The Time of The Now: Herbert Marcuse’s Politicized Aesthetics in the Context of the Frankfurt School and the American New Left

Abstract:

This essay argues that the logic subtending Herbert Marcuse’s

highly influential treatise, An Essay on Liberation, should be

reconsidered in light of its distinct relation to two historical

and national philosophical traditions. First, An Essay on Liberation

appears radical when considered against Marcuse’s long standing

relationship with the “Frankfurt School” or the Institute for

Social Research. Although his essay maintains the legacy of the

Institute’s thought, it also represents an important and rather

complex shift away from that legacy. The noted shift is evident

in both Marcuse’s reinvestment in revolutionary praxis and in his

belief that a fundamentally aesthetic sensibility can provide the

window towards emancipated forms of social organization.

However, the second context informing An Essay on Liberation is a

particularly American “structure of feeling,” that is, the socio-

historical experience of “culture politics” so prominent in the

California setting where Marcuse produced his essay. At the

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unconscious level of what remains unsaid and unresolved,

Marcuse’s attempted reconciliation of these two impulses

demonstrates a profound methodological or formal unease. The

character of this unease is deeply relevant to Alain Badiou’s

recent remarks about the past century’s impossible marriage of

revolutionary aesthetics and revolutionary politics.

Accordingly, arguments for the joint identity of the two are

faced with a series of paradoxes between the subjective and the

objective, spontaneity and conformity, and most importantly,

between the moment and the trans-historical.

Full Text:

Written over the course of the late sixties, Herbert Marcuse’s

An Essay on Liberation clearly resonates with the theoretical work

that was being done in France around the time of May ‘68. Much

like the contemporaneous French structuralist and post-

structuralist entanglements with Marx, Marcuse’s polemic against

monopoly capitalism stresses its own variations on the following,

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more widely held ideas: that power relations are symbolically

mediated through culture and “introjected” at the level of the

individual’s body (Althusser’s interpellation, and Foucault’s

inscription); that language can be productively re-appropriated

and placed towards ends anathema to the status quo (Lévi-

Strauss’s bricolage); and that resistance will take the form of

minority assemblages with a viral potency (Deleuze and Guattari’s

rhizome). This essay, however, is not concerned with “testing”

Marcuse’s ideas against potentially more rigorous French bodies

of theory, nor is it concerned with a critique of Marcuse’s logic

per se.i Rather, my objective is to illuminate what is singular

about Marcuse’s highly influential essay, a singularity that I

believe is most fruitfully understood in relation to two

contexts.

First, An Essay on Liberation appears radical when considered

against Marcuse’s long standing relationship with the “Frankfurt

School” or the Institute for Social Research. Although his essay

maintains the legacy of the Institute’s thought, it also

represents an important and rather complex shift away from that

legacy. The noted shift is evident in both Marcuse’s

3

reinvestment in revolutionary praxis and in his belief that a

fundamentally aesthetic sensibility can provide the window towards

emancipated forms of social organization. Here it is worth

taking seriously Andreas Huyssen’s claim that in the late sixties

the most politically radical attitudes in France were articulated

in the field of theory, whereas similar attitudes in America were

expressed in the field of aesthetics (Huyssen, 1986, 184).

Significantly, Marcuse’s definition of aesthetics is close to the

one proposed by Freud in his essay, “The Uncanny”: “aesthetics is

understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory

of the quality of feeling” (Freud, 1955, 219).ii In the spirit

of this definition, I argue that the second context informing An

Essay on Liberation is a particularly American “structure of

feeling,” that is, the socio-historical experience of “culture

politics” so prominent in the California setting where Marcuse

produced his essay.

I use the term “structure of feeling” because it points to

both the conscious and unconscious ways that cultural production

structures experience. On one level, Marcuse’s essay, like New

Leftist “artistic practice,” believes that politics are immanent

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to aesthetics. Moreover, Marcuse also celebrates the spontaneous

aesthetic “act” as a counterbalance to the dualistic,

instrumental logic of monopoly capitalism. But at the

(unconscious) level of what remains unsaid and unresolved,

Marcuse’s essay demonstrates a profound methodological or formal

unease. The character of this unease is deeply relevant to Alain

Badiou’s recent remarks about the past century’s impossible

marriage of revolutionary aesthetics and revolutionary politics

(Badiou, 2007). While avant-garde aesthetics tends toward a

logic of rupture and new formalizations (the sixties American

context serving as no exception), politics, and even

revolutionary politics, hinge upon the maintenance of principles

“transcending all particular ruptures” (Badiou, 2007, 151).

Accordingly, arguments for the joint identity of the two are

faced with a series of paradoxes between the subjective and the

objective, spontaneity and conformity, and most importantly,

between the moment and the trans-historical.

My attempt to historicize the presence of the above paradoxes

in Marcuse’s text is divided into two sections. The first

section traces a historical line through the Institute’s thought

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concerning the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

First, I demonstrate how Marcuse’s understanding of a politicized

aesthetics is prefigured by Benjamin’s hypotheses regarding the

role of art in the twentieth century. Benjamin describes how

modern aesthetics may, on the one hand, liberate the masses’

habitual perception through a suspension of time consciousness,

or, on the other hand, foster their destructive, instinctual

servitude. Subsequently, I describe how the category of

aesthetics becomes indissociable from the darker elements of “the

culture industry” in the Institute’s later writings. Both

Horkeimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s One

Dimensional Man render the relationship between the masses and

aesthetics in the era of advanced capitalism as a continuation of

the alienated labour process itself.

While the second section points to important similarities

between An Essay … and this later period, the focus here is on

Marcuse’s return to the politically empowering elements of

aesthetic production celebrated in Benjamin’s writings. I relate

Marcuse’s belief in the link between praxis and aesthetics to

both contemporaneous and past American artistic practices

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including the various activisms of the New Left in the 1960s and

what Daniel Belgrad calls the “culture of spontaneity” of the

1940s and 1950s. What is at stake in this section is how

Marcuse’s understanding of an aesthetics based on rupture leads

to the paradoxes noted above when extended to apply to

revolutionary politics. The ultimate result is that Marcuse

posits two irreconcilable definitions of the aesthetic, one of

which will be shown to be in direct contrast with the Frankfurt

School’s historical materialism. To demonstrate that these

paradoxes are not peculiar to Marcuse’s text alone, I also note

their presence in other American artistic products of the period,

including Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, and Norman

Mailer’s work of new journalism, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel,

The Novel as History.

*

In his impressive The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay argues that

the Frankfurt School’s work exemplifies the dilemma faced by the

Leftist intellectual in the twentieth century: the dilemma of

reconciling theory with praxis (Jay, 1996, 4).iii While figures

like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno took up

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the tradition of Western metaphysics (Kant, Hegel, etc), they

rejected traditional theory’s belief in immutable truths, and its

focus on the development of internally consistent logical

principles (Jay, 1996, 80). The metaphysical impulse to

essentialize historically contingent truths, they argued,

threatened to lead to an acceptance of existing power relations

and to negate the role of praxis in changing the world (Jay,

1996, 69). The Institute’s critical theory, by contrast, framed

theory as a basis for future action, and emphasized the mediation

between areas of society rather than fetishizing one such area as

the “real” determining element. In relation to Marxism, this

entailed a reformulation of the orthodox distinction between the

“objective” economic base and its empty “subjective” reflection

in the form of culture. The Institute insisted that culture and

economics worked in reciprocal determination, and, if anything,

it was culture that functioned, in Jay’s terms, “as the seed-bed

of political totalitarianism” (Jay, 1996, 218). Accordingly,

critical theory would direct increasing attention to the

superstructural elements of society, particularly the aesthetic

production of what they would call “the culture industry.” Here,

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it must be considered that by the late thirties, the Institute’s

members were working in political exile from the Nazis; Marcuse,

Horkheimer, and Adorno having fled to Columbia, while Benjamin

remained in Germany until he was eventually compelled to escape

to Paris before committing suicide. As cultural refugees, their

work could not ultimately wed theory to praxis, and thus a

coherent model of political partisanship was suspended in favour

of theoretical innovation (Jay, 1996, 4). For the clarity of

exposition, it is reasonable to argue that the Frankfurt school’s

diagnoses of the culture industry motioned from a profound

ambivalence toward a grave pessimism.

The ambivalent position, which is closer to Marcuse’s An Essay

on Liberation, is exemplified by Benjamin’s widely cited “The Work

of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here, Benjamin

argues that monopoly capitalism, as a dialectical phase toward

socialism, bears the seed of a strictly materialist art. This is

because pre-capitalist art was firmly entrenched in ritual: the

art object functioning as the sacred container of the

transcendent, and the artist functioning as the Romantic mediator

between the real and the transcendent.iv Ritual art placed the

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receiver at a distanced role of contemplation, producing a sense

of awe for the object’s singular duration in time and space—its

aura. Mechanically reproduced art, by contrast, reflects the

assimilative logic of capitalism and the sensory shock of urban

modernity. It responds to the masses’ desire to bring the real

closer—newspapers, magazines, the cinema—and is consumed in a

state of distraction. Once divorced from ritual, Benjamin argues

that the political implications of art are radically heightened,

since aesthetics falls under the full jurisdiction of industry.

For its part, the culture industry works to re-inscribe ritual

into mechanically reproduced art through such “phony spells” as

celebrity, and to make the logic of capitalism appear

naturalized. What is most significant for Benjamin about

contemporary art is that it seizes the receiver at the pre-

reflective level of the senses, precisely what Marcuse will later

call man’s “second nature.”v At its totalitarian worst,

capitalist art conditions the masses to experience their own

destruction as an aesthetically pleasing experience—an art of

war. In the urgent battle cry which concludes “The Work of Art”

essay, Benjamin writes, “This is the situation of politics which

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fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by

politicizing art” (Benjamin, 1968, 242).

While this conclusion continues to prompt a diversity of

interpretation, I think it is irrefutable that Benjamin

understands revolutionary aesthetics as liberating the masses’

political perception of social relations; what he calls “the

optical unconscious.” Benjamin’s understanding of an emancipated

mode of perception, moreover, is germane to the valorization of

the moment critical to our discussion. Specifically, in “Theses

on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin forges a distinction

between “homogenous, empty time” and “time filled by the presence

of the now” (Benjamin, 1968a, 262-263). The former refers to the

sterile, repetitive time characteristic of mechanized labour.

Similar to Freud’s “compulsion to repeat,” mass culture prompts

individuals to believe they are participating in spontaneous

actions which are, in fact, prescribed in advance and always

return to the same place.vi Conversely, the time of the now

involves a compression or suspension of time consciousness, in

which the moment is wrenched from the brute force of repetition

and valued in itself. The time of the now brings the present

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order’s contradictions into a hallucinatory relief, prompting a

mild “foretaste of the temporal order of the ‘other’ society.”

Benjamin’s ambivalent tone and ultimate thesis—that

politicized art involves the “tactile appropriation” of the

masses’ senses, directing them toward a time of the now—bear a

profound resonance with An Essay on Liberation. As I will

demonstrate, Marcuse’s argument gives this thesis a radical turn

of the screw by redefining aesthetics beyond the artistic sphere

proper toward a particular kind of phenomenological perception of

the world in general. It is important to note, however, that

Marcuse’s utopian proclamations were preceded by a lengthy period

in which both he and other Institute members associated the

aesthetic with the most insipid elements of mass culture. In

1941, Horkheimer and Adorno emigrated to California where they

undertook their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, a collection of

essays whose anti-populist attacks on American artistic

production would deeply inspire such Leftist critics as Clement

Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979,

217). In the book’s chapter on the culture industry, Horkheimer

and Adorno reject the partisan and revolutionary language of

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Benjamin’s essay, replacing terms like “Communism” with

“dialectical materialism” (Jay, 1996, 44). More importantly,

both figures counter Benjamin’s claim that reception in a state

of distraction can serve as an emancipatory substitute for

contemplation. They charge the film, for instance, with

inhibiting critical reflection and with leading the spectator to

identify with its phony resolutions to real world ambivalences

(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, 126).vii Indeed, Horkheimer and

Adorno even discard the counter-cultural value of jazz, arguing

that its lack of form dulls the listener into a “masochistic

passivity” rather than thoughtful engagement. In the final

analysis, the culture industry chapter describes aesthetic

production in the era of monopoly capitalism as an extension of

the labour process itself: “What happens at work, in the factory,

or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it

in one’s leisure time” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, 137). This

leaves no critical outside for the working class, whose

investment in the culture industry cements the unity of monopoly

capitalism: “The ruthless unity in the culture industry is

evidence of what will happen in politics … Everybody must behave

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(as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously

determined and indexed level” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979,

123).viii

While I will discuss Marcuse’s early writings below, it is

striking that as late as 1964, he would produce One Dimensional

Man, a book that Jay describes as a popularized version of

Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry” chapter. “One

dimensional” refers precisely to the kind of liquidation of

distinctions noted above: between consumer and political

classification, between leisure and labour, and between serious

and commercial art. A one dimensional society, propped up by the

monolithic support of mass culture, allows for no dialectical

negativity that may counterbalance its force. Significantly, One

Dimensional Man ends on a note of grave pessimism regarding the

possibility of this situation changing. Then, only five years

later, Marcuse would write an essay that begins by insisting upon

the necessity of “utopian speculation” and upholds the aesthetic

of all categories as the prism through which such speculation is

to be mediated.

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An Essay on Liberation is not, of course, a pure departure from

either Marcuse’s or the Institute’s earlier thought. Here again,

the focus is on culture as the emanating source of political

oppression. Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse describes at

length how the mass media constitutes social morality—for instance,

popular understandings of “the obscene” and “the Enemy”—through

its control over language. And echoing Benjamin, he asserts that

commodified forms of communication furnish an “instinctual

servitude” in the masses, a servitude so alienated from “organic”

needs that it threatens their own destruction (Marcuse, 1969,

11).ix Finally, he maintains the thesis that the now fragmented

working class, or “instrumental intelligentsia,” functions as an

agent of stabilization before revolution.

Nonetheless, An Essay … begins by reanimating that axiomatic

Marxist principle which had faded from the Institute’s thought

over the last two decades: that the technological excesses of

capitalism constitute a negative phase in the dialectic towards

utopian socialism.x This abrupt shift towards praxis within

Marcuse’s thought was clearly informed by a radical sense of

impending, revolutionary change that expressed itself globally in

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the late sixties through the scattered Leftist uprisings in

Chicago, Paris, Prague, and Mexico City. In the spirit of these

revolts, however, Marcuse’s understanding of revolutionary praxis

is not conventionally Marxist, in the sense of a workers’

usurpation of the mode of production. That is, if culture is the

real source from which politics exerts its power over

individuals’ bodies and imaginations, then the liberation of the

body and imagination must stage its war on the cultural front.

As such, political action is no longer circumscribed to policy or

programmatic partisanship, but takes shape in the development of

a new aesthetic sensibility that runs counter to the violence of

“the Establishment.” And while the Frankfurt School argued for

two decades that aesthetics in the era of monopoly capitalism had

fallen under the province of the culture industry, Marcuse’s

aesthetic revolution was to infect the mainstream from the

margins: “utopia is viral.”

Marcuse’s utopianism places itself in an explicit dialogue

with the diverse protest movements that were discursively unified

under the label “the New Left.” In an essay that provides a

stronger explication than critique of this label, Sean McCann and

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Michael Szalay argue that the New Left emerged out of feelings of

exasperation among marginalized activists with the conventional

Left’s bureaucracy and political complicity in Vietnam and the

Cold War. Echoing remarks made by Marcuse at the time,xi McCann

and Szalay note that both student and civil rights activists

would counter their sense of impotence against the “heaviest

power structure in the world” by engaging is a sort of “supra-

politics” (McCann and Szalay, 2005, 443). That is, rather than

pursuing the official channels of reform, activists took to

“symbolic”, or what Marcuse would call “aesthetic”, means of

protest. Such protests are exemplified by the Yippies staging of

a pig for Presidential candidacy and “exorcism” of the Pentagon,

the student movement’s development of “People’s Park,” and the

Black Panthers’ appropriation of a militaristic iconography.

Recalling Benjamin’s “time of the now,” such protests strive to

bring visibility to the act in itself as a means of breaking the

public’s “auto-perception.” While People’s Park might not have

affected zoning laws, for instance, it forced a perceptual

engagement with the way corporate imperatives stratify and

hierarchize space. And though the Black Panthers’ guns would

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eventually be put to unfortunate use, their real value was a

symbolic break with the repetition of black on black violence.

Like Norman Mailer, Marcuse is attentive to the relationship

between the New Left’s valorization of the act and the counter-

cultural aesthetic practices of the previous two decades;xii what

Daniel Belgrad would later call “the culture of spontaneity”

(Belgrad, 1998). For both Marcuse and Belgrad, spontaneous arts

like bebop jazz, beat poetry, and action painting mark a break

from the realist modes of representation prescribed by non-

revolutionary strands of Socialism (the American Artist’s

Congress, for example). Adorno bemoaned jazz’s apparent lack of

systemacity, but for Marcuse, spontaneous art’s particular

attitude towards form is its highest virtue. Traditionally, he

argues, artistic form works to impose an a priori order—religious

or political—upon an unruly nature, but “the pacifying conquest

of matter, the transfiguration of the object remain unreal – just

as the revolution in perception remains unreal” (Marcuse, 1969,

44). In the work of a Pollock, Gillespie, or Ginsberg, however,

form becomes formalization, that which is created in the process of

the artistic act itself. “In formalization,” Badiou writes, “the

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word form is not opposed to ‘matter’ or ‘content’, but is instead

coupled to the real of the act” (Badiou, 2007, 160). One of

Marcuse’s central theses in An Essay on Liberation is that spontaneous

art’s attitude towards form must be grafted onto political

praxis.

As Badiou notes, theses which join revolutionary aesthetics—

understood as “what the artistic act authorizes by way of new

thinking” (Badiou, 2007, 159)—to revolutionary politics have

tended throughout the century to redefine what both “art” and

“politics” mean. On the one hand, he argues, the notion of art

as a separate realm disappears in favour of an aestheticization

of the everyday. Indeed, Marcuse writes: “We suggested the

historical possibility of conditions in which the aesthetic could

become a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft and as such could lead to the

‘end’ of art through its realization” (Marcuse, 1969, 45). On

the other hand, the definition of politics “dilates to the point

of vaguely designating every radical break, every escape from

consensus. ‘Politics’ is the common name for a collectivity

recognizable break” (Badiou, 2007, 150). Again, Marcuse

understands revolutionary politics as hinging on rupture, on a

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shift in consciousness that emerges through the event:

“Revolutionary forces emerge in the process of change itself”

(Marcuse, 1969, 79). But the aim to direct political protest

towards a perpetual break with conventional ways of seeing,

Badiou argues, was met throughout the century with a series of

limitations, limitations which are relevant to Marcuse’s text.

If, for example, the New Left’s aesthetic practices work to

disrupt everyday perception and to produce truth only through the

event, then how is the aesthetic to be solidified at the level of

the public’s “biological solidarity”? In other words, how is the

aesthetic to serve as a stable model for a new perception of the

everyday? This solidity requires repetition, which leads to

another problem. Marcuse understands the aesthetic as

spontaneous, as producing new and singular perceptions, which

“implies a shift of emphasis toward ‘subjective factors’”

(Marcuse, 1969, 53). But the aesthetic revolution must work at

the level of the collective, or, for lack of a better term, at

the level of “the objective.” As such:

There is the real paradox of moments when creation and

obedience become indiscernible, and this other paradox,

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perhaps just a variant of the first, which is the subsumption

of the spirit of revolt and invention by the imperative to

dissolve the ‘I’ into a ‘we’ – a ‘we’ that is sometimes

uncertain about the collective freedom which it was meant to

organize (Badiou, 2007, 153).

These theoretical paradoxes are lent concrete expression by the

wonderfully uncanny “levitation” of the Pentagon episode from the

“History as Novel” section of Mailer’s The Armies of the Night.

Up until this point, Mailer has been the narcissistic center

that mediates the reader’s understanding of the events leading up

to the antiwar march; narcissistic in the proper Freudian sense

of self-confusion rather than self-glorification. The reader

endures his “scatological solo at the Ambassador Theater”, his

delirious polemics against complicit academics and the stodgy Old

Left, and his ambivalence towards a youth culture that introduces

aesthetics into American politics at the expense of liquidating

history. Mailer maintains his voyeuristic distance, and even

finds himself repelled at one moment by the “soul-killing

repetition” of the students’ chants (Mailer, 1995, 102). But

then, engulfed by the theatrical spirit of the student mass,

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Mailer finds himself spontaneously, indeed, biologically

compelled to “exorcise” the pentagon through a repetitive chant:

“… the invocation delivered some message to his throat, ‘Out,

demons, out,’ he whispered, ‘out, demons, out.’ And his foot—

simple American foot—was of course, tapping’” (Mailer, 1995,

121). What invests this episode with its uncanny quality of

feeling is that Mailer, who has worked so hard to preserve his

subjective autonomy, suddenly becomes “subjectless.” His moment

of self-alienation recalls Adorno’s claim that:

The more the I of expressionism is thrown back upon itself,

the more like the excluded world of things it becomes. Pure

subjectivity, being of necessity estranged from itself as well

and having become a thing, assumes the dimension of

objectivity which expresses itself through its own

estrangement (Adorno, 1967, 262).

This estrangement, as indicated by Badiou in the quotation above,

threatens the spontaneous and subjective character of aesthetic

revolt. Mailer’s impulse to chant coveys itself as an instance

of possession rather than as a decision that emanates from his own

will. And possession by the mob threatens danger when one no

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longer has any distance or “respect whatsoever for the

unassailable logic of the next step” (Mailer, 1995, 86).

Surrendering one’s political sensibilities to the seductions

of the moment also leads, in Badiou’s argument, to the “more

widespread confusion between the acrid flavour of revolt and the

rather greasier taste that accompanies the exercise of power over

others” (Badiou, 2007, 152). In retrospect, it is evident how

both Marcuse and Mailer veer to the latter half of this

distinction through their aestheticization of minority groups.

Already in “The White Negro,” Mailer had celebrated the African

American male by fetishizing him as an ego ideal of sexual

supremacy (Mailer, 1999). His treatment of blacks in The Armies of

the Night tends at times toward the same kinds of seductive and

vulgar generalizations: “Was a mad genius buried in every Negro?

How fantastic they were at their best—how dim at their worst”

(Mailer, 1995, 115). Likewise, Marcuse discussion of America’s

impoverished ethnic enclaves appears off course from the

remainder of the essay, motioning toward a kind of terroristic

rhetoric.xiii Even more troubling, however, is his non-

dialectical celebration of the Viet Cong. What is missing from

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Marcuse’s account of the Viet Cong is an engagement with the

thesis put forth by Apocalypse Now’s menacing Colonel Kurtz

character. That is, the Viet Cong won the war through the

“genius” of distance from the experiential knife-edge present of

violence; precisely the opposite attitude towards the world

advocated by An Essay on Liberation.

It is both unfair and naïve, on the other hand, to argue from

our historically privileged position that Marcuse is not aware of

some of these paradoxes. Indeed, he carefully articulates what

is perhaps the main paradox under consideration: “This is the

vicious circle: the rupture with the self-propelling conservative

continuum of needs must precede the revolution which is to usher

in a free society, but such rupture itself can be envisaged only

in a revolution” (Marcuse, 1969, 18). Marcuse’s proposed

solution to this vicious circle is a startling one: the assertion

of a need to return to metaphysical essences. In 1929, Marcuse

studied at Freiburg under the supervision of both Husserl and

Heidegger (Jay, 1996, 28). His work was directed towards

uncovering the abstract, a-historical “being of man.” At this

early stage, Marcuse argued that man realized his essence through

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un-alienated labour, understood as work in a communal atmosphere

of play. Once he entered the Institute, Horkheimer and Adorno

gradually discouraged him away from this phenomenological or

ontological position, arguing that the concept of essence was

historically mobilized by the powers that be to justify

contingent imperatives. By the forties and fifties, Marcuse had

renounced the notion of immutable truths, agreeing with

Horkheimer and Adorno that the concept of essence itself had to

be historicized. His discussion of aesthetics in An Essay on

Liberation, however, does not always follow this historical

materialist line of thinking. In addition to the definition

already discussed, Marcuse will also describe the aesthetic as

the “objective (ontological) character of the beautiful, as the

Form in which man and nature come into their own: fulfillment”

(Marcuse, 1969, 27). In Kantian metaphysical terms, the

aesthetic is “universal beyond all subjective varieties of taste

… prior to all rationalization and ideology … an ‘original’ basic

form of sensibility” (Marcuse, 1969, 32). So, the reader is left

with two irreconcilable definitions of the aesthetic. First, the

aesthetic has no existence prior to its immanent emergence as

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formalization through the experiential, subjective “act.”

Second, the act is merely an epiphenomenal reflection of an

immutable, objective aesthetic Form that transcends all history.

Although any firm conclusion regarding this paradox would be

inadequate, I am tempted to read Marcuse’s return to ontology as

expressing a tacit need to reinstate the stability jeopardized by

the first, more radical definition of the aesthetic. This need,

moreover, is arguably embedded within the greater structure of

feeling that constitutes the American experience of culture

politics. Consider that the New Left’s theatrics worked

precisely to “abide in the abruptness of the effectively-real,”

(Badiou, 2007, 153) to valorize the “time of the now.” But the

“effectively real” takes the form that Benjamin argued must be

negated as the precondition for revolutionary art: the form of

ritual and magic. Here, it is also not incidental that Mailer

concludes both sections of Armies of the Night with an effigy for

Christianity. On the precarious threshold of a new order, an

order that says “out with the old Ideals”, there is a concomitant

nostalgia for the ground now reduced to rubble: “Yes, we are

burning him there, and as we do, we destroy the foundation of

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this Republic, which is its love and trust in Christ” (Mailer,

1995, 214). I am not arguing, of course, that a latent

Christianity inheres in 1960s culture politics. Rather, the

staging of ritual and the lament for America’s Christian heritage

point to a desire among the New Left to maintain some semblance

of essences and macrostructures.

The split between the celebration of the temporally liberated

moment and the need to preserve essences manifests itself across

a range of the period’s “artistic practices”: the direct cinema

film, the postmodern novel, new journalism, etc. Consider Thomas

Pynchon’s notoriously “postmodern” novel, The Crying of Lot 49. As

the executrix of the mogul, Pierce Inverarity’s will, Oedipa Maas

appears on a doomed psychoanalytic mission to discover the secret

of capital itself. Her mission takes the form of both a

compulsion to repeat (the Thurn and Taxis symbol), and an endless

deferral across spatially and historically eclectic settings

(from World War II to Jacobean plays). As the heroine suggests,

a break with this repetition-deferral in the form of a recovery

of the “truth” appears as an impossibility (Pynchon, 1999, 76).xiv

If the novel’s series of events lead to no discernible outcome or

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unmasking, then each individual series is of value for its

capacity to suspend the sterility of repetition through a

temporary liberation of the senses. For instance, McCann and

Szalay argue that what counts in Oedipa’s trip to Berkeley’s

protest environment is not her identification with one of the

myriad activist groups, but her receptivity to the very spirit of

revolt “in itself.”

But what’s left remaindered by this reading is that Pynchon

never takes the edge off of our suspicion that Oedipa’s quest

does have a long-standing origin. Against a setting of

televisions and disorienting highways, Pynchon leads us to think

that the novel’s “secret” rests in the most archaic and concrete

channel of power: the mail. And since the mail was instrumental

in the solidification of the United States’ federal government,

Oedipa’s interrogation into Inverarity’s estate implicates a

structural web of power relations. So again, the reader is left

with two irreconcilable options. First, Oedipa’s quest is a

subjective fantasy, drawing imagined links between series whose

real value rests in their ability to suspend linear time

consciousness. Second, Oedipa’s quest is an objective mission,

28

tracing a line back to macro power structures that have been

obdurate in American culture for hundreds of years. At the

novel’s conclusion when it is time for Pynchon to side with

either the subjective or objective reading, with the moment or

the trans-historical origin, he, like Marcuse, leaves the

irreconcilable dialectic between these temporal poles fully

intact. And, of course, variations on these same tensions are

built into the very architecture of Mailer’s Armies of the Night.

Although Mailer describes History as a Novel as constituting the

tower from which we are to read The Novel as History, the first

section of the book remains decidedly both on the ground and in

the moment. Mailer’s methodological justification, which I think

is betrayed by the reader’s intuitive sense of the book, is

slightly duplicitous. The Novel as History constitutes the book’s

real tower, and this edifice restores to Mailer’s first

ephemeral, subjective telling of events both a synoptic-spatial

sense of the “big picture” and a linear-temporal sense of

causality.

*

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In conclusion, I would like to return to the issue that began

this essay, namely, what makes Marcuse’s essay singular in

relation to contemporaneous French, Marxist-inflected theory.

Like the situationists and the post-structuralists, Marcuse

champions the political value of those perceptions liberated in

what has been widely described as “the sense event.” His counter

tendency, however, to supplement this position with a

transcendental one is radically unique to his American context.

In their essay, McCann and Szalay tend to trample over such

theoretical distinctions (e.g., conflating Marcuse’s “aesthetic”

with Foucault’s “discourse” and Lacan’s symbolic”) with a

maverick clumsiness. The outcome is a totalizing definition of

the aesthetic as a category that can be judged as politically

useful or useless. Moreover, their essay’s fetishization of

policy reform as the imperative of political action does not

resolve the kinds of unconscious forms of “instinctual servitude”

elaborated by the Frankfurt school. In contrast to this

argument, I support Mailer’s position in Armies of the Night that the

revelation of any truth always functions to confront us with the

limits of those truths that remain obscure. So rather than

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discarding Marcuse’s essay on the basis of such limitations,

knowledge is better served by an understanding of how his

historically contingent notion of the aesthetic may be redeemed

and reformulated to meet the socio-political imperatives of the

present. We cannot determine whether the representational

impulses of the 1960s New Left will return in a different and

empowering form in the context of our virtual future.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1967.

Badiou, Alain. The Century. Boston: Polity, 2007.

Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 217-251.

________. “Theses of the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968a. 253-264.

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Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’” [Das Unheimliche] (1919). From Standard Edition, Vol. XVII. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth,1955. 217-256.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indianapolis U P, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. “Afterword: Reflections in Conclusion.” Aesthetics and Politics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukacs. New York: Verso, 1977. 196-213.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.

Leiss, William. “Critical Theory and its Future.” Political Theory 2.3. (1974): 330-349.

Mailer, Norman. Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History. London: Plume, 1995.

________. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” The Time of Our Time. Toronto: Random House, 1999. 212-230.

Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

________. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

McCann, Sean and Michael Szalay. “Do you Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2(2005): 435-468.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Collins, 1999.

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i For a severe critique of the logic behind Marcuse’s essay, see Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, “Do you Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2 (2005). ii As Marcuse writes, “The term ‘aesthetic,’ in its dual connotation of ‘pertainingto the senses’ and ‘pertaining to art,’ may serve to designate the quality of the productive-creative process in an environment of freedom.” Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 24.iii Praxis here is understood as action guided by reason. This relationship prefigures problems that will be addressed in Marcuse’s later work, since members of the institute refrained from giving reason a static, concrete definition. iv As Benjamin writes, contemporary art has the potential “to brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the fascist sense” (Benjamin, 1968, 218). Also see Badiou, 2007, 154.v “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning pointsof history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (Benjamin, 1968, 242).vi Thus in characterizing the mass’s reaction to Hollywood cinema, Benjamin writes:“individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce … The moment these responses become manifest they control each other” (Benjamin, 1968, 234).vii “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection onthe part of the audience, who is unable to respond with the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, 126).viii This unity absorbs even those digressions which Benjamin believed could break with capitalism’s serial repetition. As Horkheimer and Adorno write: “When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and … exerted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organization … The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979, 123).ix “The so-called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a ‘biological’ need in the sense just defined” (Marcuse, 1969, 11). See alsoBenjamin, 1968, 242: “Its [the mass’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” x Describing Marcuse’s writing throughout the forties and fifties, Fredric Jameson writes: “Marcuse also shared Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s rejection of the assumptionthat socialism was a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. Like them, he sounded a note of skepticism about the connection between human emancipation and the progressof technology and instrumental rationalism” (Jameson, 1977, 204).

xi “Among the New Left, a strong revulsion against traditional politics prevails: against the whole network of parties, committees, and pressure groups on all levels… using this process would divert energy to snail-paced movements. For example, electioneering with the aim of significantly changing the composition of the U.S. Congress might take a hundred years, judging by the present rate of progress, and assuming the effort of political radicalization remains unchecked” (McCann and Szalay, 2005, 63).xii “Non-objective, abstract painting and sculpture, stream-of-consciousness and formalist literature, twelve-tone composition, blues and jazz: these are not merelynew modes of perception reorienting and intensifying the old ones; they rather dissolve the very structure of perception in order to make room – for what? The new objective of art is not yet ‘given,’ but the familiar object has become impossible, false. From illusion, imitation, harmony to reality – but the reality is not yet ‘given’; it is not the one which is the object of ‘realism.’ Reality has to be discovered and projected” (Marcuse, 1969, 38-39).xiii “The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confinedto small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographic centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance” (Marcuse, 1969, 57). xiv “Oedipa wondered, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too mightnot be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back” (Pynchon, 1999, 76).

Keywords: new Left, culture politics, the aesthetic, praxis, the event, ritual, utopianism, time of the now, culture industry

Proper Names: Herbert Marcuse, Norman Mailer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,

Matthew CroombsCarleton University, Ottawa Canada