Within Western Marxist aesthetics, Marcuse is a singular figure. Taking existentialist philosophy as his foundation, absorbing Freudian psychology, and recasting both through Marxism, he constructed an aesthetic thought entirely his own. Marcuse attached the greatest importance to the political function of literature and art; yet he related literature and art to revolution in a wholly unexpected way. In his view, the revolutionary character of literature and art depends neither on the subject matter and content of the work nor on whether the writer intervenes in reality; on the contrary, it lies in the aesthetic form, in the estrangement of author and reader from reality, and in the achievement, through this estrangement from reality, of a liberation of the senses and the cultivation of a new sensibility, by which to resist reality's alienation of the human being and to resist an unreasonable reality.
I
Marcuse unfolds his aesthetic reflection on the basis of recasting Freud's psychoanalytic theory and of a profound understanding of the relation between human existence and the development of social civilization.
According to Freud, the free satisfaction of the instinctual needs of human beings is in conflict with social civilization. The precondition of civilizational progress is to restrain and defer instinctual satisfaction and to divert the libido into activities and expressions beneficial to society; the history of human civilization is therefore a history of the continuous repression of the human being's life instincts.
Marcuse reinterprets Freud's conception of civilization, excavating from Freudian psychology its implicit sociological content and critical political theory, and joining these to the doctrine of Marx. Marcuse holds that Freud's view is undoubtedly of major value, but that Freud expounded the theory of repression only in a general way, without penetrating into concrete social-historical forms to make a concrete analysis; he therefore failed to distinguish the reality principle required by civilization in general from the reality principle—that is, the performance principle—required by a specific form of civilization, and failed to distinguish basic repression from surplus repression. In Marcuse's view, the reality principle demanded by civilization in general is grounded in “scarcity.” The poverty brought about by low productive forces and insufficient material supply, together with the labor required to overcome that poverty, demands that instinctual satisfaction be restricted and delayed. Such repression is necessary; it is basic repression. But viewed with respect to a concrete social form, the mode of domination over human beings and nature determines the various historical modes of the reality principle, which carries out repressive control through a whole series of social institutions, social relations, laws, and value-standards, and which, in order to safeguard the interests of the rulers, introduces an additional repression—namely surplus repression. (1) The notion of surplus repression at once intimates the possibility of human liberation and accounts very well for the actual condition of modern advanced industrial society. It is precisely because of this surplus repression that, even in an affluent modern advanced industrial society, human beings have still not shaken off social repression; on the contrary, social control has been organized ever more tightly and ever more thoroughly.
Modern advanced industrial society is a highly technologized society; it carries out total domination not by violence but by technology. Technology penetrates every level of society—social administration, productive activity, the activity of living, daily consumption—so that no domain of the human being's real activity can escape the grip of technology. The logic of technology has become the logic of the whole society.
“Today domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology; and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture…The instrumentalist horizon of reason opens upon a rationally totalitarian society.” (2) Marcuse points out that advanced industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, because ideology today is contained within the productive process itself, within the commodity. The organization of production, the enjoyment of commodities, and all manner of services and entertainments bring with them fixed attitudes and habits and bind the individual tightly to the social whole, reinforcing the process of “integration,” so that people, even in speaking their own language, speak the language of their masters, sponsors, and advertisers. At the same time, high culture too is “vulgarized”; the “distance” between it and reality is bridged, and the cultural center becomes the commercial center. In this process the product performs the work of indoctrination and manipulation, and this indoctrination is no longer propaganda but has become a way of life, thereby molding one-dimensional patterns of thought and behavior, molding one-dimensional man. The human being is even degraded into “human capital” and a “desiring machine.” “When technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality—a ‘world.’” (3)
This change is not merely a change in the external world and in the human being's modes of thought and behavior; through a change in the human being's system of needs it further alters the very structure of the instincts, leading to the alienation of human essence. The human being seems already unable to escape this alienated destiny. “The human being's second nature thus militates against any change that might disrupt the dependence on the market—and even the situation in which the human being is engulfed and alienated by commodities.” (4) When the human being's existing world—whether daily life, political design, productive activity, cultural entertainment, discursive exchange, or modes of thought—has all been irrecoverably assimilated and integrated, when the human being helplessly loses his own freedom and loses the consciousness of freedom and the will to resist alienated existence, Marcuse cannot but pin his hopes on literature and art: he opens another path to life, constructing an aesthetic utopia in a fictional world far from the madding crowd, and by this means resisting reality.
II
In Marcuse's aesthetic thought, literature and art are constructed as the antithesis of reality; they reside in a fictional world that is other-than-real, are a refusal and indictment of an unreasonable reality, and are a struggle against the human being's alienated existence.
Marcuse develops Schiller's view that “beauty leads toward freedom,” and goes on to point out: “Man is free only where he is free from all external and internal, physical and psychic constraint, where he is constrained neither by law nor by need. But such constraint is reality. Strictly speaking, therefore, freedom is freedom from the established reality, for man is free only where ‘reality loses its seriousness’ and where its necessity, too, becomes light.” (5) The real world is an unfree world, a repressed world full of coercive laws, conditioned by order, need, and necessity; literature and art, by contrast, are an imagined world, a fictional world. In this world other-than-real, the order of reality loses its authority, necessity loses its seriousness, and need, lacking a real object, no longer presses upon the human being at every moment; when the human being dwells in this world without external bondage or repression, he at last attains a free existence. It is therefore precisely the aesthetic utopia constructed by literature and art that preserves for the human being an enclave, an Eden, holding in safekeeping the memory of a freedom and harmony already lost, and thereby holding in safekeeping a revolt against the unfree, repressed reality.
Marcuse holds that the material and the raw stuff of literature and art come from reality, and that literature and art share these materials with existing society; however they may be recast and reworked, they remain transformations on the basis of the given material. And it is precisely because they are shared in common with existing society that literature and art can be understood and accepted by people, and can lodge a protest against existing reality. “Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence…Art is part of the existing reality; and only as a part of it can it oppose the existing reality.” (6) But in literature and art the material and the raw stuff are detached from their immediate reality and become something qualitatively different from reality, become “another reality,” a component of the “world other-than-real.” By means of the aesthetic form, literature and art separate themselves from existing reality, transcend the temporal flow of reality, and are sublimated into another, independent world, an imagined world other-than-real. “Insofar as this work is art, it is not real, that is to say: the novel is not the story in the newspaper, the tranquil life in art is not life as lived, and even the real Brillo box in pop art is no longer the thing in the supermarket. The very form of art contradicts the effort to abolish the segregation of art to a ‘second’ reality, to translate the truth of the productive imagination into the first reality.” (7) Literature and art are neither the existent phenomenal world nor the so-called Idea or essence hiding behind the phenomenon; they are an altogether different being, a non-real fictional world, a transcendence and sublimation of existing reality. It is in this very process of sublimation beyond reality that literature and art at last cast off the bondage of reality and attain autonomy, becoming a world in which the human being can exist freely and in which the life-nature of the human being can be liberated.
This paradoxical relation between literature and art and reality is precisely what most effectively harbors political potential. On the one hand, literature and art originate in social reality; even their aesthetic form and their artistic autonomy are social-historical phenomena, the fruit of a specific social ideology. At the same time, literature and art give consolation to human suffering, give catharsis to the emotions, and reconcile conflicts, thereby seeming objectively to affirm existing reality. Yet on the other hand, literature and art also transcend the arena of social history. By virtue of this transcendence, this separation from the real world, the human being is freed from the constraint of the reality principle and from functional existence and becomes a free subject; literature and art, likewise, escape the endless process of reality and become another fictional world other-than-real, different from existing reality, offering the human being a wholly new experience. They let the human being feel a new world and a new experience with a new countenance and in a new way, discover truth therein, and turn to criticize and indict social reality. Only by plunging into social history, and only by realizing aesthetic sublimation through the aesthetic form and thus escaping the real world, can literature and art most fully exert their critical function toward reality. Marcuse therefore says: “The structure of the work of art is constituted by the interaction between the affirmation and the indictment of existing reality, and by the interaction between artistic ideology and artistic truth.” (8)
Marcuse draws on Russian Formalism's theory of defamiliarization, but recasts it fundamentally. Within the theoretical horizon of Russian Formalism, literature, through the defamiliarization of form, increases the difficulty of perception and prolongs its duration, thereby converting people's habitual activity of “recognition” into an activity of “sensation,” awakening and renewing the perception dulled and blocked by life, perceiving anew the things obscured by daily experience, allowing the sensuous features of things to display themselves fully, and making “the stone more stony.”
Unlike this epistemological mode of thought, Marcuse regards aesthetic form from the standpoint of ontology. In his view, reality is not a fixed, unchanging objective object; literature and art merely open the windows of the human mind in different forms, renew human perception, and let the human being see the different faces of one and the same object. The significance of aesthetic form for the human being is more fundamental: it is not merely a renewal of perception, still less a matter of increasing resistance and prolonging the time of sensation. Through the aesthetic form, literature and art change the relation between the human being and the world, change the mode of existence of literature and art themselves as well as the existential condition of the human being, lift literature and art and the human being up out of the real world, liberate them from the repression of reality, and open up human sensibility, imagination, and reason in a wholly new way never had in daily life. The aesthetic form is an “alienating” force; by alienating the alienated reality and the alienated existence of the human being, it endows the world and the human being with a new existence. Therefore, “art is, in essence, alienation, for it sustains and protects contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. By virtue of its disclosure of the dimensions of the human being and of nature that are repressed and repelled within reality, it was once a rational cognitive power…The fictional work calls things by their name, and thereby the realm of fact collapses; for the fictional overthrows daily experience and reveals its mutilated and false character. But art has this magic power only as a negating force. It can speak its own language only as long as the images are the living force of denial and refutation of the established order.” (9) By means of the aesthetic form and by means of fiction, literature and art gain a new order, a sensuous order that accords with the human being's life-activity; the power they cultivate and store up is therefore precisely the power of life that opposes alienated reality, the power that refuses and refutes the established order of reality, the power that exposes and overthrows false daily experience.
Marcuse, like Sartre, sets great store by the political-critical function of literature and art, and the two hold similar views on the aesthetic form, the fictional nature, and the aesthetic autonomy of literature and art and on their liberating role for human nature; yet on the concrete understanding of the political potential of literature and art the two differ markedly. Although Sartre does not neglect literary and artistic form, he stresses intervening in and criticizing reality through the actualization of the work's subject matter; Marcuse, by contrast, gives greater weight to the aesthetic form. In Marcuse's view, a writer who directly portrays revolution and criticizes reality in his work is, on the contrary, lacking in genuine revolutionary character, for the writer himself dwells within reality and is in the grip of ideology; his outcries, his clamor, and his resistance merely caper about within the given rational framework, within the cage of ideology, and cannot in the least deliver a forceful critique of reality or deal a fatal blow to the established reality—and are very soon re-absorbed and smothered in the silence of reality. In fact, even where political content is entirely absent—that is, where only poetry exists—revolutionary literature and art may exist. Politics can be absent from literature and art that possess revolutionary potential: the poetry of Rimbaud, the painting of Courbet, for instance, present no political content, yet by their aesthetic form they break with reality and thereby resist an unreasonable reality. It is the aesthetic form that makes literature and art estranged from, and other than, reality, and the degree of this estrangement and otherness constitutes the liberating value of literature and art. Marcuse therefore says: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness…Art can preserve and transcend its class character only by making the political content into a metapolitical one, governed by the aesthetic form as the inner necessity of art. The goal of all revolution—a world of tranquility and freedom—appears in a wholly nonpolitical medium, governed by the laws of beauty and harmony.” (10)
Literature and art have their own language, and can only disclose reality in their own linguistic form. His emphasis on the aesthetic form leads Marcuse even to advocate breaking free of “engaged literature,” wresting free of the realm of actual life and the productive process, and endowing literature and art with an uncompromising, autonomous character through the aesthetic form. Both Marcuse and Sartre see the liberating and nourishing power that the aesthetic form, the fictional nature, and aesthetic autonomy of literature and art have for human nature; but Sartre, out of his ardor for the real struggle, hastens to send the human being to intervene in reality and engage in the work of criticism, whereas Marcuse, equally full of passion for the real struggle, is—because of the frustrations of real political struggle and the assimilation and alienation of the human being by modern advanced industrial society—led to concern himself more with the revolutionary subject itself, turning to ponder just how literature and art let the human being gain genuine subjectivity and how they cultivate the human being's new sensibility. In his view, only the human being possessed of a new sensibility holds forth the hope of humanity's future. The liberation of the individual senses is the starting point of universal liberation.
III
In a fully alienated modern advanced industrial society, instrumental reason has become the core that organizes the whole of society, while human sensibility, distorted by long repression, has grown numb and lifeless, and the human being has already been cast into one-dimensional man. Such human beings, having lost their vitality and subjectivity, are incapable of shouldering the task of liberation.
To transform society, one must first transform the human being himself, must restore the richness of human nature, must remold human sensibility; to this end Marcuse proposed the “new sensibility.” “The new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the ‘standard of living.’” (11) The human being's attainment of a new sensibility is the precondition of social liberation; a free society must be rooted in wholly new instinctual needs. In Marcuse's aesthetic thought, the new sensibility becomes precisely the key linking literature and art to social revolution.
The new sensibility of which Marcuse speaks is in harmony with reason. On the basis of Kant's aesthetic thought, Marcuse develops the point further. He holds that human imagination depends on the perception that supplies empirical material, and that it transforms this perceptual material and the objects and relations of the senses, creating an imagined realm of freedom. Imaginative freedom is therefore conditioned by the sensuous order—conditioned not only by the pure form of the sensuous but also by the content of sensuous experience. Viewed from the other pole of the organic structure, imagination is further conditioned by human reason. Even the boldest imagining of a wholly new world or a wholly new way of life is still guided by concepts and still follows a logical history handed down from generation to generation and finely woven into the development of thought. Both sensibility and reason are taken up into the construction of imagination. The world of the senses is a historical world, and reason is the conceptual grasp and interpretation of that historical world. Imagination becomes the mediation that links sensibility with theoretical and practical reason; imagination becomes productive, and the reconstruction of society finds its own guide.
The reason the sensibility in literature and art is a new sensibility lies also in the fact that the life instincts are opened up: from sexuality they grow into Eros. Marcuse holds that the human being's sexual instinct was originally polymorphous, and was only gradually confined to the utilitarian function of reproducing the species and to limited zones under the long repression of civilization. When literature and art provide the human being with an imagined realm of freedom, when repression no longer exists, sexuality is again expanded and becomes a polymorphous, rich Eros. Eros is a receptivity; it tends to fuse into one with its object, so that aggressiveness can become only subordinate. “The work of art, from its own inner logical structure, brings forth another reason, another sensibility, which openly oppose the reason and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions.” (12)
The new sensibility is an outstanding insight Marcuse proposed regarding literary and artistic activity; yet his explanation still follows the ready-made conclusion of traditional aesthetics concerning the harmony of reason and sensibility. Imagination can indeed mediate between sensibility and reason; but the problem is: when sensibility is conditioned by reason, when imagination accepts the guidance of concepts, can sensibility still be free, unrepressed? And what kind of reason is that reason which fuses with sensibility? Arieti expounds the fusion of sensibility and reason from another angle. He regards the creative activity of literature and art as a special combination of the primary process (the unconscious process) and the secondary process (the conscious process), and calls it the tertiary process. “The tertiary process, with special mechanisms and ways, blends together the two worlds of the mental and the material, and in many cases blends together the two worlds of the rational and the irrational. The creative mind does not reject this primitive (or archaic, antiquated, deviant-from-the-norm) mental activity, but combines it, by a seemingly ‘magic’ synthesis, with the normal logical process, so that a new, unforeseen, yet congenial situation appears.” (13) Arieti, too, expounds the combination of sensibility and reason in literary and artistic activity, and he likewise fails to explain just how this “magic” synthesis is realized.
In fact, the very otherness of literature and art that Marcuse prizes can elucidate, most persuasively, the new relation between sensibility and reason. Viewed from the history of humanity's becoming, sensuous life is the root of the human being, and reason developed in order to safeguard and coordinate sensuous life; reason can only serve the human being's sensuous life. Sensuous life is the “master,” and reason is the “servant” serving sensuous life. Yet because of the blindness of the senses, and still more because the immense achievements of science and technology lend reason its prestige, reason at last wins an authoritative position and turns back to curb, and even smother, sensuous life. Only literature and art form a special domain. As a non-real, imagined world other-than-real, it is a place where the performance principle, or the law of reality, has lost the legitimate ground of its existence. The fictional world of literature and art is a free world; here there exists no external law, no congealed order. Thereupon the human being's sensuous life freely unfolds itself—which is to say that the world of literature and art obeys only the law of life itself, only the sensuous order. It is precisely for this reason that reason's authoritative position is stripped away and reason is once again lowered to the rank of “servant.”
This is not merely a simple inversion of relation, nor is it a return to the primitive. When sensuous life regains its freedom and once again becomes the “master,” it not only changes its repressed, alienated condition but turns to open up its own territory and strengthen its own force, unfolding toward the all-sided, polymorphous fullness of sensuous life, toward every object connected with life, toward the whole world; and sexuality is thereupon transformed into an Eros that pervades humanity and nature and intends to fuse into one with them. Reason no longer clings obstinately to dead letters and laws or to mechanical logic and norms; as the “public servant” of the sensuous individual, it must be transformed into rational wisdom, becoming a new reason—rational wisdom—that follows, serves, and coordinates sensuous life. In the fictional world of literature and art, the aggressiveness within the life instincts, having lost a real object, also loses its barbaric force and rampant arrogance; it is taken up into Eros, subordinated to Eros, and becomes one motive force of the human being's receptivity and creativity. Only when reason thoroughly relinquishes its central position, changes the role of ruler, alters its rigid and imperious countenance, and becomes a “public servant” worthy of the name, becomes rational wisdom, can it be in harmony with sensuous life. This is the fusion of sensibility and reason in the genuine sense, and sensibility thereby becomes a new sensibility that embraces reason and has assimilated rational wisdom. By way of a fictional world other-than-real, literature and art preserve, store up, and cultivate for humanity a new sensibility, and preserve, store up, and cultivate a power that opposes reality and seeks to reform it.
Marcuse foresaw, with genius, the connection between the fictional world of literature and art and the new sensibility; yet, confined within ready-made conclusions, he was unable to disclose in depth the inner mechanism at work within it.
In commenting on Sartre's existentialist thought, Marcuse pointedly observes that Sartre's “free choice” is detached from the human being's concrete social-historical situation. He says that if a philosophy, by means of its existential-ontological analysis of the human being or of freedom, can prove the persecuted Jew and the victim under the executioner's blade to be entirely free, to be still the masters of a choice for which they themselves bear responsibility, then such philosophical thought sinks to the level of pure ideology. This ideology can itself furnish the persecutor and the executioner with the handiest justification. “The free choice between death and enslavement is neither freedom nor choice, because both alternatives destroy the ‘reality of man’ that craves freedom.” (14)
Marcuse's criticism is reasonable; he himself strives to place the human being and human sensibility within the historical situation of a specific society for concrete analysis, and to elucidate the social-historical fact of their alienation. As Kellner puts it: “In phenomenology, the absence of a materialist theory of history, society, and social change impelled Marcuse to turn toward Marxism, and thus supplied the core content of the ‘concrete philosophy’ that phenomenology lacked.” (15) Yet when Marcuse turns to ponder the human being and the new sensibility from the world other-than-real of literature and art, do that etherealized “universal human being” and that “reduced” sensibility still retain their historical content?
IV
The reason literature and art can be other-than-real, and can preserve a sensuous power that resists reality, is that their aesthetic form plays the decisive role. Marcuse says: “The term ‘aesthetic form’ denotes the totality of qualities such as harmony, rhythm, and contrast, which makes the work a self-sufficient whole with a structure and order of its own (style). It is by virtue of these qualities that the work of art transforms the order that dominates everything in reality. True, this transformation is ‘illusory’; but this illusion can nonetheless express meanings and functional contents different from the dominant universe of discourse. Word, sound, and image, from another dimension, ‘suspend’ and dispossess the existing reality of its right to exist, in the name of the reconciliation yet to be attained.” (16)
The aesthetic form under Marcuse's pen is the totality of harmony, rhythm, contrast, tone, melody, color, structure, shape, style, and register; but it is also not merely the totality of these formal elements—it has an extremely profound content.
Every material object has its own spatio-temporal form; these spatio-temporal forms at once declare the object itself to be a specific object with a specific shape, distinguishing it from other objects, and yet still make it dependent upon the continuum of real space-time. The aesthetic form is wholly otherwise; it possesses a singular power, capable of lifting the literary and artistic work out of the continuum of real space-time, placing it within a non-real fictional world, and granting it autonomy. This is a “despotic power.” The reason the aesthetic form can endow literature and art with otherness and with the power to resist reality depends precisely on this despotic power. It dispossesses the real material of its reality, suspends its real relations and real rights, overthrows its real order, and recasts and remolds it according to the aesthetic order—that is, the sensuous order.
In Structuralist Poetics, Culler says: “If literature attracts us, it is because it differs markedly from ordinary communication; its formal and fictional properties determine its strangeness, its power, its organizational structure, and a permanence different from ordinary speech.” (17) Culler holds that literary form implies a specific interpretive procedure and basically settles the contract between author and reader, so that pre-reading expectations come into play, “naturalizing” the various elements, drawing them into our horizon, and letting us read the text as literature, read it as fictional words. The despotic action of the aesthetic form is like what Culler calls “naturalization.” By its formal markers the work arouses the expectation of reading and appreciation, changes the everyday practical relation between appreciator and text, establishes a non-real, non-practical relation, and constructs the text as an imagined fictional world. In this process of relational transformation, all the original material—words, sounds, lines, raw stuff, and so on—cannot but undergo a qualitative change and be taken up into the aesthetic horizon, becoming irreplaceable components within the aesthetic world; one may also say they have been naturalized by aesthetic despotism.
On the surface, the relation between literary and artistic form and interpretive procedure seems to be a matter of convention: the appreciator need only set out from a specific textual form to appreciate the text, without further thought, as a literary and artistic work—the “note-poem,” for example. But viewed in its deeper cause, the reason the aesthetic form possesses a despotic power lies precisely in its being the form of life.
Just as Kant regarded the aesthetic form as the symbol of freedom, as the mode of human existence and the mode of the existence of the natural cosmos, so Marcuse holds that “the aesthetic form is a sensuous form, composed of a sensuous order.” (18) The rhythm of literature and art is the rhythm of life, its melody the melody of life, its color the radiance of life; its forms—whether tender or magnificent, ornate or plain, upstanding or contorted, impassioned or piercingly sorrowful—all display the manifold, many-colored shapes of life, rather than being merely the form of a technique of external imitation. It is precisely this aesthetic form that keeps time and resonates with the human being's life; it is congenial at first encounter and in an instant draws the human being to leap into a new realm of life, a new world in which life can move freely and display its authentic existence—and this world can only be a fictional world other-than-real, other than the real world in which life is sorely repressed. The creative instinct of life and the infinitely rich shapes of life-activity endow literature and art with an inexhaustible motive force for creating new forms, and also determine the basic direction of formal innovation in literature and art. Those simple formal imitations or that toying with novel techniques, when they depart from the form of life-activity, cannot in the end but be corrected by life-activity, or be cast aside by life.
“Form is the reality of art itself, is art itself.” (19) In Marcuse's aesthetic thought, the aesthetic form possesses an extremely important core value. This has drawn criticism from not a few scholars. Gerald Graff says: “Formalism defamiliarizes experience not in order to disclose some reality behind the curtain, but in order that we should never again hope to encounter the real. It is precisely this use of the concept of aesthetic defamiliarization by Marcuse that allows him to reconcile his Kantian formalism with a certain Surrealism.” (20) This equation of Marcuse with formalism is plainly one-sided.
In Marcuse's view, the aesthetic form is not merely form; it is life itself, and therefore literature and art themselves. The aesthetic form distinguishes literary and artistic activity from other practical activity, distinguishes the world of life's authentic existence from the world of inauthentic existence; it is precisely by means of the aesthetic form that literature and art transcend the existing real world and transcend the alienated situation, and become works that set themselves against reality and resist it. The aesthetic form reorganizes the material and raw stuff drawn from reality according to the sensuous order, subverts the order of reality, and rebuilds the order of sensuous life. The aesthetic form therefore affirms even as it negates: even where the form expresses disorder, frenzy, and suffering, it remains a grasp and negation of disorder, frenzy, and suffering, and is at the same time an affirmation of free life. By means of the aesthetic form, literature and art let the human being encounter the truth of life—a wholly new sensuous life full of life's craving and inexhaustible creative potential, its heart thrown open and ready at every moment to welcome a new world.
The aesthetic form possesses a double character: commercialization and the resistance to commercialization. As a form, the aesthetic form always seizes the fleeting inspiration, the dim perception, the experience tangled in contradiction, and the shifting, changing emotion, giving it shape, giving it limit and frame, making it an object, and endowing it with a measurable value. This means that the literary and artistic work can thereby, like other products, be put to circulation and exchange; having been given form, it lapses into a commodity. Once given form, literature and art come to possess unlimited reproducibility, and this reproducibility in turn rapidly drives forward the process of the commercialization of literature and art. The flourishing of contemporary “anti-art” arises precisely from a resistance to this “commodity” form as a form of reality. Yet the aesthetic form is also no ordinary form—it has a despotic power. By virtue of this despotic power, literature and art transcend reality; they are carried into a non-real fictional world and thereby come to possess autonomy. Literature and art resist the process of commercialization precisely by means of the autonomy gained through the aesthetic form.
The aesthetic form endows literature and art with infinite charm; it makes the work open itself in order to attract and receive the appreciator, and lets the appreciator enter a realm in which life moves freely and creates without cease. Every appreciation is a new experience, a new creation, and the literary and artistic work thereby becomes unique; it never repeats itself and can forever be only unfinished, incapable of being fixed. Viewed from this angle, the value of literature and art cannot be determined; with the truth and freedom of life it resists the imprisonment of external material form, resists commercialization, and opposes the whole commodity society.
Marcuse further extends Benjamin's discussion of the reproducibility of art. He says that there is a being opposed to all that is reproducible—this is the aura of the artwork, the unique historical situation in which the artwork was created, to which it speaks, and which prescribes its function and meaning. Once the artwork is detached from that historical moment, which can be neither repeated nor recalled, its “original” truth is distorted or revised: it acquires another meaning, one corresponding to another historical situation. By means of new techniques and new forms of feeling and thought, the original work can be interpreted, arranged, and “translated,” and may thereby become richer, more complex, more refined, more meaningful. Yet for the artist and the appreciator the work is no longer what it once was. “That which constitutes the unique, ever-enduring identity of a work, that which makes an artifact a work of art—this substance is the form. By virtue of form, and only by virtue of form, does the content attain its uniqueness, making itself the content of one particular work of art and not the content of some other.” (21) The aesthetic form constitutes the unique character of the literary and artistic work, and by this it resists being reproduced and commercialized.
Literature and art resist real alienation and resist assimilation by commodity society by means of their otherness and uniqueness; it is precisely the aesthetic form that creates and maintains the distance between literature and art and reality, and the distance from any other thing, marking out its otherness and uniqueness as independent of reality. Marcuse therefore holds that “anti-art’s” contempt and disdain for form make it all the more easily assimilated by commodity society. Today the genuine crisis of culture lies in this: as postmodern society draws near and the mass media develop with explosive speed, the oppositional, alien, and transcendent factors within high culture are progressively eliminated, the opposition between culture and social reality is progressively eliminated, literature and art are increasingly vulgarized, and the aesthetic is dailylified—may this state of affairs perhaps in the end lead to the exhaustion of the political function of literature and art? “If the mass media blend together, harmoniously and seamlessly, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commerce, they will impart to these cultural domains a common feature—the commodity form. Music of the soul can also be music for selling.” (22) This is precisely the “de-differentiation” that Jameson fears.
Commodity society, with its immense power, levels the differences among all domains, takes exchange value as the unified measure of the whole world—including the fictional world of literature and art—and greedily devours everything it can encounter. In this all-unifying commercial kingdom, not only literature and art but the human being's body, spirit, and even soul will be stamped with a trademark and auctioned and consumed at will. Faced with this peril, can Marcuse's aesthetic utopia still retain its revolutionary character?
In an essay commenting on Marcuse, Richard Wolin says: “Marcuse maintained that the emergence of progressive historical change is necessarily connected with individual consciousness and insight. Social transformation must be a process of conscious will—a process of self-transformation—otherwise it is meaningless.” (23) Standing within a modern advanced industrial society in which everyone suffers severe alienation, Marcuse pins the hope of social transformation on the sensuous reconstruction of the individual, on the otherness of literature and art, and on the new sensibility nurtured by this world other-than-real. This is an aesthetic utopia. But, as Karl Mannheim says: “We regard as utopian all thought—and not merely the projection of wishes—that transcends its situation, in that it in any way has the effect of altering the existing historical-social order.” (24)