Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation

by Malcolm Miles

When capitalism is clearly catastrophically out of control and its excesses cannot be sustained socially or ecologically, the ideas of Herbert Marcuse become as relevant as they were in the 1960s. This is the first English introduction to Marcuse to be published for decades, and it deals specifically with his aesthetic theories and their relation to a critical theory of society. Although Marcuse is best known as a critic of consumer society, epitomized in the classic One-Dimensional Man, Malcolm Miles provides an insight into how Marcuse's aesthetic theories evolved within his broader attitudes, from his anxiety at the rise of fascism in the 1930s through his heady optimism of the 1960s, to acceptance in the 1970s that radical art becomes an invaluable progressive force when political change has become deadlocked. Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation, in which art assumes a primary role in interrupting the operation of capitalism, made him a key figure for the student movement in the 1960s. As diverse forms of resistance rise once more, a new generation of students, scholars, and activists will find Marcuse's radical theory essential to their struggle.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2012

About the author

Malcolm Miles is a writer and researcher on critical theory, art and urbanism. His writing spans the arts, humanities and social sciences, with a focus on the Frankfurt School as well as modern and contemporary art and architecture. His book on Herbert Marcuse (2011) investigates Marcuse’s aesthetic theory and links Marcuse’s critiques of specific areas of literature to more recent visual art practices. His book on eco-aesthetics (2014) reconsiders aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, setting this beside green political and social perspectives since the 1960s and a diverse range of contemporary art. Cities and Literature (2019) thematically examines key social theories, e.g. from Georg Simmel, and cultural theories, e.g. from Raymond Williams, in context of selected areas of modern and contemporary English literature, with reference additionally to elements of French, German, Russian, Portuguese, and African post-colonial literatures (read in English). It is in the Routledge series Critical Introductions to Urbanism, designed for 2nd and 3rd -year undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities, which he co-edits with John Rennie Short (Geography, University of Maryland). To date he has authored nine books and contributed to refereed journals including the Journal of Cultural Politics, Third Text, Architecture and Culture, The Journal of Architecture, Space and Culture, and Parallax.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

In our contemporary world where books on philosophy and philosophers tend to be overly analytic and highly technical, specialists writing for specialists, Malcolm Miles is most refreshing. This is a book that can be read and understood and enjoyed by anybody with an interest in Herbert Marcuse specifically or the social and cultural interplay of art, aesthetics and creative protest more generally. In order to give a taste of the insights a reader can expect, I will cite direct quotes from the book along with my brief comments.

In the first chapter, Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Society, Miles gives us an overview of Marcuse's view of art's social function. We read, "I think that Marcuse argues that aesthetics is politics, taking a world of fiction - or imagined reality - as an oblique route to real change. Art has a potential to rupture the codes and categories of how the world is seen, to imagine the world not as it is but as it might be. There is an alternative to the way things are. It begins in imagination; the problem is how imagined worlds become material worlds."

Malcolm Miles provides us with the historical and cultural framework within which Marcuse worked from the 1930s right through the 1970s, including Marxism's theory on the role of art. Also included are Marcuse's views on Marxism. Miles writes: "Marcuse rejects Socialist Realism, as a device for social control; the possibility for art is to rupture such mechanisms."

In The Artist and Social Theory, Miles reflects on Marcuse's thesis on the novel with references to such German and non-German authors as Goethe, Mann, Dostoevsky, Gorkey, Baudelaire. He writes: "What emerges is the significance of art for Marcuse, not merely as a profession but as a vehicle for negation of unfreedom when political conditions are not open to radical change."



Miles then touches on other subjects, including Marcuse's association with the Frankford School, the first Marxist-oriented research center in Germany, a research center whose members included Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Again, the author writes on the historical and social context of Marcuse's philosophical development, alluding to, for example, how the school came into conflict with the Nazis in the 1930s and was closed down.

My favorite chapter is where the author reconsiders Marcuse's response to the student movement of the 1960s. with particular focus on Marcuse's idea of a society as a work of art. Included in those mentioned from these colorful, wild times are the Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Joan Didion and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Addressing a crowd of hippies, intellectuals and political activists in 1971, Miles quotes Marcuse as saying, "I am very happy to see so many flowers here and that is why I want to remind you that flowers, by themselves, have no power whatsoever, other than the power of men and women who protect them and take care of them against aggression and destruction."

Miles adds that Marcuse continued his speech by highlighting the need to liberate both the intellect and the body and "that liberation emerges from within a system as a product of the falseness of the system's values."

This rings true for me on a personal level since all of my life as an American I have had to fight through the system of mass culture - intolerable muzak, pop and rock, insipid advertisements, mindless television, suffocating conformity - in order to liberate my mind and body via philosophy, literature, classical and world music, the arts, meditation and yoga.

What would society as a work of art look like? The author notes how Marcuse "speculates that play and imagination will reconfigure the cities and the countryside, restoring nature after its exploitation in capitalism. But this also involves provision of space for privacy and tranquility, and the elimination of noise, captive audiences, of enforced togetherness, of pollution, ugliness."

Well, my goodness! How much has our world increased in pollution, ugliness and noise over the past forty years since Marcuse's words? What a different world it would be if more people and institutions took Marcuse to heart!

In conclusion, here are my favorites two quote:

"The shock-effect represented by Heartfield was necessary, exposing the contradictions of Nazi rhetoric in ways which were both visually sophisticated and genuinely funny."

How true! The German artist Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield in protest of German anti-English sentiments and John Heartfield's montages of Hitler and other Nazis as twisted, ugly specimens of mechanized overstuffed humanity are spot-on.

On the English group Freee Art Collective and their work within the past ten years: "What I respect in their refusal to let go of the idea that history might be driven by protest, or that to say this is contagious. Within art's world, but contesting its values, Freee offer one example of how contemporary art can interrupt, and in process enact other, more democratic but also personal ideas of what the world might be, against capital's rhetoric that there is no alternative. Money may drive most history now; but to claim that protest drives it is revolutionary art."