Nicole Callahan
Herbert Marcuse, �The Affirmative Character of Culture
In The Affirmative Character of Culture Marcuse begins with original philosophy of antiquity, where knowledge was said to function as the determinant of practice. Knowledge, in the hands of Aristotle, morphed into a hierarchy of two forms: at the base a functional understanding of everyday necessity, and at the summit philosophical knowledge. Marcuse broadens these forms into the separate and somewhat oppositional forces of the necessary and the beautiful. These elements and the rift between them are the fodder for his exploration of affirmative culture.
Through the entire chapter, Marcuse builds on these oppositional and complementary forces, and molds them into a complex rubric of conceptual order.
He locates necessity in the material world of labor and matter, which is ruled by the mind and characterized by immediacy and order. Simultaneously, he excludes philosophical knowledge from the material world and instead relegates it to its own realm of beauty, sensuality, pleasure, and happiness, which is ruled by the soul, characterized as ultimate, and manifested in art and in historys theoretical discourse.
Marcuse begins with his definition of idealism, which says its basic demand is a transformation and improvement of the material world congruent with the truth and knowledge of the Ideas. He then draws upon Platos program of reorganization and Aristotles more historically minded idealism, in order to introduce us to his own agenda of order, and his use of history: The history of idealism is also the history of its coming to terms with the established order.(92)
He then moves on to look at historical forms and specific labor divisions to see how the relationships between necessity and beauty, labor and enjoyment have changed and evolved.
The bourgeois epoch signaled the beginning of free trade, when people became both buyers and sellers and the individual gained hypothetical equality, and unmediated access to society. According to Marcuse, the cultural works produced become universal values that act upon all individuals so as to bind everyone into a
Universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself from within without any transformation of the state of fact. (95)
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Marcuses model of bourgeois culture, excludes anything relating to the social process, and separates civilization as a subordinate feature of society.
This pared down conception of culture, is what Marcuse calls affirmative culture.
Marcuse then goes on to identify the central problem with the bourgeois epoch philosophy, which is that abstract equality is not actual equality. In an attempt to gloss over this incongruence, the bourgeois responded to individual discontent by projecting the ideal of humanity. Using art, they played upon humanity by elevating suffering and tragedy into eternal forces. While this is generally manipulative more than anything else, Marcuse finds an element of truth in the idea that the world can only be changed though destruction. He goes on to assert that real gratification can only come if we work against idealist culture(100).
Where the philosophy of the bourgeois epoch harped on sorrow and suffering understood in the mind, Marcuse goes on to show a historical example of converse elements not entertained in bourgeois society. The enlightenment, he says, places emphasis on the body, on feeling, and on the soul. The idea is to achieve happiness by embracing experiences, in contrast to the bourgeois epoch, which did so by purging sorrow and distancing it from the individual.
In enlightenment thinking, Marcuse says that culture needs to be changed through the interior of ones soul. The beauty of culture is an inner beauty. The soul is the real substance of the individual. Here emotions reside, in the one realm untouchable by the external world. Affirmative culture aligns itself with the soul, and not the mind. In his discussion of the soul, love and friendship are evidence of Marcuses functioning affirmative culture. Love, however, requires an intimate level of socialization, which begins to erode the idea of the isolated soul and leads to the breakdown of the individual. To Marcuse, this would require a surrender that can only truly happen in death.
Marcuse then moves on to explain how art became constructed as truth through/because of its emancipatory power, which then became a form of commodified pleasure or happiness. The discussion turns to the idea that any satisfaction gleaned from art is in fact illusion. However, beauty, unlike the soul, can be tangible, and in this quality it is uniquely positioned to traverse the realms of illusion and reality. It is the power of illusion that Marcuse highlights:
This is the real miracle of affirmative culture the injection of cultural happiness into unhappiness and the spiritualization of sensuality mitigate the misery and the sickness to a healthy work capacity.(122)
Marcuse then presents his final example of the authoritarian and utilitarian cultures, where the individual no longer has an internal identity, and affirmative culture no longer has a realm in which it can reside.
QUESTIONS:
1) What does Marcuse mean when he says that the world cannot be changed piecemeal but only through its destruction? (99) How (or is?) such a conception affirmative?
2) And a similar question What does he mean when he says that the ideal can only be realized against the ideal? (100)
3) Marcuse talks about beauty as a central and integral feature of art and as a result happiness/pleasure. What about art that dismisses beauty? Can it ever function in a way that Marcuse imagined?
4) Marcuse says of affirmative culture: right is on its side (120) He frequently labels things as good or bad. Is this justifiable? Do we all read the same understanding of right or wrong? How does this relate to the concept of the politically correct?