The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

9. Marcuse's Aesthetic Politics

9 Marcuse's Aesthetic Politics Toward an Aesthetic Socialism Hegel suggested that art contains the sensuous appearance of the Idea, the symbol of a rationality of reason that is beyond words (Hegel 1920). Art is not language for Hegel because it is nondiscursive; it gives form to hidden, ineffable content. Marcuse in his later work came to regard art as the last refuge of critical insights in a totally mobilized society. In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), he rejoins themes from his earliest ZeitschriJt essays on the problems of truth and happiness (see Marcuse 1968d). Marcuse in the 1930s originally sought a materialist concept of reason with which to overcome philosophical dualisms, a theme he later pursued in his dialectical investigation of desire. What he called a "rationality of gratification" in 1955 joined intellect and instinct and overcame the mind-body dualism that he felt served to cement social bondage by relegating the ideal of freedom to the spiritual heavens, leaving Earth to the expropriated (Marcuse 1955, 205-6). In this chapter I trace Marcuse's mature aesthetic theory, focusing on his view of art's dual role as ideology critique and socialist ontology. Like Adorno (1984), Marcuse ended with art because he felt he could no longer talk about a rationality of gratification or give it comprehensible political 153 154 BACK TO FRANKFURT form in the context of late capitalism. The cracks in one-dimensional society that showed faintly in the late 1960s were once again disappearing , leaving critical theory with no discourse other than art. In one sense, then, Marcuse finishes with a discussion of art because he concludes, after the short-lived exuberance of the 1960s, that a traditional politics of class is hopeless. Yet in another sense he maintains his internal dialogue with the Marxist tradition and uses art, as he had used psychoanalysis earlier, to ensure that subject and object, individual and class, particular and general, could never gain complete identity, thus preserving the nonidentical relation between person and collectivity . Marcuse uses art both as a transcendent ideology-critical force that evokes the dream of freedom and as a vehicle for projecting the image of a humane socialism that refuses to separate process and product. He suggests that every social order, no matter how free of internal contradictions , will need media through which individuals can confront their own mortality. Art both rescues the dream and memory of freedom in a one-dimensional social order and allows us to confront our own mortality once we-and as we ourselves-are liberated. An almost aesthetic socialism preserves the ineradicable distance between the nonidentical subject and object and thus opposes an orthodox socialism-that of Leninists and economic determinists-that dispenses with ambiguity in favor of apodictic knowledge and hence political inflexibility. The Liberating Autonomy of Art The Aesthetic Dimension is phrased as a challenge to orthodox Marxist aesthetics that reduces art to a vehicle of socialist counterpropaganda, "socialist realism." The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension . Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change. In this sense, there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht. [1978, xii-xiii] Marcuse suggests that in its autonomy art remains a repository of radical hopes for social improvement. By refusing to succumb to the appearance of the given, art is "permanent subversion," giving form to hidden 155 MARCUSE'S AESTHETIC POLITICS content amplifying the inherently dialectical character of the social world. The content is hidden, he contends, in la prose du monde, the attitude of one-dimensional common sense where things "are" as they appear to be, hence fatefully ensuring the identity of the real and rational. Marcuse suggests that art transforms our conventional perception because art is more evocative than what Hegel called Verstand, uncomprehending common sense. Instead, art grasps at the occluded possibility of a qualitatively different reality. And it is because total mobilization in advanced capitalism distorts and falsifies our immediate experience that we must resort to aesthetic transcendence in order to keep alive our dreams and memories of freedom and happiness. Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goals that failed, it can enter, as...