The Aesthetic Dimension by Herbert Marcuse

Author:Herbert Marcuse [Marcuse, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2400-3
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1978-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

A play, a novel become literary works by virtue of the form which “incorporates” and sublimates “the stuff.” The latter may be the “starting point of aesthetic transformation.”23 It may contain the “motive” of this transformation, it may be class determined—but in the work this “stuff,” divested of its immediacy, becomes something qualitatively different, part of another reality. Even where a fragment of reality is left untransformed (for example, quoted phrases from a speech by Robespierre) the content is changed by the work as a whole; its meaning can even be turned into its opposite.

The “tyranny of form”—in an authentic work a necessity prevails which demands that no line, no sound could be replaced (in the optimal case, which doesn’t exist). This inner necessity (the quality which distinguishes authentic from inauthentic works) is indeed tyranny inasmuch as it suppresses the immediacy of expression. But what is here suppressed is false immediacy: false to the degree to which it drags along the unreflected mystified reality.

In defense of aesthetic form, Brecht notes in 1921:

I observe that I am beginning to become a classic. Those extreme forced efforts [of expressionism] to spew forth with all means certain (banal or soon to be banal) content! One blames the classics for their service to form and overlooks that it is the form which is the servant here.24

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