My current investigation is more philosophical or theoretical, and somewhat more distant from the issues of practice in dance, therapy, and somatics. I think that it is important to look at the philosophical issues more closely because the proposed unifying discipline of somaesthetics proposed by Richard Shusterman, and my elaboration of that in terms of a critical somaesthetics, is a philosophical discipline that offers the scope of a unifying perspective in relation to somatic and aesthetic practices. I see the critical somaesthetics as I am developing this here as essentially an elaboration of Herbert Marcuse’s critical or negative stance. This stance insists on (a) the critical and negative role of art, and as opposed to a positive or affirmative one; (b) it insists on the critical role of reason and theory over the unifying role of ‘spirit’ and practice. I think that we need to investigate these aspects of Marcuse’s thought in more depth in order to gain sight of the contours of the the new discipline of critical somaesthetics.

It does not matter whether I see critical somaesthetics as already being there implicit in Marcuse, or whether Marcuse merely anticipates this. It seems relatively clear that he takes seriously enough Reichian elaboration of psychoanalysis in terms of somatics, and brings it together with the Heideggerian concern with the critical significance of art. It is clear enough that the basic framework for a critical somaesthetics is already there in Marcuse. The question that I want to consider is the role of the problematic of art and technology that Marcuse took from Heidegger and how that motivates the particular interest in psychoanalysis and somatics, and Marcuse’s particular interpretation of that in relation to Marxism. The basic basic contours of Marcusean critical somaesthetics are already there in his early papers.* In particular, he already spells out the fundamental role of art as having a liberatory and revolutionary potential, the basic distinction between art as affirmative and as negative or critical, and on embodiment in life practices as the key to tapping its progressive elements.

The focus on the role of art can be traced to Heidegger’s concern with the creative or constitutive role of the work of art. Heidegger’s concern was to exhibit the underlying dynamics of modernity in terms of the totalising character of what he calls technological paradigms (#Dreyfus). For the ancients (the Greeks) techne or instrumental rationality was relativised to the centrality of the polis as a political entity and its inherent ratinality and unity. The polis achieves cultural unity by bringing together cultural practices through the processes of political expression. What is characteristic of modernity on the other hand is the dominance of technological paradigms, of technical or instrumental rationality, that has a totalising tendency.

For Heidegger it was art that brought together the non-technological, non-instrumental social practices, and brough them to the centre. There is a tension between the technological and the nontechnological paradigms. Technological paradigms comprise the tendency to assimilate all practices to instrumental rationality whereas art and nontechnological paradigms offer a resistance to this tendency. So art comprises an autonomous sphere of aesthetic experience that functions to focus the non-instrumental practices and that provides a grounding. For it is the characteristic of technological practices that they seek to make everything clear, transparent and explicit, and therefore to extricate the grounding in embodied practices in terms of an abstract theory of practice.

It was the loss of grounding in embodied opaque practices that Heidegger initially saw as the fundamental problem of modernity, the loss of grouding and therefore the loss of meaning that came together with the tendency to assimilate everything to abstract instrumental reason. So for example Heidegger sought to exhibit how nature ceases to have its aesthetic immediacy and instead becomes assimilated to technology as either an exploitable resource, input into the production process, or else as a giant health park. Art is supposed to provide a form a resistance to totalising technology by focussing those practices which are non-technological or social. However, Heidegger realised that the problem with this is that the artwork itself as a totalising tendency, shining the light away from the practices themselves.

This is this problematic of the totalising effects of technology and of art itself that provides I think the backdrop and a point of departure for Marcuse’s concern with art and revolution. Marcuse sees art as at once concervative and as having revolutionary potential. In his view art is conservative if it is positive or affirmative, that is, if it posits particular values or practices a central or definitive of a culture, as for example, in the case of ‘national art’ or ‘high art’. On the other hand, art does embody the liberatory values, that is, it does focus nontechnological practices, on in Marcuse’s preferred terms, high art embodies the liberatory values of bourgeois art. Affirmative culture, according to Marcuse, is art that is placed at the centre, that embodies the values of the dominant classes.

Marcuse considers what the affirmative concept of culture comes to. This concept is essentially that of organicist theory of culture. According to the affirmative concept of culture in the sense of ‘national culture’ whereby culture contains a ‘spiritual truth’. Marcuse says:

There is a concept of culture that can serve as an important instrument of social research because it expresses the implication of the mind in the historical process of society. It signifies the totality of social life in a given situation, insofar as both the areas of ideational reproduction (culture in the narrower sense, the “spiritual world”) and of material reproduction (“civilization”) form a historically distinguishable and comprehensible unity. There is , however, another fairly widespread usage of the concept of culture, in which the spiritual world is lifted out of its social context, making culture a (false) collective noun and attributing (false) universality to it. This second concept of culture (clearly seen in such expressions as “national culture,” “Germanic culture,” or “Roman culture”) plays off the spiritual world against the material world by holding up culture as the realm of authentic values and self-contained ends in opposition to the world of social utility and means.

So here we can see that Marcuse distances himself from the view of art as an autonomous domain in opposition to the realm of techne or utility. He furthermore identifies this conception of the spiritual domain of autonomous art in the concept of affirmative culture with the historically specific bourgeois culture:

This concept itself has developed on the basis of a specific historical form of culture, which is termed “affirmative culture” in what follows. By affirmative culture is meant that culture of the bourgeois epoch which led in the course of its own development to the segregation from civilizationof the mental and spiritual world as an independent realm of value that is also considered suprior to civilization. Its decisive characteristic is the assertion of 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 himself “from within”, without any transformation of the state of fact.

We can see that Marcuse here identifies the concept of affirmative culture with bourgeois society and contrasts it with the Marxist insistence on transformation not only in the ideal world of feeling but in material conditions of life. While he departs from Heidegger’s early insistence on the artwork as providing an autonomous domain of immediacy, meaning, liberation from instrumentality, and spiritual fulfilment, his critique presupposes Heidegger. Moreover, Marcuse does not completely reject the concept of art as liberatory, because he still retains the idea, in Heidegger, that art really does embody liberatory values of bourgeois society, and therefore that art retains its liberatory potential. The problem is with the idea of art as affirmative. It is the negative or critical potential of art that provides the means of material transformation and true liberation.

And indeed Marcuse in the end thinks that it is through art, or the aesthetic dimension, that ultimately social tranformation is to be achieved. Once we shed the idea of affirmative culture and museal art as an autonomous domain of private, personal, and inner experience, the liberatory values of art are released into the world and reveal to us the oppressive and unacceptable nature of material life conditions. Bourgeois society depends on affirmative culture both, to justify its rule (so as to differentiate itself from l’ancient regime) and its idealism forms a way of distracting away from oppression by pointing to inner liberation through spiritual ideals. Marcuse however points out that implicit in this is the very criticism of bourgeois society:

But bourgeois idealism is not merely ideology, for it expresses a correct objective content. It contains not only the justification of the established form of existence, but also the pain of its establishment: not only quiescence about what is, bu also remembrance of what could be. … By painting in the luminous colors of this world the beauty of men and things and trans-mundane happiness, it has planted real longing alongside poor consolation and false consecration in the soil of bourgeois life. This art raised pain and sorrow, desperation and loneliness, to the level of metaphysical powers and set individuals against one another and the gods in the nakedness of physical immediacy, beyond all social mediations. This exaggeration contains the higher truth that such a world cannot be changed piecemeal, but only through its destruction. Classical bourgeois art put its ideal forms at such a distance from everyday occurrence that those whose suffering and hope reside in daily life could only rediscover themselves through a leap into a totally other world. In this way art nourished the belief that all previous history had been only the dark and tragic prehistory of a coming existence. And philosophy took this idea seriously enough to be concerned about its realisation. Hegel’s system is the last protest against the degradation of this idea …

Idealism takes the ideal contents of bourgeois art seriously and posits their revolutionary contents. That is, idealism takes seriously the fact that these ideals are inconsistent with the material reality and that they therefore would demand a revolution, that is, that bourgeois art posits ideals which are utopian and rebellious.

So Marcuse does, in the end, accept the revolutionary contents of art, but he sees art in its affirmative form as sustaining the existing oppressive order by raising the utopian ideals contained in bourgeois high art to the realm of the spirit and therefore by removing them from the realm of material existence. Still, Marcuse accepts that it is art that contains the utopian ideals of our historical stage of society, the problem being that it succeeds in removing these contents so far from ordinary reality and experience of individuals as to disconnect them and render them unattainable. Bourgeois high art succeeds in extricating these liberatory, revolutionary contents and in rendering them ideal and autonomous, and as such forms the necessary precondition of the material oppression and abstract ‘spiritual’ liberty that characterises bourgeois society. Yet, while it forms the psychological pre-conditions of the oppressive bourgeois society by making liberty abstracti, it is precisely because of its idealism, as contrasted with positivist ‘realism’, that renders the bourgeois art revolutionary in scope.

So it is only when the ideals are rendered merely ideal or purely abstract, disconnected from actual material life practices, that this revolutionary power is curtailed and located in the immaterial domain of the spirit and of purely inner liberation and fulfilment. The spiritualisation of art takes place throught the notion of affirmative culture, of museal art, that is, through the regimentation of art and its placement in the special autonomous domain of purely private and personal appreciation. In other words, it is art as affirmative, museal culture that achieves the diffision of the demand for social change that is contained in works of art, through the separtion of the domain of pleasure, happiness and liberation from the domain of everday material life.

Marcuse, as usual, sees a fundamental duality in the concept of the soul, as both the uncritical pacifier that is capable of making all contradictions consistent, and in that sense as opposed to reason that must seek truth by overcoming them through effective action, and at the same time as the embodiment of the ideals of bourgeois culture:

An essential difference between the soul and the mind is that the former is not oriented toward critical knowledge of truth … antitheses of (Western, Germanic, Faustian culture) dissolve into the beautiful and profound unity of culture. The reconciliatory nature of the soul manifests itself clearly where psychology is made the organon of the social and cultural sciences, without foundation in a theory of society that penetrates behind culture. … The soul takes fright at the hard truth of theory, which points up the necessity of changing an impoverished form of existence. …With the help of the soul, the bourgeoisie in advanced capitalist society buried its ideals of an early period. That soul is of the essence makes a good slogan when only power is of the essence.

But the soul really is essential–as the unexpressed, unfulfilled life of the individual. The culture of souls absorbed in a false form those forces and wants which could find no place in everyday life. The cultural ideal assimilated man’s longing for a happier life: for humanity, goodness, joy, truth, and solidarity. Only, in this ideal, they are all furnished with the affirmative accent of belonging to a higher, purer, nonprosaic world. … There is a good reason for the exemplification of the cultural ideal in art, for only in art has bourgeois society tolerated its own ideals and taken them seriously as a general demand. What counts as utopia, phantasy, and rebellion in the world of fact is allowed in art. There affirmative culture has displayed the forgotten truths over which “realism triumphs” in ordinary life. The medium of beauty decontaminates truth and sets it apart from the present.

Art succeeds in packaging the ideals of happiness and liberation of bourgeois culture and setting them apart from material reality, thus nullifying the deman for social transformation. Yet it is precisely because art has become the embodiment of these ideals that art remains the last domain where these ideals are expressed and acknowledged. It is in art that Western culture embodies is ideals and so is defined. What prevents the actual realisation of these ideals is the segmentation of aesthetic experience into the special domain of private experience, that is, bourgeois practices whereby the realisation of these ideals is rendered inner and private, and so disconnected from material reality of everyday life. “Bougeois society has liberated individuals, but as persons who are to keep themselves in check. From the beginning, the prohibition of pleasure was a condition of freedom.”

Immediately Marcuse connects this analysis to the issue of the role of the body as the instrument of pleasure within capitalist society: “A society split into classes can afford to make man into a means of pleasure only in the form of bondage and exploitation” (115). The abstraction of the liberatory ideals of art, of the sensuousness and the anticipation of sensual pleasure that it contains, is necessary in an economic system which requires that the reification or objectification of the body takes place within an exploitative system of production. In other words, the exploitative productive system would be upset where bodily sensuousness assumed an immediacy, breaking down the system of mediation demanded by capitalist economics.

Affirmative culture achieves this precisely by achieving the split between the soul and the body:

in affirmative culture, the “soulless” regions do not belong to culture. Like every other commodity of the sphere of civilization, the are openly abandoned to the economic law of value. Only spiritual beauty and spiritual enjoyment are left to culture. (117)

It is through the separation of beauty and art from the body, and then projecting truth onto art, that bourgeois culture attains the pacification of the demand for happiness by means of aesthetic experiences and moments of beauty. The beautiful moment functions to reconcile one to a bad and unhappy reality. Affirmative culture achieves this function.

If the individual is ever to come under the power of the ideal to the extent of believing that his concrete longings and needs are to be found in it–found moreover in a state of fulfilment and gratification, then the ideal must give the illusion of granting present satisfaction. It is this illusory reality that neither philosophy nor religion can attain. … in the beauty of the work of art, longing is momentarily fulfilled. The percipient experiences happiness. And once it has taken the form in the work, the beautiful moment can be continually repeated. It is eternalised in the art work. … Affirmative culture was the historical form in which were preserved those human wants which surpassed the material reproduction of existence. (119-120)

In other words, affirmative culture takes care of those aspects of human fulfilment and satisfaction which cannot be in fact fulfilled within the “material reproduction of existence”, and so must be relegated to the domain of the spiritual. Art creates an illusion and acts as a drug. If Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses, Marcuse can be seen as saying that art is the opium of the bourgeosie.

For Heidegger the work of art focuses social practices and renders them immediate and present, as the ideals of a society. But in the form of affirmative culture it succeeds, over and above this, in extricating these practices not only as a way of focussing and unifying, but also in detaching these ideals (rendering them merely ideals passed on from the past) from actual material reality, actual social practices that are taken over by the totalising technological paradigms, or in the case of a Marxist reinterpretation of that, by the expoitative practices of capitalist economy. The satisfaction contained in art must be an illusion, since the body which is the site of real fulfilment is relegated to the domain of economic expoitation, and the bourgeois individual is incapable of experiencing real pleasure and happiness: “The ideal emulated by the person who renounces his instincts and places himself under the categorical imperative of duty (the Kantian ideal is merely the epitome of all affirmative tendencies of culture) is insensitive to happiness” (119).