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Herbert Marcuse Edited by Douglas Kellner ART AND LIBERATION http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield COLLECTED PAPERS OF HERBERT MARCUSE EDITED BY DOUGLAS KELLNER Volume One TECHNOLOGY, WAR AND FASCISM Volume Two TOWARDS A CRITICAL THEORY OF SOCIETY Volume Three THE NEW LEFT AND THE 1960s Volume Four ART AND LIBERATION Volume Five PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND EMANCIPATION Volume Six MARXISM, REVOLUTION AND UTOPIA HERBERT MARCUSE (1898–1979) is an internationally renowned philosopher, social activist and theorist, and member of the Frankfurt School. He has been remembered as one of the most influential social critical theorists inspiring the radical political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Author of numerous books including One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, and Reason and Revolution, Marcuse taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis University and the University of California before his death in 1979. DOUGLAS KELLNER is George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at U.C.L.A. He is author of many books on social theory, politics, history and culture, including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, Media Culture, and Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. His Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, co-edited with Stephen Eric Bronner, and recent book Media Spectacle, are also published by Routledge. ART AND LIBERATION HERBERT MARCUSE COLLECTED PAPERS OF HERBERT MARCUSE Volume Four Edited by Douglas Kellner First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Peter Marcuse Selection, editorial matter and introduction © 2007 Douglas Kellner Afterword © 2007 Gerhard Schweppenhäuser All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 97154404 ISBN 0-203-96661-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–13783–7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96661–9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–13783–6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96661–7 (ebk) CONTENTS Introduction Marcuse, Art, and Liberation DOUGLAS KELLNER 1 I The German Artist Novel: Introduction 71 II The Affirmative Character of Culture 82 III Art in the One-Dimensional Society 113 IV Society as a Work of Art 123 V Commencement Speech to the New England Conservatory of Music 130 VI Art as Form of Reality 140 VII Jerusalem Lectures 149 VIII Art and Revolution 166 IX Letters to the Chicago Surrealists 178 X Short Takes 194 Review of Georg Lukács, Goethe und seine Zeit 194 “On Inge’s Death” 196 vi Contents Interview with L’Archibras 198 Samuel Beckett’s Poem for Herbert Marcuse and an Exchange of Letters 200 Some General Remarks on Lucien Goldmann 203 Proust 205 Letter to Christian Enzensberger 208 XI Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz 211 XII On The Aesthetic Dimension: A Conversation between Herbert Marcuse and Larry Hartwick 218 XIII The Philosophy of Art and Politics: A Dialogue between Richard Kearney and Herbert Marcuse 225 Afterword “Art as Cognition and Remembrance: Autonomy and Transformation of Art in Herbert Marcuse’s Aesthetics” GERHARD SCHWEPPENHÄUSER 237 Index 257 INTRODUCTION Marcuse, Art, and Liberation Douglas Kellner Herbert Marcuse produced a unique combination of critical social theory, radical aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and a philosophy of liberation and revolution during his long and distinguished career.1 In his dialectical vision, critical theory was to delineate both forms of domination and oppression and possibilities of hope and liberation. For Marcuse, culture and art played an important role in shaping forces of domination, as well as generating possibilities of liberation. Hence, at key junctures in his work, art, the aesthetic dimension, and the relation between culture and politics became a central focus of his writings. 1 See my book Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London and Berkeley: Macmillan Press and University of California Press, 1984) for an overview of Marcuse’s life and thought. In my Introduction to the first volume of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Technology, War and Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), I discuss Marcuse’s previously unknown 1940s texts written during his U.S. government service in World War II, and elaborate his views of technology, war, and fascism. In the second volume of the Collected Papers, my introduction to Towards a Critical Theory of Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) engages the project of developing a critical theory of society, while in The New Left and the 1960s, Volume Three (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), my Introduction provides an overview of Marcuse’s involvement with the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. In this Introduction, I elaborate on Marcuse’s analyses of art and aesthetic theory, drawing on much new material from the Marcuse archive and his personal collection. 2 Introduction Much secondary literature on Marcuse has downplayed the importance of art and aesthetics in his work, and those that have focused on it, or high- lighted it, have often exaggerated, negatively interpreted, or misinterpreted its significance. For instance, in the first comprehensive book to be published after Marcuse’s death in 1979, Barry Katz argued in Herbert Marcuse. Art of Liberation that “the primacy of aesthetics in the evolution of his thought will prove to be central to this interpretation” (1982: 12).2 Katz interpreted Marcuse’s aesthetics as the quest “for an external, critical standpoint that could cancel the totality of existence without being cancelled by it” (p. 124) and interpreted his aesthetics as a transcendental ontology, an interpretation that I will contest in this Introduction. Timothy J. Lukes in his book The Flight into Inwardness (1985) also affirms “the central role of aesthetics in Marcuse’s work,” agreeing with Katz concerning the primacy of aesthetics in Marcuse. Lukes claims that Marcuse’s work leads into a withdrawal and escape from politics and society in an aesthetic “flight into inwardness.” In addition, he mistrusts Marcuse’s attempts to mediate art and politics, believing that such a project leads to a dangerous “aestheticizing of politics,” failing to note Marcuse’s sustained attempts to both mediate art and politics and preserve an autonomous aesthetic dimension.3 Berthold Langerbein in Roman und Revolte (1985) argues that aesthetic theory in Marcuse “is the authentic fulcrum and pivotal point (eigentliche Dreh- und Angelpunkt) of his entire thought” (p. 10; emphasis in the original).4 While Langerbein correctly stresses the mediation between aesthetics and politics in Marcuse’s work, he ignores the equally important mediation with philosophy and critical theory in Marcuse’s mature work, a synthesis that I will argue characterizes his project as a whole and provides the proper locus in which to read his aesthetics. Charles Reitz in his ground-breaking study Art, Alienation, and the Humanities (2000) argues that Marcuse’s work divides into texts that advocate “art-against-alienation” in which art is mobilized as a force of emancipatory political transformation, contrasted to texts that affirm “art- 2 Barry Katz, Herbert Marcuse. Art of Liberation (London and New York: Verso, 1982); see my review of Katz’s work in Telos 56 (Summer 1983), pp. 223–9. 3 Timothy J. Lukes, The Flight into Inwardness (London and Toronto: Susquehanna University Press, 1985). 4 Berthold Langerbein, Roman und Revolte. Zur Grundlegung der ästhetischen Theorie Herbert Marcuses und ihrer Stellung in seinem politisch-anthropologischen Denken (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985). Another German scholar appraises Marcuse’s work for an aesthetics of everyday life. See Ulrich Gmünder, Ästhetik-Wunsch-Alltäglichkeit. Das Alltagsästhetische als Fluchtpunkt der Ästhetik Herbert Marcuses (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984). While his study is interesting, Gmünder opens by claiming: “Only aesthetics and art serve Marcuse as a model of critique and negation” (p. 7; my translation). I shall argue in this and subsequent volumes that critical philosophy and social theory also provide standpoints of critique and resistance. Introduction 3 as-alienation” in which art becomes a refuge and escape from the exigencies of social theory and political struggle.5 Reitz’s work is extremely useful in stressing the importance of Marcuse’s work for education; he is correct that there is an aestheticist tendency in Marcuse that can lead to inwardness and quietism. One could indeed read Marcuse’s last published book The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) in this optic.6 But Marcuse never withdrew completely into art and aesthetics, as his last works in the late 1970s include lectures on politics and the New Left, Marxist theory, and philosophy, as well as lectures on art, politics, and liberation. Hence, up until the end of his life, Marcuse’s project was to develop perspectives and practices of liberation that combined
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