The most vexed question facing art in general and literature in particular today is that of social relevance. Can literature address the problems facing us as a race, a society, a species? This question poses many others, too often dismissed or ignored as being facile, too obvious or too fundamentally potentially detrimental to the established notion that the artist / writer can effectively take action on an issue, as Sartre called it, “action by disclosure” . What if Sartre was wrong, and writing is not action at all, but inaction under the guise of action? Can literature effect any change in the world of praxis? If it can, should it? On what authority does the writer speak? How can one avoid works being allocated a programmatic social function within a state system of domination?
Marcuse’s essay is concerned with culture and its “affirmative” character. This term refers to bourgeois culture which designates itself as “the realm of authentic values and self-contained ends in opposition to the world of social utility and means [...] Its decisive characteristic is the assertion of a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world.” Marcuse’s essay is startling because it calls into question that which the liberal middle class prides itself on most: its history of humanitarian intervention through the sphere of culture. Those who engage in this way are venerated as saints: Swift, Blake, Dickens, whilst the names of actual activists are often obscure. The problem with affirmative culture is that its values are not realisable in real life – they are not even meant to be realised by the society which manufactures cultural artefacts.
The essay begins by tracing the history of affirmative culture. It opens with the assumption that the goal of philosophy is to find demonstrably correct guidance for living, but shows that from Aristotle onwards, philosophy has implied a dichotomy between what is purely ideal on the one hand, and everyday materialism on the other. Marcuse does have sympathy with the notion of hermetic philosophical endeavour as the highest pursuit, as to invest one’s happiness in the material is to make oneself a slave effectively to chance: a complex and opaque set of contiguous factors and circumstances. This striving for idealism, however, is at the root of the problem. Even at its inception philosophy finds itself facing a contradiction: between purity of thought, and common existence. Philosophy in striving for truth is accused of being an elitist and escapist pursuit, requiring certain concrete conditions (education and free time; in short, wealth) which must be inaccessible to most, and probably actually depend upon the exploitation of others. A dangerous precedent is set, that philosophy takes care of the idealist search for truth, whilst common material existence is left to its own devices. Social stratification takes place, determined by the workings of the economy, in which philosophy cannot help but collude. Abstract systems of thought are apparently sympathetic to man’s plight, but “idealism surrenders the earth” – it is either useless or perhaps potentially counter-productive. A philosophy that seeks to be practical (that of Hobbes, for example) is viewed with suspicion by those its content threatens, and derision by ‘pure’ philosophy, which cannot stomach its compromises and non-metaphysical, unscientific nature.
Idealism is then probably shamefully aware of its own irrelevance to common life, but its impractical, apolitical nature is not neutral. Adorno points out that the apolitical is always political, in that it signals its own interest and comfort in the established conditions. Marcuse states that “the history of idealism is also the history of coming to terms with the established order”; elsewhere he implies that the radical doubt that rationalism takes as its starting point is a symptom of philosophy’s shame at the state of the world. His repeated use of the loaded term “appeasement” suggests criticism of the traditional separation of the intellectuals from the rulers; a separation which should not suggest the impartiality which many assume it does. Affirmative culture is absolutely tied to the development of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist system corrupts human relations, reducing individuals to the status of commodities. It cannot provide happiness, which is also reified into commodity. Happiness exists as a tool of the system; it is unattainable, instead perpetually deferred as a means of selling products or keeping people compliant. For Marcuse, happiness may come only in the struggle of necessity against idealism. He thus implies that although it was understandable, it was regrettable that metaphysics came to occupy a position so divorced from life. Precisely what Marcuse is advocating in its place, however, is unclear, a point I shall return to below.
Marcuse views all cultural production as economically determined . This determinism does not admit the distinction which most people might assume exists between high and low culture; Marcuse’s target is not the kind of mass or popular culture which is commonly identified as reflecting contemporary social values, but rather art which prides itself on its autonomy and therefore imagines it can disinterestedly engage on socio-political issues and promote a set of moral values. This disinterest or critical distance, Marcus argues, is fictitious. It is not the creation of a realm which may be populated with Platonic ideals for the illumination of mankind, rather a by-product of the historical evolution of the bourgeoisie, who have removed art from its obviously ritualistic pre-bourgeois function only to have it serve a further ritual purpose, albeit one which does not declare itself – in fact is usually not even aware of itself. This purpose is the maintenance of the social status quo, or the mobilisation of society towards the ends of states. Art with a character of protest simply results in the “appeasement” of the mind, with no change in the world of fact. In fact, the potential for such change is effectively reduced, as both the producer and the consumer of the cultural object may consciously believe they have taken some action because of the imaginative experience they have had. It follows from this that intellectual, philosophical, and artistic protest in fact maintains the conditions it ostensibly protests against. This should not be a surprise to us, however, for it is unthinkable that the ruling class system would allow the production of anything which would really threaten its own interests: only in art can bourgeois society “tolerate its own ideals”, because “what occurs in art occurs with no obligation.”
The manner of affirmative culture is not dissimilar to that of religion, in its reliance on the Kantian notion that moral values are pre-existing and their existence can be somehow proved or inferred by reason. According to Marcuse, this secular striving for an abstract set of moral values has a “tranquilising” effect which accords with the capitalist stress on deferment of happiness; if moral truth or justice may be attained in the future this potentially legitimises present suffering in that cause. In Hegel as in Christianity, present man is a stoic, prepared to give up the present to the future. History is presented as the prehistory of the coming future in which ideals will be somehow made tangible. But the sacrifice required is absolutely not a worthwhile one: Marcuse in 1937 is already writing from a point of disillusion with the aims of Enlightenment, and as a German Jew is well placed to see the inevitable blurring together of utopianism and fascism.
Bourgeois culture must restrict the attainment of freedom to art, as it cannot allow it in life. Similarly, sensual gratification must occur only through art (Marcuse goes as far as comparing art to a kind of brothel, in which people can receive regulated exposure to beauty). This is the new ritual function of art: the displacement and playing out of liberal ideas from life. Characters in novels find solace in self-awareness. Generally, thinking characters are socially isolated, implying that any meaningful solidarity that might result in action is impossible, or blighted by compromise of divergent philosophies. The romantic subject finds his archetype in Hamlet, which serves as an apt dramatisation of the problem: the man so constrained by the potential roles suggested to him by his over-developed intellect that he is incapable of choosing any of them. Hamlet also includes a meta-textual representation of the ineffectiveness of art as prompting action. Hamlet plans the play as a means of definitely exposing Claudio’s guilt, and he is euphoric after it apparently succeeds in this. However, he again gives himself up to prevarication and vacillation, and we begin to suspect that the play itself may have been a substitute for, rather than a spur to, action.
Whilst idealist philosophy is labelled affirmative by Marcuse, he concedes that it is at least on the correct side, in that it espouses causes which would be of benefit if they could be transformed into fact. He is harsher on positivist philosophies, which he says imply that things must be the way they are. This area is not fully dealt with in the essay, despite its raising many important issues. A positivist philosophy such as biological determinism may imply things are the way they are because of a cause, but in its pure form it may neither endorse nor refute this cause. As long as its truths are correct, and it has no choice but to tell them, it must exist in the form it does, irrespective of social consequences. Also, it is not clear precisely how determinate Marcuse’s own Marxist economic determinism is, or what implied natural human relations may be possible without it. Is Marxist criticism itself a form which may fulfil a function of consolation for would be revolutionaries? How can one avoid its appropriation by means-justifying state systems? Marcuse neither poses nor implies answers to these questions within his essay, but a possible response might be that of Adorno, who advocates the necessity of shifting onus onto the reception of art rather than the production; every reader must become a critic capable of deconstructing the methods of a work and disinterestedly viewing it as part of a contextualised totality of cultural production. Marcuse therefore pre-empts the postmodern practice of carrying out this deconstruction within the work itself, perhaps therefore implicitly endorsing certain strands of artistic production which attempt to address the issues with which he is concerned. Marcuse, however, gives few examples of non-affirmative culture (those which are given are justified only in a vague way, as sincere expressions of emotions with no specific object – the music of Beethoven and Mozart are cited), but does talk of “the hard truth of theory” as a preferable, reactive response to culture embedded in and compromised by historical development. Theory and criticism attempts to stand apart from history. Non-affirmative culture, Marcuse says, would be unrecognisable as culture because it would be separate from class interests. What this would mean in effect is impossible to gauge, Marcuse concedes man liberate from capitalism and the interests of nations is unthinkable.
Marcuse devotes space to exemplifying that philosophers including Kant and Hegel have effectively dismissed the concept of the soul, yet insists that literature insists on an outmoded conception of soul – “that which is not mind”. Religion is damned in the essay as excusing, via the notion of the freedom of the “poeticised” soul, “the poverty, martyrdom, and bondage of the body” , so why does supposedly enlightened art rely on this anachronistic conception of soul to such an extent? The answer is because soul is a convenient way of isolating values in the individual and away from life. Souls, once imbued with whichever poeticised concepts the ruling class have use of, can easily be appropriated (we need only think of Stalin’s description of artists as “engineers of souls”). The soul in art is a preserve of constant, abstract values - in order to achieve its effect, which occurs “through the cultural education of individuals.” To do this, it necessarily calls into existence concepts such as truth, falsehood, justice, injustice. The action of literature proves the existence of these concepts, as there must be criteria against which characters may be judged, if the didactic effect of the work is to be achieved. Demagogues address their speeches to the soul; the soulful are the most compliant citizens - as their revolt takes no coherent form. They are the products of affirmative culture; the soul is its invention. The supposedly objective, timeless values or concepts of the soul (for example, truth), like the soul itself, do not necessarily exist; they are subjective constructs which themselves emanate from power relations. Marcuse follows Nietzsche in claiming that which we may assume to be self-evident moral values are in fact the residue of systems of bourgeois domination. “The soul takes flight at the hard truth of theory.”
Affirmative culture therefore obscures the real, chaotic conditions of life via its insistence that problems can be overcome with reference to moral coda. What is more unclear is the extent of the deliberateness of this obscurity. Most producers of affirmative culture are acting in good faith, but are unable to transcend their place in the capitalist system. Marcuse seems to state on the one hand that the system is absolutely determinate, but on the other hand the very existence of his argument suggests it is possible to transcend this system. Marx was able to explain the existence of anti-capitalism by explaining capitalism as a necessary stage of development, which would be supplanted. Marcuse is unable to do this without providing the function of philosophical consolation deferred to futurity, which he accuses idealist and progressive philosophy of doing.
Marcuse’s work is highly relevent today. The enlightenment project has failed. There is no pre-existing realm of abstract values; truth and justice alike are constructs. Worse still, they are constructs which have been engineered by a bourgeois mentality in order to serve its own convenience. What we call morality is actually the preservation (or reinforcement) of the bourgeois status quo, just as charity is a function of individualism and apology is a function of poor manners. A century of mass technological slaughters, each undertaken according to some means-justifying end or other has offered proof of our failure. The self itself is revealed as a construct, and it is constructed through text: language speaks us. It is our textual experiences which locate us within the symbolic social order, and this order delineates our possibilities. We have a mania for text, all of which prompts and is prompted by our urge to commit ourselves into the hands of further ideological myths. These texts have neither autonomy nor critical distance; they are manifestations of the economic structure in which we exist. And with the all pervasive expanse of capitalism into even those few enclaves which art held as its last refuges (nature; the unconscious), our relations are further reduced. In fact, art is responsible for compromising the security of these areas by romanticising them; romanticisation – idealisation through art - is the perfect treatment before corporate branding occurs. We are reminded of Marcuse’s poeticised soul, which can then be harnessed in the cause of oppression, it can “do honour to a bad cause” .
What is especially interesting about Marcuse’s work is its profound opposition to the mainstream assumptions which exist today, even within academic communities, about the potential of artists to engage in a meaningful way on social issues. A large proportion of books sold ostensibly address social or political issues. Many of these are novels written by respected writers and check the various boxes of modernist or postmodernist cultural production. There is a glut of novels (after Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea) that offer a revision of history from hitherto neglected class, racial or gender subjectivities. There are also those which revert to and subvert genre forms in order to highlight our cultural prejudices. Again, there are those which project dystopian visions, which should serve as warnings to us. And there are writers who attempt a formal subjective realism as a means of highlighting the inauthenticity of our simulacra populated times.
It might be argued that literature which really advocates social change falls into two categories: that which operates by narrowing perception (most didactic literature, including both protest and state sanctioned art, falls into this first category) and that which operates by widening it. For didactic literature, authorial intention is paramount; it must be able to have its intended effect on its audience, and it mobilises an army of rhetorical devices in this cause. It therefore makes use of its audience, unashamedly sending them into battle on a diet of propaganda (always justified on the basis that it is counter-propaganda). It operates on the level of allegory, its real meaning must be constructed with reference to data outside of itself. We are suspicious of such texts when they are produced by or for a dominant ideology. This is obvious in the case of Gorky’s work for the USSR, but perhaps less obvious when a work endorses a more nebulous ideology – capitalism – indirectly. The capitalist system is not even indirectly the object of the work, but is its pervasive context. It lubricates the happenings of the work and its supposed values form a comfortingly coherent moral backdrop to the action. Works of protest tend to be taken more seriously than those which endorse a system. But these are potentially equally problematic, necessarily calling constructions such as good, truth and justice into being. They also depend upon their contexts, without which they become appropriable by those with ulterior motives.
Whilst most of us might be sophisticated enough to reject state sanctioned literature, as advocated, for example, by the Soviet regime, the dominant novel form is still for a kind of Lukácsian realism that is recognisably real and so accessible for an ‘ordinary’ reader, which contains a coded blueprint for social improvement, or castigates negative traits in much the manner of Greek tragedy. This realism may be given a kind of zeitgeist glossing (the non-linear novel which, however, is reassembled by the reader into a linear structure, and thus reinforcing the notion of linear time rather than challenging it), our character sympathies and antipathies may be aggregated or directed at extra-human determinate factors, but there is clearly still a preferred reading which is there for the inference.
It is possible that the second category of non-propaganda protest literature can avoid some of these problems. This art seeks to operate outside of history, and tends to attempt its own criticism or deconstruction, to signal itself as a textual construct. These texts signal within their form (via such devices as, in the case of Kafka, the actualised metaphor or the inviting of clashing interpretations) that they are texts which may be interpreted, but this open ended exegesis is not a means to an end but an end in itself; the onus is shifted onto the activity of the reader as critique, rather than passive (perhaps flattered by his success in the face of difficult decoding, but nonetheless passive) decoder of discourse or message. As I said above, Marcuse and Adorno’s stress on the critical activity of the reader contributes to the formal justification for this literature.
The potential of this (expressionist) strand of literature for achieving anything is however diminished by several factors:
1. Its tools have become common currency, and so are rather blunted.
2. It is inaccessible to most readers, or open to a unitary, and therefore mistaken interpretation.
3. By its nature, it cannot itself advocate action, but merely negates the prompts of others.
4. It is compromised by its commodity status.
5. It takes time to read, and its reading is a mental substitute for action. It is still almost the antithesis of action.
It is interesting to consider whether it is possible for artistic forms to accommodate Marcuse’s criticisms, or whether it is not necessary (perhaps, for the reasons given above, it is futile) for literature to make this effort, when as long as readers are sophisticated enough, they will be able to see beyond the intentions of a text and read outside of their own cultural and situational prejudices. It is interesting also to consider exactly what ‘common experience’ now means. Today’s class structure is very different to that of fifty years ago. It is globalised, meaning that it is quite possible for many in the ‘West’ to live without seeing the conditions under which the world proletariat exist. In developed economies, social conditions for the poor have undoubtedly drastically improved. It is tempting to claim this improvement as the result of the culmination of libertarian thought, in fact it is more likely to be a result of the shifting pattern of location of primary industry away from its owners. Cultural production is stratified; intellectuals are still largely unconcerned with necessity, the middle class are content with ‘realism’, and the rest have ready access to a host of depraved entertainments. The middle class have a huge appetite for ostensibly engaged culture (which emerges in all forms at all cultural levels, from serious novels to comic relief appeals) but now as then, it is practically impossible to measure or even estimate any effect it may have. Does reporting on a food crisis in Africa ultimately have any effect on policy? Does going to see the global warming film An Inconvenient Truth make people significantly alter their environment-damaging behaviour? The essay condemns the utilitarian principle – still the basis on which political-ethical decisions are made, as a further by-product of capitalism; it might be described as the amount of good we can afford. This again has enormous implications, which are left undiscussed. Marcuse may have valorised a critical, activist stance. This stance has now become a middle class posture, which capitalism is only to happy to exploit. ‘Punk’ culture is mainstream and big business, rebellion is viewed as a necessary stage on the route to acquiescence in global society’s entrenched capitalist mechanisms, carbon emissions are ‘offset’ according to opportunist systems result in more pollution being released, whilst the offsetters are happily assuaged in the illusion that the issue has been dealt with. And finally, those state ideologies which have realised that a modicum of ‘protest’ is actually an appeasing release of pressure are the longest lived, most pervasive, and therefore most repressive.
