Herbert Marcuse.

The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction — the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality. Their truth was in the illusion evoked, in the insistence on creating a world in which the terror of life was called up and suspended — mastered by recognition. This is the miracle of the chef-d’oeuvre; it is the tragedy, sustained to the last, and the end of tragedy — its impossible solution. To live one’s love and hatred, to live that which one is means defeat, resignation, and death. The crimes of society, the hell that man has made for man become the actual unconquerable cosmic forces.
Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man (61)

Oh, that BBC — what uncommercial dreamers they were, especially in back in 1978, when they were foolhardy enough to run 13-part series like Men of Ideas, Bryan Magee‘s set of one-hour conversations with philosophers about philosophy. On 2 February of that year, the network aired a conversation with the Frankfurt School representative Herbert Marcuse, a colleague of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and perhaps the most public figure of the three. He became a darling of the New Left (his students included Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman) to the extent that some considered him “the father of the New Left in the United States,” a description he completely disavowed — as the New Left would come to disavow both him and Adorno, the two figures becoming increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of revolution in post-capitalist America and Europe, even during or perhaps especially in the face of the new student revolutionary movements. In Marcuse’s final book, 1979′s The Aesthetic Dimension, he argued for the continuing relevance of “high” art to culture, arguing “the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.”

In the extract below, Marcuse discusses with Magee the origins of the Frankfurt School and its attempt to effect a “happy” marriage between Marx and Freud.