The key passage in Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension (originally 1977 in German, 1978 in
English…Marcuse’s first work in aesthetics, a response to Adorno and Benjamin) for
everyday aesthetics is: “In this sense art is ‘art for art’s sake’ inasmuch
as the aesthetic form reveals tabooed and repressed dimensions of reality: aspects of liberation. The poetry of Mallarmé is an extreme example;
his poems conjure up modes of perception, imagination, gestures – a feast of
sensuousness which shatters everyday experience and anticipates a different
reality principle.” (239) Mallarmé of course represents Modernism and
he is precisely the person attacked by Lukacs.
The passage for me is key in that art for art’s sake becomes something a
bit different from what we might see in Clive Bell. It is a liberation, a new reality principle,
and also a feast of sensuousness. So the
shattering of the everyday is directed to a new liberated sensuous
everyday. I am not so much interested
here in fine art as in what the art does to life: it reveals something repressed and points to
a new reality principle. This is the
bohemian revolt, the hippie revolt which was formed in the early seventies. (1977 is really 1969-74 here.) So, “a
pleasure in decay, in destruction, in the beauty of evil; a celebration of the
asocial, of the anomic” is itself the “secret revolution of the bourgeois
against his own class.” This is Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg,
Burroughs. Marcuse also describes this
as “ingression of the primary erotic-destructive forces which explode the
normal universe of communication and behavior.”
(240) This “rebellion against the
social order” reveals Eros and Thanatos as “beyond all social control” and
“invokes needs and gratifications which are essentially destructive….even
death and the devil are enlisted as allies in the refusal to abide by the law
and order of repression.” And Marcuse
believes this is “one of the historical forms of critical aesthetic transcendence.” If we grant some of the Marxist fundamentals,
i.e. that our capitalist system is one of exploitation and repression as well
as alienation and false consciousness, then it is absurd to construct a theory
of everyday aesthetics where the dominant model of the everyday is simply accepted. Avant-garde art shows the way, i.e. material
(not spiritual) transcendence. What is
the everyday? It is the experience of
what is conditioned by the social. So
if art transcends the specific social content and form it does so by breaking
the ordinary everyday. The ordinary
everyday tells us (i.e. those in my culture) that driving a car is
inevitable: but at the same time we need
to be broken out of this to survive the onslaught of global warming. Art can help by revealing libidinous energies
that are repressed by a culture of conformity.
“Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates
individuals from their functional existence and performance in society – it is
committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all
spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.”
(237) So art is committed to
transformation of the everyday.
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