*The Aesthetic Dimension* (1978) and art's autonomy: is the late defense of art's autonomy and the *transcendence of class through form* — against orthodox-Marxist aesthetics that demanded class-bound programmatic content — the recovery of the utopian dimension that *ODM*'s pessimism had foreclosed and that critical theory required, or a retreat from political engagement into Schillerian-Idealist aestheticism that the rest of the authorship's commitment to revolutionary transformation cannot sustain?

Herbert Marcuse, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Art's truth is in its form, not its programmatic content. The aesthetic form preserves what class-bound programmatic art surrenders: the relationship of remembrance and protest against the given that the work-of-art-as-form holds open. Great art is anti-bourgeois precisely in its autonomy — Stendhal, Tolstoy, Beckett, Proust, Brecht's form (against the Brechtian content the orthodox-Marxist aestheticians invoked) — because the form transcends the class moment in which it was produced without abolishing it.

The proper philosophical lineage is Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), the Romantic-Idealist tradition that read the aesthetic dimension as the medium in which sensibility and reason achieve the reconciliation that political revolution requires for its own condition of possibility. The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) recovers the utopian register that ODM's pessimism had foreclosed.1

It is continuous with Eros and Civilization's aesthetic-erotic dimension (Chapters 7 and 9) and with the new sensibility of An Essay on Liberation (1969). Lukács's social-realist program mistakes the explicit content for the political force of the work of art; the form is the politics, not the slogan.2345

Sources

  1. The answer must be sought on two levels of "objectivity": (1) the aesthetic transformation reveals the human condition as it pertains to the entire history (Marx: pre-history) of mankind over and above any specific condition, and (2) the aesthetic form responds to certain constant qualities of the human intellect, sensibility, and imagination—qualities which the tradition of philosophical aesthetics has interpreted…
    Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 86–87
  2. The transcendence of immediate reality shatters the reified objectivity of established social relations and opens a new dimension of experience: rebirth of the rebellious subjectivity. Thus, on the basis of aesthetic sublimation, a desublimation takes place in the perception of in- dividuals—in their feelings, judgments, thoughts; an invalidation of dominant norms, needs, and values.
    The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 8–9
  3. In Faust the happy end is only and merely in heaven, and the great comedy cannot free itself from the tragedy which it attempts to banish. Mimesis remains re-presentation of reality. This bondage resists the utopian quality of art: sorrow and unfreedom are still reflected in the purest imagery of happiness and freedom. They too contain the protest against the reality in which they are destroyed.
    The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 48–49
  4. But it did try to take the idea of an aesthetic form and call that art and in the process deny the Eros principle which underlies your own definition of the aesthetic. A. It is a realism that conceals, that hides what reality actually is. And that, of course, is opposed to the very essence of art. Art should reveal and not conceal.
    XII. ON THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION: A Conversation between Herbert Marcuse and Larry Hartwick, pp. 221–222
  5. The other truth is music, song, verse, image, in the work of the masters: an aesthetic realm, self-sufficient, a world of aesthetic harmony which leaves the miserable reality to its own devices.
    Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 87–88

Where the argument is made

  • The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Beacon 1978, German Die Permanenz der Kunst)
  • the aesthetic essays in Collected Papers Vol. 4: Art and Liberation (Kellner ed., 2007) — 'The Affirmative Character of Culture' (1937), 'Art in the One-Dimensional Society,' 'Society as a Work of Art,' 'Art as Form of Reality,' 'Art and Revolution,' 'Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz,' 'On the Aesthetic Dimension' (Hartwick conversation), 'The Philosophy of Art and Politics' (Kearney conversation)
  • the aesthetic-erotic dimension of Eros and Civilization (1955), especially Chapter 7 'Phantasy and Utopia' and Chapter 9 'The Aesthetic Dimension'
  • the new sensibility of An Essay on Liberation (1969)
  • the 1922 doctoral dissertation Der deutsche Künstlerroman (in Schriften 1, 1978)

How the argument was received

The book has been read both as the late synthesis Marcuse arrived at and as a retreat from the political project the rest of the authorship sustains. The orthodox-Marxist aesthetic reception (Lukács partisans, the social-realist tradition) reads the autonomy-of-art thesis as bourgeois aestheticism — the work of art as autonomous from the social-historical totality, the "transcendence of class" as ideological illusion. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970, posthumous) develops the autonomy thesis from a different but compatible angle; Benjamin's mechanical-reproduction essay (1936) is the dialectically opposed Frankfurt position. Kellner's Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (1984) Chapter 10 reads the late position sympathetically as the utopian recovery critical theory requires. The position defends the autonomy thesis as the late synthesis grounded in the Schillerian-Idealist lineage and continuous with the Eros-and-aesthetic-dimension work of the 1950s, refuses the orthodox-Marxist "aestheticism" charge as productivism in cultural-political garb, and engages Adorno and Benjamin as fellow Frankfurt-School workers in the same general territory with different emphases.