Marcuse's Aesthetic Politics: Ideology-critique and Socialist Ontology

art contains the sensuous appearance of the Idea, the symbol of a rationality of reason that is beyond words [1], Art was not language for Hegel because it is non-discursive; it gave form to hidden, ineffable content. Marcuse in his later work came to regard art as the last refiige of critical insights in a totally mobilized society. In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), he rejoins themes from his earliest Zeitschrift essays on the problems of truth and happiness [2]. Marcuse in the 1930s originally sought a materialist concept of reason with which to overcome philosophical dualisms, a theme he later pursued in his dialectical investigation of Eros. What he called a "rationality of gratifica? tion" in 1955 joined intellect and instinct and overcame the mind-body dualism that he felt served to cement social bondage by relegating the ideal of freedom to the spiritual heavens, leaving earth to the expropriated [3]. In this essay I want to trace the contours of Marcuse's mature aesthetic theory, focussing on his view of art's dual role as ideology-critique and as socialist ontology. Marcuse ended with art because he felt he could no longer talk about a rationality of gratification, or give it comprehen? sible political form, in the context of late 1970s American capitalism. The cracks around the edges of one-dimensional society that emerged faintly in the late 1960s were once again being sealed up, leaving critical theory with no language other than poetry. In one sense, then, Marcuse finishes with a discussion of art because he concludes that a traditional politics of class is hopeless, following the short-lived exuberance of the 1960s. Yet in another sense he maintains his internal dialogue with the Marxist tradition and uses art, as he had used psychoanalysis earlier, to ensure that subject and object, individual and class, par? ticular and general, could never gain complete identity thus preserving the non-identical relation between person and collectivity. Marcuse uses art both as a transcendent