Herbert marcuse an essay on liberation

Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Subverting Forces -- in Transition iv. Once this initial foundation has been set and affirmed in the first two sections, Marcuse explores how aesthetics and modes of art can act to supersede the status quo and create a form of individual and social awakening for utopia.

The strength of this essay is that it reduces Marcuse's ideology on liberation into a more concise and refined medium, especially as compared to One-Dimensional Man. This ultimately makes his philosophy more accessible for readers.

Herbert marcuse an essay on liberation: His Marxist scholarship inspired

However, the actual philosophical content of Marcuse's liberation theory is highly debatable. Both the Frankfurt School and Marcuse were a product of the Weimar Republic and the development of both existential thought and post-modernism. However Marcuse has failed to remain relevant per his own critique. The idealism that Marcuse sought and the utopia he supposed have largely become irrelevant, falling out of fashion in an epoch of instrumental and pragmatic reasoning.

The reason for this being that his work -- while important in the historical canon of philosophy -- is so disconnected and unfounded when juxtaposed to our current status quo and the overarching zeitgeist of the early 21st century. To be more specific, art is utilized not to reach utopia in so much as warn against "perceived perfection" and inform the current conceptual framework of our collective reality.

InHerbert Marcuse predicted America's efforts to assist Saddam Hussein in Iraq and countless other dictators or military agents which were given our aid in order to suppress uprisings by the populaces of third world countries. He predicts the mental sickness which has become prevalent in our society. Marcuse seems to predict the local, youth-oriented, grassroots support for a more progressive way comparable to the campaigning done for Barack Obama.

This essay reads less like an essay and more like a manifesto for anarcho-socialism. Marcuse calls for a new revolution to counter the corporate capitalism which dominates America. Marcuse analyzes how this revolution's instigators are young, college students. He explains why middle class, pre-dominantly white students can lead the fight against oppression.

But that's not all that he discusses. There is also a new sensibility which adds a sensuousness to creating equality and treating people humanely which Marcuse hopes to expound. Marcuse is successful in his description of a revolution, something which Marx was vague about which has led the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao to propagate their own ways.

The most basic form of Marcuse's philosophy on liberation is that, in the way that Aristotle's goal was the good life, freedom is Marcuse's since freedom is simply inherently good. Marcuse creates and outlines a future revolution for the good of society and not just the few. He describes how it can be done and what its goals should be.

In order to know how it can be done, we must know why it hasn't been done yet and Marcuse summarizes his theory on the repressive and authoritarian nature of our society quite well in this essay. Ultimately, in the last few pages, Marcuse describes just a glimpse of what exactly the end result of this revolution would be and it sounds worthy of respect.

If Marx was correct in that socialism is the ultimate trajectory of history, hopefully those who establish it will have read Marcuse to understand would it should be and what it should steer clear of being. Dan William. A to the point look a modern capitalist society and the possible. From the book: "Marx rejects the idea that work can ever become play.

Herbert marcuse an essay on liberation: Marcuse argues that the traditional conceptions

Alienation would be reduced with the progressive reduction of the working day, but the latter would remain a day of unfreedorn, rational but not free. However, the development of the productive forces beyond their capitalist organization suggests the possibility of freedomwithin the realm of necessity. The quantitative reduction of necessary labor could turn into quality freedomnot in proportion to the reduction but rather to the transformation of the working day, a transformation in which the stupefying, enervating, pseudo-automatic jobs of capitalist progress would be abolished.

But the construction of such a society presupposes a type of man with a different sensitivity as well as consciousness : men who would speak a different language, have different gestures, follow different impulses; men who have developed an instinctual barrier against cruelty, brutality, ugliness. Such an instinctual transformation is conceivable as a factor of social change only if it enters the social division of labor, the production relations themselves.

They would be shaped by men and women who have the good conscience of being human, tender, sensuous, who are no longer ashamed of themselves — for -the token of freedom attained, that is, no longer being ashamed of ourselves" Nietzsche, Die FrOhliche Wissenschaft,Book III, " Page Steven H. He was even briefly one of the "darlings" of the Student Movement of the s.

This global power keeps the socialist orbit on the defensive… Now, however, this threatening homogeneity has been loosening up, and an alternative is beginning to break into the repressive continuum… in the men and women who resist and deny the massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism… "The Great Refusal takes a variety of forms.

In Vietnam, in Cuba, in China, a revolution … struggles to eschew the bureaucratic administration of socialism. The guerrilla forces in Latin America seem to be animated by the same subversive impulse… The ghetto populations may well become the first mass basis of revolt… The student opposition is spreading… They confront the critical theory of society with the task of reexamining the prospects for the emergence of a socialist society qualitatively different from existing societies, the task of redefining socialism and its preconditions.

To the degree to which the university becomes dependent on the financial and political goodwill of the community and of the government, the struggle for a free and critical education becomes a vital part in the larger struggle for change. Another aspect of the same ambiguity: radical change depends on a mass basis, but every step in the struggle for radical change isolates the opposition from the masses and provokes intensified oppression.

But these individuals are more… than private persons with their particular contingent preferences and interests. There can be societies which are much worse… The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action. In the exploitative societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the … introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living.

But the life instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life… they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a reality which would no longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. November Publication history [ edit ].

Reception [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ]. Easlea, Brian London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0 3. And the political protest activates in this dimension precisely the foundational, organic elements: the human sensibility which rebels against the dictates of repressive reason, and, in herbert marcuse an essay on liberation so, invokes the sensuous power of the imagination.

Beyond the limits and beyond the power of repressive reason now appears the prospect for a new relationship between sensibility and reason, namely, the harmony between sensibility and a radical consciousness: rational faculties capable of projecting and defining the objective material conditions of freedom, its real limits and chances. But instead of being shaped and permeated by the rationality of domination, the sensibility would be guided by the imagination, mediating between the rational faculties and the sensuous needs.

The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man. Such a world could in a literal sense! Andre Breton has made this idea the center of surrealist thought: his concept of the hasard objectif designates the nodal point at which the two chains of causation meet and bring about the event.

The aesthetic universe is the Lebenswelt on which the needs and faculties of freedom depend for their liberation. They cannot develop in an environment shaped by and for aggressive impulses, nor can they be envisaged as the mere effect of a new set of social institutions. They can emerge only in the collective practice of creating an environment: level by level, step by step — in the material and intellectual production, an environment in which the non-aggressive, erotic, receptive faculties of man, in harmony with the consciousness of freedom, strive for the pacification of man and nature.

In the reconstruction of society for the attainment of this goal, reality altogether would assume a Form expressive of the new goal. The essentially aesthetic quality of this Form would make it a work of art, but inasmuch as the Form is to emerge in the social process of production, art would have changed its traditional locus and function in society: it would have become a productive force in the material as well as cultural transformation.

This would mean the Aufhebung of art: end of the segregation of the aesthetic from the real, but also end of the commercial unification of business and beauty, exploitation and pleasure. According to Kant, there are pure forms of sensibility a priori, common to all human beings. Only space and time? Or is there perhaps also a more material constitutive form, such as the primary distinction between beautiful and ugly, good and bad [14] — prior to all rationalization and ideology.

It has been said that the degree to which a revolution is developing qualitatively different social conditions and relationships may perhaps be indicated by the development of a different language: the rupture with the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with the vocabulary of domination. The surrealist thesis, according to which the poet is the total nonconformist, finds in the poetic language the semantic elements of the revolution.

The surrealist thesis does not abandon the materialistic premises but it protests against the isolation of the material from the cultural development, which leads to a submission of the latter to the former and thus to a reduction if not denial of the libertarian possibilities of the revolution. It is not, it cannot be, an instrumentalist language, not an instrument of revolution.

It seems that the poems and the songs of protest and liberation are always too late or too early: memory or dream. Their time is not the present; they preserve their truth in their hope, in their refusal of the actual.

Herbert marcuse an essay on liberation: An Essay on Liberation is a

The distance between the universe of poetry and that of politics is so great, the mediations which validate the poetic truth and the rationality of imagination are so complex, that any shortcut between the two realities seems fatal to poetry. There is no way in which we can envisage a historical change in the relation between the cultural and the revolutionary movement which could bridge the gap between the everyday and the poetic language and abrogate the dominance of the former.

The latter seems to draw all its power and all its truth from its otherness, its transcendence. And yet, the radical denial of the Establishment and the communication of the new consciousness depend more and more fatefully on a language of their own as all communication is monopolized and validated by the one-dimensional society. Perhaps necessarily so, because through all revolutions, the continuity of domination has been sustained.

But in the past, the language of indictment and liberation, though it shared its vocabulary with the masters and their retainers, had found its own meaning and validation in actual revolutionary struggles which eventually changed the established societies. The familiar used and abused vocabulary of freedom, justice, and equality could thus obtain not only new meaning but also new reality the reality which emerged in the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries and led to less restricted forms of freedom, justice, and equality.

Today, the rupture with the linguistic universe of the Establishment is more radical: in the most militant areas of protest, it amounts to a methodical reversal of meaning. It is a familiar phenomenon that sub-cultural groups develop their own language, taking the harmless words of everyday communication out of their context and using them for designating objects or activities tabooed by the Establishment.

But a far more subversive universe of discourse announces itself in the language of black militants. Here is a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined, and places them into the opposite context — negation of the established one. The ingression of the aesthetic into the political also appears at the other pole of the rebellion against the society of affluent capitalism, among the nonconformist youth.

These political manifestations of a new sensibility indicate the depth of the rebellion, of the rupture with the continuum of repression. They bear witness to the power of the society in shaping the whole of experience, the whole metabolism between the organism and its environment. Beyond the physiological level, the exigencies of sensibility develop as historical ones: the objects which the senses confront and apprehend are the products of a specific stage of civilization and of a specific society, and the senses in turn are geared to their objects.

This historical interrelation affects even the primary sensations: an established society imposes upon all its members the same medium of perception; and through all the differences of individual and class perspectives, horizons, backgrounds, society provides the same general universe of experience. Consequently, the rupture with the continuum of aggression and exploitation would also break with the sensibility geared to this universe.

Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception, for a new sensorium, is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search. But it is vitiated when its narcotic character brings temporary release not only from the reason and rationality of the established system but also from that other rationality which is to change the established system, when sensibility is freed not only from the exigencies of the existing order but also from those of liberation.

Intentionally non-committed, the withdrawal creates its artificial paradises within the society from which it withdrew. They thus remain subject to the law of this society, which punishes the inefficient performances. In contrast, the radical transformation of society implies the union of the new sensibility with a new rationality. The imagination becomes productive if it becomes the mediator between sensibility on the one hand, and theoretical as well as practical reason on the other, and in this harmony of faculties in which Kant saw the token of freedom guides the reconstruction of society.

Such a union has been the distinguishing feature of art, but its realization has been stopped at the point at which it would have become incompatible with the basic institutions and social relationships. The material culture, the reality, continued to lag behind the progress of reason and imagination and to condemn much of these faculties to irreality, fantasy, fiction.

Art could not become a technique in reconstructing reality; the sensibility remained repressed, and the experience mutilated. But the revolt against repressive reason which released the chained power of the aesthetic in the new sensibility has also radicalized it in art: the value and function of art are undergoing essential changes.

They affect the affirmative character of art by virtue of which art has the power of reconciliation with the status quoand the degree of sublimation which militated against the realization of the truth, of the cognitive force of art. The protest against these features of art spreads through the entire universe of art prior to the First World War and continues with increased intensity: it gives voice and image to the negative power of art, and to the tendencies toward a desublimation of culture.

Non-objective, abstract painting and sculpture, stream-of-consciousness and formalist literature, twelve-tone composition, blues and jazz: these are not merely new 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 senses must learn not to see things anymore in the medium of that law and order which has formed them; the bad functionalism which organizes our sensibility must be smashed.

From the beginning, the new art insists on its radical autonomy in tension or conflict with the development of the Bolshevik Revolution and the revolutionary movements activated by it. Eikhenbaum insists:. L'automatisation avale les objets, les habits, les meubles, la femme et la peur de la guerre [18]. If this deadly system of life is to be changed without being replaced by another deadly one, men must learn to develop the new sensibility of life of their own life and that of things:.

I have referred to the Formalists because it seems characteristic that the transformative element in art is emphasized by a school which insists on the artistic perception as end-in-itself, on the Form as Content. It is precisely the Form by virtue of which art transcends the given reality, works in the established reality against the established reality; and this transcendent element is inherent in art, in the artistic dimension.

Art alters experience by reconstructing the objects of experience reconstructing them in word, tone, image. This exigency explodes in the situation of contemporary art. Wir setzen grossen Jahrhunderten ein Nein entgegen Wir gehen, zur spottischen Verwunderung unserer Mitwelt, einen Seitenweg, der kaum ein Weg zu sein scheint, und sagen: Dies ist die Hauptstrasse der Menschheitsentwicklung.

Since then, the eruption of anti-art in art has manifested itself in many familiar forms: destruction of syntax, fragmentation of words and sentences, explosive use of ordinary language, compositions without score, sonatas for anything. And yet, this entire de-formation is Form: anti-art has remained art, supplied, purchased, and contemplated as art.

The wild revolt of art has remained a short-lived shock, quickly absorbed in the art gallery, within the four walls, in the concert hall, by the market, and adorning the plazas and lobbies of the prospering business establishments. Transforming the intent of art is self-defeating — a self-defeat built into the very structure of art. The oeuvre is unreal precisely inasmuch as it is art: the novel is not a newspaper story, the still life not alive, and even in pop art the real tin can is not in the supermarket.

What is meant by these metaphors? The root of the aesthetic is in sensibility. What is beautiful is first sensuous: it appeals to the senses; it is pleasurable, object of unsublimated drives. However, the beautiful seems to occupy a position halfway between sublimated and unsublimated objectives. It seems that the various connotations of beauty converge in the idea of Form.

This triumph of art is achieved by subjecting the content to the aesthetic order, which is autonomous in its exigencies. The content is thereby transformed: it obtains a meaning sense which transcends the elements of the content, and this transcending order is the appearance of the beautiful as the truth of art. The redeeming, reconciling power of art adheres even to the most radical manifestations of non-illusory art and anti-art.

They are still oeuvres: paintings, sculptures, compositions, poems, and as such they have their own form and with it their own order: their own frame though it may be invisibletheir own space, their own beginning, and their own end. And in this aesthetic universe, joy and fulfillment find their proper place alongside pain and death — everything is in order again.

The indictment is canceled, and even defiance, insult, and derision — the extreme artistic negation of art — succumb to this order. With this restoration of order, the Form indeed achieves a katharsis — the terror and the pleasure of reality are purified. But the achievement is illusory, false, fictitious: it remains within the dimension of art, a work of art; in reality, fear and frustration go on unabated as they do, after the brief katharsisin the psyche.

This is perhaps the most telling expression of the contradiction, the self-defeat, built into art: the pacifying conquest of matter, the transfiguration of the object remain unreal — just as the revolution in perception remains unreal. And this vicarious character of art has, time and again, given rise to the question as to the justification of art: was the Parthenon worth the sufferings of a single slave?

Is it possible to write poetry after Auschwitz? The question has been countered: when the horror of reality tends to become total and blocks political action, where else than in the radical imagination, as refusal of reality, can the rebellion, and its uncompromised goals, be remembered? Today, the outline of such conditions appears only in the herbert marcuse an essay on liberation of the advanced industrial societies.

They are societies whose capabilities defy the imagination. No matter what sensibility art may wish to develop, no matter what Faun it may wish to give to things, to life, no matter what vision it may wish to communicate — a radical change of experience is herbert marcuse an essay on liberation the technical reaches of powers whose terrible imagination organizes the world in their own image and perpetuates, ever bigger and better, the mutilated experience.

However, the productive forces, chained in the infrastructure of these societies, counteract this negativity in progress. To be sure, the libertarian possibilities of technology and science are effectively contained within the framework of the given reality: the calculated projection and engineering of human behavior, the frivolous invention of waste and luxurious junk, the experimentation with the limits of endurance and destruction are tokens of the mastery of necessity in the interest of exploitation — which indicate nevertheless progress in the mastery of necessity.

Released from the bondage to exploitation, the imagination, sustained by the achievements of science, could turn its productive power to the radical reconstruction of experience and the universe of experience. In this reconstruction, the historical topos of the aesthetic would change: it would find expression in the transformation of the Lebenswelt — society as a work of art.

In other words: the transformation is conceivable only as the way in which free men or rather men in the practice of freeing themselves shape their life in solidarity, and build an environment in which the struggle for existence loses its ugly and aggressive features. The Form of freedom is not merely self-determination and self-realization, but rather the determination and realization of goals which enhance, protect, and unite life on earth.

And this autonomy would find expression not only in the mode of production and production relations but also in the individual relations among men, in their language and in their silence, in their gestures and their looks, in their sensitivity, in their love and hate. The beautiful would be an essential quality of their freedom. Their libertarian aspirations appear as the negation of the traditional culture: as a methodical desublimation.

Perhaps its strongest impetus comes from social groups which thus far have remained outside the entire realm of the higher culture, outside its affirmative, sublimating, and justifying magic — human beings who have lived in the shadow of this culture, the victims of the power structure which has been the basis of this culture. Black music is originally music of the oppressed, illuminating the extent to which the higher culture and its sublime sublimations, its beauty, have been class-based.

It is still the simple, elementary negation, the antithesis: position of the immediate denial. This desublimation leaves the traditional culture, the illusionist art behind unmastered: their truth and their claims remain valid next to and together with the rebellion, within the same given society. The rebellious music, literature, art are thus easily absorbed and shaped by the market — rendered harmless.

In order to come into their own, they would have to abandon the direct appeal, the raw immediacy of their presentation, which invokes, in the protest, the familiar universe of politics and business, and with it the helpless familiarity of frustration and temporary release from frustration. Was it not precisely the rupture with this familiarity which was the methodical goal of radical art?

They would reside in modes of work and pleasure, of thought and behavior, in a technology and in a natural environment which express the aesthetic ethos of socialism.

Herbert marcuse an essay on liberation: The Essay contains the

Then, art may have lost its privileged, and segregated, dominion over the imagination, the beautiful, the dream. We have repeatedly referred to such tendencies: first of all the growing technological character of the process of production, with the reduction of the required physical energy and its replacement by mental energy — dematerialization of labor.

Already today, the achievements of science and technology permit the play of the productive imagination: experimentation with the possibilities of form and matter hitherto enclosed in the density of unmastered nature; the technical transformation of nature tends to make things lighter, easier, prettier — the loosening up of reification. The material becomes increasingly susceptible and subject to aesthetic forms, which enhance its exchange value the artistic, modernistic banks, office buildings, kitchens, salesrooms, and salespeople, etc.

The fantastic output of all sorts of things and services defies the imagination, while restricting and distorting it in the commodity form, through which capitalist production enlarges its hold over human existence. And yet, precisely through the spread of this commodity form, the repressive social morality which sustains the system is being weakened.

The obvious contradiction between the liberating possibilities of the technological transformation of the world, the light and free life on the one hand and the intensification of the struggle for existence on the other, generates among the underlying population that diffused aggressiveness which, unless steered to hate and fight the alleged national enemy, hits upon any suitable target: white or black, native or foreigner, Jew or Christian, rich or poor.

This is the aggressiveness of those with the mutilated experience, with the false consciousness and the false needs, the victims of repression who, for their living, depend on the repressive society and repress the alternative. Their violence is that of the Establishment and takes as targets figures which, rightly or wrongly, seem to be different, and to represent an alternative.

But while the image of the libertarian potential of advanced industrial society is repressed and hated by the managers of repression and their consumers, it motivates the radical opposition and gives it its strange unorthodox character. Very different from the revolution at previous stages of history, this opposition is directed against the totality of a well-functioning, prosperous society — a protest against its Form — the commodity form of men and things, against the imposition of false values and a false morality.

This new consciousness and the instinctual rebellion isolate such opposition from the masses and from the majority of organized labor, the integrated majority, and make for the concentration of radical politics in active minorities, mainly among the young middle-class intelligentsia, and among the ghetto populations. It is of course nonsense to say that middle-class opposition is replacing the proletariat as the revolutionary class, and that the Lumpenproletariat is becoming a radical political force.

What is happening is the formation of still relatively small and weakly organized often disorganized groups which, by virtue of their consciousness and their needs, function as potential catalysts of rebellion within the majorities to which, by their class origin, they belong. In this sense, the militant intelligentsia has indeed cut itself loose from the middle classes, and the ghetto population from the organized working class.

But by that token they do not think and act in a vacuum: their consciousness and their goals make them representatives of the very real common interest of the oppressed. As against the rule of class and national interests which suppress this common interest, the revolt against the old societies is truly international: emergence of a new, spontaneous solidarity.

This struggle is a far cry from the ideal of humanism and humanitas ; it is the struggle for life — life not as masters and not as slaves, but as men and women. For Marxian theory, the location or rather contraction of the opposition in certain middle-class strata and in the ghetto population appears as an intolerable deviation — as does the emphasis on biological and aesthetic needs: regression to bourgeois or, even worse, aristocratic, ideologies.

What appears as a surface phenomenon is indicative of basic tendencies which suggest not only different prospects of change, but also a depth and extent of change far beyond the expectations of traditional socialist theory. Under this aspect, the displacement of the negating forces from their traditional base among the underlying population, rather than being a sign of the weakness of the opposition against the integrating power of advanced capitalism, may well be the slow formation of a new base, bringing to the fore the new historical Subject of change, responding to the new objective conditions, with qualitatively different needs and aspirations.

And on this base probably intermittent and preliminary goals and strategies take shape which reexamine the concepts of democratic-parliamentary as well as of revolutionary transformation. The modifications in the herbert marcuse an essay on liberation of capitalism alter the basis for the development and organization of potentially revolutionary forces.

Under total capitalist administration and introjection, the social determination of consciousness is all but complete and immediate: direct implantation of the latter into the former. Under these circumstances, radical change in consciousness is the beginning, the first step in changing social existence: emergence of the new Subject.

Historically, it is again the period of enlightenment prior to material change — a period of education, but education which turns into praxis: demonstration, confrontation, rebellion. The radical transformation of a social system still depends on the class which constitutes the human base of the process of production. In the advanced capitalist countries, this is the industrial working class.

The changes in the composition of this class, and the extent of its integration into the system alter, not the potential but the actual political role of labor. The development of a radical political consciousness among the masses is conceivable only if and when the economic stability and the social cohesion of the system begin to weaken.