178
HERBERT MARCUSE
True, in
this
spectacle, the audience actively participates: the
music
moves
their bodies, makes them "natural." But their (literally)
electrical excitation often assumes the features of hysteria. The ag–
gressive force of the endlessly repeated hammering rhythm (the
variations of which do not open another. dimension of music), the
squeezing dissonances, the standardized "frozen" distortions, the
noise level in general- is it not the force of frustration?1 And the
identical gestures, the twisting and shaking of bodies which rarely
(if
ever) really touch each other - it seems like treading on the spot, it
does not get you anywhere except into a mass soon to disperse. This
music
is,
in a literal sense,
imitation, mimesis
of effective aggression:
it
is,
moreover, another case of
catharsis:
group therapy which, tem–
porarily, removes inhibitions. Liberation remains a private affair.
The tension between art and revolution seems irreducible.
Art
itself, in practice, cannot change reality, and art cannot submit to
the actual requirements of the revolution without denying itself. But
art can and
will
draw its inspirations, and its very form, from the
then prevailing revolutionary movement - for revolution is in the
substance of
art.
The historical substance of art asserts itself in all
modes of alienation; it precludes any notion that recapturing the
aesthetic fonn today could mean revival of classicism, romanticism or
any other traditional form.
Does
an analysis of the social reality
allow any indication as to art forms which would respond to the
revolutionary potential in the contemporary world?
According to Adorno,
art
responds to the total character of
repression and administration with total alienation. The highly in–
tellectual, constructivist and at the same time spontaneous-formless
music of John Cage, Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, may be the extreme
examples.
But has this effort already reached the point of no
retu~,
that
is,
the point where the
oeuvre
drops out of the dimension of aliena–
tion, of
formed
negation and contradiction, and turns into a sound
7.
~
frustration behind the noisy aggression is revealed very neatly in a
statement by Grace Slick of the "Jefferson Airplane" group, reported in
The
New York Times Magazine
(October 18, 1970): "Our eternal goal in life,
Grace say., absolutely deadpan, is to get louder."
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