1.82
HERBERT MARCUSE
the cranes met only a short while ago, and they
will
leave
each
other soon. Space is no longer a limit: they fly nowhere, and they
flee from everyone, from
all.
The end is illusion: love
seems
to give
duration, to conquer time and space, to evade destruction. But the
illusion cannot deny the reality which it invokes: the cranes
are,
in
their sky, with their clouds. The end
is
also
denial of the illusion,
in–
sistence on its reality, realization.
This
insistence is in the poem's
language which is prose becoming verse and song in the
midst
of the
brutality and corruption of the
N etzestadt
(Mahagonny) - in the
dialogue between a whore and a bum. There
is
no word in
this
poem which is not prose. But these words are joined to sentences, or
parts of sentences which say and show what ordinary language never
says and shows. The apparent "protocol statements," which seem
to describe
things
and movements in direct perception, turn into
images of that which goes beyond
all
direct perception: the flight
into the realm of freedom which
is
also
the realm of beauty.
Strange phenomenon: beauty as a quality which
is
in an opera
of Verdi as well as in a Bob Dylan song, in a painting of Ingres as
well as Picasso, in phrase of Flaubert as well as James Joyce,
in
a
gesture of the Duchess of Guermantes as well as of a hippie
girl!
Common to all of them is the expression, against its plastic deerot–
ization, of beauty as negation of the commodity world and of the
performances, attitudes, looks, gestures, required by it.
The aesthetic form will continue to change as the political prac–
tice succeeds (or fails) to build a better society. At the optimum, we
can envisage a universe common to
art
and reality, but in
this
com–
mon universe, art would retain its transcendence. In
all
likelihood,
people would not talk or write or compose poetry;
la
prose du monde
would persist. The "end of art" is conceivable only
if
men are no
longer capable of distinguishing between true and false, good and
evil, beautiful and ugly, present and future. This would be the state
of perfect barbarism at the height of civilization - and such a
state
is indeed a historical possibility.
Art
can do nothing to prevent the ascent of barbarism - it can–
not by itself keep open its own domain in and against society. For
its own preservation and development,
art
depends on the struggle
for the abolition of the social system which generates barbarism as
its own potential stage: potential form of its progrC$. The fate of
