Introduction

What does it mean to say that society is a work of art? Would there be art in such a society? Is protest beautiful or beauty itself a protest? I address these questions by reconsidering the writing of Herbert Marcuse from the late 1960s and 1970s, his most optimistic period. In his earlier Eros and Civilization,^[1] Marcuse integrated psychoanalysis in a Marxist critique of consumer society, extended in One Dimensional Man.^[2] Both books were re-issued in paperback in 1966, the former with a new political preface, and became required reading in the student movement. But I want to focus on two papers and a lecture delivered in 1967, when Marcuse engaged with student and anti-war protest, the counter-culture, and the new Left.

 

At the University of California at San Diego he taught courses in philosophy but also on The Warfare State.^[3] The state governor, Ronald Reagan, tried to persuade the University to sack him. When Marcuse received threats of violence, students guarded his house while he stayed with friends. Then, aged 69 in July 1967,^[4] he lectured at the Free University, Berlin and spoke following black power activist Stokely Carmichael at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London's Roundhouse.^[5]

 

At the Roundhouse, he alludes to an aesthetic society as 'the oldest dream of radical theory and practice ... the most utopian, the most radical possibility of liberation today.'^[6] In August, at the 3^rd Conversation on Humanism, Salzburg^[7] he develops the idea in his paper 'Society as a Work of Art.' When he moves to aesthetics as retreat from the political in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), he retains the idea that beauty, as non-repressive order, negates the established society precisely through its autonomy. This last book was a formative influence on the art critic Peter Fuller^[8] who turned away from Marxist art criticism to a psychoanalytic approach after reading it - but that is another story. My focus here remains on the optimistic 1960s.

 

 

Flowers, ghettos and the counter-culture

The 1960s was the time of the civil rights movement, anti-war protest, campus unrest,^[9] a New Left, and the counter-culture with its music, sexual liberation and consciousness-changing drugs. Marcuse saw groups such as the Hippies in San Francisco and the Motherfuckers in New York - 'addressed as men who have perpetuated the unspeakable oedipal crime'^[10] - as a new political-cultural avant-garde, agents for a wider refusal of consumer society using performance to provoke recognition of that society's irrationality. It was also a time of small magazines, such as International Times in the UK and Black Mask - the mouthpiece of the Motherfuckers - in the US. In the first issue of Black Mask, Ben Morea and Ron Hahne state, in a tone reminiscent of the Revolution of 1917:

 

The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretence and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity. Your lie has failed. The world ir rising against your oppression. .. We are ready. Let the struggle begin!^[11]

 

It was also the beginning of environmental activism, and intentional communities in rural areas as groups left the city to build new social architectures through consensus and non-violence. Social ecologist Murray Bookchin and his partner Bea joined one such commune briefly in 1969.^[12] These departures from mainstream society, a direct application of the idea of dropping out, represented a search for sanity and healing, or refuge from what Marcuse calls in an essay on ecology 'the mutilated consciousness of individuals' in consumer society^[13]

 

The cause of that mutilation was the American dream, merging family values with consumerism. Joan Didion writes of an 'uneasy apprehension' in a society which, while economically strong, had evacuated its sense of value.^[14] The casualties and the dreamers went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to wear flowers in their hair and take part in the Summer of Love. Actually, the Summer of Love began on January 14^th, 1967 at the First Human Be-In.

 

 

 

The Berkeley Barb reported,

 

The spiritual revolution will be manifest ... In unity we will shower the country with waves of ecstasy and purification. Fear will be washed away; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empire will lie drying on deserted beaches ...^[15]

 

This fuses Enlightenment and millenarianism, purity - fear is washed away like sin - and immanent revolution. But the Summer of Love was, as Didion saw, political: the personal becomes political, and the political takes place in personal life - or did in Haight-Ashbury, known as the District. Peter Braunstein, too, writes of the flower-child phase as 'a radical political stance' in a Politics of Love^[16] in face of the war in Vietnam. He suggests, 'to be childlike ... meant to be at one with nature, with the earth, with other human beings, to be nonviolent ... to consciously regain the simplicity and wonder of childhood as a perceptual prism ...'^[17] In Britain, a William Blake revival similarly informed a new Albion, manifest in free festivals.^[18] Then, writing on Woodstock in August, 1969, Lauren Onkey states that a rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner by Jimi Hendrix fractured the values of white, middle-class American consumerism. in a 'sonic assault on the audience ... [which] attained the aural equivalent of Armageddon.'^[19]

 

The flower children were at the Roundhouse, too. Marcuse begins,

 

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.^[20]

 

In An Essay on Liberation, mostly written during 1967 with changes after May 1968, Marcuse notes the Hippies' subversion of language: 'subcultural groups develop their own language ... Òtrip,Ó Ògrass,Ó Òpot,Ó ÒacidÓ... '^[21] and sees a more forceful revolt by language in black culture. Words, of course, denote categories which can be revised or reclaimed for new ways of thinking.

Situating the aesthetic society.

The conditions in which Marcuse wrote his most optimistic papers, often in response to quickly moving engagement, indicates an emergent, qualitatively new society in as much as the counter-culture lived the revolution (before the revolution). This matters in relation to Marcuse's efforts to say how the new society comes into being. Later he cites the role of an intelligentsia but in 1967 it seemed the contradictions and excesses of affluence produce a spontaneous refusal, which he rationalizes as the production of a new biological need for liberation.

 

Vincent Geoghegan identifies two aspects of Marcuse's view of student protest and the counter-culture: a refusal of conformity and a demand 'that critical thought and knowledge are ... brought to bear on intellectual discussion ...'^[22] and a moral-sexual rebellion in 'sit-ins, be-ins and love-ins' constituting an 'existential community'.^[23] Geoghegan summarises that Marcuse saw in sexual and moral liberation (and use of consciousness-changing drugs - to which he did not object though his own preference was for cigars), 'the rediscovery within themselves of the instinctual basis of freedom ... needs that are the Òabsolute negationÓ of the current order.'^[24] This is personal and political, a subversion of social institutions vital to any wider restructuring. Similarly, looking back on her experiences in Paris in 1968, Julia Kristeva emphasises the sexual revolution: 'Group sex, hashish, etc., were experienced as a revolt against bourgeois morality and family values ... striking savagely at the heart of the traditional conception of love.' and, ' ... '68 was a worldwide movement that contributed to an unprecedented reordering of private life ... '^[25]

 

For Marcuse, the counter-culture produced a transformative politics. In An Essay on Liberation he writes, 'If now, in the rebellion of the young intelligentsia, surrealistic forms of protest and refusal spread through the movement, this ... may indicate a fundamental change in the situation.'^[26] This is a politics of moments, of sudden clarity and immediacy, immanent rather than imminent. In his Roundhouse paper he cites Walter Benjamin's observation that, 'during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city ... there were people shooting at the clocks ...'^[27] as 'the leap into the realm of freedom - a total rupture.'^[28] At times he is lyrical, citing a fusion of Marxism and surrealism in the slogans of May 1968; he continues,

 

... the piano with the jazz player stood well between the barricades ... the striking students in Toulouse demanded the revival of the language of the Troubadours ... The new sensibility has become a political force. It crosses the frontier between the capitalist and the communist orbit; it is contagious because the atmosphere ... carries the virus.^[29]

 

The revival of the langue d'Oc might be low on a revolutionary agenda today, though the small town of Millau on the Larzac plateau was the site of a mass demonstration to support farmer-activist José Bové on 30 June, 2000 - described by François Dufour as 'Seattle-on-Tarn.'^[30] I think there is a continuity of a revolution of being present - or immanent revolt - in the counter-culture of the 1960s, the squatting movement which began then, anti-roads protest in the 1990s, and anti-capitalist activism (as on June 18^th, 1999 in London). Action also change policy but produces a transformation in the personal and social consciousness of those there. It is in this context of an eruption of new ways of being that Marcuse adopts the idea of a society as a work of art: a ludic, libidinal society, a post-scarcity society in which toil is abolished and work is play, founded on replacement of the performance principle by the pleasure principle.

 

In 1967, as Marcuse argues in his Berlin lecture, 'The End of Utopia',^[31] the ludic, post-scarcity society is no longer a dream. It is really possible, in the unprecedented conditions of revolt in an affluent society, when the working class is no longer the revolutionary force but revolt nonetheless erupts, when resistance is produced by the system itself, 'by virtue of the contradiction generated ...'^[32] and liberation is 'a biological, sociological and political necessity',^[33]

 

Society as a Work of Art

The abolition of work, the ludic-libidinal society, has a precedent in the work of anarchist Peter Kropotkin in the 1880s, and utopian theorist Charles Fourier in the early nineteenth century. For Fourier, work relations, as social relations, are erotic when people of complementary passions are naturally drawn to work together. Marcuse is more cautious than Fourier, but sees a period of sexual liberation in the pre-Stalinist history of the Soviet state - as he writes, a time 'when sexual morality was factually and legally free to a degree unknown in previous history.'^[34] though this was also linked to a requirement to produce children for the collective workforce. But Marcuse is equally concerned with the agency of beauty in the ludic-aesthetic society. ^[35] Paul Robinson argues that the identification of beauty, articulated in art and literature, with non-repressive order fits awkwardly with Marcuse's earlier idea that bourgeois art, by purveying beauty as a displacement of hope, enables an established society to reduce unrest. Robinson sees a 'distrust of culture ... throughout Marcuse's early writings.'^[36] But Marcuse cites bourgeois escapism, and refers to beauty as a pervasive quality that emerges free of such displacement in liberation.

 

Leaving that aside, in 1967, Marcuse proposes that the creative imagination is the productive force of a new society, breaking with a tradition of Utopia as the far-away - islands of a far-distant sea recounted in travellers' tales. For Marcuse, the end of utopia is here-and-now, a Land of Cockaigne^[37] enacted in the counter-culture. In Salzburg, he argues that the creative imagination can be the productive force of a qualitatively different society in conditions of technological advance. Its realization is repressed by the mechanisms of the established society, yet affluence conjures the promise of liberation in a false liberation from want.

 

Marcuse attaches particular force to art as a vehicle for a radical imagination Citing the idea of false consciousness in Marxism, he states, 'The power of knowing, seeing, hearing, which is limited, repressed and falsified in reality, becomes in art the power of truth and liberation.'^[38] He begins by outlining the function of bourgeois art as affirmative culture that reconciles but does not lessen strife, displacing peace to aesthetics. Then, citing the Expressionist painter Franz Marc, Marcuse reads the crisis (as he calls it) of art in the 1910s, time of early abstraction, as, 'a rebellion against the entire traditional function of art' in which the object is dissolved.^[39] The old art offered a 'beautiful semblance' but the new is - citing Dadaist Raoul Hausmann - 'a painted or moulded critique of cognition.'^[40] Marcuse asks if art's critical function is bound to semblance, and asserts that art is aware of the contradiction while it should, 'no longer be powerless with respect to life, but should instead help give it shape - and none the less remain art, i.e. semblance.'^[41] This recalls Ernst Bloch - in The Principle of Hope -on art as a vehicle for the shaping of hope. Bloch writes,

 

We say of the beautiful that it gives pleasure, ... But its reward does not end there, art is not food. For it remains even after it has been enjoyed ... into a land which is pictured ahead. The wishful dream goes out here into what is indisputably better ... a shaped beauty. Only, is there anything more in what has been shaped ... than a game of appearance? ^[42]

 

Returning to Marcuse, rejecting Socialist Realism and citing Surrealist poetry as the evocation of a new world in new images and language, he says, 'art is rescued in its dual, antagonistic function. As a product of the imagination it is semblance, but the possible truth and reality to come appear in this semblance and art is able to shatter the false reality of the status quo.'^[43] But a difficulty appears.

 

If art is to dissolve reality, it remains a non-material entity, a semblance even in the form of a negated reality. But Marcuse aligns art to an articulation of beauty and a sensibility he regards as a prerequisite for change. Society must create the conditions for 'the truth of art to be incorporated in the social process itself and for the form of art to be materialized.'^[44] This could be read in context of abstraction - form has a non-mimetic order which fractures the perceptual. For Marcuse, 'The beautiful belongs to the sphere of non-repressive sublimation, as the free formation of the raw material of the senses and thus the sensuous embodiment of the mere idea.'^[45] Beauty is integral to order.^[46] In a period of totalitarianism, 'The luxury function of art must be destroyed'^[47] in favour of antagonism.^[48] Then, he argues that if technology and art are traditionally separated as the beautiful and useful, the divide can be collapsed, like that between work and play: 'the idea of a possible artistic formation of the life world.'^[49] Form is the form of freedom, a practice of life, 'which free people in a free society are able to provide for themselves.'^[50]

 

This raises interesting implications for art in a society which is itself a work of art. To say people provide the form of freedom for themselves is a crucial understanding of a necessary shift in power relations from imminent revolution founded in the privileged knowledge of an intelligentsia - who retain privilege as the group within society who introduce it by virtue of a privileged anticipation - to the direct production of a qualitatively different society and way of personal life.

For Joseph Beuys, everyone is an artist in as much as they have a creative imagination and can envisage new social as well as artistic forms. The definition of art dissolves into free living. I return to this, but the difficulty remains: how is the new society to be produced?

 

The Circle.

In Berlin, after the lecture 'The End of Utopia', a member of the audience says, 'the centre of your paper today was the thesis that a transformation of society must be preceded by a transformation of needs ... this implies that changed needs can only arise if we first abolish the mechanisms that have let the needs come into being as they are.'^[51] Marcuse replies:

 

You have defined what is unfortunately the greatest difficulty in the matter. Your objection is that, for new, revolutionary needs to develop, the mechanisms that reproduce the old needs must be abolished. In order for the mechanisms to be abolished, there must first be a need to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are placed, and I do not know how to get out of it.^[52]

 

But it seems that in his allusion to a society produced by its members, or in a direct democracy in Beuys' terms, the temporal trajectory which confines the new to a tomorrow which never dawns is abandoned. In its place is a liberation which I would compare with Henri Lefebvre's idea that moments of presence, or sudden clarity, occur within the routines of everyday life.

 

To juxtapose Marcuse's idea of liberation from the affluent society and Lefebvre's theory of moments is not unreasonable. Both revised Marxism, both engaged with student movements, and both were interested in art (though Lefebvre's link to the Situationists is more definite than Marcuse's reflections on literature and art).^[53] They met when Marcuse was in Paris. Marcuse was inspired by the events of May 1968, observing the radicalism of many in the technical intelligentsia, or technocrats of repression.^[54] But Lefebvre was uninspired by Marcuse's emphasis on the aesthetic. Lefebvre recalls,

 

I met Marcuse several times. We had some points of agreement on the critique of bourgeois society and one-dimensional man ... but I didn't agree with him on the fact that one could change society by aesthetics ... According to Marcuse, industrial society, by its mode of social control, provokes a reductionism of possibilities for individuals and an integration (or disintegration) of the working class. The attack on the system can only come from an encounter between critical theory and a marginal substratum of outcasts and outsiders. But in May 1968 this attach took the form of a formidable working class general strike.^[55]

 

Marcuse's reliance in his writing on avant-garde tendencies contrasts with Lefebvre's optimism as to the role of the working class. But while Marcuse clings to the role of students as a new intelligentsia,^[56] Lefebvre is informed by his experience of what he regards as a still vital working class, 10 million of whom were on strike in May, 1968. Lefebvre insists, too, on the non-totality of repression -as Andy Merrifield writes, 'Lefebvre could never comprehend modern capitalism as seamless; his mind revelled in openness not closure ...'^[57] Marcuse saw the system as tending to total repression through consumerism, but for Lefebvre it leaked.

 

These comparisons are easy to make in retrospect. In Salzburg in 1967, Marcuse ends by accepting that freedom is not-yet. He concludes:

 

For art itself can never become political without destroying itself ... The contents and forms of art are never those of direct action, they are always only the language, images, and sounds of a world not yet in existence. Art can preserve the hope for and the memory of such a world ... no longer the great representational, reconciling, purifying art of the past ... instead the uncompromising rejection of illusion, the repudiation of the pact with the status quo, the liberation of consciousness, imagination, perception, and language from its mutilation in the prevailing order.^[58]

 

 

Beauty as Protest?

What kind of art, if any, would be produced in (and by) an aesthetic society? In one way, there would be no difference between art and life, hence no art as such. It is an attractive vision: a life of ease prefigured by Baudelaire in his poem 'L'invitation au voyage', the subject-matter for several paintings by Matisse in 1905-06. There, all is order and beauty, calmness and sensuality. When social relations are libidinal, public as well as intimate life is erotic. Every day is Sunday,^[59] as set out in George Seuarat's paintings: Bagneux, Asnieres (1883, London, National Gallery) and La Granfe Jatte (1995, Chicago, Art Institute). Set on opposite banks of the same stretch of the Seine, these paintings show the artisan class and the bourgeoisie taking their leisure, while the factory chimneys of Clichy signify the post-scarcity economy.

 

This is in keeping with the counter-culture's adoption of a life of hanging out as the refusal of a system driven by the military-industrial complex, as it was called, which produced the Vietnam war. Similarly, Dada in Zurich in 1916 was a rejection of the values that produced the 1914-18 war. The Summer of Love denotes a lifestyle of new music, the use of marijuana and lsd, but a revolt against power-over, indicated in the slogan Make Love Not War. It was, too, in everyday life in the District, an adoption of non-productive time - combined with self-reduction, as in reducing oneself the price paid for goods, and re-distributing the surplus of the affluent society in free-shops, free food distributions, and at times free health care. The counter-culture has, too, a commonality with Situationism. David Pinder writes of the dérive, 'Accounts ... suggest slowness and a sense of drifting with currents ... fugitive movement, willed drive and an intense sensation of the passage itself .'^[60] He cites Kristin Ross that the dérive resonates with a refusal of the idea of work as toil for Rimbaud and Laforgue, and the oppositional culture of the Paris Commune; and quotes Ross that laziness becomes, 'the impossible liberty of having exempted oneself from the organization of work in a society that expropriates the very body of the worker.'^[61] Meanwhile in the District, the Hippie (Haight-Ashbury independent property) culture took an equally resistant form. James Farrell writes,

 

The hippies ... differentiated themselves from mainstream culture by their drugs and music ... by their hair and dress and decorum. Like civil rights workers who put their bodies on the line, countercultural activists drew a line with their bodies. When men let their hair grow ... their long hair ... symbolized countercultural identity and defiance of the culture of conformity. ... Freeing themselves from the fashion world, many wore hand-me-downs and Army surplus ... Men and women adorned themselves with flowers and with crafted beads and colourful baubles. ... By appearance and behaviour they declared themselves actors (and sometimes activists) in a new cultural drama. ^[62]

 

Frances Fitzgerald writes similarly that the Hippies aimed to 'disarticulate the society and the intellectual frames they had grown up in', and that, 'everyone had a right to do his or her own thing.^[63] Meanwhile, the New York Diggers,

 

... arranged for a tour of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the auspices of ESSO (the East Side Service Organisation, a hip social services agency; the fact that this acronym was better known as the name of a giant oil corporation is probably what gained them entrée to the NYSE) Once they had been escorted into the visitors' gallery ... they produced fistfuls of dollar bills and flung them from the balcony onto the floor below. All bidding stopped as traders impulsively switched ... to an atavistic frenzy, scrambling to grab what they could from the shower of cash. They then began to berate the Diggers ... '^[64].

 

Today artist-groups such as the Yes Men use performative tactics, or, like WochenKlauser in Vienna, use dialogic tactics. But at this point I have moved from a society that has become a work of art to art that attempts to contribute to conditions in which the dominant society's contradictions and excesses are evident. In the really achieved ludic society I see no need for art as a specialist form of production or reception, in its place art as expression of a new sensibility in the acts of everyday life.

 

Perhaps Beuys combines work articulating an emergent revolution with work that tries to point towards a possibility of revolution - living the new society within the old as well as critiquing the dominant society. In the Revolution is Us (1972), he uses a life-size, photographic image of himsef walking towards the viewer, first used as a poster for an event. A catalogue states: 'His version of an alternative to bureaucratic state control was based on the principle of ÒFREE DISCUSSION, DEMOCRATIC DECISION MAKING and COLLECTIVE ACTIONÓ.'^[65] In We Can't Do It Without The Rose (1972), a live art work, he sits at a desk on which a fresh red rose is placed in a scientific glass cylinder. Caroline Tisdall writes, 'Bud and bloom are in fact green leaves transformed. So in relation to the leaves and the stem the bloom is a revolution, although it grows through organic transformation and evolution.'^[66] I have reservations ab

out biological metaphors which take matters from history to a realm outside human intervention, and about the mystical aspect sometimes read into Beuys' work But I am reminded of Marcuse's idea of a production of new biological needs, like new instincts in the Freudian Es though (he says) not in a scientific sense; I read this as between biological and psychological evolution. For Marcuse, beauty is the form of such desires, de-sublimated, freed from the repression of productivity just as from mimetic impositions. In The Aesthetic Dimension, by which time real-political change is neither imminent nor immanent, it is as if art becomes a safe house in an occupied land, where freedom finds its last resort in - at least - rupture of the codes (as of perception) of the dominant society.

 

Does art offer a force to interrupt, or a moment of clarity that remains transformative and that is personal but not limited to private life? Art, after all, is public, but I do not imply a fixation with the visual, using the term art for music and literature as well. I am reminded of the notes to a Patti Smith album in which she cites Rimbaud - or Breton - that beauty is convulsive or not at all. But I do not know how to make the necessary leap. Like Marcuse in Berlin, I don't know how we exit the circle. I end with a quote from Beuys:

 

In the future all truly political intentions will have to be artistic ones. ... they will have to stem from human creativity and individual liberty. ... this cultural sector ... would be a free press, free TV, and so on ... free from all state intervention. I am trying to develop a revolutionary model that formulates the basic democratic order in accordance with the people's wishes ... that changes the basic democratic order and then restructures the economic sector in a way that will serve the people's needs and not the needs of a minority that wants to make its profits. That is the connection, and this I define as Art.^[67]