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is
the will to transcend the given world of fact, to redefine these
facts in the context, as he would have it in
One Dimensional Man,
of "their arrested and denied possibili ties." Indeed we can only
know
men are unhappy, however much they claim not to be,
because art makes us aware of the possibilities in men and in facts
that have been denied by social and economic systems. Thus the
absolute necessity to radicalism of the "aesthetic sense." And by
aesthetic Marcuse means both that which pertains to the senses
and that which pertains to art, the "life instincts," as he puts it.
So that when he has to face the question of whether or not
his co ncept of the "new type of man" and of that man's trans–
forming powers is not hopelessly utopian, he not only poin ts, in
what now seems a pathetically eager way, to the events of May
1968 but more specifically to the connection on that occasion
between art and politics: "The concept of the new man as a trans–
forming agent has been the great, real, transcending force, the
idee
neuve
in the first powerful rebellion against the whole of the
existing society, the rebellion for the total transvaluation of
valu·es, for qualitatively different ways of life: the May rebellion in
France. The graffiti of the
'jeunesse en colere,'
joined Karl Marx
and Andre Breton; the slogan
'imagination au pouvoir'
went well
with
'les comites (soviets ) partout';
the piano with the jazz player
stood well between the barricades; the red flag nicely fitted the
statue of the author of
Les Miserables ;
and striking students in
Toulouse demanded the revival of the language of the Trouba–
dours, the Albigensians. The new sensibility has become a political
force. It crosses the frontier between the capitalist and the com–
munist orbit; it is contagious because the atmosphere, the climate
of the established societies, carries the virus."
So far does Marcuse push his claims for the new sensibility as
a source of a new politics and of political action that he proposes
something close to what Jerry Rubin was to call "demonstration
theater." "The political protest, assuming a total character," Mar–
cuse writes in the Liberation essay, "reaches into a dimension
which, as esthetic dimension,
has
been essentially a-political." Sim–
ilarly, Rubin in his
Yippie Manifesto--also
interestingly enough
published, as was
Do It!,
in 1969--declares that "a new eco–
nomic structure would produce a new man," and he follows this
