Forty years after the revolutionary year, 1968, memories become nostalgic for the supposed creative individualism of the time. Yet the moment between the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and the crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact forces in August, 1968 was characterized by an extraordinary degree of optimism. This was a qualitatively new politics. Its historical evidence includes that, in May '68 in Paris, the government was brought near to defeat by a general strike involving 10 million workers while students occupied the Latin Quarter. Perhaps, though, the experience of being-there-among-others was more transformative than any proposed reorganisation of the state. It was a time when personal liberation was political, for example in new attitudes to gender and sexuality, and in context of campaigns for national liberation from Algeria to Vietnam. In the prelude to this upheaval, when a new society began to appear really possible (while the actually-existing socialism of the East bloc was increasingly perceived as not actually existing), Herbert Marcuse spoke at the Free University in Berlin and at Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London, in July, 1967. Other speakers at the Roundhouse included black power activist Stokely Carmichael and alternative psychiatrist R D Laing. The title of Marcuse's paper was 'Liberation from the Affluent Society', in which he introduced the idea of society as a work of art. But what does it mean to say that society is a work of art? And is there art in such a society?

 

I address these questions by reconsidering Marcuse's writing from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his earlier Eros and Civilization,^[2] Marcuse integrated psychoanalysis in a Marxist critique of consumer society, extended in One Dimensional Man.^[3] Both books were re-issued in paperback in 1966, the former with a new political preface, and became required reading in the student movement. At the University of California, San Diego, Marcuse taught a course titled The Warfare State.^[4] Governor Ronald Reagan tried to persuade the University to sack Marcuse, who received threats of violence - students guarded his house while he stayed with friends. Then, aged 69 in July 1967,^[5] he lectured in Berlin (at a student-organised series of discussions), and spoke at the Roundhouse a few days later.^[6] At the Roundhouse, he alludes to an aesthetic society as 'the oldest dream of radical theory and practice ... the most utopian, the most radical possibility of liberation today.'^[7] In August, at the 3^rd Conversation on Humanism, Salzburg^[8] he develops the idea in his paper 'Society as a Work of Art.' Later, in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), he retains the idea that beauty, as non-repressive order, negates the established society precisely through the autonomy of aesthetic form, its non-reliance on ordinary perception.

 

Flowers, ghettos and the counter-culture

The 1960s was the time of the civil rights movement, anti-war protest, campus unrest,^[9] a New Left, and the counter-culture - music, sexual liberation, consciousness-changing drugs. Marcuse saw the Hippies in San Francisco, and other groups, as agents for a refusal of consumer society, using performance to provoke recognition of that society's irrationality. It was a time of small magazines, such as International Times in the UK and Black Mask in the US. In the first issue of Black Mask, Ben Morea and Ron Hahne state, in a tone reminiscent of factory soviets in the Russian Revolution fifty years earlier:

 

The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretence and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity. Your lie has failed. The world is rising against your oppression. .. Let the struggle begin!^[10]

 

It was also the beginning of environmental activism, and intentional communities in rural areas building new social architectures through consensus and non-violence. These departures from mainstream society represented a search for sanity and healing, or refuge from what Marcuse calls in an essay on ecology 'the mutilated consciousness of individuals' in consumer society^[11] The cause of that mutilation was the American dream, merging family values with consumerism. Joan Didion writes of an 'uneasy apprehension' in a society which, if economically strong, had evacuated its sense of value.^[12] The casualties and the dreamers went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to wear flowers in their hair, though the Summer of Love began on January 14^th, at the First Human Be-In. The Berkeley Barb reported,

 

The spiritual revolution will be manifest ... In unity we will shower the country with waves of ecstasy and purification. Fear will be washed away; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empire will lie drying on deserted beaches ...^[13]

 

This fuses Enlightenment and millenarianism, purity and immanent revolution. But the Summer of Love was, as Didion saw, political: the personal becomes political, and the political takes place in personal life - or did in Haight-Ashbury, known as the District. Peter Braunstein, too, writes of the flower-child phase as 'a radical political stance' in a Politics of Love^[14] in face of the war in Vietnam: 'to be childlike ... meant to be at one with nature, with the earth, with other human beings, to be nonviolent ... to consciously regain the simplicity and wonder of childhood as a perceptual prism ...'^[15] In Britain, a William Blake revival similarly informed a new Albion, manifest in free festivals.^[16] Then, writing on Woodstock in August, 1969, Lauren Onkey states that a rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner by Jimi Hendrix fractured the values of white, middle-class American consumerism. in a 'sonic assault on the audience ... [which] attained the aural equivalent of Armageddon.'^[17] The flower children were at the Roundhouse, too. Marcuse begins,

 

I am very happy to see so many flowers here and that is why I want to remind you that flowers, by themselves, have no power whatsoever, other than the power of men and women who protect them and take care of them against aggression and destruction.^[18]

 

In An Essay on Liberation, mostly written during 1967, Marcuse notes the Hippies' subversion of language: 'subcultural groups develop their own language ... 'trip,' 'grass,' 'pot,' 'acid'... '^[19] and sees a forceful linguistic revolt in black culture.

Situating the aesthetic society.

 

The conditions in which Marcuse wrote his most optimistic papers, often in response to quickly moving engagement, indicates an emergent, qualitatively new society in as much as the counter-culture lived the revolution (before the revolution). This matters in relation to Marcuse's efforts to say how the new society comes into being. Later he cites the role of an intelligentsia but in 1967 it seemed the contradictions and excesses of affluence produced a spontaneous refusal, which he rationalizes as the production of a new biological need for liberation.

 

Vincent Geoghegan notes two aspects to Marcuse's view of student protest and the counter-culture: first, an intellectual refusal of conformity and a demand 'that critical thought and knowledge are ... brought to bear on intellectual discussion ...'^[20] and, second, an experiential, moral-sexual rebellion in 'sit-ins, be-ins and love-ins' constituting an 'existential community'.^[21] Marcuse saw in sexual and moral liberation (and use of consciousness-changing drugs - to which he did not object though his own preference was for cigars), 'the rediscovery within themselves of the instinctual basis of freedom ... needs that are the 'absolute negation' of the current order.'^[22] This is personal and political, a subversion of social institutions vital to a wider restructuring. Similarly, looking back on her experiences in Paris in 1968, Julia Kristeva emphasises the sexual revolution: 'Group sex, hashish, etc., were experienced as a revolt against bourgeois morality and family values ... striking savagely at the heart of the traditional conception of love.' and, ' ... '68 was a worldwide movement that contributed to an unprecedented reordering of private life ... '^[23]

 

For Marcuse, the counter-culture produced a transformative politics. In An Essay on Liberation he writes, 'If now, in the rebellion of the young intelligentsia, surrealistic forms of protest and refusal spread through the movement, this ... may indicate a fundamental change in the situation.'^[24] This is a politics of moments, of sudden clarity and immediacy. In his Roundhouse paper he cites Walter Benjamin's observation that, 'during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city ... there were people shooting at the clocks ...'^[25] as 'the leap into the realm of freedom - a total rupture.'^[26] At times he is lyrical, citing a fusion of Marxism and surrealism in the slogans of May 1968; he continues,

 

... the piano with the jazz player stood well between the barricades ... the striking students in Toulouse demanded the revival of the language of the Troubadours ... The new sensibility has become a political force. It crosses the frontier between the capitalist and the communist orbit; it is contagious because the atmosphere ... carries the virus.^[27]

 

The revival of the langue d'Oc might be low on a revolutionary agenda today, though the small town of Millau on the Larzac plateau was the site of a mass demonstration to support farmer-activist JosŽ BovŽ on 30 June, 2000 - described as 'Seattle-on-Tarn.'^[28] I think there is a continuity of immanent revolt in the counter-culture of the 1960s, the squatting movement, anti-roads protest in the 1990s, and anti-capitalism. Seeing an eruption of new ways of being, Marcuse adopts the idea of a society as a work of art: a post-scarcity society in which work is play and the pleasure principle replaces the requirements of productivity.

 

In 1967, Marcuse argues in his Berlin lecture, 'The End of Utopia',^[29] the post-scarcity society is no longer a dream but really possible, in the unprecedented conditions of revolt in an affluent society, when the working class is no longer the revolutionary force but revolt nonetheless erupts, when resistance is produced by the system itself, 'by virtue of the contradiction generated ...'^[30] and liberation is 'a biological, sociological and political necessity',^[31]

 

Society as a Work of Art

The abolition of work - the ludic-libidinal society - appears in the writing of anarchist Peter Kropotkin in the 1880s, and utopian theorist Charles Fourier several decades earlier. For Fourier, work relations, as social relations, are erotic when people of complementary passions (in his elaborate system of human nature) are naturally drawn to work together. Marcuse is more cautious than Fourier, and less given to fantasy, but nonetheless sees (as actually-existing precedent) a period of sexual liberation in the pre-Stalinist history of the Soviet Union: 'when sexual morality was factually and legally free to a degree unknown in previous history.'^[32] though this also reflected a requirement to produce children for the collective workforce. Marcuse, however, is equally concerned with the agency of beauty, not just sex, in the ludic society. ^[33] Paul Robinson argues that the identification of beauty with non-repressive order fits awkwardly with Marcuse's idea (in the 1930s) that bourgeois art, by purveying beauty as a displacement of hope, enables the established society to reduce unrest. Robinson sees a 'distrust of culture ... throughout Marcuse's early writings.'^[34] But Marcuse cites bourgeois escapism there (in an essay which is a reaction to the rise of fascism), and refers to beauty as a pervasive quality that emerges free of such displacement in liberation. Leaving that aside, in 1967 Marcuse proposes that the creative imagination is the productive force of a new society, breaking with a tradition of Utopia as far-away islands in a far-distant sea, recounted in travellers' tales. For Marcuse, the end of utopia is here-and-now, a Land of Cockaigne^[35] enacted in the counter-culture. In Salzburg, he reiterates that the creative imagination can be the productive force of a qualitatively different society in conditions of technological advance. Its realization is repressed by the mechanisms of the established society, yet affluence conjures the promise of liberation in a false liberation from want.

 

Marcuse attaches particular force to art as a vehicle for a radical imagination Citing the idea of false consciousness in Marxism, he states, 'The power of knowing, seeing, hearing, which is limited, repressed and falsified in reality, becomes in art the power of truth and liberation.'^[36] He first outlines the function of bourgeois art as affirmative culture that reconciles but does not lessen strife, displacing peace to aesthetics. But then, citing the Expressionist painter Franz Marc, Marcuse reads the crisis (as he calls it) of art in the 1910s, the time of early abstraction, as, 'a rebellion against the entire traditional function of art' in which the object is dissolved.^[37] The old art offered a 'beautiful semblance' but the new is - citing Dadaist Raoul Hausmann - ''a painted or moulded critique of cognition.''^[38]

 

Marcuse asks if art's critical function is bound to semblance, and asserts that art is aware of the contradiction while it should, 'no longer be powerless with respect to life, but should instead help give it shape - and none the less remain art, i.e. semblance.'^[39] This recalls Ernst Bloch - in The Principle of Hope -on art as a vehicle for the shaping of hope. Bloch writes,

 

We say of the beautiful that it gives pleasure, ... But its reward does not end there, art is not food. For it remains even after it has been enjoyed ... into a land which is pictured ahead. The wishful dream goes out here into what is indisputably better ... a shaped beauty. Only, is there anything more in what has been shaped ... than a game of appearance? ^[40]

 

Returning to Marcuse, rejecting Socialist Realism and citing Surrealist poetry as the evocation of a new world in new images and language, he says, 'art is rescued in its dual, antagonistic function. As a product of the imagination it is semblance, but the possible truth and reality to come appear in this semblance and art is able to shatter the false reality of the status quo.'^[41] But a difficulty appears.

 

If art is to dissolve reality, it remains a non-material entity, a semblance even in the form of a negated reality. But Marcuse aligns art to an articulation of beauty and a sensibility he regards as a prerequisite for change. Society must create the conditions for 'the truth of art to be incorporated in the social process itself and for the form of art to be materialized.'^[42] This could be read in context of abstraction - form has a non-mimetic order which fractures the perceptual. For Marcuse, 'The beautiful belongs to the sphere of non-repressive sublimation, as the free formation of the raw material of the senses and thus the sensuous embodiment of the mere idea.'^[43] Beauty is integral to order.^[44] In a period of totalitarianism, 'The luxury function of art must be destroyed'^[45] in favour of antagonism.^[46] Then, he argues that if technology and art are traditionally separated as the beautiful and useful, the divide can be collapsed, like that between work and play: 'the idea of a possible artistic formation of the life world.'^[47] Form is the form of freedom, a practice of life, 'which free people in a free society are able to provide for themselves.'^[48] This has implications for art in a society which is itself a work of art. To say people provide the form of freedom for themselves is a crucial understanding of a necessary shift in power relations from an imminent revolution resting on the privileged fore-knowledge of an intelligentsia towards the direct production of a qualitatively different society; the latter has implications of both direct democracy and a new quality of personal life.

 

For Joseph Beuys, coincidentally, everyone is an artist in as much as everyone has a creative imagination and can envisage new social as well as artistic forms. The definition of art dissolves here into free living. I return to this below, but a difficulty remains: how in practical terms is the new society to be produced?

 

The Circle.

In Berlin, after the lecture 'The End of Utopia', a member of the audience says, 'the centre of your paper today was the thesis that a transformation of society must be preceded by a transformation of needs ... this implies that changed needs can only arise if we first abolish the mechanisms that have let the needs come into being as they are.'^[49] Marcuse replies:

 

You have defined what is unfortunately the greatest difficulty in the matter. Your objection is that, for new, revolutionary needs to develop, the mechanisms that reproduce the old needs must be abolished. In order for the mechanisms to be abolished, there must first be a need to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are placed, and I do not know how to get out of it.^[50]

 

But it seems that in his allusion to a society produced by its members, or in a direct democracy in Beuys' terms, the temporal trajectory (which confines the new to a tomorrow which never dawns) is abandoned. In its place is a liberation which I would compare with Henri Lefebvre's idea that moments of presence, or sudden clarity, occur within the routines of everyday life.

 

To juxtapose Marcuse's idea of liberation from the affluent society and Lefebvre's theory of moments is not unreasonable. Both revised Marxism, both engaged with student movements, and both were interested in art (though Lefebvre's link to the Situationists is more definite than Marcuse's reflections on literature and art).^[51] They met when Marcuse was in Paris. Marcuse was inspired by the events of May 1968, observing the radicalism of many in the technical intelligentsia, or technocrats of repression.^[52]

 

But Lefebvre was uninspired by Marcuse's emphasis on the aesthetic. He recalls,

 

I met Marcuse several times. We had some points of agreement on the critique of bourgeois society and one-dimensional man ... but I didn't agree with him on the fact that one could change society by aesthetics ... According to Marcuse, industrial society, by its mode of social control, provokes a reductionism of possibilities for individuals and an integration (or disintegration) of the working class. The attack on the system can only come from an encounter between critical theory and a marginal substratum of outcasts and outsiders. But in May 1968 this attach took the form of a formidable working class general strike.^[53]

 

Marcuse's reliance in his writing on avant-garde tendencies contrasts with Lefebvre's optimism as to the role of the working class. But while Marcuse clings to the role of students as a new intelligentsia,^[54] Lefebvre is informed by his experience of what he still regards as the vitality of a working class, 10 million of whom joined the general strike. Lefebvre insists, too, on the non-totality of repression -as Andy Merrifield writes, 'Lefebvre could never comprehend modern capitalism as seamless; his mind revelled in openness not closure ...'^[55] Marcuse saw the system as tending to total repression through consumerism, but for Lefebvre power leaked.

 

These comparisons are easy to make in retrospect. In Salzburg in 1967, Marcuse ends by accepting that freedom is not-yet. He concludes:

 

For art itself can never become political without destroying itself ... The contents and forms of art are never those of direct action, they are always only the language, images, and sounds of a world not yet in existence. Art can preserve the hope for and the memory of such a world ... no longer the great representational, reconciling, purifying art of the past ... instead the uncompromising rejection of illusion, the repudiation of the pact with the status quo, the liberation of consciousness, imagination, perception, and language from its mutilation in the prevailing order.^[56]

 

Beauty as Protest?

What kind of art, if any, would be produced in (and by) an aesthetic society? In one way, there would be no difference between art and life, hence no art as such. It is an attractive vision: a life of ease prefigured by Baudelaire in his poem 'L'invitation au voyage', the subject-matter for several paintings by Matisse in 1905-06. There, all is order and beauty, calmness and sensuality. When social relations are libidinal, public as well as intimate life is erotic - every day a Sunday^[57] as set out in George Seuarat's paintings, Bagnieux, Asnieres (1883, London, National Gallery) and La Grande Jatte (1885, Chicago, Art Institute). Set on opposite banks of the same stretch of the Seine, these paintings show the artisan class and the bourgeoisie taking their leisure, while the factory chimneys of Clichy signify the post-scarcity economy.

 

This is in keeping with the counter-culture's adoption of a life of hanging out as the refusal of a system driven by the military-industrial complex, seen as it was in the Vietnam war. Similarly, Dada in Zurich in 1916 was a rejection of the values that produced the 1914-18 war. The Summer of Love denotes a lifestyle of new music, the use of marijuana and LSD, but a revolt against power-over, indicated in the slogan Make Love Not War. It was, too, in everyday life in the District, an adoption of non-productive time - combined with self-reduction, in reducing oneself the price paid for goods, and re-distributing the surplus of the affluent society in free-shops, free food distributions, and at times free health care. The counter-culture has, too, a commonality with Situationism. David Pinder writes of the dŽrive (drift), 'Accounts ... suggest slowness and a sense of drifting with currents ... fugitive movement, willed drive and an intense sensation of the passage itself .'^[58] He cites Kristin Ross that the dŽrive resonates with a refusal of the idea of work as toil for Rimbaud and Laforgue, and the oppositional culture of the Paris Commune; and quotes Ross that laziness becomes, 'the impossible liberty of having exempted oneself from the organization of work in a society that expropriates the very body of the worker.'^[59]

 

Meanwhile in San Francisco, in the District, the Hippie (Haight-Ashbury independent property) culture took an equally resistant form. James Farrell writes,

 

The hippies ... differentiated themselves from mainstream culture by their drugs and music ... by their hair and dress and decorum. Like civil rights workers who put their bodies on the line, countercultural activists drew a line with their bodies. When men let their hair grow ... their long hair ... symbolized countercultural identity and defiance of the culture of conformity. ... Freeing themselves from the fashion world, many wore hand-me-downs and Army surplus ... Men and women adorned themselves with flowers and with crafted beads and colourful baubles. ... By appearance and behaviour they declared themselves actors (and sometimes activists) in a new cultural drama. ^[60]

 

Frances Fitzgerald writes similarly that the Hippies aimed to 'disarticulate the society and the intellectual frames they had grown up in', and that, 'everyone had a right to do his or her own thing.^[61] Meanwhile, the New York Diggers,

 

... arranged for a tour of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the auspices of ESSO (the East Side Service Organisation, a hip social services agency; the fact that this acronym was better known as the name of a giant oil corporation is probably what gained them entrŽe to the NYSE) Once they had been escorted into the visitors' gallery ... they produced fistfuls of dollar bills and flung them from the balcony onto the floor below. All bidding stopped as traders impulsively switched ... to an atavistic frenzy, scrambling to grab what they could from the shower of cash. They then began to berate the Diggers ... '^[62].

 

In the 1990s, artist-groups such as the Yes Men used similar performative tactics, or, like WochenKlauser in Vienna, dialogic tactics. But at this point I have moved, almost without realising it in the process of writing (which is where my thinking is generally located), from a society that is a work of art to art that contributes to conditions in which the dominant society's contradictions and excesses are evident - as prelude to the realisation of a new society. This is either a jump into speculation, or a leap of faith. Either way, in the really-achieved ludic society there is no need for art as a specialist form of production, in its place is art as expression of a new sensibility in the actions of everyday life.

 

Perhaps Beuys combines work articulating an emergent revolution with work that tries to point towards a possibility of revolution - living the new society within the old, as well as critiquing the dominant society. In the Revolution is Us (1972), he uses a life-size, photographic image of himself walking towards the viewer, first used as a poster for an event. A catalogue states: 'His version of an alternative to bureaucratic state control was based on the principle of 'FREE DISCUSSION, DEMOCRATIC DECISION MAKING and COLLECTIVE ACTION'.'^[63] In We Can't Do It Without The Rose (1972), a live art work, he sits at a desk on which a fresh red rose is placed in a scientific glass cylinder. Caroline Tisdall writes, 'Bud and bloom are in fact green leaves transformed. So in relation to the leaves and the stem the bloom is a revolution, although it grows through organic transformation and evolution.'^[64] I have reservations about biological metaphors which take matters from history to a realm outside human intervention, and about the mystical aspect sometimes read into Beuys' work But I am reminded of Marcuse's idea of a production of new biological needs, like new instincts in the Freudian Es though (he says) not in a scientific sense. I read this as between biological and psychological evolution. For Marcuse, beauty is the form of such desires, de-sublimated, freed from the repression of productivity just as from mimetic impositions. In The Aesthetic Dimension, by which time real-political change is neither immanent nor near, it is as if art becomes a safe house in an occupied land, where freedom finds its last resort in - at least - rupture of the codes of the dominant society, such as perceptual codes. Does art offer a force to interrupt, or a moment of clarity that remains transformative and that is personal but not limited to private life? Art, after all, is public, but I do not imply a fixation with the visual, using the term art for music and literature as well. I am reminded of the notes to a Patti Smith album in which she cites Rimbaud - or Breton - that beauty is convulsive or not at all. But I do not know how to make the necessary leap. Like Marcuse in Berlin, I don't know how we exit the circle. I end with a quote from Beuys:

 

In the future all truly political intentions will have to be artistic ones. ... they will have to stem from human creativity and individual liberty. ... this cultural sector ... would be a free press, free TV, and so on ... free from all state intervention. I am trying to develop a revolutionary model that formulates the basic democratic order in accordance with the people's wishes ... that changes the basic democratic order and then restructures the economic sector in a way that will serve the people's needs and not the needs of a minority that wants to make its profits. That is the connection, and this I define as Art.^[65]

 

Malcolm Miles