Craig Leonard - Uncommon Sense : Aesthetics after Marcuse

Craig Leonard

Foreword by Nathifa Greene

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leonard, Craig (Professor of art), author. | Greene, Nathifa, writer of foreword.

Title: Uncommon sense : aesthetics after Marcuse / Craig Leonard ; foreword by Nathifa Greene.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049850 | ISBN 9780262544467 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Marcuse, Herbert, 18981979. | Aesthetics, Modern20th century. | AestheticsPolitical aspects. | Philosophy, German20th century.

Classification: LCC B945.M2984 L435 2022 | DDC 193dc23/eng/20220423

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049850

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I am happy I accepted the invitation to write this foreword. There is much to consider, for readers who are primarily interested in Herbert Marcuse, as a sole figure, as well as those who are mainly interested in theories of art or the Frankfurt School. Scholars will find a historically grounded discussion of various aspects of the ideas that Marcuse developed, and implications that link to broader concerns. The interpretations of artistic movements and the meaning of art are careful engagements with Marcuse, as well as his interlocutors in dialectical historical materialism and Frankfurt School critiques of capitalism. But there are also implications that extend further, tracing the analyses of key themes.

I will mention at the outset that I am not an expert in Marcuse, and my research areas are not limited to Frankfurt School critiques of political economy and culture. I do believe that the appeal of this text to scholars whose primary areas of research are related, such as myself, is a strength. I will confess that I become very quickly bored with intense discussions of scholarly arcana, which do have their place; this is just a reference to my scholarly temperament, in William Jamess sense of the term (and I will leave it to those who prefer arcana more than I do to determine whether Marcuse would be tender- or tough-minded, according to James).

Reading this text, it is easy to imagine how the insights on art in Marcuse could also be helpful to scholars in many fields, and not only to specialists on Marcuseeven as there is much to consider here for those whose theoretical concerns are more narrowly defined. My appreciation for the authors insights on Marcuse in this text stem from our shared interests and many enjoyable conversations about habit, and scholarly analyses of habits in wide-ranging discussions across epistemology, existential phenomenology, and social theory. Although our institutional affiliations are very different, the treatment of habit in defamiliarization, according to Marcuse, is only one indication of the reasons that our conversations are so enjoyableand reasons that are far less surprising than our institutional affiliations might initially suggest. The implications of these ideas will be of interest to readers whose scholarly concerns may be as narrowly technical as the existential-phenomenological structure of lived experience, or as broad as the questions of dialectical materialist historiography, as well as the more likely interlocutors in Frankfurt School critical theory.

Depending on the interests that a reader brings to this text, certain moments may stand out and create further connections to intellectual lineages, connecting Marcuse in ways that one would expect, as well as links that are more unexpected and thought provoking. Uncommon Sense is in the lineage of texts that are more commonly read in Western aesthetic theory, recalling poetics in Plato and Aristotle, as well as the sensus communis in Kants Critique of Judgment. Some of these themes may also seem to be unlikely pairings, as in the discussion of habituation in Marcuse alongside Peirce and treatments of habit in American Pragmatism. The treatment of instinct also situates Marcuse in dialogue with interlocutors who may seem unlikely, at first glance, from a cursory sense of where Marcuse might fit in the trajectory of European ideas about art in the twentieth century. Scholars interested in Henri Bergson would note that Marcuse discusses instinct in ways that often recall Bergson. And, although the popularity of Bergson and the extent of the Bergson boom before the First World War may be lost on contemporary readers, instinct was a concept that moved from scholarly discourses into everyday language, much like concepts developed by Freudwhich may also be understood in European intellectual history as a descendant of Bergsonian instinct.

Freudian interpretations of instinct also suggest how this discussion of Marcuse also links to further themes, which Marcuse did not consider. For example, it is remarkable how psychoanalytic interpretations of drives, and sexual drives in particular, became a proxy for political discussions of violence in the mid-twentieth century, after the Second World War. Leonard suggests an opening onto other ways of interpreting the myopic limitations in Marcuse, treating these as more than simple ethnocentrism. If ethnocentrism is understood as a confinement to European authors, the history of Europe, and Western intellectual traditions, then this problem would be resolved by including more authors, and attention to colonialism beyond Europe. But there is more than the mere inclusion of topics and issues that are linked to race, gender, and colonial forms of difference.

Leonard rejects the misinterpretations of defamiliarization and anti-art that attribute idealism to Marcusewhich is frequently the pathway to discussions of Eurocentric ethnocentrism in Marxist and Hegelian historiography. On this note, Sylvia Wynterwho is cited in this textis indispensable for further reading. Wynters essay On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory describes how critical analyses of capitalism are often limited, analyzing symptoms or structures instead of the actual problems that need to be addressed. Marcuses notion of anti-art is an example of a critique that mistakes the map for the territory, in Wynters sense. Marcuse is concerned with the alienating effects of capitalism, the instrumental reduction and use of human beings, and the ideological problems in societies that are formed around capitalist economies and the modern liberal state. Critiques of such concepts and social practices are certainly necessary, as maps. And it remains important to note that Marcuse fails to consider these maps. But mistaking the map for the territory, in Wynters sense, is much more than a failure to include ideas or examples or authors that should be included.

On one conceptual map, the consolidation of Europe into a distinct geographical and historical West is an artifact of the Cold War. But scholars who are mindful of European colonialism would also note the Berlin Africa Conference in 18841885, as another significant moment of political integration that unified Europe, across national borders, and the mechanized forms of dehumanization and genocidal violence in colonies, which prefigured the outbreak of war within Europe in 1914 and 1939. The lineage that Wynter identifies as the reclassification of Manas separate and with dominion over the natural world, and in contrast to human Othersoccurred at key moments when the West institutionalized itself into a geocentric center of the universe. Leonard shows how Marcuse is situated in discussions both within and beyond the Frankfurt School, with insights on various themes, including technology, instinct, habituation, and the social dimensions of capitalist political economy. In this way, the nuanced discussions of artistic movements and intellectual lineages beyond those that Marcuse considered, such as Caribbean Surrealism, are more than mere inclusions of non-European texts or traditions. The actual and more fundamental problem is the reclassification of Man in terms that would support settler-colonial rule, to build concepts of Western civilization in terms of a subhuman Other. Therefore, in Wynters terms, Marcuse is working with a partial and distorted reproduction of a section of the map that has been mistaken for the territory.