Herbert Marcuse - The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics

Erica Sherover has given the manuscript a critical reading from the first draft to the final version. She has discussed with me every paragraph, and insisted on improvements. This little book is dedicated to her: my wife, friend, and collaborator.

Intensive discussions with my friends Leo Lowenthal and Reinhard Lettau have been a great help and a great pleasure. Leo Lowenthal has again proved his reputation as a fierce reader and critic; Reinhard Lettau has demonstrated that authentic literatureliterature as resistanceis still possible today.

My stepsons Osha and Michael Neumann gave me stimulating suggestions: Michael by his encouraging comments, Osha in lively conversations about his own work in art.

My son Peter, whose work in urban planning led us to common problems, has again been a dear friend and advisor.

I am particularly grateful to Catherine Asmann who typed about half a dozen versions of this essayand liked it.

My debt to the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno does not require any specific acknowledgment.

This essay seeks to contribute to Marxist aesthetics through questioning its predominant orthodoxy. By orthodoxy I understand the interpretation of the quality and truth of a work of art in terms of the totality of the prevailing relations of production. Specifically, this interpretation holds that the work of art represents the interests and world outlook of particular social classes in a more or less accurate manner.

My critique of this orthodoxy is grounded in Marxist theory inasmuch as it also views art in the context of the prevailing social relations, and ascribes to art a political function and a political potential. But in contrast to orthodox Marxist aesthetics I see the political potential of art in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such. Furthermore, I argue that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autonomous vis vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.

Some preliminary remarks: although this essay speaks of art in general, my discussion is essentially focused on literature, primarily the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I do not feel qualified to talk about music and the visual arts, though I believe that what holds true for literature, mutatis mutandis, may also apply to these arts. Secondly, in reference to the selection of the works discussed, the objection that I operate with a self-validating hypothesis seems justified. I term those works authentic or great which fulfill aesthetic criteria previously defined as constitutive of authentic or great art. In defense, I would say that throughout the long history of art, and in spite of changes in taste, there is a standard which remains constant. This standard not only allows us to distinguish between high and trivial literature, opera and operetta, comedy and slapstick, but also between good and bad art within these genres. There is a demonstrable qualitative difference between Shakespeares comedies and the Restoration Comedy, between Goethes and Schillers poems, between Balzacs Comdie humaine and Zolas Rougon-Macquart.

Art can be called revolutionary in several senses. In a narrow sense, art may be revolutionary if it represents a radical change in style and technique. Such change may be the achievement of a genuine avant-garde, anticipating or reflecting substantial changes in the society at large. Thus, expressionism and surrealism anticipated the destructiveness of monopoly capitalism, and the emergence of new goals of radical change. But the merely technical definition of revolutionary art says nothing about the quality of the work, nothing about its authenticity and truth.

Beyond this, a work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

In this sense, every authentic work of art would be revolutionary, i.e., subversive of perception and understanding, an indictment of the established reality, the appearance of the image of liberation. This would hold true of the classical drama as well as Brechts plays, of Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften as well as Gnter Grasss Hundejahre, of William Blake as well as Rimbaud.

The obvious difference in the representation of the subversive potential is due to the difference in social structure with which these works are confronted: the distribution of oppression among the population, the composition and function of the ruling class, the given possibilities of radical change. These historical conditions are present in the work in several ways: explicitly, or as background and horizon, and in the language and imagery. But they are the specific historical expressions and manifestations of the same transhistorical substance of art: its own dimension of truth, protest and promise, a dimension constituted by the aesthetic form. Thus, Bchners Woyzeck, Brechts plays, but also Kafkas and Becketts novels and stories are revolutionary by virtue of the form given to the content. Indeed the content (the established reality) appears in these works only as estranged and mediated. The truth of art lies in this: that the world really is as it appears in the work of art.

This thesis implies that literature is not revolutionary because it is written for the working class or for the revolution. Literature can be called revolutionary in a meaningful sense only with reference to itself, as content having become form. 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.

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: the retreat into a world of fiction where existing conditions are changed and overcome only in the realm of the imagination. However, this purely ideological conception of art is being questioned with increasing intensity. It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution. With this insight, the basic conception of Marxist aesthetics, that is its treatment of art as ideology, and the emphasis on the class character of art, become again the topic of critical reexamination.

This discussion is directed to the following theses of Marxist aesthetics:

1. There is a definite connection between art and the material base, between art and the totality of the relations of production. With the change in production relations, art itself is transformed as part of the superstructure, although, like other ideologies, it can lag behind or anticipate social change.

2. There is a definite connection between art and social class. The only authentic, true, progressive art is the art of an ascending class. It expresses the consciousness of this class.