Continuing on with the Frankfurt School: Marcuse and Adorno

Both part of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Marcuse seem to be writing about art and its radical potentialities. While Marcuse views the radical nature of art as the merging of form and content (by foregrounding form) toward a transformation of consciousness, Adorno posits that art is radical due to its ability to move beyond reality--to present us with the possibility of "other".

The imagined audience for this week carries with it many of the same traits as our previous readings--these writings are written for an academic audience that is familar with Marxist theory and certain literary works. However, these writings (Benjamin, Marcuse and Adorno) seem to be even more tightly in dialogue with one another than some of our readings in the past due to the fact that these scholars all belong to the Frankfurt school. Both Marcuse and Adorno, for example, focus on the autonomy of art and its radical potentialities. Because of the relatively homogeneous audience, these writers, particularly Marcuse, again make assumptions about universality regarding values and tastes. It is sometimes shocking to me that these texts--claiming to move toward a more just and free society--can so easily reinscribe some of the current class stratification through the values latent in these theories.

I'm still finishing my reading of Adorno's text, so I'm not ready to formulate any questions yet. I do have a couple of points I'd like to discuss regarding the Marcuse, though:

While Marcuse goes on to nuance these terms in his later chapters, I'm interested (and troubled) by his notions of "autonomy", "quality", and "standard" (with his discussion of Shakespeare). I agree with Marcuse that Marx's attribution of the class and how social position appears in work is overly simplistic; however, it seems to me that Marcuse's discussion of art lapses into talking about art in ways that make the means of producing art more available to some and not others. Am I missing something here?

Also, I was wondering about the passage at the very beginning of the Marcuse text (3-4) where he is discussing the moving away from individual consciousness toward a class consciousness. I found this passage interesting because it seems that pre-Marx aesthetic theory focuses so heavily on the individual that it erases the collective sense of how we both produce and experience art. If we have time, I'd be interested in talking about this passage more and what Marcuse is referring to exactly with the phrase "the subjective potential for revolution" (4).