; reporting to Moscow newspapers; introducing radio, travelling film shows, etc.²⁰

This was not the art Marcuse had in mind. If it was consistent with Engels’s idea that art ‘is based on economic development’²¹ the image of the writer ordering tractor parts could be read as too literal an engagement, and reliant on exactly the division between economic and cultural life which Marcuse rejects.

The issue is complex. For Marx, art is part of the superstructure constructed over the base of economic life. It does not answer basic human needs such as those for clothing, food and shelter, but art still reflects the base from which it is produced even if it answers higher needs. In actually existing socialism it reflects the realised utopia of a classless society. But art does not change reality, though changes to the base cause changes in the superstructure, hence in art. In revising Marxism, Marcuse sets aside the division of base and superstructure. Informed by modernist art – the art of the early twentieth century, such as German Expressionism, which draws back from representing reality in order to present an imagined reality – Marcuse reasserts a divide between a not yet existing utopia and an art which exposes that non-realisation in the non-realism of its images (contrary to the realism required in Soviet art). For Marcuse, Soviet Marxism asserts a link between social progress and the yet to occur ‘obsolescence of art’²² in the state of actually existing socialism. Without the tension of an imagined freedom and a real unfreedom, however, art for Marcuse has no more than a residual function of representing reality. This is inadequate in Marcuse’s view. He argues that ‘the Soviet treatment of art is not simply an outburst of boundless authoritarianism’,²³ in that it requires a reliance on art’s cognitive function – its representation of reality in images which can be read as data – and a claim to the objective truths of science.

Critical theory refutes that claim; even scientific theory is produced, not given, just as critical theory itself re-presents the conditions of its own production in social research and theoretical abstraction.²⁴ This enables critical theory to intervene in, not merely record, its social situation. Following from that, and before looking at the aesthetic deficit in Marxism as Marcuse perceived it, it is helpful to note that critical theory in the 1930s, and Marcuse’s writing in the post-war period when he remained in North America, are contextualised by the rise of modern art and abstraction.

For many of those employed by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – and in the re-convened International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, New York after 1934 – art was peripheral. For some of its associates, notably Benjamin and Bloch, it was central; and Marcuse stands out among the Frankfurt Institute’s staff in making detailed studies of literature and art. His main interest was always literature, but modernist art had a pervasive presence even if its significance was beginning to be questioned from new perspectives in feminism, post-colonialism and analyses of mass culture by the 1970s. Recalling her time as a student in San Diego, art historian Carol Becker writes: ‘I thought Marcuse was trapped in modernism, unaware of how times had changed. The imagination … was now virtually oppressed by the effects of mass media.’²⁵ Continuing, though, Becker sees Marcuse as having been correct to insist on the resistant capacity of art: ‘Within the creative process is resistance.’²⁶ In the 1960s, or even the 1950s, abstract art in the West resisted an unfree reality through images on the edge of nothingness. For some this was a freedom to be quiet. For others it was the near-silence which is the last gasp on the edge of terror – a terror sedimented in the work which refracts it, redirecting attention critically to the conditions in which a gasp is all that can be uttered.

Marcuse rejects Socialist Realism, then, as a device for social control; the possibility for art is to rupture such mechanisms. Although there is no direct link, his position follows exchanges o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Society
• 2. The Artist and Social Theory
• 3. Affirmations
• 4. A Literature of Intimacy
• 5. Society as a Work of Art
• 6. The End of Utopia
• 7. The Aesthetic Dimension
• 8. Legacies and Practices
• Notes
• Index