John Dewey on the Threat that Totalitarianism Poses to Democracy

"The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here - within ourselves and our institutions."

Erich Fromm citing John Dewey in Escape from Freedom (Avon, 1965), pp. 19-20.

Societal Disintegration and the Rationality of Narratives

Earlier this year, in a sermon about postmodernity, I preached about Foucault's inversion of Sir Francis Bacon's "Knowledge is Power." For Foucault, power is knowledge. But what does this mean? It means that the social disintegration we see around us, particularly in the increasing bifurcation of our political worldviews, can be explained by Foucault. "Post-truth" politics seems to be the phrase of 2016, but Foucault predicted this and even suggested that it undergirded our systems of rationality nearly four decades ago. The increasing separation of our worldviews (Republican and Democratic) is a reflection of the structures of power, and their constituent methodologies, that create and sustain the narratives and news-cycles that we consume. Without a common enemy, like the Soviet Union, our competitive worlds have turned on each other, rather than unifying behind a singular methodology - like the kinds of journalism we saw under the Cold War.

Academics and Ministry

One of the pastors who had the largest impact on my own development just started a sabbatical in the American Southwest to write poetry. It's one of his great talents. Sometimes it even makes its way into his sermons. I've always been inspired by spiritual mentors who try to live holistic journeys, full of a rich mixture of curiosity and empathy. For me the academic side of ministry isn't a retreat into obscurity, but an engagement with all of life's riches. If we're called t...o walk alongside and hold people as they face their own joys and trials, shouldn't we strive to understand them as much as possible? God sees the depths of our joys, our discoveries, and our pains. Christ lived them. Part of our task as Christians is to strive to be like Christ to those around us, even in the depths by which he drew near to people. That's my thought, perhaps dream, for this evening.

Marcuse on Nonalienated Labor

"The real danger for the established system is not the abolition of labor but the possibility of nonalienated labor as the basis of the reproduction of society."

Herbert Marcuse, "Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society" in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

Benjamin on Marx's Project

"When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalist mode of production this mode was in its infancy. He went back to basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself."

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), p. 211.

Hobbes on Freedom

"A Free-Man, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to doe what he has a will to do."

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 146.

Jürgen Habermas on Communication

"Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction."

Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Beacon Press, 1973), p. 169.

Erich Fromm on Marx's Fetishised Labour

Spinoza, Hegel, and Goethe all held that, "man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realises his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God."

Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man: Including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 26.

Horkheimer on Utopia and Schopenhauer's Wheel of Ixion

"The ensnarement of humanity in eternal nature and an unswerving struggle against temporal injustice are already central in his thinking. As essential as he finds it that the 'unjust distribution of goods' be abolished, he nevertheless wonders if the fulfillment of the boldest utopias would not leave the 'great' torment untouched, 'because the core of his life is... torment and dying."

Alfred Schmidt, 'Max Horkheimer's Intellectual Physiognomy', in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonns and John McCole (Boston: MIT Press, 1995), p. 26.

Horkeimer's Spring

"I feel sorry for you, you now know the truth... Nut it is not enough to take off the rose-tinted glasses and then to stand there confused and helpless. You have to use your eyes and learn to walk in the colder world. Intoxicate yourselves and praise every minute that you spend without being conscious, for consciousness is terrible; only Gods can possess it clear and undistorted and still smile."

Max Horkheimer's vagrant speaking to the young couple in  Spring as cited in: John Abrometit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge University press, 2011), pp. 31-32.

Marcuse on Liberation

"All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own."

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 7.

Thinking about Peace in Times of War, Injustice, and Dehumanization.

December 4th, 2016

Isaiah 10:1-11

Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,
    who write oppressive statutes,
² to turn aside the needy from justice
    and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be your spoil,
    and that you may make the orphans your prey!
³ What will you do on the day of punishment,
    in the calamity that will come from far away?
To whom will you flee for help,
    and where will you leave your wealth,
⁴ so as not to crouch among the prisoners
    or fall among the slain?
For all this his anger has not turned away;
    his hand is stretched out still.

⁵ Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger—
    the club in their hands is my fury!
⁶ Against a godless nation I send him,
    and against the people of my wrath I command him,
to take spoil and seize plunder,
    and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
⁷ But this is not what he intends,
    nor does he have this in mind;
but it is in his heart to destroy,
    and to cut off nations not a few.
⁸ For he says:
“Are not my commanders all kings?
⁹ Is not Calno like Carchemish?
    Is not Hamath like Arpad?
    Is not Samaria like Damascus?
¹⁰ As my hand has reached to the kingdoms of the idols
    whose images were greater than those of Jerusalem and Samaria

shall I not do to Jerusalem and her idols
    what I have done to Samaria and her images?”

Sermon:

          In 1954, amidst the fear and terror of the Cold War, a German-Jewish exile named Herbert Marcuse wrote that, "The defeat of Fascism and National Socialism has not arrested the trend towards totalitarianism. Freedom is on the retreat - in the realm of thought as well as in that of society."[1] It’s a statement that refers to the many faces that dehumanization and horror can take on. At that time the world was facing the possibility of nuclear annihilation, a possibility and terror that we are perhaps too eager to forget about these days. Ten years after writing those words, Marcuse went on to express his fears about how interrelated productivity and destruction are. The more we produce and consume, the more waste we generate. Rather than encouraging schools to embrace curriculums that focused on individuals we had begun to move towards a system where our hopes, thoughts, and fears became attached to institutions like governments, mass media, and corporate interests. The outbreak of the New Left and the student protests of the 1960’s were largely a product of a search for individuality – of young people crying out for a place for subjectivity – the ever-pressing question of “who am I?” and “what does it mean to live an authentic life?”. And in the midst of this also stood the same dark specter that we see in our world today – “misery in the face of unprecedented wealth.”[2]

     Much has changed, yet little has too. It’s a paradox of our contemporary life. Each of you can recount the thousands of ways your lives have changed over the years. Yet, if you think about some of the fundamental things, a lot has changed very little. The world still faces the abyss of nuclear annihilation, war, famine, and the existential angst of realizing that “our lofty ideals about the rights of the individual under democracy have in fact yielded a society in which ‘choice’ – at least for a certain demographic – is the difference between two forms of scented body wash.”[3] To put it another way, we’ve come to a place in the history of civilization where ‘uniqueness’ and ‘individuality’ have been commodified. So much so, in fact, that varying degrees of uniqueness are a privilege that come with geography, education, parentage, and exposure. As the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu argued, we don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them.

     All of this can be encompassed under the realization that some things haven’t changed for the better 1964. Some things certainly have, but many of the problems that we faced back then still exist now. In some respects, they even exist in more extreme forms. In the 1960’s young adults rose up in an attempted revolt against many of the societal ills they saw around them. Other did not, but many did. Today, millennials have a derogatory label that they sometimes throw at people. If a girl wears a particular kind of outfit, behaves a particular way, and gets a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks every morning she might be labeled “basic.” It’s a label that implies that she is boring and not creative enough to be interesting. Now, I think that’s interesting not only because it’s an incredibly dehumanizing thing to say about another person, but because it also flips the behavior of the beatniks and hippies right on its head. Rather than rejecting consumerism, wastefulness, or other extremes, today’s hipsters judge people on the basis of the ‘authenticity’ or ‘uniqueness’ of their purchases and hobbies. Classism and stigmas have not disappeared, they have only taken on new – ever more consumeristic – forms. Our society still faces the threats that Marcuse listed; they’ve only changed clothing.

     Most of us probably assume that the book of Isaiah is paired with Advent and Christmas because he provides us with a lot of the foreshadowing, prophecies, and imagery we use for the Baby Jesus. I think that’s true. Yet, I also can’t help but notice the irony in pairing this particular prophet with a season that has become all that it has become for us as 21^st century Americans. Let’s list out all of issues that the lectionary provides for us as we reflect on the theme of peace. Isaiah lists:

• Evil and unjust laws and political actions.
• Indifference and a turning away from the needs of the poor.
• Robbing the poor of what is justly theirs. In the context of ancient Israel, that would have included the right to basic things like food as well as fair treatment before the law.
• Isaiah, speaking for God, condemns those who prey on widows and orphans – the weakest in society. God is in the business of getting mad when people take advantage of those who are most vulnerable.

Isaiah even goes so far as to goad those who have committed these crimes. He insinuates that their money and privilege will not protect them from the wrath that God will unleash upon them. The wonderful thing about the prophets is that they show how thoroughly enraged God can get with those who commit crimes against other humans. He is, after all, a God of justice. So, when we get to the second-half of today’s lectionary text for the season of Advent – the season where we celebrate the coming of God – we hear about God using another nation (Assyria) as his hand of wrath, even though they too are evil. God does not like it when any nation or people, regardless of size, behaves evilly. However, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that he regards the bad behavior of his own people as an even worse offense.

     So why all of this on this Sunday? Why did the people who composed the lectionary choose this passage of scripture to talk about peace? I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this particular passage dates back to medieval use. However, I can say that I think that this passage can help us reflect on the message of peace in a way that is critically important. Peace is not just about the absence of violence. Peace is something that flows out of justice and righteousness. There can be no peace when the poor and vulnerable are being exploited. A person or society that commits injustices can not only not have peace with God, but cannot realistically claim to have peace in any real material sense either. I believe that there is good reason to believe that the Bible tells us economic violence and exploitation undermines peace in a material and ontological sense as well. If one segment of society is stealing from, or exploiting, another part of society the people who are responsible for that not only have to face the fact that they’ve violated God’s laws, but they also have to face the fact that they’ve undermined the trust and peace that helps the different components of a society work together cooperatively – the peace between peoples who may share a common language, culture, religion, or geography.

     Today we’re celebrating the coming of the true Prince of Peace and that’s a powerful thing. It’s a title we probably think about less than we should. When we invoke it, we might glance at it and just assume that it means that one day there won’t be any more warfare. I think we miss something very fundamental to a biblical conception of peace when we do that. Sometimes it’s helpful to really sit with a biblical idea like peace and look at the contexts in which it is used.

     Even if we think about the usage of the term “holiness” what are we really referring to? Many of us probably have a number of extrapolations as to what it means, but in the Biblical context it’s really just a referral to God’s removal from the taint of everything we’ve just been talking about. Holiness, when it is applied to God, is a recognition of his transcendence; and in that respect, it is related to the concept of righteousness and majesty. God is absolute and complete, totally self-sufficient and non-contingent. As a consequence, God is not affected by things like insufficiency. God is, in our faith, good and pure; and consequently righteous – incapable of doing evil. We are obviously very capable of doing evil. Holiness is really an issue of that distinction between us, beings capable of atrocious things, and God who is not.

     Peace is a similar thing. God is peace in the fact that there is harmony within the trinity; one substance expressed in three persons who are not in conflict. We are not blessed to have the luxury of having a substance that we all share. However, we do have a common humanity, so peace for us is inextricably bound to righteousness. Our task is to be at peace God and one another. We cannot have one without the other. Its our acts of right and wrong that have an effects upon the peace we see in the world. Acts of physical, emotional, or economic violence remove us from the kind of peace that God calls us to – that Jesus embodies. Words that we may express that dehumanize other people also destabilize the peace that God calls us to. In a sense, we fall short of peace whenever we fail to be just. That’s why we read Isaiah this morning. The coming of God is about the coming of peace.

     Today, we’re celebrating a different kind of future. We’re celebrating the opportunity to live into a different future – a future where each and every one of us strives to imitate Christ and make the world a more peaceful place. Jesus doesn’t just redeem us and offer us forgiveness. He demonstrates what a more perfect humanity can look like. Following Jesus is about following that example. May we strive to make the world a better place, to live lives of love, and to act justly. If we can do that, we can make the world a more peaceful place.

---

[1] Herbert Marcuse, "Epilogue," Reason and Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), pp. 433ff.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, "Introduction to the First Edition," One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991), p. xlv.

[3] Anne Helen Petersen, “What We’re Really Afraid of When We Call Someone ‘Basic’: Breaking Down Why We’re Actually Dismissive of All Things Pumpkin Spice” (Buzzfeed, October 20^th 2014): https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/basic-class-anxiety?utm_term=.mp4rN9jnP#.mmWVaYEZL

Marcuse on the Need for Change

"... the need for qualitative change is as pressing as ever before. Needed by whom? The answer continues to be the same: by the society as a whole, for every one of its members. The union of growing productivity and growing destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender of thought, hope, and fear to the decisions of the powers that be; the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitute the most impartial indictment - even if they are the raison d'être of this society but only its by-product: its sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, is itself irrational."

Herbert Marcuse, "Introduction to the First Edition," One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991), p. xlv.

Marcuse on Totalitarianism

"The defeat of Fascism and National Socialism has not arrested the trend towards totalitarianism. Freedom is on the retreat - in the realm of thought as well as in that of society."

Herbert Marcuse, "Epilogue," Reason and Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), pp. 433ff.

Benjamin on Capitalism

"Capitalism, was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces."

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap, 2002), p. 391.

Schiller on Play

"Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing."

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: A Series of Letters, trans. R. Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), p. 80.

Marcuse on the Practical Element of Philosophy

"Only when [concrete philosophy] influences existence in the public sphere, in its daily being, in the sphere where it really exists, can it hasten the movement of this existence in the direction of truth... At the end of every concrete philosophy stands the public act."

Herbert Marcuse, "Über die konkrete Philosophie," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 62 (1929): 124, 127.

Marcuse on Marx's Rejection of the 'bios theoretikos'

"... historical necessity is realized through men's activities. Men can bypass this activity - recent history is full of such bungled revolutionary situations - and can degrade themselves from subject to objects of history. The task of theory is to free praxis in light of the knowledge of necessity."

Herbert Marcuse, "Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism," Telos 4 (Fall 1969): 6.

Marcuse on the Problem of Reification/Alienation and Inauthenticity

"Everything is an endless sum of activities, one after the other, yet all are inextricably interconnected and determined. All these activities are divorced from the agent who is not part of them, but only deals with them, minds his own business, or - the ultimate absurdity - must undertake activities in order to live. It is 'the metamorphosis of personal into material powers,' which has left behind 'abstract individuals, deprived of all true vitality,' so that man's own activity confronts him as an alien power. This penetrates to the very foundation of capitalist society. It goes beneath the economic and ideological forms of the 'reality of an inhuman existence.' On the other hand, it confronts this with the reality of human existence demanding radical action."

Herbert Marcuse, "Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism," Telos 4 (Fall 1969): 6.

Marcuse on a Revolution of Affects

"[T]he existing society is reproduced not only in the mind, the consciousness of men, but also in their senses; and no persuasion, no theory, no reasoning can break this prison, unless the fixed, petrified sensibility of the individuals is 'dissolved,' opened to a new dimension on history, until the oppressive familiarity with the given object world is broken - broken in a second alienation: that from the alienated society."

Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 16-17.

MLK on the Relationship Between Science and Religion

"Softmindedness often invades religion. This is why religion has sometimes rejected new truth with a dogmatic passion. Through edicts and bulls, inquisitions and excommunications, the church has attempted to prorogue truth and place an impenetrable stone wall in the path of the truth-seeker. The historical-philological criticism of the Bible is considered by the softminded as blasphemous, and reason is often looked upon as the exercise of a corrupt faculty. Softminded persons have revised the Beatitudes to read, 'Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God.'"

"This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the march of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism."

Martin Luther King, Jr. "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart," The Strength to Love.

Marcuse on the Weakness in the Chain of Exploitation

"However, the exemplary force, the ideological power of the external revolution, can come to fruition only if the internal structure and cohesion of the capitalist system begin to disintegrate. The chain of exploitation must break at its strongest link."

Herbert Marcuse, “Solidarity” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 82

Marcuse on the Sovreign's Enforcement of Language

"The existing society defines the transcending action on its, society's, own terms - a self-validating procedure, entirely legitimate, even necessary for this society: one of the most effective right of the Sovereign is the right to establish enforceable definitions of words."

"The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated by the courts and by the police, is not only the voice but also the deed of suppression."

"the established vocabulary discriminates a priori against the opposition - it protects the establishment."

Herbert Marcuse, “Subverting Forces - in Transition” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp.73-77.

Marcuse on the Agression of the Oppressed

"This is the aggressiveness of those with the mutilated experience, with the false consciousness and the false needs, the victims of repression who, for their living, depend on the repressive society and repress the alternative. Their violence is that of the Establishment and takes as targets figures which, rightly or wrongly, seem to be different, and to represent an alternative."

Herbert Marcuse, “Subverting Forces - in Transition” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 51.

Marcuse on Appropriation, Liberation, and the Intrinsic relation of Autonomy and Beauty

"No matter what sensibility art may wish to develop, no matter what Form it may wish to give to things, to life, no matter what vision it may wish to communicate - a radical change of experience is within the technical reaches of powers whose terrible imagination organizes the world in their own image and perpetuates, ever bigger and better, the mutilated experience."

"However, the productive forces, chained in the infrastructure of these societies, counteract this negativity in progress."

"Released from the bondage to exploitation, the imagination, sustained by the achievements of science, could turn its productive power to the radical reconstruction of experience and the universe of experience. In this reconstruction, the historical topos of the aesthetic would change: it would find expression in the transformation of the Lebenswelt - society as a work of art. This 'utopian' goal depends (as every stage in the development of freedom did) on a revolution at the obtainable level of liberation."

"In other words: the transformation is conceivable only as the way in which free men (or rather men in the practice of freeing themselves) shape their life in solidarity, and build an environment in which the struggle for existence loses its ugly and aggressive features. The Form of freedom is not merely self-determination and self-realization, but rather the determination and realization of goals which enhance, protect, and unite life on earth. And this autonomy would find expression not only in the mode of production and production relations but also in the individual relations among men, in their language and in their silence, in their gestures and their looks, in their sensitivity, in their love and hate. The beautiful would be an essential quality of their freedom."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 45-46.

Marcuse on Art's Capacity to Seemingly Transform Reality through Sublimation

"Form is the negation, the mastery of disorder, violence, suffering, even when it presents disorder, violence, suffering. This triumph of art is achieved by subjecting the content to the aesthetic order, which is autonomous in its exigencies. [...] The content is thereby transformed: it obtains a meaning (sense) which transcends the elements of the content, and this transcending order is the appearance of the beautiful as the truth of art."

Example - the tragedy of Oedipus, wherein evil is subordinated to poetic justice.

"With this restoration of order, the Form indeed achieves a catharsis - the terror and the pleasure of reality are purified. But the achievement is illusionary, false, fictitious: it remains within the dimension of art, a work of art; in reality, fear and frustration go on unabated (as they do, after the brief catharsis, in the psyche). This is perhaps the most telling expression of the contradiction, the self-defeat, built into art: the pacifying conquest of matter, the transfiguration of the object remain unreal - just as the revolution in perception remains unreal."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 43-44.

Marcuse on the Violence of Artistic Reconstruction

"The radical character, the "violence" of this reconstruction in contemporary art seems to indicate that it does not rebel against one style or another but against 'style' itself, against the art-form of art, against the traditional 'meaning' of art. [...] And yet, this entire de-formation is Form: anti-art has remained art, supplied, purchased, and contemplated as art. [...] Transforming the intent of art is self-defeating - a self-defeat built into the very structure of art."

"The very Form of art contradicts the effort to do away with the segregation of art to a 'second reality,' to translate the truth of the productive imagination into the first reality."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 40-42.

Marcuse on the Function of Art

"It is precisely the Form by virtue of which art transcends the given reality, works in the established reality against the established reality; and this transcendent element is inherent in art, in the artistic dimension. Art alters experience by reconstructing the objects of experience - reconstructing them in word, tone, image. Why? Evidently, the 'language' of art must communicate a truth, an objectivity which is not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience. This exigency explodes in the situation of contemporary art."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 40.

Marcuse on Perception and Revolution

"the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 37.

Marcuse on Political Protests

"The political protest, assuming a total character, reaches into a dimension which, as aesthetic dimension, has been essentially apolitical. And the political protest activates in this dimension precisely the foundational, organic elements: the human sensibility which rebels against the dictates of repressive reason, and, in doing so, invokes the sensuous power of the imagination."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 30.

Maruse on Sensibility and the Imagination

"The order and organization of class society, which have shaped the sensibility and the reason of man, have also shaped the freedom of the imagination."

Herbert Marcuse, "The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 29.

Marcuse - Aesthetics as a Social Force

"the aesthetic dimension can serve as a sort of gauge for a free society. [...] For the aesthetic needs have their own social content: they are the claims of the human organism, mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment which can be created only in the struggle against the institutions which, by their very functioning, deny and violate these claims."

Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 27.

Marcuse on a Truly Free Democracy

"We would have to conclude that liberation would mean subversion against the will and against the prevailing interests of the great majority of the people. In the false identification of social and individual needs, in the deep-rooted, 'organic' adaptation of the people to a terrible but profitably functioning society, lie the limits of democratic persuasion and evolution. On the overcoming of these limits depends the establishment of democracy."

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 17.

Marcuse on the Evolving Nature of Capitalism

"Capitalism reproduces itself by transforming itself, and this transformation is mainly in the improvement of exploitation. Do exploitation and domination cease to be what they are and what they do to man if they are no longer suffered, if they are 'compensated' by previously unknown comforts?"

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 13.

Marcuse on the Tie Between Economics and Second Nature

"The so-called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling, and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a 'biological' need in the sense just defined. The second nature of man thus militates against any change that would disrupt and perhaps even abolish this dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise - abolish his existence as a consumer consuming himself in buying and selling. The needs generated by this system are thus eminently stabilizing, conservative needs: the counterrevolution anchored in the instinctual structure."

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 11.

Marcuse on the Second Nature and the Possibility of Social Change

"a society constantly re-creates, this side of consciousness and ideology, patterns of behavior and aspiration as part of the 'nature' of its people, and unless the revolt reaches into this 'second' nature, into these ingrown patterns, social change will remain 'incomplete,' even self-defeating."

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 11.

Marcuse on the Relationship Between Political and Moral Radicalism

"Political radicalism thus implies moral radicalism: the emergence of a morality which might precondition man for freedom."

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 10.

Marcuse – The Seduction of Exploitation

“The qualitative difference between the existing societies and a free society affects all needs and satisfactions beyond the animal level, that is to say, all those which are essential to the human species, man as a rational animal. All these needs and satisfactions are permeated with the exigencies of profit and exploitation. The entire realm of competitive performances and standardized fun, all the symbols of status, prestige, power, of advertised virility and charm, of commercialized beauty – this entire realm kills in its citizens the very disposition, the organs, for the alternative: freedom without exploitation.”

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 17.

Marcuse – Impoverishment, Imagination, and the Soil of Revolution

“It is not simply the higher standard of living, the illusionary bridging of the consumer gap between the rulers and the ruled, which has obscured the distinction between the real and the immediate interest of the ruled. Marxian theory soon recognized that impoverishment does not necessarily provide the soil for revolution, that a highly developed consciousness and imagination may generate a vital need for radical change in advanced material conditions.”

“The power of corporate capitalism has stifled the emergence of such a consciousness and imagination; its mass media have adjusted the rational and emotional faculties to its market and its policies and steered them to defense of its dominion. The narrowing of the consumption gap has rendered possible the mental and instinctual coordination of the laboring classes: the majority of organized labor shares the stabilizing, counterrevolutionary needs of the middle classes, as evidenced by their behavior as consumers of the material and cultural merchandise, by their emotional revulsion against the nonconformist intelligentsia. Conversely, where the consumer gap is still wide, where capitalistic culture has not yet reached into every house or hut, the system of stabilizing need has its limits; the glaring contrast between the privileged class and the exploited leads to a radicalization of the underprivileged. This is the case of the ghetto population and the unemployed in the United States; this is also the case of the laboring classes in the more backward capitalistic countries.”

Herbert Marcuse, “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 15-16.

Marcuse – an Apology for Utopia

“The dynamic of their productivity deprives ‘utopia’ of its traditional unreal content: what is denounced as ‘utopian’ is no longer that which has ‘no place’ and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies. Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism: the rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future.”

Herbert Marcuse, “Introduction” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 3-4.

Marcuse on the 1968 Student Revolution in France

“They have again raised the specter (and this time a specter which haunts not only the bourgeoisie but all exploitative bureaucracies): the specter of a revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces and higher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace. In one word: they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension – that of liberation.”

Herbert Marcuse, "Preface” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. ix-x.

Marcuse – A Strange Statement

“But the perversion of the capabilities of technological reality reveals itself in the fact that the function of politics is joined with that of the entertainment and beauty parlor industry – a fatally premature juncture. When a candidate for the highest political office appears on the television show of a popular comedian, he re-enacts the satyr-play after the ancient tragedy. Finis tragoediae – but it is not so much the hero as the people who would make the ritual sacrifice.”

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), p. 74.

Marcuse – Thesis on Language, Institutions, and Control

“This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction: it denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary which evokes a qualitatively different dimension of thought and qualitatively different possibilities of action.”

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), p. 73.

Marcuse - Functional Language and History

“Functional language is an unhistorical language: the tendency to identify things with their function destroys the meta-physical grammar which had linked noun-subject-substance-essence, linked in such a manner that the essence was the permanent First Principle. Ground, and Reason of the entire structure. […] It may not be altogether fantastic to associate the repression of development in the functionalized universe of discourse with social repression.”

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), pp. 72-73.

Marcuse on an Alternative to Functionalized Language

“Compared with these constructions, the non-functional substantive, the noun-subject, and the demonstrative and narrative predication are rather abstract forms; they express the transcending universality of the concept, the ‘excess’ of its intent over the term (word) in current usage: thus they retain the tension between the particular and the genus, which is greatly attenuated in the functional construction. […] The grammatical form thus retains the dialectical distinction between the subject and its functions; the proposition contains the negation of the given fact: it links that which is happening to the conditions which made it happen, and allows the reader or listener to follow and reconstruct the development.”

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), p. 72.

The Correlation Between Sexual Liberation and Political Repression

"Thus we are faced with the contradiction that the liberalization of sexuality provides an instinctual basis for the repressive and aggressive power of the affluent society. This contradiction can be resolved if we understand that the liberalization of the Establishment's own morality takes place within the framework of effective controls; kept within this framework, the liberalization strengthens the cohesion of the whole. The relaxation of taboos alleviates the sense of guilt and binds (though with considerable ambivalence) the 'free' individuals libidinally to the institutionalized fathers. [...] On the other hand, if the violation of taboos transcends the sexual sphere and leads to refusal and rebellion, the sense of guilt is not alleviated and repressed but rather transferred: not we, but the fathers, are guilty [...] Instinctual revolt turns into political rebellion, and against this union, the Establishment mobilizes its full force."

Herbert Marcuse, "A Biological Foundation for Socialism?" An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 9.

Marcuse on Morality as a Political Weapon

"Morality is not necessarily and not primarily ideological. In the face of an amoral society, it becomes a political weapon, an effective force which drives people to burn their draft cards, to ridicule national leaders, to demonstrate in the streets, and to unfold signs saying, 'Thou shalt not kill,' in the nation's churches."

Herbert Marcuse, "A Biological Foundation for Socialism?" An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 8.

Marcuse on Linguistic Therapy and the Transformation of Moral Standards

"Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment [...] obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace. Linguistic therapy - that is, the effort to free words (and thereby concepts) from the all but total distortion of their meanings by the Establishment - demands the transfer of moral standards (and of their validation) from the Establishment to the revolt against it. Similarly, the sociological and political vocabulary must be radically reshaped: it must be stripped of its false neutrality; it must be methodologically and provocatively 'moralized' in terms of the Refusal."

Herbert Marcuse, "A Biological Foundation for Socialism?" An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 8.

Marcuse on the Biological Foundation of Rebellion

"What is now at stake are the needs themselves. At this stage, the question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others, but rather how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude? The advent of a free society would be characterized by the fact that the growth of well-being turns into an essentially new quality of life. This qualitative change must occur in the needs, in the infrastructure of man (itself a dimension of the infrastructure of society): the new direction, the new institutions and relationships of production, must express the ascent needs and satisfactions very different from and even antagonistic to those prevalent in the exploitative societies. Such a change would constitute the instinctual basis for freedom which the long history of class society has blocked. Freedom would become the environment of an organism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for well-being under domination, no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life. The rebellion would then have taken root in the very nature, the 'biology' of the individual..."

Herbert Marcuse, "Introduction" An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 4-5.

Marcuse on the Hypnosis of Language Employed by Politicians and Business

"FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE here reveals its magic element, which is also its essentially political element. [...] Such language is at one and the same time 'intimidation and glorification'; propositions tend to assume the form of suggestive commands; they are evocative rather than demonstrative; prediction becomes prescription - the whole communication has a hypnotic character. [...] The powerless individuals are constantly called upon to identify themselves with the goods, and the politicians incessantly summon them to meet a challenge and to face an issue which is not theirs."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 70.

Marcuse on the Restrictions of Analytic Language

"On the other side, transgression beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different. In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies, actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference. The analytic structure insulates the governing nouns from the negation which their concept in the synthetic proposition involves [...] In this sphere, to identify things with their function is to identify them with their function in their society, and if this identification affects the animate things, men, it may be a highly restrictive and even destructive procedure: although it may have the merit of certainty, it may also succeed in arresting thought."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 69.

Marcuse on Language's use as a Authoritarian Organizer

"On the other side of the fence, ordinary language still is haunted by the big words of higher culture: by the dignity of the individual and the inalienable rights and the philosophy of democracy, etc. However, the defense laboratories and the executive offices, the time keepers and managers, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlors (which provide the leaders with the appropriate make up) speak a different language, and for the time being they seem to have the last word. And from these centers of organization and manipulation, the word is transmitted and incorporated into the common universe of discourse and behavior. The words thus transmitted is the word which orders and organizes, which induces people to do and to buy and to accept what is offered, to identify themselves with the function they perform in established society, to release all frustration in the (equally organized and controlled) realm of leisure and relaxation. As a consequence, whole dimensions of communication atrophy, or they are ritualized."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), pp. 67-68.

Marcuse on the Production of Language

"Language is literally made by corporate and national Business, by hired researchers, entertainers, press agents, etc. The more blatantly production for profit demands manipulation of needs, the more obviously it depends on mass hypnosis and autosuggestion, the more vanishes the difference between the 'ethics' of business and those of the racket, between selling and cheating, between promoting and poisoning, between truth and lie, sense and non-sense."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 67.

Brecht on Radio

"radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let listeners speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 52.

Brecht on Film and Capitalism

"What the film really demands is external action and not introspective psychology. Capitalism operates in this way by taking given needs on a massive scale, exorcizing them, organizing them and mechanizing them so as to revolutionize everything. Great areas of ideology are destroyed when capitalism concentrates on external action, dissolves everything into processes, abandons the hero as the vehicle for everything and mankind as the measure, and thereby smashes the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel."


Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 50.

Bertolt on the Pallatives that Distract us from Real Life

"The life imposed on us is too hard; it brings us too many agonies, disappointments, impossible tasks. In order to stand it we have to have some kind of palliative. There seems to be three classes of these: overpowering distractions, which allow us to find our sufferings unimportant, pseudo-satisfactions which reduce them and drugs which make us insensitive to them. The pseudo-satisfactions offered by art are illusions if compared with reality, but are none the less psychologically effective for that, thanks to the part played by the imagination in our inner life. (Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kulter, page 22.) Such drugs are sometimes responsible for the wastage of great energy which might have been applied to bettering the human lot."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 41.

Brecht on the Significance of the Open Exchange of Ideas

"Why the refusal to discuss? Answer: nothing can come of discussion. To discuss the present form of our society, or even of one of its least important parts, would lead inevitably and at once to an outright threat to our society's form as such."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 41.

Brecht Bashing Wagnerites

"Those composers who stem from Wagner still insist on posing as philosophers. A philosophy which is of no use to man or beast, and can only be disposed of as a means of sensual satisfaction."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 39.

Brecht on Innovating Opera's Social Function

"Once the context becomes, technically speaking, an independent component, to which text, music and setting 'adopt attitudes'; once illusion is sacrificed to free discussion, and once the spectator, instead of being enabled to have an experience, is forced as it were to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect the theatre's social function."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 39.

Brecht on the Relationship between Intellectuals and Business

"For a long time now they have taken the handiwork (music, writing, criticism, etc.) of intellectuals who share in their profits - that is, of men who are economically committed to the prevailing system but are socially near-proletarian - and processed it to make fodder for their public entertainment machine, judging it by their own standards and guiding it into their own channels; meanwhile the intellectuals themselves have gone on supposing that the whole business is concerned only with the presentation of their work, is a secondary process which has no influence over their work but merely wins influence for it. [...] Their output becomes a matter of delivering the goods."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 34.

Brecht on Der Flug der Lindberghs and the Radio

"Der Flug der Lindberghs is not intended to be of use to the present-day radio but to alter it. The increasing concentration of mechanical mean and the increasingly specialized training - tendencies that should be accelerated - call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 32.

Benjamin on Baudelaire

"Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. The semblance of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flâneur, had faded for him. To heighten the impression of the crowd's baseness, he envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcasts, would readily espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd - with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of the immediate experience to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience. He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience. He paid dearly for consenting to the disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry. This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as 'a star without atmosphere.'"

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 343.

Benjamin - Gaze and Aura

"Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us."

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 338

Benjamin - The Absence of Beauty in Technological Reproduction

"Insofar as art aims at the beautiful and, on however modest a scale, 'reproduces' it, it retrieves (as Faust does Helen) out of the depths of time. This does not happen in the case of technological reproduction. (The beautiful has no place in it.)"

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 338

Benjamin - Technology's Training of the Human Subject

"Whereas Poe's passers-by cast glances in all directions, seemingly without cause, today's pedestrians are obliged to look about them so that they can be aware of traffic signals. Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned shock was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film."

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 328.

Benjamin - War, Alienation, Annilhilation, and Aestheticization

"Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 270

Benjamin - War and the Uprising of Technology

"Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology, which demands repayment in 'human material' for the natural material society has denied it."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 270

Benjamin - War as an Organizing Force for the Masses

"All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest of scale while preserving traditional property relations."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 269.

Benjamin - Fascism, Property, Relations, and Aestheticization of Political Life

"Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strove to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses - but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping those relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 269.

Benjamin - Contemplation and Habit as Modes of Reception

"For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means - that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually - taking their cue from tactile reception - through habit."

"Reception in distraction - the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception - finds in film its true training ground. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of reception."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 268-269.

Benjamin - Scientific and Artistic Fucntions of Film

"Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses - these two dimensions having usually been separated until now - will be one of the revolutionary functions of film."

"It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 265-266.

Benjamin - Reproducibility led to the Disappearance of Art's seeming Autonomy

"The nineteenth-century dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography seems misguided and confused today. But this does not diminish its importance, and may even underscore it. Insofar as the age of technological reproducibility separated art from its basis in cult, all semblance of art's autonomy disappeared forever."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 258.

Benjamin - The Reception of Art as either Cultic or Exhibitionistic

"With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase."

"In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image finds its last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 257-258.

Benjamin - the Demise of Ritual and Rise of Politics

"technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. [...] But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics."


Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 257.

Benjamin - Art and Ritual

"it is highly significant that the artwork's auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words: the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 256.

The Power of Persistence

This painting was created by Marc Chagall, who is sometimes referred to as the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century. He was not only a pioneer, but a synthesizer of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. His work largely influenced the rise of surrealism and expressionism. This work, "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel", is a powerful illustration of our emotional turmoil as we try to understand and wrestle with the divine, particularly in prayer.

Luke 18:1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ² He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³ In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” ⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ⁸ I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Sermon:

This morning’s parable is often paired with another, very similar, parable. That parable is about the Insistent Friend and can be found in Luke 11:5-13. Today’s is about the Stubborn Widow and both center around one of the meaning and power inherent to prayer. Yet, these two parables are also different from one another. The one we just heard is not just a story of knocking on a door waiting to receive something we need from a friend. It’s not a story about asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. No! There’s something far more pressing in today’s parable. It’s a parable about injustice, contrasts, and eschatological hope.[1]

This is a story about Torah.[2] The unjust judge that we hear about in this story embodies the misuse of the law that God gave Israel. He embodies the antithesis to God Himself and everything that God had taught the Israelites about fairness, justice, and the responsibilities a community has towards its weakest members. In 2 Chronicles God tells Israel, and us, what a judge should be:

“You judge not on behalf of human beings but on the Lord’s behalf… Now, let the fear of the Lord be upon you; take care what you do, for there is no perversion of justice with the Lord our God, or partiality, or taking of bribes.” (2 Chronicles 19:6-7)

Likewise, God embodies all that is opposite to what we hear about the judge in this story. As one commentary from the intertestamental period exhorts:

“Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it… for the Lord is the judge, and with him there is no partiality. […] He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan, or the widow when she pours out her complaint. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against the one who causes them to fall?” (Sirach 35:14-19)[3]

In other words, God gets pissed off when the weakest among us are taken advantage of. In God’s Law we find that widows, orphans, and sojourners are placed under special protection – God goes out of His way to tell Israel that these people are to be treated well, precisely because they are weak. “In the patriarchal societies of the ancient world they were structurally the first victims of economic and social injustice and of legal maneuverings, and they were the objects of treachery and attempts at exploitation.”[4]

          In the parable that Jesus tells here, the widow is treated unjustly on two levels. First, she is victimized by a man who has exploited her economic insecurity. He is simply referred to in this parable as the “opponent.”[5] She tries, like most of us would, to get justice in the court system and goes before a judge. But, she becomes the victim of a second injustice – a judicial decision that has no regard for her rights. The parable tells us that the judge has repulsed her many times. As the parables tells us, the judge did not fear God. If he had, he would have given her justice on her first attempt.

          But this widow, who has been victimized, returns again and again to the judge – apparently becoming more objectionable every time she returns. So the judge finally relents and does justice for her, not because it is just, but because he wants to avoid trouble for himself.[6] The widow’s cries, then, become an example for us of how one might protest. “She resists injustice by drawing the judge’s attention to her rights, that is, to the Torah.”[7] She is obstinate and persistent precisely because she knows that God’s law is on her side. So on each occasion as she returns to court, seeking justice, she ups the ante by going one step further in violating social boundaries – she behaves loudly and aggressively in public, so much so that it seems to embarrass the judge and makes him eager to draw attention away from himself.[8] The judge’s internal conversation, that he has within his own mind, reflects this transgression of boundaries.

This is, in many ways, a story about the spotlight of attention. When injustices are laid bare before everyone’s eyes the unjust retreat and try to hide. They deflect attention away from themselves, before the public’s eye can see too deep, and incite the hand to crush those who seek inly to enrich themselves.

Many of us, here this morning, are wrestling with questions. We all have anxieties and fears, but some of us might have more than that sitting on our hearts. Some of us are wondering why we are still seeing children being crushed under the weight of bombs. Others might be wondering why we still see men and women alike thrown into the chains of sex trafficking and slavery.[9] Some of us might be wondering why some injustice happened to us; or, perhaps, why someone was so easily able to take advantage of our children or grandchildren without consequence. We all have a yearning for justice deep in our souls and those inclinations, those ideas about justice, that we have are often expressed in God’s Law – where he talks about these sorts of things.

This is why I put the Chagall painting on the back of today’s bulletin. It doesn’t correlate directly with today’s passage from scripture, but it does express the emotions that we might be wrapped up in when we try to make sense of our world. We are wrapped up in the deeply intense, reddish, emotions as we wrestle with our minds through prayer and doubt. Yet, we also encounter the tranquility and assurance of God that’s intrinsic to His nature. The sun, the represents God’s light, shines upon all things; and illuminates what God offers, even insofar as we can turn a reflection of God’s light – in terms of attention – upon the injustices of the world.

I want to conclude by having us reflect on the same questions that Jesus’ audience was reflecting on. Just prior to this parable, the Pharisees asked when the Kingdom of God will come. The disciples asked, “where” it will come.[10] Both audiences are longing for a rapid liberation from their pains – perhaps we are too. Yet, Jesus highlights the illusionary character of these questions. He tells them that now is the time for the Son of Man’s suffering, that the judgment of the world is not set for this time, but is instead something to follow this period, which is like the days of Noah before the Great Flood.[11] We often live short-sighted and violent lives (17:26-33) as though things will go on like this forever. But they will not go on like this forever. God will judge.

This parable is “an admonition to do what is necessary in this situation, in which so much violence is [our] experience.”[12] Our task is to pray and cry to God for justice, even if it means that we have to reflect His light and shine it upon the injustices of this world. Our time is a time of repentance because we are all disdaining God’s will for justice, which is expressed in His Law.[13] As the last verse of the parable suggests, fidelity to God has become rare.[14] The unjust judge is the image of everything that is diametrically opposite to God – including the structures of oppression from which the people to whom Jesus is speaking are suffering.[15]

This passage, along with Romans 8:15 and 26, suggests that the task of believers is to pray and cry out to God against injustice – to protest and place our trust in God. We are to cry out like women in labor, not giving up, but maintain the patient power of resistance that comes from hope in the nearness of God.[16] It’s a stubborn and persistent hope in the coming of God’s justice. May we emulate the widow and reflect the light of God, just as she did.

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[1] ‘Eschatology’ is any system of doctrines concerning last, or final, matters, as death, the Judgment, the future state, etc.

[2] ‘Torah’, or Pentateuch, is the central reference of the religious Judaic tradition. It is constituted by the first five books of the Bible.

[3] Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, was written between 200 and 175 BCE by the scribe Shimon ben Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira of Jerusalem. It is considered canonical by Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and most of the Oriental Orthodox. It is also included in many Protestant Lectionary readings, even though it is not considered canonical, but simply an important and instructive intertestamental text.

[4] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 191.

[5] Luke 18:3

[6] Luke 18:5

[7] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 192.

[8] Luke 18:7 can be understood in this way.

[9] There are approximately 30 million people still in slavery. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/modern-slavery_n_4124496.html

[10] Luke 17:37

[11] Luke 17:25

[12] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 193.

[13] Luke 18:9-14

[14] Luke 18:8

[15] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 193.

[16] Ibid.