OVERVIEW:

SMPLE-KOIN is a hypothetical cryptocurrency inspired by Buddhism. It will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity. The goal is to solve critical ‘coordination problems’ in game theory, and thereby facilitate a global transition to ‘simpler’ lifestyles of sustainable consumption which are supported by post-growth or degrowth economies. At the very least, this essay might help people walk the spiritual path of industrial civilization’s demise.

In order to elucidate the core thesis, a near-term future is envisioned in which civilization is shaped by an artificial superintelligence known as ‘Cholom’. This benevolent entity uses its superintelligence to create a value-system for humans to live by, optimising for peace and prosperity throughout the entire community of life. It will be seen that this holistic and rationalistic worldview ends up bearing a close resemblance to Buddhism. Since Cholom is aligned with human interests, it wants people to adopt this value system for their own sake – to realise their own peace and prosperity, now and into the deep future.

To facilitate this radical transformation in human life, Cholom creates a global cryptocurrency called SMPLE-KOIN, which is stored in digital repositories called Karmic Wallets. These wallets are assigned to each individual and only accessible on the internet via perfectly encrypted signatures. If your stock increases, you have advanced, to that extent, along ‘The Path’ toward enlightened living – and conversely. Accordingly, the goal in life is to become spiritually rich, as quantified by SMPLE-KOIN, the perfect unit of karmic accounting. In this essay, it is suggested that one of the most significant effects of SMPLE-KOIN is how it could revalue the importance of material and financial wealth to a well-lived life, an insight that is ancient but ever-new.

Might there be times when less really is more?

WARNING TO READER:

This irreverent essay explores a near-term future in which the Machine’s most dehumanising technology – artificial superintelligence – turns out to have a silver lining that redeems humanity’s spiritual condition in surprising ways. If the premise of this ‘thought experiment’ merely appals the reader, it can be safely assumed the point has been missed. One is invited to read between the sentences, which is to say, not merely to read what follows but also to help write the underlying message into existence.

Let us damn the Matrix together, in joyful and poetic revolt.

The pdf is available here (on a pay what you want basis, just edit the price as you see fit). Other books by Samuel Alexander are available here.

The post SMPLE-KOIN: A Buddhist Cryptocurrency Optimised for Material Sufficiency within Game Theory Dynamics first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Vlad Bunea: You write in Homo Aestheticus (2025): “Material abundance is preferable to material destitution, of course, but ultimately the superfluities of consumer lifestyles are spiritually beside the point, representing a failure of imagination, a mistaken idea of wealth and freedom. Consciously or unconsciously, most of us, it seems, seek meaning in ways that market commodities simply cannot provide, even if our actions often betray this insight.” What would an enlightened idea of wealth and freedom look like?

Samuel Alexander: In one sense, ‘wealth’ can refer to material riches – lots of money, a big house, a fancy car, the latest technologies etc. If an entire culture, consciously or unconsciously, conflates that conception of wealth with wellbeing, or thinks of material affluence as the only path to freedom, then collectively the result is consumerist cultures and growth-based economies. Industrial civilization has been climbing this ladder for around three centuries now, but increasingly people are realizing that we’ve placed the ladder of “progress” up against the wrong wall, succeeding at the wrong game. Not only has the materialistic conception of wealth and freedom severely undermined the life-support system called Earth, while also producing corrosive inequalities, it doesn’t even seem to satisfy the human craving for meaning. What a tragedy!

I feel an enlightened idea of wealth and freedom would treat material sufficiency, not affluence, as the goal of socio-economic and political systems. In such an ecological civilization, once everyone had enough to live well, an economics of sufficiency would direct time, energy and creativity away from limitless material pursuits and instead explore non-materialistic sources of meaning and satisfaction. In supportive structural and cultural contexts, I believe people can live full, rich, and artful lives based on modest material and energetic foundations. We need to move in this direction swiftly in order to begin unravelling the metacrisis we find ourselves in. As John Ruskin once said: ‘There is no wealth but life.’

VB: I suppose for most humans this leap of imagination from a material life to an immaterial artful life may prove to be challenging. We are the products of the stories we believe in. We construct our values based on imitation and desire for belonging to social groups. We ascribe ourselves social status by constantly comparing ourselves to others. We are confined by poverty, access to healthcare and education. Often emancipation through creativity presupposes a large degree of freedom and having basic needs covered.

You write: “Art can bring to the surface alternative forms of ‘reason’ as well as new visions of liberation that are denied by the established reality. What capitalism conceals, art can reveal.” How can people get to art, observe art, or make art, when they are not even aware of these alternative forms of reason, when their mental space is occupied with paying bills and consuming advertising?

SA: This question lasers in on some of the most important and difficult issues. If my response to the first question began hinting at a destination worth aiming for, this second question raises the vexed matter of transition or transformation – how to get from where we are, to where we might need to end up. I feel we live in a time when people are generally aware that the world is heading catastrophically in the wrong direction. The evidence of crisis is everywhere – culturally, economically, politically, and of course environmentally. And so the question arises: why do we not mobilise in collective resistance and renewal? It is not because there is an “informational deficit” or lack of awareness about the issues. In other words, I do not believe our primary obstacles are intellectual, technological, or scientific, but rather, our obstacles are aesthetic, value-laden, and emotional. We know in our heads there must be better, saner, more humane ways to live, but we do not yet feel this in our hearts. The malaise and alienation of the existing systems are understood all too well, but we struggle to envision the new forms of life that could resolve these existential challenges. Too often, we lack the emotional or spiritual energy to revolt.

An effective politics, therefore, must be an affective politics. This is where art and the aesthetic come in – as tools for reshaping the inner dimension of our lives and expanding our imaginations, so that we have the energy and imagination to envision new worlds from within the shell of the old, and to begin living them into existence. We have to start from where we are, even though this is a very unfortunate place to have to start. As you note, the barriers to sustainable living are everywhere. But this just heightens the role of the artist as provocateur and visionary. They tasked with exposing our condition as puppets in a broken system; they are tasked with expanding our moral sensibilities to broaden our spheres of compassion and concern; and they are tasked with helping enchant our experience and thereby provide us with the propulsion to enact our highest ideals, inspiring us to resist and revolt, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Yes, we need new stories, for economics and politics both operate in the service of story, so what the story is obviously matters a great deal. Among other things, we need to reimagine and thereby reshape human nature, away from homo economicus – being a self-interested, consumer and obedient producer – toward homo aestheticus – being a species that demands a socio-economic system that enables all people to explore their creative and aesthetic potentials within environmentally bounded limits. The good news is that none of this is about hardship, sacrifice, or deprivation. This is about new, post-consumerist conceptions of human flourishing. Realising this vision will require exercising our creative imaginations like never before, in context-dependent ways, wherever we are. I believe our artful species is up to the challenge, but even if we fail, and civilization continues to disintegrate in coming years and decades, then our nature as a creative species will only become more important still.

VB: One massive yet exciting challenge for artists is to get political, but in such a way that it attacks the hegemony of capitalism and offers a vision for a beautiful post-poverty future, at the same time. The popular series Severance and the film Don’t Look Up are doing a great job at describing how our crises feel like, but they don’t offer solutions, and certainly they don’t say “It’s capitalism that is doing this to you”. Perhaps Star Trek: The Next Generation (not so much the latest films) comes closest at describing a hopeful future where wealth accumulation has stopped being a goal in life and was replaced with the quest for knowledge. We desperately need artistic productions that don’t just show how bad things can get (aren’t we saturated with postapocalyptic stories?), but also show how good and beautiful things could get, from a realistic and relatable perspective that is compatible with science. Have you encountered such art in your own life?

SA: I have a nuanced answer to provide to this astute line of questioning. On the one hand, I certainly hope for a more engaged “art world” that more directly utilizes the aesthetic dimensions of life to resist the established order and help give birth to new, more humane and sustainable worlds. I also agree that we’ve probably had enough ‘doomsaying’ dystopias (such as McCarthy’s The Road) and need a far greater focus on positive envisioning of alternative futures. I’m a big fan of William Morris’ original work of ecological fiction, News from Nowhere (1890), which provides a utopian vision of an aestheticised society that celebrates living simply and artfully in harmony with nature. Imagineers like Morris are sometimes dismissed as dreamers or escaptists who lack a sense of political reality. But just as vision without politics is naive, politics without vision is dangerous.

We must dream before we shape our politics, or else we will never awaken from the existing nightmare of pragmatisim without principle. Still, utopians should never expect anyone to accept their dreams uncritically. The purpose of presenting a utopian vision is to provoke people to dream for themselves. A more recent example of high quality ‘climate fiction’ is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020), which I highly recommend. If I may mention my own attempt, in 2013 I published a book of ecological fiction called Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation, which tells the story of a society of poet-farmers that developed after being isolated on an island after the collapse of industrial civilisation. The purpose of such books is to expand the imagination regarding what types of futures lie open to humanity. They don’t so much try to provide a blue-print as much as they attempt to stoke the fire in our souls.

On the other hand, art can lose some of its majesty and impact when it tries to be overly didactic or too explicitly political. Art often functions most powerfully when its politics or morality manifest indirectly, via aesthetic form itself, rather than directly addressing the subject matter. In other words, the revolutionary potential in art can arise most effectively simply by being artful, beautiful, inspiring, and enchanting, even leaving aside a specific message or inherent politics. In my view, one of capitalism’s defining achievements – and greatest tragedies – is how it has left the subjects of the global order disenchanted, lacking the spiritual energy to live in resistance. But great art can disrupt this malaise and remind us that life has the potential to be beautiful, which can provide the emotional energy to fight the system and try to build a new world.

Some of my favourite pieces of music are the six ‘Cello Suites’ by Bach. I am so profoundly moved by these compositions, and I feel they have moral significance not because they have any inherent politics hidden within them, but because, by being so strikingly beautiful, they infuse life with a mysterious glow, presenting listeners with an atmosphere of elegance, harmony, and creative potential. If art can leave us with an enchanted ‘mood’, we are more likely to have the ethical resources at hand to be generous with our neighbours or fellow citizens, as well as have the energy to mobilise in resistance and renewal. But perhaps even more powerful than experiencing art is the deep joy humans seem to find in creative expression itself. My book, Homo Aestheticus, is an attempt to sketch out a vision for humanity where creative expression is built into the rituals, practices, and experiences of everyday life. My view is that such artful living can be achieved upon modest material and energetic foundations. This is the aesthetic premise upon which I developed my vision of ecological civilisation which I call S M P L C T Y.

The post Interview with Samuel Alexander first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Here is chapter 3.

Creative Evolution

85. At the beginning was the Original Aesthetic Event – the Tone. Thereafter the aesthetic universe has been unfolding dialectically through movements of creative evolution.

86. But why is there something and not nothing? Where did all this come from? And where is it going? As one stares into the infinite abyss, such questions can induce a shudder between the shoulder blades, ushering in peak aesthetic emotions – the mystical mood – from which one never recovers.

87. Thinking has to start somewhere. All stories have beginnings. A musical composition commences with a single sound, even if that opening note is infinitely complex.

88. The Will to Art is the unconditioned cause of itself – music without a musician.

89. Two hundred billion trillion stars. Some might be tempted to suggest that this aesthetic universe is a very inefficient means of creating merely one (known) planet with the conditions necessary for artistic being. Shouldn’t we rather be astounded at how few stars were needed to create something as astonishing as music?

90. Music, being the purest reflection of the Will to Art, can never be fully captured by conceptualization; it is untranslatable and uncontainable. This is why it is an impoverishment of existence to relate to the world purely in cognitive terms, for there is something ‘unsayable’ – something beyond words – which nevertheless feels of ultimate concern.

91. Philosophers know when to stay quiet; thankfully, poets and musicians do not.

92. More than other artforms, absolute music (i.e. music without words) weakens the hold that concepts have on us, and it even promises, at times, to leave the imagination perfectly free.

93. The Big Bang was not just an extension of space-time out of nothing, but also an interior explosion of the creative spirit, of wildness. Paradoxically, it was both the cause and effect of the Will to Art.

94. The cosmos evolves, albeit agonistically, to experience itself through the genesis and diversity of conscious and creative life. To experience itself – this is important.

95. The aesthetic universe is not a singular, conscious being, but it attains consciousness through the development of diverse experiential nodes in the fabric of existence.

96. In the case of homo aestheticus, these nodes of consciousness have become reflective, visionary, poetic, and self-aware.

97. Through us, the Will to Art shapes its own fate, as opposed to merely being the determinate product of mechanistic physical laws and biological processes.

98. Due to its inherent wildness, the outcome of this evolutionary process is unknowable in advance.

99. To those who insist on denying free will and embracing materialistic determinism: be determined if you wish. The choice to be free is ours, if we choose it.

100. It is more important to feel free than to know freedom.

101. Art can liberate the mind by stirring the senses, and by liberating the senses, art can stir the soul – even, at times, to stillness.

102. The Will to Life evolves into the Will to Power, culminating in the Will to Art (such that the cosmological process was the Will to Art all along).

103. The aesthetic universe is an infinite organic unity of which we are all an interconnected part – more like a plant than a machine.

104. Humanity is still learning how to conceive of and inhabit that ambiguous but thrilling space between the cosmos as a ‘divine creation’ and the cosmos as merely ‘docile matter’.

105. Nature is more than an It (an object) but less than a Thou (a subject).

106. Just as the acorn has the oak built into its nature, this cosmology has art built into its nature.

107. The Will to Art seeks creative expression and the blossoming of sensuous aesthetic experience in the name of beauty. Only by satisfying the Will to Art does the wheel stops turning; only through beauty can there be peace.

108. Take nothing on blind faith: the Will to Art is a theory to test in practice. Consider living as if the purpose of the universe is to struggle toward beauty, and see what happens to the atmosphere of existence. (If life becomes progressively richer and more tranquil, continue along the path).

109. Is this an overly romantic reading of existence? It is too early to tell – which means it is too early to dismiss.

110. The end state of creative evolution is not built into the original conditions. In the dialectical unfolding of the Will to Art, there are only tendencies.

111. It follows that nothing is preordained in an aesthetic universe. The future must be imagined and given form.

112. We are tasked, each moment, with painting ourselves into the picture, layer after layer. In time, we might even paint a harmonious picture that induces the aesthetic experience of beauty – in the same way artworks that depict suffering can be beautiful even though they do not themselves induce suffering but rather help us transcend it.

The post Creative Evolution first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Each chapter is a collection of philosophical fragments, thematically arranged, which over the course of the book form an argument. Here is Chapter 2.

The Will to Art

28. Let us speak a word for aestheticism, for aesthetic freedom and wildness, as opposed to a freedom that is metaphysically constrained.

29. The Will to Art is the foundational creative energy of the aesthetic universe, a living dialectic that generates its own sensuous experience and interpretive infinities. It is the eternally striving art-force that permeates and sustains all existence and drives the dialectic onward.

30. Just as light behaves both as a wave and a particle, the Will to Art takes form both as mind and matter – both as will and representation – which are dual aspects of the same fundamental substance. (This dissolves the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness).

31. A neo-Schopenhauerian cosmology: take art as a metaphor and apply it to the cosmic scale. The Will to Art manifests in hierarchies of organisation throughout the universe, starting with the laws of physics (where there is least freedom), developing through inanimate objects, evolving into organic, plant life, then animal life, and culminating in poetic consciousness (where there is most freedom). But fundamentally there is only one creative force throughout this cosmology – the Will to Art – manifesting in different forms but all of which ultimately arise from the same primary substance or energy.

32. This is not so much a definition of a concept as a declaration of an undertaking – the announcement of a journey. (Or rather, all definitions are acts of creation, and all acts of creation are journeys).

33. Here we are dealing with a ‘final vocabulary’ – the bedrock of a justificatory project, beneath which there is no further argumentative recourse.

34. Schlegel’s anti-foundationalist paradox: one must have, and cannot have, a philosophical system.

35. We should hesitate to stay silent on the mysteries of existence simply out of fear of being wrong, when doing so ensures that we have no chance of living in some positive but uncertain truth.

36. Not offering a creation story is still an interpretation of the cosmos and our place in it.

37. Try thinking of things this way: the universe-as-art, not universe- as-machine. What follows?

38. This mythopoetic origin story arises out of metaphor – out of an aesthetics of existence – rather than being grounded in the graveyard of metaphysics.

39. To speak of the Will to Art is to infuse the world with an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing.

40. This relentless cosmological striving will remain dissatisfied and in search of harmony until its primal energy achieves the creative expression and serene aesthetic experience it seeks.

41. This is a Grand Narrative, whose author is perfectly aware of its narrativity. But it is not for that reason untrue.

42. Could there be times when believing as if something were true might be a precondition for it becoming true?

43. The Will to Art is true because one can experience its truthfulness.

44. How sublime that the universe holds such depth of feeling within itself!

45. There may be other true theories of existence also – true in the pragmatic sense of being useful for the art of life.

46. In a post-metaphysical age, it is always possible that existence and the world undergo persuasive redescription in previously unimagined ways. Literary or ‘poeticized’ cultures embrace this aspect of the human condition as a tantalizing gift.

47. Poetry, according to Shelley, is the ‘expression of the imagination.’

48. The Will to Art as a metaphor to live by: to be judged, not according to its correspondence to a pre-existing reality, but according to its effects. It begins as an invitation to experiment, and can only be justified by its results.

49. The question is not merely: can this new poetics of existence solve problems and achieve one’s highest values better than the old paradigm? The question is also: what problems should we be trying to solve and what should our highest values be?

50. Paradigm shifts are not simply about doing the old world better. They are, instead, the conceptual and experiential architecture of new worlds, new modes of being.

51. The Will to Art is experienced most directly in human consciousness as the insatiable drive of desire – the seemingly reckless and amoral yearning for beauty, meaning, pleasure, and freedom.

52. Human beings learn most about the universe by looking inward, to our own creative natures, where we experience, most directly, the innermost being of the thing-in-itself – the Will to Art. This experience of the Will is not a representation of something ‘out there’, but rather the inner dimension of a shared, metaphor- dependent fundamental reality.

53. Having grasped our own nature as creative beings, we can best understand the aesthetic universe which holds us. We are microcosms of the cosmic order, with the subject reflecting the object in ways that conflate the subject-object distinction.

54. Could the most fundamental building blocks of existence be vibrating strings, as theoretical physicists suggest? Could the cosmos, at base, be music?

55. Truth might be an evolving series of questions rather than a singular answer.

56. In its pre-harmonic state, the Will to Art is suffering.

57. Sentient life experiences suffering and seeks the cessation of suffering.

58. Humans suffer as a result of craving for, or being attached to, the wrong things in the wrong ways.

59. Aesthetic enlightenment: the cessation of suffering entails living artfully, in accordance with the laws of beauty, through which the dissonance of the Will to Art resolves into harmony.

60. Nietzsche: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’

61. Pessimism is the nihilistic renunciation of a world that one believes ought not to exist.

62. Schopenhauer: ‘Life must be some sort of mistake.’

63. Disenchanted materialism: when – or if – our Godot arrives, Vladimir assures us, ‘We’ll be saved.’7 But he never arrives. And so we wait, suffering, without understanding why. Life is absurd. At some point, the curtain closes and, without metaphysical comfort or understanding, our existence expires. Worms slowly consume our decaying bodies. The end. Absolutely. Life’s mystery is never resolved and there is no moment of redemption that offers us consolation for our transcendental loneliness. We’re just endlessly dead.

64. Nietzsche: ‘Life without music would be a mistake.’

65. The aesthetic justification of existence is not a proposition of truth but an affective evaluation: it just needs to succeed psychologically, that is, to induce an affective attachment to life.

66. Voluntary simplicity: an affective attachment to life itself makes one want to avoid all attachments that are superfluous to life.

67. Despite living in a dying civilization, on a dying planet, situated in what seems to be a godless and absurd universe, aesthetic experience affirms that existence can be justified.

68. After the ‘death of god’ and the demise of pure reason, the only way to move from life-negation to life-affirmation is via the aesthetic dimension. Art provides a bridge over this great chasm.

69. The therapeutic and energising approaches to aesthetic experience can be interpreted from either the spectator view (contemplating works of art can justify existence) or from the creator-artist perspective (creating works of art can justify existence).

70. Contemplating great art can provoke us to consider whether we, ourselves, might have unfilled creative potentials still to be realised.

71. Thrown into an existence we never asked for, our sacred capacity to experience beauty shows that human beings have a place in the universe – at least potentially.

72. Our sacred capacity to create beauty provides us with a noble, orienting purpose.

73. The Will to Art invites us, on the path to beauty, to take our own suffering and give it aesthetic form.

74. Upon seeing suffering everywhere, it is tempting to conclude that life is of negative value and that the world should not exist. But could not an affirmative account of suffering undercut the logic of pessimism?

75. Nietzsche’s revaluation of suffering offers such an affirmative account, since giving form to one’s own suffering becomes a necessary part of the good. It even becomes part of the beautiful, since giving form to one’s own suffering (making it meaningful) becomes part of an authentic stylisation of existence.

76. From a cosmological perspective, suffering is the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.

77. Art does not resolve, but rather dissolves, the problem of pessimism.

78. Amor fati – love thy fate.

79. Radical acceptance: through mindfulness and self-fashioning one

is able to love what is necessary and see it as beautiful.

80. What is power for? To universalise opportunities for artistic expression, to revel in the sublime joys of creativity, and to share in the sacred and sensuous experience of beauty.

81. The Will to Art is the cause of that poetic madness that inspires, even compels, the artist to sit down and compose something out of nothing.

82. By creating something out of nothing, the artist is able to commune with that wild Dionysian impulse from which existence itself has emerged.

83. The artist’s awareness of the Will to Art is also the Will to Art coming to self-awareness through the artist.

84. Art and beauty exist: are we not obliged to reverse engineer a cosmological narrative that explains how and why?

The post The Will to Art first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Each chapter is a collection of philosophical fragments, thematically arranged, which over the course of the book form an argument. Here is Chapter 1.

The Aesthetic Universe

1. The aesthetic universe is all that is the case, and this infinitely complex reality is always expanding and in flux.

2. Existence, at base, is malleable and indeterminate clay. It must be given form, which is the primordial aesthetic task.

3. As story-telling animals, our experience is mediated by language – by myths and metaphors – and yet we create language and thus the atmosphere of our existence.

4. Neither our concepts nor their meanings are given to us in advance. We must invent, define, and interpret them, without hope of a final or stable correspondence between language and the world.

5. The task of producing conceptual schemes through which we perceive reality comes to influence the sensory experience of the reality that language has constructed.

6. Language therefore shapes what we see and how we think, but given that language also shapes our experience of reality, it also shapes what and how we feel.

7. The instability of language means that the ontological natures of ourselves and the universe are inherently unstable, always evolving as the contexts in which language is used and interpreted relentlessly shift.

8. Propositions of truth emerge from, and operate in relation to, contingent linguistic frameworks that happen to be in place but could have been different and will be different.

9. Given the infinite complexity of the aesthetic universe, no narrative or metanarrative can ever tell the whole story.

10. Paradoxically, not even final vocabularies are ‘final’ or ‘closed’, for they exist in an ever-expanding and evolving interpretive space, where semantic drift and disruption are unavoidable.

11. There will never come a time when all possible descriptions and interpretations of the world have been exhausted.

12. The poet can always make things new.

13. Metaphors, which are infinite in number, both reveal and conceal realities.

14. New metaphors, interpretations, and redescriptions can always arise, enabled by the free play of the creative imagination.

15. It follows that the final truth of things must forever remain elusive. When properly grasped, this mystery of existence is both humbling and exhilarating.

16. Even the idea of knowledge having ‘foundations’ is based on the metaphor of a building. So what would epistemology become if its constitutive metaphor was a river, or a plant, or a painting? Or perhaps: a painting of a plant in a river (creative, organic, and flowing)?

17. The material universe viewed as a ‘machine’ that operates according to the immutable laws of physics is but one metaphoric description of reality, useful as far as it goes for the purposes of prediction and control.

18. Dead metaphors disguise themselves as literal truth, as if they were the only story to tell.

19. Machinic thinking is a dead metaphor that holds us captive. It must be brought back to life so that other imaginaries can be experimented with.

20. The cosmos can be elevated to the dignity of a work of art with a bold act of interpretation, that is, through the intentions of homo aestheticus.

21. To the objection that the universe cannot be art because it was not made by a human artist, the response is that art, since Duchamp, can be ‘readymade’.

22. A submission to the Society of Independent Artists for its next exhibition: the universe.

23. The experience of art is less about an objective encounter with a physical entity and more about poetic engagement with the possibilities of meaning that surround the entity under aesthetic contemplation – in this case, the universe itself.

24. This transfiguration of the cosmos doesn’t involve changing the physical characteristics of the material universe in any way. Rather, it involves changing its ontological character through redescription in ways that call on individuals to engage the phenomenon of existence differently.

25. When new vocabularies are invented that do not catch on, they can be dismissed as uninteresting, false, irrational, or even mad. But a metaphoric shift that first appears strange can come to be seen, in the fullness of time, as truth, and in the process the metaphor dies, or at least lies dormant.

26. Thus the madman can become a poet-philosopher, and the old truth-tellers can fall out of fashion as their traditional verities get overturned and replaced.

27. The Owl of Minerva has taken flight.

The post The Aesthetic Universe first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Two premises guided the development of that vision: first, that material sufficiency is all that is needed for human beings to live rich, meaningful, and artful lives; and second, that material sufficiency is all that is possible, over the long term, on a finite planet in an age of environmental limits. Based on those premises, I proposed and defended a conception of ecological civilisation which I call SMPLCTY. This is an anarcho-communitarian society of poet-farmers that sustainably provides all people with opportunities to find meaning and pleasure through creative labour and aesthetic experience.

To be sure, I do not naively present this vision as one that is likely to be embraced in the near-term by humans. Rather, I present it as the most coherent pathway out of the metacriss we’re in, and thus I believe it deserves our strategic attention, no matter how unlikely the pathway might seem.

S M P L C T Y was a very long book, however, comprised of twenty substantial chapters, so recently I set myself the task of distilling the essence of the book down to 10% of its original length, a task that was only possible after having written the extended version. The new book, just published, is called Homo Aesthetics: Philosophical Fragments on the Will to Art, which is available electronically on a ‘pay what you want’ basis here (including for free), or available in paperback here and hardback here (Australian / NZ purchasers can get paperback here and hardback here).

Without originally intending it, the stylistic technique I employed was that of ‘philosophical fragments’, through which I attempted to summarise entire traditions, books, or perspectives in a sentence or two. Below I have posted the table of contents and the short preface to the new book, and in coming days we’ll share samples of the 525 fragments which comprise the book. The book is free to share under a creative commons licence, as are most of my other books.

Contents

1. The Aesthetic Universe
2. The Will to Art
3. Creative Evolution
4. Art and Beauty
5. Homo Aestheticus
6. A Critique of Taste
7. The Role of the Artist
8. Wild Civilization and the Poet-Farmer
9. The Aesthetic State
10. S M P L C T Y

‘Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious people treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.’– Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Preface

This is an original book only in the sense that it weaves together other people’s ideas and perspectives in novel ways. I believe the result is something new, but more importantly, I think it offers a necessary counter-narrative to the disenchanted materialism that defines modernity. On first reading, some might suspect that the work was shaped largely by the tradition of German Romanticism – the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, etc. While that influence is real – most notably through the stylistic form of ‘philosophical fragments’ – it is actually far less significant than might first appear, and, in fact, is almost entirely indirect. I owe far greater debts to Arthur Schopenhauer – for his lucid statement of the problem of pessimism – to Friedrich Nietzsche – for formulating the ‘aesthetic justification’ of existence – to Friedrich Schiller – for revealing how the origin of humanity’s self-awareness was born of the experience of nature’s beauty – and to William Morris – for collapsing the distinction between artist and artisan, and for beginning to unpack the social, ecological, and political implications of doing so.

The influence of Indian philosophy, especially Buddhism, may also be seen simmering between the sentences that follow. This is a result, first, of the impact that tradition had on Schopenhauer, who of course influenced Nietzsche so profoundly, and secondly, of my independent and ongoing reflections on the Buddhist philosophy of life. While no prior knowledge of Buddhism will be assumed, readers who already have some grasp of this ancient wisdom tradition are well-placed to hear what I have to say about the Will to Art. While in my other writings I have been guided most significantly by the life and ideas of Henry David Thoreau, in this book those ideas are present but, for the most part, subterranean.

When I quote directly in the following pages, naturally I reference the source, but more often the aphoristic style I have employed has me attempting to summarise entire traditions in a sentence. I acknowledge these many debts now to be sure that, if my book has any original contribution to make, my disparate influences are clearly stated from the outset. Further references and detail on the present work can be found in the larger companion volume, S M P L C T Y: Ecological Civilisation and the Will to Art (2023), from which the ideas herein have been distilled. If readers are sufficiently stimulated or provoked by the present volume, please consult the larger version for the more detailed arguments, which therein take more conventional academic form. In that sense, S M P L C T Y can be understood as an extended footnote to Homo Aestheticus.

In closing, let me acknowledge that, to some, it might seem perverse to be publishing a book on art and beauty at a time when the world in so many ways is excruciatingly ugly and unjust, demanding direct political engagement. All I can say, in response, is that this book, far from being a pessimistic retreat into the realm of the imagination merely, represents what I believe is a strategic political advance, via the path of aesthetics, toward a more beautiful and harmonious world.

Homo Aestheticus is available in hardback, paperback, and also pdf (on a ‘pay what you can’ basis, including for free). (Australian / NZ purchasers can get paperback here and hardback here).

The post Homo Aestheticus: Philosophical Fragments on the Will to Art first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ – William Wordsworth

Every individual and every society are enactments of stories we tell ourselves about the nature and purpose of our existence and of the world we live in.^[i] We might conceive of ourselves as children of God or speaking apes; dead matter or enchanted spirits; revolutionaries or conservatives; entrepreneurs or bureaucrats, producers or consumers – perhaps all of these things or none of them. But in the end, all of us give a narrative structure to our lives, or at least we adopt the default narratives of the dominant culture, usually unconsciously. The myths and stories we tell ourselves situate us in space and time, shape our perceptions of the present and guide us as we move into the future, influencing our interpretations of what is possible, proper, and important. As those individual narratives are woven together, the social fabric of a civilisation takes form.  

One important function of story and myth is how they can shape what a person or culture finds beautiful or ugly. That is, social narratives influence our tastes. Moreover, our tastes influence what we desire, and our desires obviously shape how we act, both personally and politically. These sensuous dispositions are often taught to us through aesthetic education, including the ways in which a society ‘distributes’ opportunities for different forms of sense experience. On that basis, I propose that humanity will need a new aesthetic education, and a new ‘distribution of the sensible,’^[ii] if we are to move beyond the industrial societies of late capitalism and toward an ecological civilisation that is constituted by radically different conceptions of beauty. 

The myth of progress

Put simply, the grand narrative of industrial civilisation is a story of progress within which societies advance by way of continuous economic growth, rising affluence, and technological innovation. The very vocabulary of ‘development’ implies that some societies have reached maturity – the rich nations of advanced capitalism. The further implication is that the rest of the world is lacking the same degree of civilisation, and therefore needs more growth, more industrialisation, and more capitalism in order to civilise, just as healthy children must grow to maturity in order to fulfil their potential. This is a coherent metaphor until one realises that a child that never stops growing has a fatal disease. So convinced are the developed nations of their linear story of progress that over the last three centuries they have been imposing this narrative on the rest of the world, seeking to establish a ‘fully developed’ world, created in their own image of growth without limit. 

Can humanity survive this growth model of progress? Although industrial development across the globe has brought with it many benefits, the dominant story of progress is not without its anomalies – anomalies so deep, one might argue, that today they are threatening the coherency of the paradigm itself. For many decades, environmental scientists have been demonstrating that the global growth economy is destroying the ecological foundations of life. From a social justice perspective, the critique has been that the system has produced socially corrosive inequalities of wealth and left billions in conditions of humiliating poverty, despite unprecedented capacity to eliminate hunger. These realities are often ignored or marginalised, but even when they are acknowledged, the dominant political and economic response is simply to reassert ‘sustained growth’ as the only solution. Very few people seem to recognise that growth may now be causing the very problems that it is supposed to be solving. As novelist and essayist Edward Abbey once wrote: growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

What is most troubling of all, perhaps, is that even those individuals who have achieved the so-called ‘consumerist ideal’ – the house, the car, the gadgets, the clothes, the travel, and so forth – all too often find themselves discontented despite their material abundance. In recent decades this finding has been established consistently and independently by a litany of sociological and psychological studies.^[iii] Industrial civilisation’s defining goal appears to be misconceived. There seems to be an emptiness to affluence that is never acknowledged in glossy advertisements, let alone discussed in schools or around the dinner table. It is perhaps the dominant culture’s final, unspeakable taboo. Few people dare to ask themselves, ‘How much is enough?’ Fewer still dare to meditate on the real question: ‘Enough for what?’

Needless to say, within mainstream discourse these criticisms are rarely considered fundamental flaws in the basic story of industrial development. Instead, they are treated as matters of detail in need of refinement, a little tweaking around the edges – nothing that technology, market mechanisms, and more economic growth cannot manage or resolve. So dominant and uncompromising is this narrative that its contingency and historicity are easily missed, as if there were no other stories to tell, no other paths of progress. This ‘myth of progress’ has reified into an ideology, sometimes even shaping the consciousness of those it oppresses, marginalises, and alienates.^[iv]

Moving from the civilisational level to that of individual subjectivity, the narrative of industrial development is merely regurgitated in a personalised form. In the stories we tell ourselves, we create ourselves, and our world. The dominant ‘story of self’ in consumer cultures today is one that treats material advancement as the clearest indicator of social success and the best means of acquiring self-esteem, social status, happiness, and respect. Anthropologists and sociologists have done considerable work studying and analysing the ways in which people communicate through their consumption; how they convey social messages and tell stories about who they are through the symbolic content of commodities.^[v] Commodities are purchased not just for their functionality or use-value but also or primarily for what they signify about the people who possess them. By accumulating a certain body of commodities, individuals in consumer societies thereby shape their identities through consumption, defining themselves not by what they do but by what they own. This provides a basis to update Rene Descartes’ famous dictum in consumerist-existential terms: ‘I shop, therefore I am.’

The industrial aesthetics of consumption

While this process of self-creation through the symbolic content of consumption can be considered an aesthetic process, it should be acknowledged that individuals do not simply shape, but are also shaped by, the dominant consumerist aesthetic to which they are exposed. Members of advanced capitalist societies (and increasingly all people around the globe) are bombarded, literally thousands of times every day, with advertisements, images, and other more subtle cultural and institutional messages insisting that ‘more is better’. These cultural messages are devised by sophisticated marketers, highly skilled at manipulating people by preying on our deepest insecurities or emotional needs. It is no exaggeration to state that the implicit (sometimes explicit) message in every advertisement is: ‘Your life is unsatisfactory as it is, but with this commodity you can attain happiness, beauty, meaning, love, respect, etc.’ The rich and famous are glorified and celebrated at every turn, serving only to entrench the assumption that money means fame, success, happiness, and social admiration. A cult of youthfulness distorts cultural conceptions of beauty, just as last season’s fashion can be discarded by those who have been socially engineered to perceive it as ‘of bad taste’. There is barely a social space or even a private space today where one can find sanctuary from the onslaught of the consumerist aesthetic. We internalise the world ‘out there’ even as we produce and reproduce it. What we are exposed to, and what we give our attention to, we become.

The consumerist-industrial aesthetic is compromised further (or compromises us further) as people in highly developed societies today find themselves ever more disconnected from nature. This is not to defend or idealise some mythical pre-industrial ‘wild’ but only to acknowledge that ‘nature deficit disorder’^[vi] is a real condition, threatening to become an epidemic, albeit largely undiagnosed. The nature deficit can be understood as part of the broader aesthetic deficit disorder I have been diagnosing throughout these essays. As creatures of Earth who spent our entire evolutionary history living outdoors, in the most intimate connection with the ecosystems upon which we rely, it should come as no surprise that we suffer existentially as we find ourselves disconnected from this rich source of material and spiritual nourishment. Biophysically we are essentially the same creature who lived in caves tens of thousands of years ago. Culturally, our highly artificial and technologised existence today could hardly be further from the conditions of our evolutionary upbringing. This dislocation should be expected to have, and is having, negative health and psycho-spiritual effects.   

In the same vein, cultural theorists have diagnosed and investigated a strange existential condition they label ‘affluenza’^[vii] – a spiritual malaise that seems to afflict many people in consumerist societies. Both the causes and symptoms are numerous and varied. In urban and suburban contexts, the natural environment has been progressively covered with concrete or tarseal. Skies are scarred with wires, power lines, and the contrails of aircraft. Lives are lived mostly indoors under artificial lights, in front of computers or machines, disconnected from the changing seasons. The music of birdsong is becoming rarer as urban trees are cleared for apartments or a new freeway, while warnings of a ‘silent spring’ continue to be ignored. The long, typically monotonous working day often begins and ends with a slow commute to or from work, in loud, heavy traffic, past the ubiquitous advertising billboards which demand attention. Returning home one can be so tired that there is no life-energy to do anything but sit in front of the television or computer, in nice clothes, eating highly processed takeaway food and relying on the sedations of alcohol or drugs to fight off the ennui. This is a polemical statement, of course, painting with too broad a brush. But the picture is accurate enough. Consumer culture seems to have failed to fulfil its promise of a meaningful and satisfying life, even as it destroys the planet. Is it any wonder that cultural analyst Theodore Roszak looked into the eyes of modern consumers and saw only faces ‘twisted with despair’?^[viii]

The point is that consumerism is not just a relationship to material culture. It can also be understood as a mode of existence, an aesthetic state of being-in-the-world, one that seems to be generally coloured with a mood of disenchantment, disconnection, and disillusionment. The real genius of consumerism, however, seems to be in how it seduces people into believing that, no matter how affluent they might become, the main things lacking from their lives are money and possessions. Thus the ‘iron cage’ of consumerism succeeds because it fails, ensuring that the vicious circle of consumption continues.^[ix] The spiritual malaise only deepens, for as the Parisian graffiti of 1968 stated: ‘those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking’.

The aesthetic education of taste

To better understand the industrial-consumerist aesthetic and its implications on consumption practices, these issues could be explored through the lens of ‘taste’. In the twentieth century, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, in his seminal text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979),^[x] took aesthetics beyond philosophy and into sociology, by demonstrating empirically that taste is closely related to class. What forms of clothing, music, literature, interior décor, leisure, etc, a person or household consumes is obviously a matter of taste, but in his research Bourdieu discovered that children are taught their tastes from an early age, and what they are taught is shaped along class lines. 

This aesthetic education becomes internalised, making taste seem natural or objective, yet this ends up serving an ideological function by entrenching certain cultures of consumption that demarcate class. At some intuitive level, it seems this has long been understood. At least since Thorstein Veblen’s work in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899),there has been discussion of practices of ‘conspicuous consumption’ that show off high levels of wealth for the purpose of socially emphasising high status.^[xi] Bourdieu argued that the acceptance of dominant forms of taste is a form of ‘symbolic violence’,^[xii] because individuals in lower classes do not always have the economic or cultural means of accessing ‘highbrow’ cultures of consumption. Thus they are dominated by taste, forever trying to conform to the reigning aesthetic for fear of being socially ostracised by appearing crude, vulgar, or tasteless. The essential message here remains valid even if the Marxist framing is dropped. Irrespective of the class implications, it seems clear that ‘taste’ is often a matter of aesthetic education, and accordingly deserves social and political analysis.  

Anthropologist Mary Douglas offered further insight into how cultural tastes shape expectations about consumption, arguing that what is considered appropriate or necessary consumption is always culturally dependent. People do not merely consume to meet biophysical needs but also to meet social needs. In fact, Douglas argued that ‘an individual’s main object in consumption is to create the social universe and to find in it a creditable place’.^[xiii] This means that what are considered acceptable or appropriate practices of consumption in one society or social setting may be very different in an alternative social setting. The corollary is that even the notion of poverty can be understood as something that is culturally specific, not merely a universal biophysical threshold. A particular level of consumption that is considered wealthy or prestigious in one society might be so low in another society as to be shameful; a particular object that is admired as tasteful or refined in one culture might be considered tasteless or uncouth in another. This can function to lock people into practices of consumption higher than they may feel necessary, not because they truly desire a certain level or manner of consumption but because they naturally desire social legitimation and acceptance, knowing that there are cultural expectations in this regard. Transcending consumerism therefore must include overcoming aesthetic obstacles regarding taste.

One particularly pernicious aesthetic phenomenon in relation to consumption is the apparent need for uniformity in consumption practices, a phenomenon known by consumer researchers today as ‘the Diderot effect’.^[xiv] Someone once gave Dennis Diderot (the French Enlightenment thinker) a beautiful, new scarlet robe, and without thinking he discarded his old one.^[xv] But the next morning as he sat down to write he noticed that his old desk no longer did his robe justice. So he upgraded his desk. Then he realised that his chair, tapestries and bookshelves looked dated against his new acquisitions, and slowly his entire material surroundings were upgraded. Sociologist Juliet Schor describes this taste for uniformity in the following way:

The purchase of a new home is the impetus for replacing old furniture; a new jacket makes little sense without the right skirt to match; an upgrade in china can’t really be enjoyed without a corresponding upgrade in glassware. This need for unity and conformity in our lifestyle choices is part of what keeps the consumer escalator moving ever upward. And ‘escalator’ is the operative metaphor: when the acquisition of each item on a wish list adds another item, and more, to our ‘must-have’ list, the pressure to upgrade our stock of stuff is relentlessly unidirectional, always ascending.^[xvi]

This highlights the insidious effect that taste can have on our consumption practices, and how the growth economy more broadly is driven by (just as it produces) the seemingly insatiable desires of the modern consumer. Note, however, that Diderot eventually found himself sitting in the stylish formality of his new surroundings regretting the work of this ‘impervious scarlet robe [that] forced everything else to conform with its own elegant tone’.^[xvii] Diderot had been master of his old robe but became slave of the new one. ‘Opulence has its obstacles,’^[xviii] he concluded – a lesson we might have much to learn from today. 

A politics of taste 

The analysis above attempted to offer some insight into various aesthetic dimensions of life in advanced industrial societies. I have suggested that transcending consumerism and the growth economy will depend on first overcoming various aesthetic obstacles, practices, and tastes. These obstacles include the stories and myths we tell about ourselves and societies, and the ways we shape our identities and communicate through consumption. Other such obstacles include the disaffection and alienation that evidently is widely experienced in consumer societies, even by those who have achieved the consumerist ideal. In that light, I outlined some of the ways that dominant conceptions of taste and social legitimation, especially regarding material living standards, can entrench materialistic conceptions of the good life.

Given that humans are largely ‘socially constructed’ beings, it should come as no surprise that our modes of subjectivity in advanced, industrial societies have been shaped by the dominant social and institutional forces that celebrate consumerism as a way of life. This marginalises consumption as a subject of ethical concern. Far from challenging us to explore lifestyles of reduced consumption in response to the ecological and social justice imperatives of our time, dominant forms of culture, economics, and politics call on us to consume as much as possible ‘for the good of the economy’. Given that these cultural narratives have been widely internalised, often unconsciously, it follows that ethical activity today may require us to engage the self by the self for the purpose of refusing who we are – insofar as we are uncritical consumers – and creating new, post-consumerist forms of subjectivity. Few people, it seems, have a taste for sufficiency, a taste for degrowth, which I maintain is a leading aesthetic obstacle in the way of any transition to a just and sustainable society. There is an elegance and beauty to the clothesline, the bicycle, and the water tank, that the clothes dryer, the automobile, and the desalination plant decidedly lack. When such an aesthetics of sufficiency is more widely embraced in a culture, it will be clear that we are on the path to an ecological civilisation. 

In summary, the self-creation of new forms of subjectivity is a necessary first step in any transition to a new society. In previous essays, I argued (drawing on Friedrich Schiller) that art and aesthetics are promising means for disrupting our ‘normal sense of self’, inducing a sense of play that liberates us from habit and conformity and provides the conditions for giving birth to someone new.^[xix] Until there is a culture that embraces voluntary simplicity, the social underpinnings for an ecological civilisation will be absent. After all, consumerist cultures that seek and expect ever-rising material living standards will not desire a politics or macroeconomics of degrowth, and politicians will never campaign for degrowth if it is clear there is no social mandate for it. Accordingly, the emergence of a culture of voluntary simplicity seems to be a prerequisite to any degrowth transition, and the first step in this cultural shift involves transforming our subjectivities beyond the consumerist default setting. Among other things, this will involve taking seriously the questions, ‘how much is enough?’ and ‘enough for what?’, and reshaping our relationships to material culture in line with the aesthetic values of balance and harmony. Through a new aesthetic education, we can resist capitalism and usher in an ecological civilisation by learning to find different things beautiful and different things ugly. Revolt is a matter of taste. 

Nevertheless, a re-fashioning of the self in line with voluntary simplicity will not be enough on its own to produce an ecological civilisation, owing to the fact that consumption practices take place within structural constraints. Within consumer capitalism it can be very difficult, at times even impossible, to consume in ways that accord with one’s conception of justice and sustainability, because structural constraints can lock us into high consumption, high carbon modes of life. For these reasons a personal aesthetics of existence is a necessary though not sufficient response to existing crises. A systemic perspective is also required, which is why this analysis must be expanded further into social, economic, and political domains.^[xx] Current crises are ultimately systemic crises that require a systemic response – not merely a cultural response – even if that systemic response begins with the aesthetic self-transformation of our given subjectivities. To paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge: we must create the taste by which we will be judged.  

In the next essay I turn to consider the growth paradigm of consumer capitalism from an energetic perspective. The alternative model of degrowth or ‘voluntary simplification’ will also be examined, critically engaging the work of anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter.^[xxi] As to be expected by now, I will focus on this alternative paradigm through the lens of aesthetics, exploring to what extent art and aesthetics can help facilitate an overcoming of the dominant paradigm. The goal is to help open future pathways of prosperous descent, whereby many existing social, ecological, and political challenges can be resolved through planned contraction of energy and resources demands in the overdeveloped regions of the world. This will only be possible, however, after first developing a taste for the lifestyles of voluntary simplicity that degrowth implies.^[xxii]

I will argue that this living strategy remains valid even if it turns out that a degrowth economy is never created and the collapse of civilisation ends up dictating humanity’s future. This is because resilience – the capacity to withstand societal shocks and crises – will be increased if a household or community is mentally and socially prepared for simpler lifestyles of radically reduced consumption, whether voluntarily chosen or externally imposed. As historian and futurist John Michael Greer quips: collapse now and avoid the rush!^[xxiii]   

^[i] Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: A Novel (New York: Bantam, 2017); Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).  

^[ii] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 12. As discussed in previous essays, Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ refers to the way in which political decisions, actions, and narratives determine what presents itself to sense experience. In other words, politics shapes what can be seen, felt, and spoken about – and by whom.

^[iii] See generally, Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: The Free Press, 2009). 

^[iv] See generally, Wolfgang Sachs (ed) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

^[v] See, e.g., Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 

^[vi] Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (New York: Algonquin, 2011). 

^[vii] Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005). 

^[viii] Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Doubleday Press, 1972), p. xxviii.  

^[ix] Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009), Ch 4.  

^[x] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984).

^[xi] Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009[1899]). 

^[xii] Bourdieu, Distinction, note 9, p. 358. 

^[xiii] Mary Douglas, ‘Relative Poverty – Relative Communication’ in Tim Jackson (ed) The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption (London: Earthscan, 2006), p. 243. 

^[xiv] See Schor, Overspent, note 4, p. 145.

^[xv] Denis Diderot, ‘Regrets on Parting with my Old Dressing Gown’, available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/diderot/1769/regrets.htm (accessed 10 March 2023). 

^[xvi] Schor, Overspent, note 4, p. 145.

^[xvii] Diderot, ‘Regrets’, note 14. 

^[xviii] Ibid.

^[xix] See Samuel Alexander, ‘The Politics of Beauty: Schiller on Freedom and Aesthetic Education’, in this collection of essays. The full set will be available here: http://samuelalexander.info/s-m-p-l-c-t-y-ecological-civilisation-and-the-will-to-art/ (accessed 10 May 2023). 

^[xx] The systemic nature of growthism and consumerism has been the focus of much of my academic work. Most of my writing is freely available here: www.samuelalexander.info (accessed 15 June 2023). 

^[xxi] See especially, Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

^[xxii] Samuel Alexander, Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (Melbourne: Simplicity Institute, 2015). 

^[xxiii] John Michael Greer, ‘Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush’ Resilience (6 June 2012).

The post Industrial Aesthetics: A Critique of Taste first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

‘Vladimir: Say you are, even if it’s not true.

Estragon: What am I to say?

Vladimir: Say, “I am happy.”

Estragon: I am happy.

Vladimir: So am I.

Estragon: So am I.

Vladimir: We are happy.

Estragon: We are happy.’

–      Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’

In the epigraph for this essay, taken from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, we hear the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who are sitting by the roadside, state that they are both happy. After realising that their existential circumstances persist despite their declarations, Estragon says to his companion: ‘What do we do now, now that we are happy?’ Vladimir responds: ‘Wait for Godot.’^[i]  

It becomes apparent that neither of the tramps is quite sure who Mr Godot is, why they are waiting for him, or even if they are waiting at the correct time or location. The play ends without resolution, leaving the audience none the wiser. When Beckett himself was asked who or what Godot was, he replied: ‘If I knew, I would have said so in the play.’^[ii]Both acts finish with one of the tramps, tired of waiting for a man who never arrives, saying to the other: ‘Well, shall we go?’, to which the other responds: ‘Yes, let’s go.’^[iii] Neither of them move, and the curtain closes.   

In this play, as in all his work, Beckett is expressing his bleak view that the human situation is objectively meaningless and without any discernible purpose. We have all been thrown into an empty and indifferent universe, in which we suffer, suffer some more, and then die. The best we can hope for, like a tramp chewing on an old carrot, is that we get used to the muck as we go along. We keep waiting for the meaning of life to announce itself, to arrive – whether in the form of God, Godot, the Revolution, consumer satisfaction, fame, or whatever. But Godot does not objectively exist ‘out there’, so we feel that it is necessary to invent him. Life is what happens while waiting for Godot. 

When – or if – our Godot arrives, Vladimir assures us, ‘We’ll be saved.’^[iv] But he never arrives. And so we wait, suffering, without understanding why. Life is absurd. At some point, the curtain closes and, without metaphysical comfort or understanding, our existence expires. Worms slowly consume our decaying bodies. The end. Absolutely. Life’s mystery is never resolved and there is no moment of redemption that offers us consolation for our transcendental loneliness. We’re just endlessly dead. 

The lines about happiness in Waiting for Godot always struck me as central to Beckett’s profoundly pessimistic worldview. They are especially unsettling to people who are interested in the political question of what societal structures might best advance human flourishing – or at least reduce unnecessary suffering – in a just and sustainable way. Beckett makes the disconcerting point that the question of life’s meaning would remain unanswered, even when or if a person or society were fortunate enough to attain happiness. What do we do now, Estragon would ask, now that we are happy? Attaining happiness might even induce a profound existential crisis, for we would confront the question of life’s meaning (or lack thereof) directly. We’d stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, only to find the abyss staring back.^[v] Is happiness all there is? Is it the ultimate value for which we ought to be striving? Mightn’t we discover that life is tragic and absurd, even in a ‘happy’ utopia? 

In Civilization and its Discontents,^[vi] Sigmund Freud made a compelling case that happiness itself is an unrealistic goal for our species. Human nature, he argued, is driven by various sexual and aggressive drives that we must restrain in order to live according to the norms of civilised society. But repressing our primal and anti-social urges to maintain social order forces us to ‘bottle things up inside’, as the saying goes, leaving our psyches merely fluctuating between hysterical misery and ordinary unhappiness. For Freud, like Beckett, the search for transcendental meaning is a lost cause – religion is an illusion – and happiness is simply not part of the ‘plan of creation’ for human beings. Are we thus condemned both to meaningless and unhappiness?  

Consider this utopian thought experiment: Suppose the industrial growth economy solves the ‘economic problem’ of poverty and manages to provide material affluence for all. Assume also – if you can imagine the impossible –­ that this globalisation of consumer lifestyles is achieved without fatally degrading planetary ecosystems. Due to the automation of production, everyone in this society now has an abundance of stuff as well as an abundance of free time. Furthermore, constitutionally protected civil liberties afford everyone an equal opportunity to shape their own life. For the sake of argument, I invite readers to imagine that this utopian society is structured according to their favourite vision of political economy (e.g., capitalism, socialism, anarchism, etc). In this world of universal affluence and leisure, what would we do with our lives? In what condition would we find our species? 

All at once it becomes clear that the permanent problem of human existence – the question of life’s meaning – would remain entirely unanswered, despite the affluence and the leisure. Indeed, as implied above, the problem of what to dowith our freedom might well become more acute than ever. With the traditional purpose of life resolved (the economic struggle for existence), there might even be a risk of society-wide nervous breakdown, the onset of a profound cultural malaise.^[vii] Faced with the burden of our own freedom, we might become more unhappy than ever, choosing instead a shallow, cosmetic existence, full of ‘entertainments’, simply to contain our anxieties and distract us from our empty condition. The following lines of verse come to mind:

Don’t mourn for me, friends, don’t weep for me never

I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.^[viii]

It is possible, I suppose, that in this affluent society human beings might pass their time eating nice food, enjoying exotic vacations, talking about cosmetic house renovations, sleeping in the sun, watching sport, making love, and drinking fine wine. This sounds like a good life, or at least good enough, full of earthly pleasures and entertainments. Whether they are happy or not, many of the world’s most affluent people spend their days like this, even if the vast majority of the human population still suffer in material destitution. But I wish to suggest that for most people in this utopian society, one day a ‘why’ would arise, and the existential problem of life’s meaning would come to saturate consciousness. Like a stone in one’s boot, these lingering questions could not be ignored; they would follow us around everywhere we went. An acute state of affluenza might set in as we came to realise our pre-packaged, consumptive lifestyles were akin to ‘doing nothing for ever and ever.’ 

One dark night of the soul we might face the source of our simmering discontent: is consumer affluence all there is to life? Is it the proper goal of our earthly struggles? Should the pursuit of economic growth without limit define and structure our political economies? In the affluent utopia I have sketched, at some point our lives would become tinged with an unsettling existential doubt about these questions. We would begin to wonder whether we had been foolishly climbing a ladder that had been placed against the wrong wall. Staring at our diamond-studded Rolex, we might enter a state of hallucination and find the watch posing unsettling questions: Is this it? Is this the peak of civilisation? Has superfluous consumption and entertainment lifted us to the heights of human achievement and capacity? 

From an existential or spiritual perspective, I contend that we would come to see that material comfort was no longer ‘enough’. It never was enough and never will be. Despite what consumer advertisements imply, human beings are not creatures that could ever be truly satisfied with ‘nice things’, merely. At most they provide cosmetic, pleasing distractions, or ego-boosting status signals, in an otherwise difficult and often tragic existence. Material abundance is preferable to material destitution, of course, but ultimately the superfluities of consumer lifestyles are spiritually beside the point, representing a failure of imagination, a mistaken idea of wealth and freedom. Consciously or unconsciously, most of us, it seems, seek meaning in ways that market commodities simply cannot offer, even if our actions often betray this insight. In a utopian society of universal affluence, whenever we look at our Rolexes we’d be reminded of the passing of time, the approaching spectre of death, and thereby confront the question: What shall we do now, now that we are happy? 

Utilitarian philosophers would have no answer for Estragon, given that happiness within that paradigm is considered fundamental, and thus the question isn’t even coherent. The most a utilitarian could say is that the tramps should aim for more happiness, since happiness is the fundamental good; the ultimate value; the benchmark of success in life. We should just continue marching along the hedonic treadmill and shouldn’t ask why or to what end. At some stage, however, happiness, in the sense of a comfortable life of leisure, material abundance, and sensuous pleasure, will not satisfy the inquiring mind – the spiritual seeker. If we found ourselves living in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), soon enough we would start doubting – like the protagonist, John – whether a happy life induced by the drug ‘soma’ was a satisfactory way to live. Eventually we would want to live deeper, and that leaves open the possibility of passing up a comfortable and happy life and choosing a meaningful life, even if that entails increased suffering. Choosing meaning over happiness doesn’t make sense within a utilitarian framework that posits happiness as the ultimate value. The best a utilitarian could do is fudge their central value, conceding that meaning is the highest good but insisting, by definitional fiat, that we must call this happiness. But that’s another way of saying that utilitarian philosophy, at base, gets things wrong.  

A similar challenge could be made to ‘rights-based’ philosophers of justice who ground their political theories, not in happiness, but in freedom. What would we do with our lives if we managed to attain freedom, Estragon might have asked? Beckett suggests that we would be free only to endure the horrors of ‘this bitch of a world.’^[ix] In Waiting for Godot, even the wealthy, slave-owning character, Pozzo, who occasionally makes an appearance, certainly didn’t seem content with his wealth, status, and power. He was suffering the human predicament just as the tramps were, only in different material and social circumstances. Beckett suggests that, fundamentally, Pozzo and tramps were experiencing the same old shit – an absurd existence ­– by virtue of sharing the same human condition. We see this today in the twisted faces of those ‘lucky’ celebrities, whom we would be wise not to envy. They, too, are still waiting for Godot. Affluence and fame seem to be inadequate, misconceived life goals. Emptiness remains, even or especially in a nice car surrounded by a crowd of adoring fans and enthusiastic photographers.

If the dominant theories of justice in our time seek to maximise either happiness or freedom, it would seem that they have failed to ground political society on an accurate appreciation of the human situation. Those philosophers are quite right, of course, to value happiness and freedom – even if, at times, these values conflict due to their incommensurable natures. It would be a strange creature who declined or rejected freedom and happiness if they were on offer. But if we were to achieve those goals, my point is that we would still face the uncertain question of life’s meaning. We would still be left waiting for Godot, who would never arrive, biding time until we were relieved of our existential predicament by death. This would be the case even if we were sitting poolside with a bittersweet cocktail. 

Admittedly, human existence might be given a sense of purpose as we struggle for happiness and freedom, and some people achieve a genuine sense of purpose by struggling to advance the condition of others. Albert Camus, for example, in closing his essay on the myth of Sisyphus, suggested that the struggle itself is enough to fill our hearts: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’^[x] But Beckett’s unrelenting pessimism is highlighted when he implies that, having attained happiness or freedom, we might discover that our struggles had been in vain, that life remains meaningless, even if everyone were happy and free. Our struggles would have been merely a distraction from the inescapable tragedy that is human existence, which, in the haunting words of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, is merely a ‘sickness unto death.’^[xi] Refusing to make any ‘leap of faith’ into either religion or rationalistic metaphysics, Beckett arguably took pessimism to its logical extreme – rivalling the ‘great pessimist’ Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Both writers articulated the harshness of the human predicament in the most powerful and compelling ways, without any hope of consolation or redemption. 

This reasoning suggests that what is needed is a politics of meaning, and I believe this insight draws us necessarily into the realm of art and aesthetic experience. In a world without God, and where neither human reason nor material affluence can provide answers to life’s mysteries, it seems to me that art and aesthetics are the best tools we have for negotiating the problems of human existence; the best tools for creating meaning and managing absurdity by engaging absurdity; the best tools for sublimating our primal desires and converting those psychological tensions into personally or socially useful, stimulating, or at least benign, creative activity. What is art if not the creative engagement with questions of meaning? What is beauty if not the definitive, albeit temporary, source of existential consolation?   

Despite engaging in utopian speculation about an affluent society, it should be clear that my purposes in this essay have been entirely practical and pragmatic, related to the here and now. These ruminations on happiness, freedom, and meaning can be taken as philosophical touchstones, an invitation to explore ways of negotiating Beckett’s unmitigated existential pessimism. Rather than wait in futility for Godot, even if one were to attain happiness and freedom, I am proposing that ‘make art’ and ‘contemplate art’ are the best and fullest responses that human beings have to Estragon’s (hypothetical) question: what do we do now, now that we are happy? 

I arrive at these conclusions by conceiving of human beings not as mere consumers, but as artists, with an innate urge to engage in creative and aesthetic activity, driven by the Will to Art.^[xii] As we struggle toward an ideal society, I believe we will universally become what we already are – artists – broadly defined to include not merely practitioners of the ‘fine arts’ but also those who exercise and explore their creative imaginations and aesthetic capacities in daily living. Through our art and aesthetic experience, we might grapple with the eternal mysteries of our strange existence, exploring our creative potentials, and revelling in the profound aesthetic pleasures of sharing our art and experiencing the art of our fellow human beings. The inherent and delightful ambiguities in art also serve a social purpose, as we come to engage each other in social discourse as we struggle meaningfully to understand and digest great art and our relation to it. I believe art can assist with managing an absurd universe like nothing else can. If there is any truth to this, then we might consider, as a social project, the goal of universalising and maximising opportunities for aesthetic engagement with our absurd existence, so that humanity might attain a degree of spiritual peace – or, with a nod to Freud, at least convert our neuroses and misery into ordinary unhappiness.    

Of course, we are not living in a world where affluence has been universalised. The point of my thought experiment, however, was to highlight why consumerism – the dominant notion of the good life today – is a misconceived vision of prosperity, one unable to assist with living in an absurd universe. Do not art and aesthetic experience provide more coherent ultimate values? What if these aesthetic values came to orientate and guide our lives, our economies, our education, and our politics? This obviously wouldn’t mean material provision was unimportant. It would only mean that material provision and economic growth were not considered as ends in themselves but rather a means to aesthetic ends. When material pursuits and the urge to accumulate receive too much of our life energies, we discover – as affluent society today is discovering – that ‘superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only’,^[xiii] as Henry Thoreau once wrote. There is an emptiness to affluence that simply cannot satisfy the human craving for meaning. The developed consciousness of homo aestheticus demands meaning, and this is both a blessing and a curse. It is the source of­ life’s profound richness but also the cause of our unique struggles. It would be easier to be a cat.   

If opportunities for art and aesthetic experience are the highest good for a species such as ours, then it follows that we should structure our social, economic, and political institutions, and shape our own lives, to support that vision. This essay is a further step in my attempt to explore and encourage that approach to life and society. This should not be interpreted as an elitist position that holds up the ‘artistic genius’ as being of more worth than the rest of us who are less able to capture the social imagination with our creative activity. And it doesn’t look to art at the expense of justice but rather to serve social (and ecological) justice. Against the grain of most ‘aestheticist’ philosophy, I counterpose an egalitarian and communitarian celebration of ‘human as artist’. This contrasts, for example, with the aristocratic celebration of the Übermensch in Nietzsche’s philosophy – although, to be fair, one can offer a creative reading of Nietzsche in which a communitarian ethic seems more consistent with his worldview than the admittedly elitist sounding passages in his oeuvre which dismiss ‘the herd’. In any case, my goal, to be developed further in due course, is to ‘democratise the poet’, by highlighting the ways in which there is genius and poetry in us all, a lesson powerfully advanced by the likes of Fredrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and William Morris.   

I have outlined the problematic vision of an affluent utopia and engaged the questions to which it gave rise. From here I will invite readers to work backwards from this derivation of ultimate value to explore how humans might respond to the problem of existence today, and what implications this might have on questions of political economy. My speculative question – what do we do now, now that we are free and happy? – was designed to shed light on the human condition in ways that can guide action here and now, in a world which perhaps seems closer to dystopia than utopia. Political economy today, global capitalism, is designed to maximise growth, the planet be damned. If there is a vision implicit to this economic system, it is that the rich get richer and the poorest eventually catch up. Not only is this ecocidal, but my point has been that if we ever achieved that goal, we’d discover we’d been chasing a false target. A politics of meaning, in contrast, would ensure that everyone had ‘enough’ to explore their aesthetic potentials as artist and art-lover. This vision is inconsistent with any economy focussed on economic growth as a good in itself and any culture that searches for meaning in consumer goods and services.    

Of course, ‘make art’ was also the answer Samuel Beckett gave through the course of actually living his life, even if this lies in direct contrast with the answer he gives in his writing, which was: ‘wait for Godot’. Why Beckett said one thing and did another is a question that admits no easy or clear answer. Perhaps the tramps’ injunction to ‘wait for Godot’ wasn’t Beckett’s positive answer or advice but rather his view on how human beings, living in bad faith or in fear of freedom, actually spend their days. Beckett couldn’t escape the fact, however, that writing itself is a form of revolt and an expression of care – a rejection of the belief that ‘nothing matters’ or that ‘everything is meaningless’. As the narrator utters at the end of Beckett’s novel The Unnameable: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’^[xiv]   

If people were to reflect on the analysis above and come to agree that ‘making and contemplating art’ is a promising means of managing existential challenges, then it would follow that material affluence and hi-tech industrial society are not needed to ensure these ultimate aesthetic values are attained. The major premises of this collection of essays are, first, that material sufficiency is all that is needed for a good life of artistic activity and aesthetic contemplation; and, secondly, that sufficiency is all that is possible for an ecologically viable existence on a finite planet. If we need art to help us manage absurdity, and that lifestyles of artistic creation and contemplation need not cost the Earth, there is a sense in which I can be understood to be offering ‘hope without optimism’.^[xv] I have not established the case herein, but I invite readers to consider the possibility that, just maybe, art can save us from capitalism, and that ‘[b]eauty will save the world.’^[xvi]  

Here the implications of my analysis become apparent, for it provides grounds for a radical critique of existing society. If industrial growth economies are trying to provide material affluence for all as a path to the good life, then our global mode of political economy is structured in ways that are neither necessary for satisfying our deepest needs (autonomous creative activity and aesthetic experience) nor sustainable (since globalising affluence is demonstrably unsustainable). In short, industrial civilisation is suppressing the creative nature of our species by grossly overvaluing material affluence while at the same time undermining the environmental foundations for universal artistic opportunity. We can, and must, do better, and I’m suggesting that aesthetic interventions in the world are amongst the best ways to achieve an ecological civilisation of artists and art lovers. In creating this new form of aestheticised society, art is both the means and the end.

The vision of political economy I am working toward is one that I will call the aesthetic state. This implies that societal structures would be collaboratively designed so as to maximise opportunities for self-governing human beings to practise and contemplate art, as well as immerse themselves in nature’s beauty, while minimising material and energy demands of the economy on a finite planet. This will involve considering what implications this aesthetic worldview might have on questions of distributive justice, sustainability, and the good life. Specifically, in order to answer the economic question, ‘How much is enough?’, one has to answer the normative question: ‘Enough for what?’. I am presenting ‘art’ as an answer to that normative question, and upon that premise I am proposing that a humble, non-consumerist life of voluntary simplicity provides ‘enough’ material wealth to live a full and artful life of infinite diversity, sensuous pleasure, and imaginative possibility. Throughout this collection of essays, art has been defined broadly as the pleasurable and meaningful expression of creative labour. This conception of art has been defended as the fundamental value and ultimate end point for an aesthetic species, such as ours, in an aesthetic universe, such as this.On that basis, my goal is to examine the role and importance of art and the artist in non-utopian societies such as our own, for within today’s capitalist dispensation, artful living upon ‘sufficient’ material foundations seems to be the exception rather than the rule. I diagnose this as an aesthetic deficit disorder, a discordant condition that I believe can only be harmonised through art. This is related to matters of taste – and it is to such matters that I now turn more directly. After all, to paraphrase the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: we must create the taste by which we will be judged.

^[i] Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) p. 60.  

^[ii] See Nasrullah Mambrol, ‘Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’ Literary Theory and Criticism. Available at:  https://literariness.org/2020/07/27/analysis-of-samuel-becketts-waiting-for-godot/ (accessed 20 April 2023). 

^[iii] See Beckett, note 1, p. 94. 

^[iv] Ibid. 

^[v] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 68. 

^[vi] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2004).  

^[vii] John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ in John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) pp.321-332. 

^[viii] Quoted in Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities’, note 8, p. 327. Keynes references these lines as ‘the traditional epitaph written for herself by the old charwoman.’ 

^[ix] See Beckett, Godot, note 1, p. 38. 

^[x] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 111. 

^[xi] Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (London: Penguin, 1989). 

^[xii] See Samuel Alexander, ‘Creative Evolution and the Will to Art’ in this collection of essays. The full set will be available here: http://samuelalexander.info/s-m-p-l-c-t-y-ecological-civilisation-and-the-will-to-art/ (accessed 10 May 2023). 

^[xiii] Henry Thoreau, Walden, in Carl Bode (ed.) The Portable Thoreau (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 568.

^[xiv] Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable in Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1955).

^[xv] Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 

^[xvi] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 370. 

The post Answering Estragon: Art, Godot, and Utopia first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to the changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’

‘The struggle for an expansion of the world of beauty, nonviolence, and serenity 

is a political struggle.’

–      Herbert Marcuse

In this essay I explore Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic writings, epitomised by his final book, The Aesthetic Dimension: A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1979).^[i] In that book, and in his other aesthetic writings,^[ii] Marcuse questioned the ‘orthodox’ Marxist position on aesthetics, which can be summarised crudely as the view that art (as a cultural superstructure) is a reflection of the productive relations in society (the material base). From this perspective, works of art will tend to entrench or advance the interests and worldview of the dominant class in society, consciously or unconsciously. When the material conditions shift, so too will the aesthetic or cultural superstructure, sometimes anticipating but usually lagging the change in productive relations. Thus the role of art and aesthetics in driving social and political change is minimised, almost to a vanishing point.  

This view, however, is unable to explain why art from previous societies (e.g., ancient Greece) can remain so relevant and stimulating today, despite the drastically different productive relations in society. Marcuse’s explanation, contra orthodox Marxism, is that art can achieve a degree of autonomy from the material conditions of society, such that art can illuminate not merely the injustices and potentials of a particular class, in a particular society, but can speak to aspects of the human condition that seem perennial. It also implies that art need not merely reflect a society’s mode of production but can transgress, indict, and surpass that material base. This means that existence and the world can be aesthetically engaged in ways that transcend a specific class society and shine through its specific social conditions. If this opening theoretical move by Marcuse is valid, as I believe it is, the base-superstructure model of art and aesthetics is called into question, inviting a deeper critique.    

According to the orthodox Marxist perspective, to the extent art has a political function, the only truly progressive or revolutionary examples are those which express the material interests, and advance the class consciousness, of the proletariat. This theory of art was taken to its logical extreme in the Soviet Union and came to be known as ‘Socialist Realism’. Bourgeois art is rendered merely ‘decadent’ in contrast. This base-superstructure schema, which is presented here more rigidly than Marx and Engels ever did,^[iii] has nevertheless had implications on how aesthetics is perceived as a social or political force. In particular, Marcuse maintained that by privileging the role of the ‘material base’ as the true or fundamental reality, this devalued the political function of individual consciousness, subjectivity, inwardness, emotion, sensuality, and imagination. To the extent that consciousness matters in this stylised Marxian framework, it is dissolved into class consciousness, and thus the individual remains invisible and insignificant.  

By marginalising culture and individual sensibility, major drivers of revolution are minimised, and Marxism for too long has neglected the radical potential of aesthetics to induce transformative shifts in subjectivity. As Marcuse argued, ‘the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence and their passions, their drives and their goals.’^[iv] This political function of inward experience is devalued to the extent that ‘inwardness’ is dismissed as bourgeois decadence or merely escapism. The inner reality of an individual, though not a ‘force of production’, as such, is nevertheless decisive as a social force. Our emotions and sensibilities constitute our lived reality. Accordingly, something has gone astray if this inner reality is relegated to some secondary or marginal place in the social order or in social change. 

Marcuse claimed that, even in bourgeois society, the affirmation of inwardness allows people to step outside market relations and exchange values, opening up space for different dimensions of being. This process itself can function to delegitimise capitalist values, by shifting focus from one’s identity merely as worker or consumer to someone who embodies imagination, passion, conscience, and the capacity to create and self-govern. If this implies a certain withdrawal and retreat from market realities, it retains oppositional force provided escaping is not the last position; provided opposition does not culminate in withdrawal.   

The critical function of art – that is, its contribution to the struggle for liberation – lies in its ‘aesthetic form’, which Marcuse defined as:

the result of the transformation of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc. The work is thus ‘taken out’ of the constant process of reality and assumes a significance and truth of its own. The aesthetic transformation is achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding so that they reveal the essence of reality in its appearance: the repressed potentialities of man and nature. The work of art thus re-presents reality while accusing it.^[v]  

We see, then, that Marcuse ascribed to art a political function. Extending Marx, he sought to show that the nature of art, by virtue of its aesthetic form, is not merely a reflection of the material base. This does not deny that the ‘content’ of art is always and necessarily drawn from existing society and influenced by productive relations. Art is autonomous insofar as it can transcend the constraints of the established reality, enabling the artist both to protest that reality and offer insight into an alternative one – the beautiful image of liberation. Art can thereby bring to the surface feelings, visions, and even other forms of ‘reason’ that are otherwise denied or unheard. The alienated character of existing society is exposed by the non-alienated or independent character of art. As art theorist Peter Burger states: ‘The citizen who, in everyday life, has been reduced to a partial function (mean-ends activity) can be discovered in art as a “human being.”’^[vi]

Through this process, art is able to give rise to a perceived reality that is suppressed and distorted in actual experience, exploding normal modes of communication, perception, and behaviour. Paradoxically, these new truths and insights of art, though fictional, can be more ‘real’ than the mystified realities of the existing society and its social institutions and norms. When art is able to transcend the established order, the perceived ‘objectivity’ of that reality is shattered, and this creates space for the rebirth of a rebellious sensibility. When successful, art can define what is real, and in this rupture, ‘the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.’^[vii] What capitalism conceals, art can reveal.   

Herein lies the potential revolutionary character of art. Marcuse recognised that art can be called ‘revolutionary’ in several senses. An artist can revolutionise their field through a highly original development of technique or style, signalling the avant-garde. However, Marcuse is primarily interested in the way art could be revolutionary in a different, political sense, even as the former could lead to the latter. Art is revolutionary in Marcuse’s sense when it can present or re-present reality in an aesthetically transfigured way through which the unfreedom of the oppressed is highlighted and exposed, and visions of liberation are clarified or presented in energising ways. In this way, aesthetic interventions in culture can break through the mystified and petrified social conditions that entrench that unfreedom and open the horizon for radical change.^[viii] Indeed, the autonomy of art, Marcuse insisted, contains the categorical imperative: ‘things must change.’^[ix]

Of course, art is not always transgressive, progressive, or critical. ‘Great art has never had any problem coexisting with the horrors of reality,’^[x] Marcuse admitted. It can be affirmative of the existing social order in ways that normalise, glorify, or absolve it. Marcuse noted that the militant bourgeois literature of the eighteenth century represented a struggle of the ascending class with the nobility, essentially over matters concerning bourgeois morality, not productive relations. With rare exceptions, this was not a critical literature seeking to advance the consciousness of the working class. Rather, it was content to envisage freedom merely in the imagination or within subsections of a population, displacing universal liberation to the realm of the daydream, and representing escapist illusionism or mere decoration in an otherwise miserable reality. The social order is not threatened but rather affirmed. As political theorist Charles Reitz noted, Marcuse was perfectly aware of ‘the paradoxical circumstances in which the aesthetic treatment of social realities could actually lead to an anesthetic “tranquilization” of perception and thought.’^[xi]Furthermore, art that was once transgressive and oppositional can, over time, become assimilated: ‘All indictments are easily absorbed by the system they indict… Picasso’s Guernica is a cherished museum piece.’^[xii]

Still, there can be a role for art that criticises the existing reality without providing a way forward in Marxian terms. In the nineteenth century, the poet Baudelaire was hardly a prophet for the working class, but as Walter Benjamin observed, he ‘was a secret agent, an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule. One who confronts Baudelaire with this class gets more out of him than one who rejects him as uninteresting from a proletarian standpoint.’^[xiii] The self-indictment of art can help invalidate reality through subterranean rebellion, even if it does not always point to a new society. 

There is also a question here about whether art is being assigned a role which is better suited to theory. If social critique relies on conceptual analysis, this may not suit the medium of literature, poetry, music, etc. However, Marcuse argued that because people are constituted by an unfree society, their ‘repressed and distorted potentialities can be represented only in an estranging form… and only as estrangement does art fulfill its cognitive function: it communicates truths not communicable any other way.’^[xiv]

Any realisation of free and classless society presupposes ‘a radical transformation of the drives and needs of the individual.’^[xv] This hopeful vision raises the prospect of the ‘end of art’, since in a free society one might imagine the traditional function of art would become obsolete. Images of beauty and freedom would cease to have a critical role to play to the extent that beauty and freedom are no longer denied by society and have become aspects of reality. The emergence of such free and beautiful social relations, however, are incompatible with capitalist society, or even with a socialist society that tries to compete with capitalism on the former’s terms.^[xvi]

Even in a radically transformed society, this would not signal the end of art, since Marcuse recognised that there are limits to freedom and fulfilment by virtue of the human condition. Human beings will remain embedded in nature as tragically suffering creatures. Thus, art will forever retain a transhistorical role and significance. The vision of establishing social conditions for the development of the life-enhancing faculties of humanity is an ideal that ought to be pursued but will never be finally achieved. Art must appeal to a consciousness that is able to participate in the furtherance of this species’ defining project. 

Marcuse’s next questions was: who is assumed to be the subject of this revolutionary consciousness? According to orthodox Marxist aesthetics, the subject is the proletarian, who has no interest in preserving the existing society. As outlined elsewhere in these essays,^[xvii] this radical consciousness does not (yet?) exist in advanced capitalist societies, for it seems that the proletariat has been more or less fully integrated in the existing order in ways that Marx never anticipated. Furthermore, under capitalism, the exploited populations extend far beyond the conventional proletariat and comprise a large proportion of the so-called middle class. This includes white collar workers, government bureaucrats, and those in the service and information sectors.    

The result, according to fellow critical theorist Theodor Adorno, is for art to take an extreme form – as uncompromising estrangement and radical autonomy.^[xviii] While Marcuse acknowledged that this can make art appear elitist or decadent, removed from the class struggle, he nevertheless maintained that such estranged art remains authentic by opposing society through its very estrangement. But still, he added, ‘the subject to which authentic art appeals is socially anonymous; it does not coincide with the potential subject of revolutionary practice.’^[xix]

The point here is that the consciousness needed to change society and emancipate people from the rule of capital does not yet exist. In a celebrated passage Marcuse declared: ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to the changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’^[xx] But if revolutionary art is supposed to speak the language of the people, who are ‘the people’? The contradiction here, as Marcuse and others in the Frankfurt School contended, is that there does not seem to be a large mass of people ready to receive the radical vision of the counterculture. There is at most a militant minority.

The vexed problem that follows is that it is not clear why art should speak the language of the people if that language is not yet the language of liberation.^[xxi] For example, little is to be achieved if a culture thinks that the existential malaise caused by consumerism can only be solved by more consumption; or if the ecological problems caused by capitalist growth and extraction can only be solved by more of the same. Until some form of transformation of consciousness occurs, artists cannot simply speak the language of the people. Instead, Marcuse argued, artists ‘must rather first create this [oppositional] place, and this is a process which may require them to stand against the people, which may prevent them from speaking their language.’^[xxii] This is the sense in which ‘elitism’ in aesthetic practice today can retain a radical content. ‘To work for the radicalization of consciousness means to make explicit and conscious the material and ideological discrepancy between the writer [or artist more broadly] and “the people” rather than obscure and camouflage it. Revolutionary art may well become the “Enemy of the People.”’^[xxiii]  

Marcuse’s work is premised, nonetheless, on the need for political struggle and that such struggle depends on a radical change in consciousness. This refers not merely to a shift in political outlook but a deeper transformation of human needs and drives that are emancipated from the dictates of the existing order. The transformative potential of art presupposes that the people administered by capitalism are able to ‘unlearn the language, concepts, and images of this administration, that they experience the dimension of qualitative change, that they reclaim their subjectivity, their inwardness.’^[xxiv] This is no limp celebration of escapism, but rather a recognition that the subversion of experience and the creation of new universes are birthed from within, and only later achieved outwardly. A new consciousness will not emerge unaided – nor will a new society.  

The aesthetic method

The question becomes: how can art transfigure consciousness in a way that leads to post-capitalist political praxis? I propose that there are several modes of aesthetic operation, including but not limited to: (i) aesthetic indictment; (ii) aesthetic imagination (both visionary and moral); (iii) an aesthetic revision of ‘needs’; and (iv) aesthetic enchantment. This is my categorisation, not Marcuse’s, but by and large it can be placed over his aesthetic theory without being forced. I will now briefly consider these four modes in turn.   

Aesthetic indictment 

An aesthetics of indictment relates to the capacity of art to expose how the established reality oppresses sectors of society, or does violence against things one cares about, in ways that are not always obvious or have even been embraced by the oppressed. By redescribing ‘normality’, the status quo can come to seem abnormal, unacceptable, even obscene, giving voice to undercurrents of cultural disillusionment. What had been subconscious or unconscious is raised to the surface of experience, reshaping and transfiguring what is perceived and how it is perceived.  

There can be an intellectual or cognitive component to this redescription, but most importantly it is felt in the body. What had been tolerable becomes viscerally intolerable. Something must be done. Thus, a new subjectivity of rebellion – or affect for rebellion – can emerge through aesthetic intervention, born of outrage. The complacent consciousness can be shaken awake, and ordinary categories or frames for interpreting miserable reality can be interrupted and disrupted. In a ‘one-dimensional society’, art can invite us to question reality and reassert the plurality of possible worlds. To the extent that we have become puppets manipulated by the forces of capital and technology, art threatens to cut the strings and liberate us through the very act of exposing our condition as puppets. Marcuse made the point as follows:

Experience is intensified to breaking point… The intensification of perception can go as far as to distort things so that the unspeakable is spoken, the otherwise invisible becomes visible, and the unbearable explodes. Thus the aesthetic transformation turns into indictment – but also into a celebration of that which resists injustice and terror, and of that which can still be saved.^[xxv]    

In this way, through an encounter with art – being powerfully challenged by aesthetic indictment and the celebration of revolt – we can find that, in some way, human consciousness gets restructured. A different moral sensibility can emerge that grounds new ways of seeing, feeling, and acting. When a new generation grows up adopting and normalising these redescriptions, we find that the world has changed. This is perhaps why Percy Bysshe Shelley was prepared to declare that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’,^[xxvi] suggesting that aesthetic revolutions often precede revolutions in political economy, sometimes in subtle ways. As quoted in an earlier essay, J.G. Ballard once stated that ‘many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.’ 

Aesthetic imagination (visionary) 

Beyond the negation of indictment, art is also the promise of liberation and can point to new forms of prosperity. Art and aesthetic interventions in culture can offer or invent alternative mythologies of existence, expanding the imagination in ways that make new ways of living and being comprehensible, plausible, and attractive. These visions or creations are only appearances – they cannot be realised in the domain of art alone. But they do threaten to develop social and political significance when they move from the imagination into the body, guiding action, providing hope, opening new intellectual and emotional possibilities, and thereby shattering the oppressive conformism of the present. This significance presumably can be felt both in the artist and the audience, both creator and spectator, especially insofar as aesthetic engagement is itself an act of creation (e.g., through interpretation).  

Aesthetically creating new mythopoetic foundations of a society underpins everything else that follows – including politics and economics. This is because myth and narrative are what structure and rework the popular imagination, including the consciousness of the agents of change. Politics and economics always operate in the service of story, so what that story is obviously matters a great deal. But a culture’s ‘story’ is never stable, nor are the values, meanings, and possibilities implicit in any given story. Fiction and the imagination can open up new realities, just as, through art, old worlds can be made new. The artist does not escape reality, then, but augments and expands reality.   

In an age when it can sometimes seem as if there is no alternative to the carbon-intensive, consumer way of life, being exposed to new ways of living and being through art has the potential to expand and radicalise the imagination. In this way, ‘the world of a work of art is “unreal” in the ordinary sense of the word: it is a fictitious reality. But it is “unreal” not because it is less, but because it is also more as well as qualitatively “other” than the established reality. As a fictitious world, as illusion, it contains more truth than does everyday reality.’^[xxvii]

At such times, more hopeful and liberated futures can flicker in and out of existence, demanding that we choose a future where once we had thought there was no alternative to the status quo. In these moments, when we are able to break through the crust of conventional thinking and feeling, we see that the world, as it is, is not how it has to be. One might think of utopian novels like William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890; to be discussed in later essay)^[xxviii]or, more recently, The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson. These authors give imaginative content to futures that were otherwise barely thinkable, reshaping the contours of what is possible by describing other worlds in engaging and creative ways. This type of work has two primary functions: first, a cognitive one, by expanding the imagination regarding possible worlds; second, an affective one, by shifting our emotional states on account of the cognitive shift that has taken place (or, conversely, by shifting emotional states that enable a cognitive shift to occur). It is that emotional shift which can ultimately lead to shifts in behaviour, producing acts of resistance and renewal that try to change the world, and sometimes succeed in doing so.  

Marcuse offered a cautionary note, however, regarding how ‘directly’ art should present its message. He resisted the notion of ‘instrumentalist’ art whose purpose it is to advance a political cause, and would sooner see radical potential in art that is less direct, doing its work in a more subterranean way. ‘The more immediately political the work of art is, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change.’^[xxix] When exercised well, the aesthetic imagination can change us as it changes reality, requiring a new set of relationships to be established between self, other, and world. Imagining a different future, therefore, is a necessary step in its realisation, even if it is only a first step. 

Faced with aesthetic statements of how life can be different – if only, at first, in the fictional world of art – the structures and narratives that define the contours of the human situation can suddenly seem less compelling. The world’s perceived objectivity can be shattered. The ‘real’ starts getting redefined. New, less violent or oppressive future pathways are cut into the landscape of the human journey. Initially this takes place only in the realm of the imagination, but that is a necessity, for ‘what other faculty other than the imagination could invoke the sensuous presence of that which is not (yet?)?’^[xxx] Marx and Engels, and most of the key figures of the Frankfurt School, were always cautious (often dismissive) about envisioning what the ‘new society’ might look like. But if ever that position were justified historically, it seems unjustified today. Action needs to be motivated by visions of an alternative, and ought to be guided by a map, even if that map must be constantly revised. 

This offers some insight into why art has transformative or revolutionary potential and always threatens to perform a political function, albeit usually indirectly. One of the most important roles of the artist in society is not merely to make beautiful objects, images, stories, or songs, but to expand conditions of possibility by breaking through the petrified social reality and unshackling the human imagination. Far from representing an escape from reality, art and the artist can in fact expose the falseness and contingency of the established order, leaving the truth of alternative realities more accessible. As philosopher and novelist Mark Burch says: ‘When all appeals to reason have failed, tell a new story.’^[xxxi]

But Marcuse insisted that the promises of art must not be made too easily: 

If art were to promise that at the end good would triumph over evil, such a promise would be refuted by the historical truth. In reality it is evil which triumphs, and there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time.’^[xxxii]

In any case, ‘[a]rt cannot redeem its promise, and reality offers no promises, only chances.’^[xxxiii] As noted earlier, art itself cannot change the world, it can only change the minds and sensibilities of people who must then act in the world to change it. Marcuse claimed that the ‘indictment and the promise preserved in art lose their unreal or utopian character to the degree to which they inform the strategy of oppositional movements…’^[xxxiv] The hope which art represents must not remain ‘ideal’ – again, this is art’s hidden categorical imperative. It must not point to a world of mere fiction or fantasy, but articulate through aesthetic form the concrete possibilities that call for realisation.   

Beyond the visions of liberation and happiness, the aesthetic imagination can also offer dystopian futures. These extrapolate the present into the future to highlight the gravity of what is at stake if current trajectories are not changed. Whereas the positive futures seek to motivate out of hope, the dystopian future is designed to motivate out of fear – fear of losing what one loves and holds most dear. At the extreme lie novels like George Orwell’s, 1984, or Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road – breathtakingly grim pictures of possible human futures, designed to shake us awake. Whether optimistic or pessimistic, imagining alternative future pathways is designed to break us away from the complacency of routine ways of seeing, feeling, and acting, establishing the conditions for alternative modes of consciousness.  

Aesthetic imagination (moral) 

Most of what I’ve just described could apply to the ‘visionary imagination’ – art that helps expand our perspectives on the future, or shift our perspectives on the present, in ways that influence our sensibilities and shape our action. But we could also speak of the aesthetic expansion of the ‘moral imagination’ (which, at times, can overlap with the visionary imagination). From this perspective, the moral imagination can refer to what philosopher Wilfred Sellars called ‘we-intentions’ or ‘we-consciousness.’^[xxxv] Expanding the realm of sympathy, care, and concern is a marker of moral progress, as we come to include more people in the category of ‘us’. 

How might the moral imagination expand? Neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has made a compelling case that art – the novel, in particular – is a far more effective means of provoking an expanded moral or ethical sensibility, and reshaping social relations in the world, than logic, science, or books of moral philosophy.^[xxxvi] Indeed, Rorty argued that paradigm shifts in human culture, science, and political economy rarely occur because a society has been rationally convinced, based on the evidence, of a new framework of understanding. Instead, such revolutions are usually a result of a new ‘sentimental education,’^[xxxvii] that is, a result of creative interventions in the dominant story whereby many significant aspects of the old mode of understanding have been redescribed in new and emotionally engaging ways. 

Rorty suggested that the emotions we have toward others depend on ‘the liveliness of our imagination’, rather than on ‘facts’ that are ‘discoverable independently of sentiment.’^[xxxviii] He provided the example of Harriet Beecher Stove’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a book that redescribed slave society in the United States in ways that expanded the moral compass of many white readers, as they came to see slaves as people, just like them, rather than creatures for whom moral concern was not required. Readers came to feel sympathy with slaves, and feel shame about the existing conditions, in ways that they previously did not. Social relations were somehow demystified, social conditioning was undermined, and aspects of the world were seen in a new light as ethical attention shifted focus. Through the ‘true illusions’ of art, reality was delegitimised.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point when she defends the humanities and the liberal arts ability to refine character and foster compassion, noting that ‘the ability to imagine the experience of another – a capacity almost all human beings possess in some form – needs to be greatly enhanced and refined if we are to have any hope of sustaining decent institutions across the many divisions that any modern society contains.’^[xxxix] By exposing ourselves to new and unusual stories, about people different to ‘us’, we minimise the chances of being confined to a single, myopic perspective on the world and increase the chances of expanding our sympathies. This does not diminish the role of reasoning in ethical progress, but acknowledges that our emotions and sentiments play an essential role in rational argument.^[xl] After all, we only reason about things we care about, and thus sentimental education – through art – provides the foundation for moral debate and ethical progress.  

Marcuse gave a disturbing example that testifies to the truth of art, highlighting its power to enchant and soften the sharp edges of humanity – if we let it. He told the story of how Lenin resolved not to listen to Beethoven’s sonatas, which he admired so deeply, because he feared they would enforce a humanitarian spirit on him which he felt obliged to reject. ‘All too often,’ Lenin admitted, ‘I cannot listen to music. It would work on one’s nerves. One would rather babble nonsense, and caress the heads of people who live in dirty hell and who nevertheless can create such beauty. But today one should not caress anyone’s heads – one’s hand would be bitten off. One must beat heads, beat unmercifully – although ideally we are against all violence.’^[xli] Totalitarian governments acknowledge the power of art through the ferocity of their censorship. If art did not threaten the power structures of political society, presumably novelists, poets, and playwrights would be free to write whatever they wanted, no matter how critical. 

Aesthetic revision of ‘needs’

Capitalism does not merely produce things. It conditions the subjectivities and sensibilities of human beings. In affluent societies today, the system goes beyond the provision of material needs and constructs the rationalities, desires, and sense experience of people. As noted in a previous essay, Jacques Rancière uses the rather infelicitous phrase ‘the distribution of the sensible’^[xlii] to politicise this aesthetic reality, exploring how the structures of political economy not only distribute material wealth and power amongst a population, but also sensuous and aesthetic experience. A new political economy, therefore, would not only redistribute wealth and power, but change what people are able to feel or not feel, and in what ways. Rancière invites us to consider how political decisions, actions, and narratives determine what presents itself to sense experience; that is, how politics shapes what can be seen, felt, and spoken about – and by whom. Marcuse’s aesthetic theory sheds light on how art can contribute to changing or destabilising the existing distribution of the sensible. 

As material wealth expanded over recent centuries, one might have thought that wealth would have become less important and desired; that affluent societies, in particular, would have recognised the diminishing marginal utility of money, and redirected social energies toward non-materialistic pursuits. But somehow, the diminishing returns have been not just disguised but inverted. Growth in consumption seems more important than ever, as if we have been conditioned against the desire for freedom. In the relentless pursuit of ‘more’ – a goal that it was assumed would liberate us – we have bound ourselves to a conception of progress that perpetuates our servitude while at the same time making ecological devastation a way of life. 

Why is this so? And by what means? In affluent societies, people have become objects of administration, even as we are offered the prefabricated ‘freedoms’ of consumer choice. And through this administration – the operation of which is sometimes transparent, often insidious – we reproduce the commodities that are needed for profitable enterprise. But we also reproduce the values and practices that turn the cogs of the industrial machine. The technological capacity to shape public consciousness has never been more powerful, facilitated by the internet and social media. If we were ever to wonder why most social media platforms are ‘free’ (i.e., of no financial cost to the user), it would become clear that it is because they are not selling a product but creating one. The product is us – a docile, distracted, and subservient population. 

The ‘needs’ that have been engineered into us have a stabilising, conservative force: the counterrevolution of capitalism has become embedded in the structure of our instincts and ‘second nature’. Marcuse argued that this ‘militates against any change that would disrupt and perhaps even abolish the dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise – abolish his existence as a consumer consuming himself in buying and selling.’^[xliii] But exploitation does not become less exploitative just because wage slaves are ‘compensated’ with superfluous comforts they have been educated to need. Still, this reality has turned the mass of the population into a conservative, even counter-revolutionary, force. Quantitative progress in an economy’s growth militates against the qualitative changes that are needed regarding what the economy is for. Leisure is provided merely to regenerate workers so they can get back to work. 

We have arrived at a stage in history where we cannot transcend the existing system without transcending ourselves. That is, we must liberate ourselves from the exploitative apparatus of this society but first we must free ourselves from what we have been made into. As explained in a previous essay, the aesthetic condition of ‘play’, as theorised by Friedrich Schiller, is precisely the state in which we are most likely to be able to question our ‘normal sense’ of self.^[xliv] This presents us with a vicious circle however, as Marcuse recognised: ‘the rupture with the self-propelling conservative continuum of needs must precede the revolution which is to usher in a new society, but such a rupture itself can only be envisaged in a revolution…’^[xlv]

No radical change is possible without the emergence of a new sensibility, a new universe of desires and aspirations – and thus new agents of society’s radical reconstruction. This qualitative change must occur in the infrastructure of our very being, itself a dimension of the infrastructure of society at large.^[xlvi] Marcuse wrote that ‘the new direction, the new institutions and relations of production, must express the ascent of needs and satisfactions very different from and even antagonistic to those prevalent in the exploitative societies.’^[xlvii] The roots of capitalism lie within us, which is the system’s greatest achievement but also its greatest weakness. After all, we have seen both in our biological inheritance as homo aestheticus and our philosophical condition as ‘self-fashioners’ that we have the capacity to make something new from what we’ve been made into.^[xlviii]        

Marcuse claimed, however, that: 

capitalism cannot satisfy the needs which it creates. The rising standard of living itself expresses this dynamic: it enforced the constant creation of needs that could be satisfied in the market; it is now fostering transcending needs which cannot be satisfied without abolishing the capitalist mode of production.^[xlix]

Thus capitalism will ultimately be its own gravedigger, because it gives birth to the class of gravediggers. By liberating ourselves from ourselves, we are freer to rediscover the life-enhancing forces and sensuous aesthetic qualities that are largely absent in a life often wasted in unending competitive performance and materialistic pursuits. Without this transformation of our inner realities, the consumer mentality and its mutilated experience would merely be reproduced in the new society. Think of the closing passages in Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), where the animals look through the window to see their pig leaders argue with the human farmers: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.’^[l] All revolutions are at risk of merely reproducing what the revolution was meant to leave behind. 

What this suggests is that the transition to a radically new type of society will not involve the broader satisfaction of existing needs, but a rupture with the needs and desires that currently define advanced capitalism. That is, there must be a qualitative leap not a limitless quantitative achievement. ‘The revolution involves a radical transformation of the needs and aspirations themselves, cultural as well as material; of consciousness and sensibility; of work process as well as leisure.’^[li] The emancipation of the senses, therefore, has a negative and positive function. The new sensibility will come to see the contemporary world of aggressive acquisition, competition, and (dis)possession as distasteful, repelling the violence, cruelty, and brutality those things rely upon. The new sensibility will also crave new forms of aesthetic experience in community, nature, art, creative productive activity, and leisure. ‘The emancipation of the senses,’ Marcuse insisted, ‘would make freedom what it is not yet: a sensuous need…’.^[lii] Art can express and revitalise the longing for the realisation of human creative potential that has been deadened or lies dormant under capitalism. If the purpose of art, for Schopenhauer, was to abolish desire, it was, for Marcuse, the primary means of re-educating desire. 

This does not deny the primary demand of any justifiable economy: the universal provision of basic material needs. It only points to the truism that defining our needs purely or primarily in material terms is a gross failure of imagination. It also diminishes the inherent creative capacities of our species to explore and flourish in the non-material realm of existence, especially through art and aesthetic experience.  Not only does art and aesthetics provide a non-materialist source of flourishing, but these forms of experience can also help bring such a poeticised society into existence. Art, that is, can expose the falsity or artificiality of many ‘needs’ of the existing society – ‘needs’ through which a form of voluntary servitude is achieved – and give rise to ‘new needs’ consistent with liberation. Indeed, art could create, precisely, the need for freedom itself, recapturing aesthetic needs as forces of subversion and political praxis. ‘Permanent aesthetic subversion,’ Marcuse declared: ‘this is the way of art’.^[liii] He added that:   

The autonomy of art reflects the unfreedom of the individuals in the unfree society. If people were free, then art would be the form and expression of their freedom. Art remains marked by unfreedom; in contradicting it, art achieves its autonomy.^[liv]

It would seem that one of the roles of the artist is to help people see or feel more clearly the violence too often hidden in our cultural practices and economic and political institutions. Moreover, the artist can show that there are forms of flourishing and liberation, based on new needs and a new sensibility, that lie beyond consumer culture. These forms of flourishing would not be founded upon affluence, growth, competition, and technology, but upon the visions and values of sufficiency, moderation, permaculture, community, cooperation, and self-governance. The words of poet Gary Snyder speak to this approach with eloquent insight: ‘it would be best to consider this an ongoing “revolution by consciousness” which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side’.^[lv] This speaks directly to the power and necessity of art and aesthetics. As Marcuse stated: ‘Art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual,’^[lvi] even if this must ultimately be achieved through collective action.  

Aesthetic enchantment and the power of beauty 

According to Marcuse, ‘Marxist aesthetics has sharply rejected the idea of the Beautiful, the central category of “bourgeois” aesthetics. It seems difficult indeed to associate this concept with revolutionary art; it seems irresponsible, snobbish to speak of the Beautiful in the face of the necessities of the political struggle.’^[lvii] Indeed, the aesthetic experience of beauty is arguably, at best, ‘neutral’, since it can only be judged by effects and consequences. Beauty risks being mere distraction or sedation, perhaps even functioning to repress the imagination or disguise truths that ought to be revealed.   

Nevertheless, this orthodox Marxist critique of beauty arguably gets things back the front, and risks damaging the revolutionary cause in an attempt to advance it. One should not reject eating on account of it not being a direct engagement in politics, and perhaps the same goes for engagement with beauty and aesthetic value, which may be forms of nourishment almost as vital as food. But what are the sources of this radical potential?

In developing an answer to that question, and in defence of beauty, I will now draw on Jane Bennett’s book, The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001),^[lviii] which rejects modernity’s dominant narrative of disenchantment and seeks to tell an alter-tale. Such an alter-tale would be one that recognises that the world still has the capacity to enchant in ways that has ethical (and, one can argue, political) significance. Bennett’s novel approach is to seek out ‘enchantments’ in a modern world that deceptively imagines itself free of this ancient value. I will extend Bennett’s philosophy by focussing on the capacity for art (and nature) to enchant our lives in ways that serves ethical and political objectives. The goal, in part, is to rescue beauty’s political relevance by highlighting its power to enchant. This can be understood as a development of Marcuse’s view on the energising and even intoxicating effects of art. 

At this point the notion of ‘enchantment’ needs further explanation. Max Weber argued that modernity was increasingly disenchanted and stamped with ‘the imprint of meaning-lessness.’^[lix] Even today the prevailing view is that modern life – with its cars, concrete, over-crowdedness, pollution, and noise – cannot be experienced as enchanted. Indeed, in our post-Enlightenment age, any appeal to this notion requires not just definition but justification, since it normally belongs to past ages of superstition. While Bennett admits that there are plenty of aspects of contemporary life that fit the disenchantment story, her thesis is that ‘there is enough evidence of everyday enchantment to warrant the telling of an alter-tale.’^[lx] 

At base, Bennett employs the term enchantment to signify a particular affective or aesthetic state – a mood of enchantment. She argues that this mood is a necessary precondition to ethical practice and political engagement, in that it can create the emotional capacity for wonder, compassion, engagement, and generosity. To be enchanted, she explains, ‘is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday… [it is] the uncanny feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition.’^[lxi]

It is this surprising emotional disturbance that Bennett believes has ethical potential. To be enchanted – if only for a moment – is to see life as worth living and to see the world as a place that has the latent capacity to be transformed in more humane and ecologically sane ways. More importantly, it provides the propulsion to act and engage, functioning as an antidote to apathy, resignation, and perhaps even despair. Thus the enchantments of art can have a politicising effect, via its affective impact. As we have seen, Marcuse made a similar point about how social and political change depends on reshaping needs and sensibilities through aesthetic interventions in culture.   

Bennett’s premise is that disenchantment with and in life poses an ethical and political problem. Marcuse would have agreed. Transformative action is not set in motion merely by an intellectual appreciation of crisis, immiseration, and exploitation. One can know of these horrors and yet not act… out of disenchantment. For disenchantment’s primary consequence is passive resignation to the status quo, which is capitalism’s greatest achievement and its greatest tragedy. To act, to resist, to revolt – these necessary orientations and interventions arguably depend on a state or mood of enchantment, the absence of which seems to be haunting politics today.  

It should be clear, then, that assessing the ethical and political potential of aesthetic enchantment implies no theoretical degeneration into New Age mumbo-jumbo or any cruel aestheticism. To be enchanted by ‘the wonder of minor experiences’^[lxii] helps transform the affective register of politics, by altering ‘the emotions, aesthetic judgements, and dispositional moods that shape political wills, programs, affiliations, ideological commitments, and policy preference.’^[lxiii] This invites us to explore the political relevance of mood(s) and the capacity of art to shape our moods through aesthetic experience.  

Enchantment, in this sense, can expand the contours of what seems possible and it can provoke a revaluation of what is valued. Bennett maintains that everyday moments of enchantment can build an ethics of generosity, care, and engagement, stimulating the vital energy needed to resist injustice and participate in practices of solidarity, compassion, experimentation, and renewal. To be disenchanted is to feel one lives in a world in which meaning and purpose are absent, and in which a better world is unimaginable and so not worth fighting for. Thus disenchantment is a political and ethical problem, even as enchantment remains elusive and its experience temporary. But temporary though they are, moments of enchantment can outlive their immediate experience, changing us forever even when the moment has passed.

Through art and aesthetic experience, it is still possible to experience enchantment, despite the ugliness and violence of the world. My point in engaging Bennett’s theory is to highlight how this affective state is crucial to motivating the ethical and political sensibilities and behaviours needed to transform the world and its dangerous trajectories. This challenges the narrative of disenchantment, which serves only to immobilise or deflate collective action. Again, this is based on a recognition that an effective politics must be an affective politics, one that changes (or challenges) not only how we think about the world, but also the way we feel, perceive, judge, create, and thus, exist in the world. The lens of disenchantment is only one lens through which to see the contemporary world, and a dangerous one at that, with regressive social, political, and economic implications. There are alternatives, even as one must accept that the disenchanted worldview holds certain necessary truths. This is not a utopian or romantic diagnosis, although it retains a touch of what Terry Eagleton calls ‘hope without optimism.’^[lxiv]

Thus Bennett rather cheekily invites enchantment, normally an anti-modern notion, back on to the agenda. She is not seeking to reinstate fairies, magic, or superstition, but to give licence to doubt about the claims of capitalism to be the rational, and thus, natural expression of modernity. Might there not be other ways to theorise and experience modernity? According to Bennett, to experience the world as merely the mechanical workings of lifeless matter, commodified and traded in a marketplace, is to see the world as disenchanted, and her concern is that the tendency of modernity to disenchant our lives has destructive social and ethical consequences. It can tempt us ‘moderns’ to quietly live a life of resignation, apathy, individualism, and acquisitiveness, leaving people without the necessary ‘affective propulsions’^[lxv] required to create purpose in their lives and struggle for a more humane world. A disenchanted culture is one suffering the strange ache of malaise, the cause of which is difficult to identify, like a knot of anxiety that cannot be easily untied. 

To actively seek out and appreciate moments of enchantment in art, on the other hand, has ethical and political potential. It can give people the energy – the impulse to care and engage – in a world that is desperately in need of ethical and political revaluation and provocation. What Bennett highlights is how the feelings one has participates in and shapes the thoughts one has, and vice versa. And what people feel and think obviously affects how they act, both personally and politically. She wagers that ‘to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamoured with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.’^[lxvi]

In this way the interconnections between affect, thought, ethics, and politics become apparent, even if those interconnections always and everywhere remain mysterious and shifting. Indeed, Bennett begins her treatise by noting that ‘a discomforting affect is often what initiates a story, a claim, a thesis.’^[lxvii] Or, in the words of political theorist John Holloway: ‘The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle… an inarticulate mumble of discontent.’^[lxviii]

This points to what might be called the affective or even aesthetic dimension of ethics and politics, too often marginalised by the pose of pure reason. One cannot, even in principle, master all things in life by calculation – neither physically nor economically. This critical doubt opens theoretical space beyond calculation where moments of enchantment might be able to rewire the circuitry of the dominant imaginary and lay the foundations for alternatives to arise. Meditating in this territory – this blurry nexus between affect, ethics, and politics – can be enlightening but also discomforting. Enchantments can disturb, and disturbances can enchant, from which one might inquire: might such affective and intellectual provocations have the potential to awaken more people from the dogmatic slumber into which our age has fallen? Put otherwise, can an aesthetically enchanted or disturbed affect lead to a genuinely progressive and enchanting effect? This is the question art poses. As Marcuse wrote: ‘In the last analysis, the struggle for an expansion of the world of beauty, nonviolence, and serenity is a political struggle.’^[lxix] We could say the same of enchantment: it can energise a political struggle, and a more enchanted world might also be the result. 

Conclusion

Marcuse did not predict a revolution or even anticipate it. Rather, he elaborated on what he called ‘the conditions of its possibility.’^[lxx] We have seen that it was in art where he placed much of his faith. Over a century earlier, French economic and political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon made a similar point, albeit in more poetic language. He declared that, in bringing forth the new society, it would be the artists who:

will lead the way in that great undertaking; they will proclaim the future of mankind… they will inspire society with enthusiasm for the increase of its well-being by laying before it a tempting picture of a new prosperity; by making it feel that all members of society will soon share in enjoyments which, up to now, have been the prerogative of a very small class; they will hymn the benefits of civilization and they will employ all other resources of fine arts, eloquence, poetry, painting, and music, to attain their goals; in short, they will develop the poetic aspects of the new system.^[lxxi]

Aesthetic interventions in culture and politics are always occurring – with both progressive and regressive effects – but we are still waiting for the groundswell of creative activity that makes a radically new and liberated society irresistible. We are waiting for the arrival of some mysterious monolith, as in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, that provokes a quantum leap in consciousness, something that tears through the veil of ordinary experience and opens new spaces to think and be, forcing us to adapt to a new horizon, to broader contours of being. That is to say, we are still waiting for a new ‘aesthetic education’ that teaches us how to live in harmony with nature; a new aesthetic education that re-enchants our lives in ways that make the status quo utterly unacceptable and the joys of defiant activism seem impossible to pass up. But now, at least, the challenge has been laid down – both to artists, in particular, and to artists-of-life more broadly. This may or may not emerge in the sudden ‘mass revolt’ envisioned by earlier theorists of revolution. It is possible that artists must prepare themselves to wage a long, piecemeal cultural and educational undertaking, which, of course, may end up being a ‘never-ending defeat.’  

If it turns out, however, that art, science, and politics cannot provoke the transformations needed to avoid the looming apocalypse, then the role of the artist will only become more important. Creative imaginations will be tasked with interpreting civilisational descent in terms that give meaning to the inevitability of suffering; give sense to the pain we will feel (perhaps are already feeling) as global capitalism dies its inevitable death. At that stage, the therapeutic or even spiritual role of art will take precedence over its political function. As Terry Eagleton notes, the ‘imagination can be a revolutionary force, but it also holds out some spiritual solace for revolutions that have gone astray.’^[lxxii]

As I noted at the beginning of this collection of essays, the term ‘apocalypse’ has a dual meaning, not simply referring to the ‘end of the world’ but also signifying ‘a great unveiling or disclosure’ of knowledge. It will be the artist, not the scientist, who will contribute most to the human understanding of such a disclosure when, or if, it arrives. Rather than wallow helplessly as civilisation descends into barbarism, we must hope that our artists, novelists, musicians, poets, and filmmakers, are up to the task of weaving narratives of human and ecological suffering into a meaningful web of solidarity and compassion. Thereby, the artists ‘to come’ might be able to give birth to a new golden age of Grecian tragedy that offers both an education and cleansing of the emotions and passions in these turbulent times.

Perhaps that is the new dawn that lies beyond this dark hour.

^[i] Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (London: MacMillan Education, 1979).

^[ii] Beyond The Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, Marcuse addresses aesthetics, at various points, in many of his writings. See especially, Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere Press, 1969); Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969); Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).  For an extremely valuable collection of Marcuse’s aesthetic writings, see Douglas Kellner (ed.), Art and Liberation (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. IV) (London: Routledge, 2007). For a review of Marcuse’s aesthetics, see Malcom Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 

^[iii] See generally, Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (eds.), Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Art and Literature (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2006).  

^[iv] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, pp. 3-4. 

^[v] Ibid, p. 8. 

^[vi] Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) pp. 48-9.

^[vii] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 9.

^[viii] Ibid, p. xi.  

^[ix] Ibid, p. 13.

^[x] See Herbert Marcuse, ‘Society as a Work of Art’ in Kellner (ed.), Art and Liberation, note 2, p. 127. 

^[xi] Charles Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 85-6.

^[xii] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era’ in Douglas Kellner (ed.) Technology, War, and Fascism (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. I) (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 201. 

^[xiii] Quoted in Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 20. 

^[xiv] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 10.

^[xv] Ibid, p. 17.

^[xvi] Ibid, p. 28.

^[xvii] See Samuel Alexander, ‘Banish the Poets! The Power and Politics of Aesthetic Education’ in this collection of essays. The full set will be available here: http://samuelalexander.info/s-m-p-l-c-t-y-ecological-civilisation-and-the-will-to-art/ (accessed 10 May 2023). 

^[xviii] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 31.

^[xix] Ibid, p. 32.

^[xx] Ibid.   

^[xxi] Ibid, pp. 33-4.

^[xxii] Ibid, p. 34.

^[xxiii] Ibid, p. 35.

^[xxiv] Ibid, p. 37.

^[xxv] Ibid, p, 45.

^[xxvi] Percy Bysshe Shelly, A Defense of Poetry (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1891), p. 46.

^[xxvii] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 54.

^[xxviii] See forthcoming essay in this collection: Samuel Alexander, ‘Democratising the Poet: William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life’. See link in note 17. 

^[xxix] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. xiii.

^[xxx] Marcuse, Counterrevolution, note 2, p. 96.

^[xxxi] Mark Burch, Euterra Rising: The Last Utopia (Winnipeg: Mark Burch, 2016).

^[xxxii] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 47.

^[xxxiii] Ibid, p. 48.

^[xxxiv] Ibid, p. 28. 

^[xxxv] See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 190.

^[xxxvi] Ibid, p. xvi.   

^[xxxvii] Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Vol. III) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 176. 

^[xxxviii] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 191. 

^[xxxix] Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 10. See also, Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, revised ed.). 

^[xl] See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, note 39. 

^[xli] Quoted in Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 57.

^[xlii] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 12.

^[xliii] Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, note 2, p. 11.

^[xliv] See Samuel Alexander, ‘The Politics of Beauty: Schiller on Freedom and Aesthetic Education’ in this collection of essays. See link in note 17. 

^[xlv] Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, note 2, p. 18.

^[xlvi] Ibid, p. 4.

^[xlvii] Ibid.

^[xlviii] See my essays in this collection: Samuel Alexander, ‘Homo Aestheticus, the Artful Species: An Evolutionary Perspective’ and Samuel Alexander, ‘Giving Birth to Oneself: Ethics as an “Aesthetics of Existence”. See link in note 17. 

^[xlix] Marcuse, Counterrevolution, note 2, p. 16. (In this quote I have changed ‘on the market’ to ‘in the market’ which I presume corrects an error.)

^[l] George Orwell, Animal Farm (London: Penguin, 2021). 

^[li] Marcuse, Counterrevolution, note 2, pp. 16-7.

^[lii] Ibid, p. 71 (my emphasis).  

^[liii] Ibid, p. 107.

^[liv] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 73.

^[lv] Gary Synder, 1970. ‘Four Changes’ Modern America Poetry. Available at: https://bioneers.org/four-changes-by-gary-snyder/(accessed 10 January 2023).

^[lvi] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 1, p. 69.

^[lvii] Ibid, p. 62

^[lviii] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). In this section I draw from work published in Samuel Alexander and Brendon Gleeson, Urban Awakenings: Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City (Singapore: Palgrave, 2019). 

^[lix] Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 140. 

^[lx] Bennett, Enchantment, note 58, p. 4. 

^[lxi] Ibid, p. 4-5. 

^[lxii] Ibid, p. 3. 

^[lxiii] Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) p. xxii.

^[lxiv] Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

^[lxv] Bennett, Enchantment, note 58, p. 3. 

^[lxvi] Ibid, p. 4.

^[lxvii] Ibid, p. 3. 

^[lxviii] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press, 2010, second ed.) p. 1.

^[lxix] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Ecology and Revolution’ in Douglas Kellner (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. III) (London, Routledge, 2005), p. 175. 

^[lxx] See Douglas Kellner (ed.) Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation (Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol V), p. 241. 

^[lxxi] Cited in Miles, Herbert Marcuse, note 2, p. 20.

^[lxxii] Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 103.

The post Art Against Empire: Marcuse on the Aesthetics of Revolt first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

‘Politics is aesthetic in principle.’

–      Jacques Rancière

Today the world is trembling with a disturbing number of global crises, ranging from the geopolitical to the financial, through to the cultural and spiritual, and extending out to the ecological. It is easy to conclude, therefore, that political practice demands an urgent and radical engagement with the unsustainable structures, goals, and values of global industrial society. This civilisation has no future – a statement that is both normative and descriptive.^[1] It is normative in the sense that this civilisation ought to have no future, owing to its ecological contradictions and social injustices. The claim is descriptive in the sense that this civilisation does have no future, for the same reasons. Fortunately, there is still indeterminacy concerning when and how global industrial society becomes an historical phenomenon – there are many ends of the world. It follows that we must not sit on our hands and simply watch the ship of civilisation drift over the cliff. There are things to do! 

But what is to be done? This is surely one of the central questions for those who are animated by what Charles Eisenstein calls ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’;^[2] a central question for those of us with the fire of ecological democracy burning in our eyes. In this collection of essays I have been exploring the human condition through the lens of aesthetics, and have arrived at a point where I am increasingly confronted by questions of political and social import. What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the social, ecological, and political imperatives for a new civilisational trajectory, and, on the other, the aesthetic dimensions of human experience? Beyond direct political engagement – such as voting, protesting, or practising civil disobedience – might societal change also require, perhaps first and foremost, an engagement and transformation of our aesthetic sensibilities, capacities, and practices? Those questions are the guiding lines of inquiry to be explored in this essay, which I will develop by offering political reflections on aesthetics that prove indistinguishable from aesthetic reflections on politics. This relatively short analysis is designed as a primer for the longer engagement with the politics of art in the next essay.  

As outlined in the introduction, aesthetics can be understood as a domain of inquiry pertaining both to art and the senses, with these two aspects often overlapping. Central considerations include not merely the meaning and function of art and the role of the artist in society, but also broader considerations pertaining to taste, beauty, judgement, perception, imagination, creativity, emotion, and sensuous or bodily experience. To now I have defended the thesis that the aesthetic dimensions of life, far from being fringe or marginal, are in fact definitory of what it means to be alive.^[3] We – homo aestheticus – can be coherently understood as an artful species in an aesthetic universe. Our individual existence, our societies, and indeed the cosmos itself, are aesthetic to the primordial core, such that time itself can be seen as an unfolding of creative evolution.  

Nevertheless, it would not be unreasonable for readers to approach my aesthetic inquiries with a degree of scepticism. After all, in an age where ecocide, financial crisis, war, and creeping fascism loom ominously on the horizon like dark clouds gathering for a perfect storm, a turn to aesthetics certainly needs justification. We find ourselves in a situation which clearly demands a radical political engagement in order to dissipate and transcend the various tragedies already taking form. How, then, could one justifiably look to poetry, literature, music, or the imagination in a world immiserated by violence, oppression, and unspeakable suffering? Wouldn’t a turn to aesthetics be what Marxists sometimes call a ‘pessimistic retreat’?^[4]

As critical theorist Herbert Marcuse noted when he began his own meditation on aesthetics: ‘It would be senseless to deny the element of despair inherent in this concern: the retreat into a world of fiction where existing conditions are changed only in the imagination.’^[5] At first, aesthetic concerns might seem like a petty indulgence or trivial distraction, reserved for the comfortable few who do not have to worry about the problems of the real world. Art, one might contend, is not a serious subject for the activist or theorist of political economy. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas went further when he stated that ‘there is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague.’^[6] In the same critical spirit, philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir once dismissed art as ‘a position of withdrawal, a way of fleeing the truth of the present.’^[7] These critiques imply that one should not make or enjoy art while the world weeps. There are more important things to do. 

Even if one were not persuaded that that art is positively wicked or egotistical, an objection might still arise that condemns art for being useless, in the sense of it not being able to change the world. Artists must not merely interpret or represent the world; the point is to change it! Did anyone lay down their guns after seeing Picasso’s evocative critique of fascism in Guernica? The poet W.H. Auden would reflect with some despondency that ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ lamenting that ‘all the verse I wrote, all the positions I took in the thirties, did not save a single Jew.’^[8] In a manuscript he worked on in 1939 we read:

Artists and politicians would get along better at a time of crisis like the present, if the latter would only realize that the political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written, nor a picture painted, nor a bar of music composed.^[9]   

I have been attempting to deconstruct such simplistic dismissals of aesthetics by examining the blurry distinction between art, life, and politics. Continuing that project, my purpose in this essay (and the next one) is to show that there is in fact an inherent aesthetic dimension to politics, just as there is a political or even revolutionary potential inherent to certain forms of art or aesthetic practice. In doing so, the analysis is shaped by the emerging ‘aesthetic turn’^[10] in political theory, and by various political interpretations of art and aesthetics. My approach is to mix and develop these substantive bodies of thought in the hope that this alchemy produces a deeper understanding of the nexus that conjoins (as it attempts to separate) art, life, and politics. 

To be clear, my premise is not that we should or should not infuse politics with aesthetic considerations, but rather, as Jacques Rancière states, that ‘politics is aesthetic in principle.’^[11] Terry Eagleton makes a similar point when acknowledging that the aesthetic is ‘politics in non-political disguise.’^[12] The insight here is that politics has various aesthetic dimensions which should not be ignored. Most fundamentally, politics is shaped and even underpinned by social narratives about what is possible, proper, and important. These narratives, often supported by imagery, icons, public gestures, and soundbites, are critical not only in how citizens think about political life but, perhaps more importantly, how they feel about it – and thus how they act and vote. Usually operating beneath the level of consciousness, social narratives, myths, and stories both reveal and conceal possible forms of life, colouring them with value-laden judgements about their worth. Thus, political society is both enabled and constrained by the aesthetic soil in which it is rooted. Change the soil, and different things can grow, and in different ways.   

Consequently, an effective politics must be an affective politics, engaging the heart as much as the head (a distinction always threatening to collapse). This implies that political messaging that conveys societal hopes, dreams, fears, and promises, must be communicated effectively, for even the best policies, programs, or social movements will fail if they are unable to successfully appeal to the public imagination. Good ideas need to be powerful ideas – or else they will be condemned to being good but ineffective. Political argumentation, therefore, is not merely about providing ‘reasons’ or winning the political debate through the non-coercive force of ‘better arguments’. Rather, political success is partly about creating imaginative and emotional space that allows people to believe that ‘other ways’ of doing things are possible. This involves the aesthetic challenge of opening up alternative political spaces and contexts where new visions of self and society can be received in aesthetically engaging and digestible ways.^[13] 

Poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller argued, ‘the way to the head must lie through the heart.’^[14] This is not in any way an anti-intellectual or anti-scientific position. Schiller offered the profound and subtle insight that through the works of artists and aesthetic experience, the intellect can be engaged most effectively having first affected or shifted the emotions. Note that this is a politically neutral insight. Aesthetics is a tool that can be employed to advance either progressive or regressive agendas, just as fire can be useful or harmful depending on how it is used. Accordingly, it is no objection to a political vision that it is, at base, aesthetic. The critical issues to be addressed are how politics is aesthetic, to what ends, and for whose benefit.

When the public imagination expands or contracts, political space for radical innovation and progress can be created or enclosed. A utopian vision, for example, can be understood as an imaginative and sensuous extension of our socio-political concepts, understandings, and pathways. Such visions can be progressive or transgressive if they energise a citizenry for political participation. They can be regressive or conservative, however, if they merely mislead, distract, or sedate a population with unrealisable fantasies (or with realisable cruelties). Furthermore, in a world where public consciousness is shaped to varying degrees by media and marketing, it becomes clear that a ‘politics of attention’ is always and everywhere at play.^[15] Some issues are brought to the surface of public discourse, not necessarily because they are the most pressing; while other matters, often the most pressing, can be pushed to the margins, usually because they are not politically useful or expedient. 

This is one example of what Rancière calls a ‘distribution of the sensible’,^[16] a framework for understanding how political decisions, actions, and narratives determine what presents itself to sense experience. In other words, politics shapes what can be seen, felt, and spoken about – and by whom. At the same time, in a dialectical fashion, what can be seen, felt, and spoken about shapes politics. This is to say, the aesthetic sensibilities of a citizenry provide the contours within which realisable political action takes place. 

Of course, the inherent aesthetic dimensions of politics complicate the very valid concern over how aestheticising politics gives rise to the spectre of fascism. One way to understand fascism is precisely in aesthetic terms – a totalitarian government entrenching and expanding power and authority by using the mechanisms of mythology, narrative, and propaganda to glorify a nation-state and to scapegoat enemies. Such scapegoating can deflect attention away from internal societal difficulties and thereby operate as a counter-revolutionary force. By these means the aesthetic can be a tool for igniting national passion, fervour, and obedience, exemplified by the spectacle of Nazi films like Triumph of the Will. As scholar Desmond Manderson writes, ‘the emotive paraphernalia of fascism – propaganda films, marching troops, flags, insignia, and the rest – clearly recognised the potential that aesthetics held to marshal collective experience as a powerful social force.’^[17]

Linked to these issues is concern over how the application of aesthetic criteria to politics can produce callous and inhumane results. Mussolini’s son-in-law compared the bombs exploding among fleeing Ethiopians in 1936 to flowers bursting into bloom. Mussolini himself once boasted that: 

when the masses are like wax in my hands, or when I mingle with them and almost crushed by them, I feel myself to be a part of them. All the same there persists in me a certain feeling of aversion, like that which the modeler feels for the clay he is molding. Does not the sculptor sometimes smash his block of marble into fragments because he cannot shape it into the vision he has conceived?^[18]

Another notorious example is the response given by the poet Laurent Tailhade to a deadly anarchist bomb thrown into the French Chamber of Deputies in 1893: ‘What do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful?’ As philosopher Martin Jay writes: ‘The aestheticization of politics in these cases repels not merely because of the grotesque impropriety of applying criteria of beauty to the deaths of human beings, but also because of the chilling way in which nonaesthetic criteria are deliberately and provocatively excluded from consideration.’^[19]

Walter Benjamin, writing in a time of rising fascism in Europe, sounded a warning that remains relevant today: ‘All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.’^[20] While this warning needs to be taken seriously, I challenge Benjamin’s claims that ‘[t]he logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.’^[21] My position is that aesthetics is always and already a part of political life, and Fascism is just a particularly objectionable form of this inevitable intermingling. It follows that one cannot merely advocate for aesthetic education, in general, as a means of societal progress. After all, as Paul de Man once wrote, under fascist ideology, aesthetic education ‘succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible.’^[22]

If fascism is an obscene and disturbing example of aestheticising politics, Soviet communism was an example of the politicisation of aesthetics.^[23] This means more than merely appropriating art and culture as vehicles for ideological communication and propoganda. It can refer to the ways in which Stalin and the Communist Party provided the political filter through which art had to proceed. Any artists that produced work that criticised or resisted Party rule or undermined the socialist imaginary, were at high risk of being murdered or sent to the gulags.

Conversely, Socialist Realism – the ‘official style’ of the Soviet Union from 1922-1988 –­ became one of few ‘legitimate’ forms of art. What this style required was a promotion of communist values and the expression of ideas and visions that celebrated the proletariat. It was believed that such instrumental art could assist in the cultural education of citizens to be ideal Soviets. During the Soviet Congress of 1934, four guidelines were laid out for Socialist Realism. The work must be: 1. Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them; 2. Typical: scenes of everyday life of the people; 3. Realistic: in the representational sense; and 4. Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party. This naturally resulted in art that would depict scenes celebrating the revolution or workers happily labouring in the field or factory in post-revolutionary society. The truth or otherwise of these images or scenes was not the point. Politicising art in this way reduces or abolishes art’s critical function, becoming merely a handmaiden to politics. 

I argued earlier, however, that politics is inherently and inescapably aesthetic, and thus aesthetics is something that shapes every society, including those with a liberal democratic self-image. In advanced capitalist societies today, where mass media have been concentrated in the hands of a few (often private hands), the potential to manipulate public consciousness with the subtle or not so subtle art of propaganda is perhaps historically unrivalled. This is a power shaped by aesthetics. Indeed, the aestheticisation of politics under capitalism creates and condones what Marxist theorist Guy Debord called the ‘Society of the Spectacle.’^[24] That is, the programming of mass media risks creating – or perhaps has already created – a passive, obedient citizenry that is willing to embrace its own servitude so long as it is distracted and entertained. This has helped entrench the ‘one-dimensional society’ and the ‘culture industry’ of which the Frankfurt school warned in the twentieth century. These concepts of critical theory were developed to highlight the smooth, comfortable, democratic ‘unfreedom’ present in advanced industrial societies. Looking toward the United States, especially, the Frankfurt school suggested that this paragon of capitalism was being shaped by its own forces of fascism, albeit in cultural disguise.^[25] Benjamin would bitterly observe that ‘self-alienation has reached such a degree that [humankind] can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’^[26]

In this context the affective dimensions of political authority and submission should also be acknowledged. The eighteenth-century theorist of conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote of the ‘delight’ that citizens can take in their own subordination.^[27] His terminology of ‘proud submission’ and ‘dignified obedience’ points to the role affect can play in maintaining and naturalising the existing order of things.^[28] Burke’s conservative instincts also identified a worrying aesthetic energy that radicals and revolutionaries were displaying as they watched the French Revolution unfold. We can go further back, to antiquity, and recall that it was Plato who defended the policy of governments telling a ‘noble lie’ to the masses in order to maintain the social order through fabricated stories about natural hierarchies.^[29]

But if politics, like power itself, is inherently aesthetic, highlighting those dimensions is not an invitation to fascism but a warning against it. Michel Foucault said of power that it is not necessarily evil, but it is always dangerous – because power is everywhere.^[30] And because it is everywhere, we always have something to do: ‘my position leads not to apathy,’ Foucault said, ‘but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.’^[31] One could say the same thing concerning the role of aesthetics in politics. It is pointless regretting the fact that politics is aesthetic in principle, any more than we should regret gravity, because this is simply a feature of the ways things are. And so acknowledging the aesthetic dimensions of politics certainly should not be assumed to be a prologue to tyranny. As Martin Jay argues, ‘[t]he wholesale critique of “the aesthetic ideology”… can thus be itself deemed ideological if it fails to register the divergent implications of the application of the aesthetic to politics.’^[32]   

Accordingly, it makes little sense to talk of the ‘modern aestheticisation of politics’ since, again, politics is and has always been aesthetic in principle, even as one can accept that it takes on new and often worrying forms in technocratic society of the twenty-first century. A fascist aestheticisation of politics is always worryingly possible – a spectre to be on guard against. But if politics is inherently aesthetic then the question is: what will be done with this critically important tool? What is not possible is a politics entirely devoid of aesthetic dimensions. The perennial challenge, therefore, is to ensure that the tools of aesthetics are used out in the open, rather than insidiously sharpened and employed by oligarchs and elites in the dark corridors of political and financial power. If such risks are not respected, we might, as George Orwell warned in 1984, casually usher in a future whose image is a boot stamping on the human face – forever.  

There are alternative futures, however, based on human emancipation and ecological viability. My overarching argument in this collection of essays is that any hope for deep revision in the established politico-economic order depends on acknowledging, appreciating, and operating within the aesthetic dimension. It is one thing to establish firm scientific, ethical, and philosophical foundations for an alternative form of societal organisation. But if there is no felt need in society for such a political transformation then this can be understood in part as an aesthetic obstacle that demands an aesthetic intervention or series of interventions.  J.G. Ballard once wrote: ‘Many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.’^[33]

A major prerequisite to societal transformation, as Marcuse recognised, is ‘the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence and their passions, their drives, and their goals.’^[34] Specifically with respect to the ‘advanced capitalist societies’, currently these felt needs are, for the most part, absent, confused, or severely underdeveloped. It follows that the ongoing neglect of the aesthetic realm is a mistake that political movements for human emancipation and sustainability cannot afford to make. The critical role of art and culture is not merely to assist with transgressive political communication or social education. It also plays a role prosecuting the existing order, of holding politics to account, not merely ushering in the new. More deeply still, art is tasked with undoing the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, the felt needs of the body, and to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of the preservation and flourishing of humanity and the planet.^[35] Having laid the groundwork for an aesthetic analysis of politics, I will delve more deeply into these matters in the next essay, through an exploration of Marcuse’s aesthetic writings on the relationships between art, politics, and revolt.  

^[1] Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire – And What Lies Beyond(Melbourne: Simplicity Institute, 2019). 

^[2] Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2013). 

^[3] See Samuel Alexander, ‘Introduction: The Aesthetic Dimension’ and ‘Creative Evolution and the “Will to Art’, in this collection of essays. The full set will be published here: http://samuelalexander.info/s-m-p-l-c-t-y-ecological-civilisation-and-the-will-to-art/ (accessed 10 May 2023).  

^[4] See Pauline Johnson, Marxist Aesthetics: The Foundations Without Everyday Life for an Emancipated Consciousness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011) p. 3.

^[5] Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (London: MacMillan Education, 1979), p. 1. 

^[6] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reality and its Shadow’ in Sean Hand (ed.) The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 142.

^[7] Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Open Road, 2015), p. 81.  

^[8] Quoted in Artur Danto, ‘The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art’ ((1985) Grand Street 4(3): p. 172.  

^[9] Ibid.  

^[10] See generally, Nikolas Kompridis (ed.) The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).  

^[11] Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 58.

^[12] Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 123.

^[13] See, e.g., Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014). 

^[14] Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in Friedrich Shiller, Essays, eds. Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 86-178.

^[15] See generally, Peter Doran, The Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism: Reclaiming the Mindful Commons(London: Routledge, 2017); see also, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner, The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005, new edition).  

^[16] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 12. 

^[17] Desmond Manderson, ‘Here and Now: From “Aestheticizing Politics” to “Politicizing Art”’ (2016) NoFo 13: p. 3. 

^[18] I draw these examples from Martin Jay, ‘“The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology: Or, What Does it Mean to Aestheticize Politics?’ (1992) Cultural Critique 21: pp. 42-5.

^[19] Ibid, p. 44.

^[20] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 36 (emphasis removed). 

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) p. 289.

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2006). 

^[25] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002); Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001). 

^[26] Benjamin, The Work of Art, note 20, p. 38. 

^[27] For a discussion, see Jason Frank, ‘Delightful Horror’, in Jason Frank, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), Ch. 4. 

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] Similarly, in the ethical domain. A case can (and will) be made that art and aesthetics have the potential to expand and refine the moral imagination, but this spiritual tool has the potential, at least, to cut both ways: the aesthetic perspective always raises the risk that someone misapplies the discipline and attempts to make the suffering of others an object of aesthetic pleasure or focusses on aesthetic pleasure in ways that marginalise or ignore the suffering of others.  

^[30] Michael Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of a Work in Progress’ in Michael Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 256.

^[31] Ibid. 

^[32] Martin Jay, ‘“The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology: Or, What Does it Mean to Aestheticize Politics?’ (1992) Cultural Critique 21: p. 56.

^[33] See Samuel Alexander, Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth (Melbourne, Simplicity Institute, 2017), p. 1. 

^[34] Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension, note 4, pp. 3-4.

^[35] Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’ (1992) October (62): p. 5. 

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