Art and Liberation: A Review

Contrary to previous attempts at understanding the Marcuse project, Douglas Kellner states in his opening essay to Art and Liberation: The Collected Papers of Hebert Marcuse, Volume 4, that “aesthetics is not the key, primary, or central element in his [Marcuse’s] thought,” however, it is “an important part of Marcuse’s project” (p. 3). Furthermore, Kellner insists that in the thirty years after Marcuse’s death, most people have misinterpreted all, or at least part, of Marcuse’s work, attempting to ascribe value to, or criticize that which is non-existent.

For example, Kellner takes issue with the first interpretation posited by Barry Katz (1982) and furthered by Timothy Lukes (1985) which understood Marcuse’s aesthetics as a transcendental ontology that would “cancel the totality of existence without being cancelled by it”(p. 2). Katz contests the idea put forth by Lukes, that Marcuse’s aesthetics leads to withdrawal from politics and an escape inward; and agrees more with Berthold Langerbein (1985) that Marcuse emphasizes and repeatedly attempts to mediate between art and politics in order to preserve a separate aesthetic dimension. However, Kellner asserts that Langerbein fails to address the other dimensions Marcuse mediates, such as philosophy and critical theory.

In regards to more recent scholarship, such as Charles Reitz (2000), where Reitz states that Marcuse’s work can be divided into two spheres “art-against-alienation” and “art-as-alienation.” Kellner largely agrees, and yet suggests, that splitting his work this way is what leads people to misinterpret Marcuse’s work as tending towards withdrawal, or aestheticising politics. “Marcuse’s project was to develop perspectives and practices of liberation that combined critical social theory, philosophy, radical politics, and reflections on art and cultural transformation” (p. 3). Readers need to be able to see the totality of the Marcuse Project as the various components sometimes “stood in tension with each other” (p. 3). E.g. art is both alienation and against it all at once. The remainder of Kellner’s opening essay walks the reader through a his interpretations of Marcuse’s chronologically presented essays that follow beginning with a segment of Marcuse’s dissertation written in 1922 and ending with a posthumously published interview (1984). Kellner’s opening essay not only provides an interpretation of Marcuse’s essays within the book, as well as other major works (Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, and The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics); but also provides useful historical and biographical information that sheds light onto the character of Herbert Marcuse.

The first piece by Marcuse is the introduction to his dissertation. In this piece Marcuse begins to grapple with art in a critical way, and the reader begins to see the seeds of what will be the Marcuse project. In this essay classic Marcusean aesthetic tensions emerge: liberation/alienation in art and artist; engagement for change by art in the world/escapism to idealized realms. There are also hints at concepts later developed by Lacan, in which art is an attempt to find that which is ultimately real and will completes the soul. Marcuse also clearly shows his reverence for traditional artistic high culture, a theme that remains (with notable deviance) throughout his writings on art.

In “The Affirmative Character of Culture” we are introduced to Marcuse the radical. Marcuse as anti-(materialism, capitalism, positivism, affirmative culture). Here, he appears to embrace the very notions of bohemia through a Hegelian mind-soul link, universal empathy, individuality and his characterization of transcendence and the ideal; where transcendence is the good, the beautiful and the true, the ideal is that “which in its very unreality keeps alive the best desires of men amidst a bad reality” (p. 92). Marcuse does not articulate utopia or illusions as a particularly bad thing, but dialectic in nature, asserting that while utopia may be an unattainable ideal, it is not bad to have this. Furthermore, it is the illusions portrayed in art, which make utopia real, even if never attainable.

The 1967 essay “Art in the One-Dimensional Society” outlines Marcuse’s core beliefs about art, revolution and politics, as well as offering a rare tip-of-the-hat to popular culture in the name of Bob Dylan (as “the only revolutionary language left today” (p. 113)). This essay illuminates Marcuse’s understanding that art is a human need and a way of experiencing reality. Marcuse states here that art can only be revolutionary when it refuses to “become part of any Establishment, including the revolutionary Establishment” (p. 115). Furthermore, art is essentially aesthetic; art may not be instrumentalized and maintain authenticity as art; art is perpetual revolution. This essay also suggests that authentic art is a method for combating one-dimensionality: that art is a technique, and that a technique is the opposite of technology (and by extension the technological rationality that plagues the one-dimensional world); technique is creative and liberatory, whereas technology is destroys and oppresses.

These lines of thought are continued in “Society as a Work of Art” and “Art as a From of Reality” Marcuse says that reality is a creation of art, plus imagination. One way in which it accomplishes this is through purification of society: “Art purifies, it removes what is and remains unreconciled, unjust and meaningless in life” (p. 126). Furthermore, “The utopian idea of an aesthetic reality must be defended even in the face of ridicule, which it mus necessarily evoke today. For it may well indicate the qualitative difference between freedom and the prevailing order” (p. 128). However, art is unable to be harnessed for change: art to be allowed to be art, in order for the liberation and transformation of society to continue. In “Art as a Form of Reality,” Marcuse adds that art can never become reality without cancelling itself out; and the so-called living art is, in reality, a new society and this aesthetic vision is part of the revolution. Art is inherently other, and it is through human development and liberation that art may be truly enjoyed.

In “Art and Revolution,” Marcuse illuminates the contradictions in art as a weapon of class-consciousness. “Art can indeed become a weapon in the class struggle by promoting changes in the prevailing consciousness.” However, it cannot be created as a weapon, furthermore, by virtue of being subversive, art is revolutionary and thereby associated with revolutionary consciousness. Part of the problem with designing art to combat class, is that it cannot, due to aesthetics, reflect the true reality of what is going on and still be art.

“Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz” is an unfinished manuscript in which Marcuse struggles with the question of whether lyric poetry is possible after the world has born witness to the extreme depravity and horrors of humanity and technology, as presented in the symbol of Auschwitz. Through this struggle, the question is not fully answered, however, it is clear that Marcuse believes art is still possible, and furthermore, it is necessary.

The final pieces in the book are interviews with Marcuse about his life’s work. In these concluding pieces, we get a glimpse of Marcuse’s reflection on nearly 60 years of work in critical aesthetics regarding: the essential otherness of art and how it is both more and less real; whether there is revolutionary quality of rock and roll; and, the relationship between politics, art, revolution, beauty, and any potential utility.

My major critique of Marcuse is his failure to do much in the way of modern musical and art forms, such as rock and roll, aside from large-scale dismissal of the potential libratory and radical potentials. What remains necessary is an explanation as to why, for example, Bob Dylan is a legitimate and revolutionary artist/language of revolution, but all the other contemporaries of Bob Dylan are basically inherently self-defeating? Why is Bob Dylan authentic, as opposed to everyone else doing the same thing?

Kellner’s approach to Marcuse is historical, which provides brilliant critical insight into the development of Marcuse’s thought as it continues to be refined and attempts handle the creative contradictions of the aesthetic world. Unfortunately, Kellner’s opening essay provides the reader with Kellner’s interpretation of Marcuse, before the reader has a chance to interpret Marcuse. While the historical and biographical background was helpful, the book could have benefited from a much shorter introductory essay accompanied by smaller interpretive essays and critiques matched to Marcuse’s essays.