Marcuse, Aesthetics, Imagination, and Desires

Abstract

Because the way society reproduces itself in consciousness is located in the imagination and desires of its members, and perceiving the penetration of social norms and values into the instinctual structure of individuals, we will examine (1) how Marcuse relates the movement of socio-political emancipation to transformations in mutilated perception, and (2) the place of the aesthetic dimension in forms of perception, considering the polysemy of the term derived from aisthesis: referring to the sensible, to the senses, to beauty, and to art. Marcuse emphasizes the active role of the senses in producing the matrix of intelligibility through which we experience, interpret, and order the lifeworld. We focus on reflections formulated from the 1960s onward, when Marcuse perceives, in the Zeitgeist, a “new sensibility” capable of opposing the experience of the senses as conditioned and contained by instrumentalized rationality. In this article, we consider that the new sensibility can lead to a “paradigm shift” capable of calling into question the very ongoing determination of the real. To conclude, we will show Marcuse’s radical defense of the permanence of art as a phenomenon that transforms sensible perception, as it appears in his last work. Its alienation from reality allows the work of art to express both a refusal of the given and the experience of distinct situations.