Marcuse's Aesthetics and the Displacement of Critical Theory

Marcuse's initial concern with the relationship between art and politics, as set forth in "Affirmative Character of Culture," I originated during the years which witnessed the efforts of the fascists to consolidate their political interests by means of a total mobilization of all social strata in German society. Whereas the major thrust of the article was directed towards an exposition of the decline and redefinition of the bourgeois culture under National Socialism, also present in this early essay is the inclination to see art as the victim of similar pressures in advanced industrial society, since Marcuse believes fascism to be but one, and the most primitive technologically and politically, of many forms of authoritarianism that serve to preserve monopoly capitalism.2 The parallel trends of the debilitation of art in pre-World War II Germany and in postwar democracies serve Marcuse as the basic motive for imparting a (non-violent) authoritarianism to liberal political systems. Though western democracies operate according to principles of tolerance, because they appear to share many of the ebbing cultural traits that colored fascist society, the historical analogy between the fate and future of art in fascist and liberal democratic regimes means that we will be exploring changes in the nature and function of art--relative to its general historical character--as a response to tendencies endemic to 19thcentury capitalism and not merely in response to the conflicts proceeding from a Soviet-modeled suppression of art as part of a vulgar political curtailment of free expression. Significantly, therefore, Marcuse's "Affirmative Character of Culture" possesses many of the same ideas and motifs which distinguish his subsequent writings on art and aesthetics. The concept "affirmative culture" denotes those dimensions of the