Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation

201 Pages·2012·7.67 MB·English

by  Malcolm Miles

Herbert Marcuse
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Modern European Thinkers
Series Editors: Anne Beech and David Castle
Over the past few decades, Anglo-American social science and humanities
have experienced an unprecedented interrogation, revision and strengthening
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and work of key European thinkers.
As well as being comprehensive, accessible introductory texts, the titles in
the ‘Modern European Thinkers’ series retain Pluto’s characteristic radical
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Also available
Hannah Arendt Gilles Deleuze
Finn Bowring John Marks
Alain Badiou André Gorz
Jason Barker Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman
Georges Bataille Félix Guattari
Benjamin Noys Gary Genosko
Jean Baudrillard Jürgen Habermas
Mike Gane Luke Goode
Walter Benjamin Guy Hocquenghem
Esther Leslie Bill Marshall
Pierre Bourdieu Slavoj Žižek
Jeremy F. Lane Ian Parker
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Herbert Marcuse
an aesthetics of Liberation
Malcolm Miles
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First published 2012 by Pluto Press
345 archway road, London N6 5aa
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the united states of america exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of st. Martin’s Press LLc,
175 Fifth avenue, New York, NY 10010
copyright © Malcolm Miles 2012
the right of Malcolm Miles to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988.
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IsbN 978 0 7453 3038 9 Paperback
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contents
Introduction 1
1 Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Society 10
2 The Artist and Social Theory 27
3 Affirmations 46
4 A Literature of Intimacy 65
5 Society as a Work of Art 86
6 The End of Utopia 106
7 The Aesthetic Dimension 126
8 Legacies and Practices 145
Notes 165
Index 191
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Introduction
In this Introduction I set out my aims in writing the book, its scope,
and why I think that Herbert Marcuse’s writing is of interest today.
I explain why I address his work on aesthetics rather than the wider
project for a critical theory of society, sketch the book’s organisation,
and finally say a little of the background from which I wrote it.
AIms And scope
My aim is to increase interest in Marcuse’s writing on aesthetics.
Although there has been a proliferation of commentary on the work
of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno – his contemporaries
in the development of critical theory, both of whom also emphasised
aesthetics – less has been published on Marcuse’s work. Benjamin’s
essay on the work of art1 has been used almost to exhaustion in
courses on photography and media arts, and Adorno is seen as a
more philosophically weighty contributor. Yet in the 1960s, when
it seemed society might change, Marcuse’s writing reached a wider
readership and evoked a more immediate engagement with the
problems and potential benefits of a cultural revolt.
Marcuse died in 1979, after which a few books on his work were
published.2 But his theories then fell into neglect until publication
of the Collected Papers began in 1998,3 followed by a further few
critical titles.4 Yet the Collected Papers, edited by Douglas Kellner
in collaboration with Peter Marcuse, show the depth of Marcuse’s
insights into culture, and the consistency of his pursuit of an
understanding of social change. At the time of writing, five of the
planned six volumes are in print, and have been a key source for my
re-reading of Marcuse’s work. Organised thematically, the Collected
Papers juxtapose both well-known and hitherto unpublished
material. But the Collected Papers will appeal to readers already
interested in Marcuse’s work. I make no claim to compete with
Kellner’s scholarly introductions to each volume, and aim instead to
offer an introductory commentary relating specifically to Marcuse’s
aesthetic theories.
An increasing tendency towards interdisciplinary work since the
1970s suggests that Marcuse’s effort to integrate social, cultural,
1
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2 Herbert mArcuse
political and psychoanalytic insights will be of methodological
interest, too, across the arts, humanities and social sciences. His
willingness to present seemingly opposed polarities – such as art’s
social and aesthetic dimensions – as potentially creative tensions,
is also interesting, in a period when both education and politics
seem driven increasingly by a need for solutions. For the most part,
Marcuse’s writing was work in progress, developed in the 1960s
from one paper to the next as he spoke at student gatherings as
well as academic conferences; ideas migrated, and questions were
kept open. Andrew Feenberg, a colleague in the 1960s, recalls
that Marcuse did not predict the revolution but elaborated ‘the
conditions of its possibility’.5 I read this as the necessary ground
for an imaginative reconstruction of society, and the beginning of
a longer project of realisation.
To introduce Marcuse’s writing on aesthetics is less difficult
than, say, to comment on Adorno’s work with its long sentences
and aversion to paragraph breaks, or to explain Ernst Bloch’s
unrestricted eclecticism. When an interviewer suggested to him
that his writing was ‘difficult to understand’, Marcuse replied that
he regretted such difficulty, adding (in his German accent) ‘I try to
write clearer’ and that he took comfort in the fact ‘that a few people
do and did understand it’.6 In fact, his most important texts are
remarkably succinct: An Essay on Liberation7 and The Aesthetic
Dimension8 are each less than a hundred pages long, and accessible.
Marcuse’s philosophical and literary references are evidently drawn
from the German philosophical tradition, and may now appear to
be dated, but they are not intentionally obscure or obstructive. To
me, what permeates a re-reading of Marcuse now is how radical
and refreshing his ideas appear despite the lapse of time since their
first publication.
I am, then, confident that this book will engage the interest of
second- and third-year undergraduates in the arts, humanities and
social sciences; and graduates in areas such as cultural policy, radical
philosophy, and research between culture and the political sciences. It
may also be relevant to the professional practices of artists, planners
and policy makers seeking to look beyond a society governed by
the notion that there is no alternative to the way things are. New
social movements have proclaimed that a new society is possible;
Marcuse’s theories link the possibility to a careful reordering of
the implicit values of the existing society, and a robust indication
of its contradictions.
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IntroductIon 3
WHy reAd mArcuse noW?
Marcuse’s aesthetic theories were contextualised by the political
realities of the 1930s (the rise of fascism), the 1960s (the counter-
culture), and the 1970s (the aftermath of the failed revolt of 1968).
Marcuse did not think that history repeated itself; yet if freedom
was only a dream in the 1930s, against totalitarianism, and became
a dream again in the 1970s (as now) in face of the rise of globalised
capitalism, it is appropriate to recall the interlude of hope which
occurred between these dire outlooks. Marcuse wrote in 1972 that,
‘In its extreme manifestations, it [the capitalist system] practices
the horrors of the Nazi regime.’9 William Robinson writes that
‘Transnational capital and its political agents are attempting ...
a vast shift in the balance of class and social forces worldwide to
consolidate the neo-liberal counterrevolution of the 1980s.’10 I do
not equate advanced capitalism and the Nazi state, but the extent
to which neo-liberalism and earlier forms of totalitarianism seek
total control of society – now by the soft forces of consumerism
and culture – implies that a common form of analysis is needed.
But does this include aesthetics? Marcuse argued in The Aesthetic
Dimension that a concern with aesthetics is justified when political
change appears remote. Today, the sporadic growth of new political
formations in single-issue campaigning and activism inspires hope,
but this is too easily marginalised. Now is an appropriate time, then,
for a critical reconsideration of the optimism of the 1960s which
Marcuse reflected in his writing. The prospect of a new society was
(and might still be) electrifying and contagious, a force to interrupt
– and rout – the notion that world history has a single, given course.
For Marcuse, as for Bloch, to imagine another form of society is
to begin the process of its realisation. Encouraged by the counter-
culture and the New Left, Marcuse argued that art negated the
dominant society, reintroducing the emphasis on sensuality of
Marx’s early writings. Marcuse writes of beauty as a non-repressive
order, of society as a work of art, and of the reclamation of verbal
language to express new values – in the context of a continuing
and vital revision of Marxism for the conditions of the twentieth
century. New frameworks arose in feminism, post-colonialism,
and environmentalism, from the 1970s to the 1990s, but I argue
that Marcuse’s work contributes to an imaginative reconstruction
of the social order alongside these frameworks, and that they are
not incompatible.
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