Marcuse and Bourdieu on The Sociology of Art
Marcuse and Bourdieu on The Sociology of Art
Richard Birch
Modern Sociological Theories SOCI 3016
Professor Vardalos
Friday, Nov 25 2005
When considering the meaning of cultural creativity in the social, the meanings and their conceptual connotations of art, the meanings of creative expression, and the identity of the artist as both an objectified fragment and distinctive subject, it is interesting to examine the very tragic nature of the artist as perceived in sociology. What is an artist in the social? Is an artist a fragmentary entity disconnected to culture in order to create new cultural productions? Is artistic expression truly a freely constructed thing immune to the confines and restraints of technocapitalism and social hegemonic ideologies? Is an artist immune from the rationality of postmodern production and consumerist demand that in turn influences the evolution and direction of artistic freedom and expression? These are questions the sociology of art never answers. These are questions that ring as most profound and subjectively important for an artist to have as entities within the social. These are questions ignored by the very nature of sociology itself in its empirically quantitative character. These represent the tragedy of the sociology of art. Yet there are two important theorists who have attempted, though not as the primary thrust of their research, to engage critical thought with explicating art in the social. By conflating artistic production with technological production, Herbert Marcuse and Pierre Bourdieu transcend the typical in social thinking on the sociology of art. In Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man, he engages in critical analysis of art as an extension of technology and technocapital ethos, constructing connectivity to artistic alienation with the rationalization of labour and oppression. Artists are producers, labourers essentially chained to having to sell their labour as artists in order to continue artistic production, not artistic expression. Bourdieu in his book Sociology in Question depicts artists as components of the social constrained by the commonality of what art is mediated from. The artist eventually breaks from the everyday socially constructed symbolic representation of the artist as a creator, and adopts immediate complicities the term artist must bring forth from creator to the consumer (1993).
If we are to embark on a discourse of the meaning of art in the social, one has to confirm the identity of art and artistic creation as a form of production. The very term production is used in all forms of artistic technical definitions, from music, film, literature, architecture, dance, and dramatics. Without production there would be no art as either of a humanist form of expression, or as a commodified institutional enterprise, that is if there really is any distinction to be made between these two. The question is, can art be separated from those aspects of human technocapitalist existence that are rationalized? Is art in essence, essential in true artistic form? Is there really any true artistic subjectivity for the artist and for those who experience it as consumers? In other words, is art essentially one-dimensional and can it be applied to strategies of distinction if artists are extensions of technology and postmodern capitalism? Therefore for purposes of constructing connectivity between art and production, it is useful to conflate the impact of technology on artistic creativity in human existence with rationalization. Herbert Marcus’s book One-Dimensional Man defines people as extensions of technology. It could also be argued in analysis that people are not merely extensions of technology, but we are also subsequent to the relationship between technology and labour. We are as thus extensions of corporations, especially corporations that own and control the means of commercial and non-commercial artistic production in society. Therefore in this thinking we are also products of the relationship between corporate culture and labour culture, not precursors to either one of them. Artists do not live individual human lives as subjective entities. Artists live as objects as constructed by the corporatization of human existence. In this way artists are controlled as objects, made to believe they are subjects of their own creation and postmodern design. “Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances” (Marcuse, 1964). This is what Marcuse calls the Freedom of Enterprise, where non-conformity to technocapitalism is essentially socially useless especially “when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole” (1964). This Freedom of Enterprise is about a bilateral choice universal to economic and political socialization. One can choose the liberty of selling one’s labour, or the liberty and inevitability of starving to death (1964). Marcuse claims in his book that if people were allowed to exist without having to be subject to the mechanization and technological processes involved in the marketing of their labour, then they would become free economic agents, essentially free from this form of freedom. But freedom of enterprise is contingent on alienation according to Marcuse. For without the alienation of the labour force, it can be argued that the rationalization of human existence could not be achieved to serve technocapitalism. In analysis the risk for the established processes of global oppression and the relationship between labour and the ownership of production is not the eradication of labour and of the necessity for one to sell his or her labour in order to consume, but the potential creation of nonalienated labour as the foundation of society.
Pierre Bourdieu saw this relationship of labour to human existence in a somewhat different fashion in his book Sociology in Question. He does not believe that rationalization of human existence was a product of alienation from labour and production, but more so an ethos of what he calls “distanciation” (Bourdieu1993). Distanciation is a result of strategies of distinction, where cultural practices are “always strategies for distancing oneself from what is ‘common’ and ‘easy’” (1993). Strategies for distinction are typically active in non-dominant classes for dominant classes by definition are already distinct to political economical structures as in control of that which is common epistemology. Distinction for Bourdieu is about distinguishing knowledge, institutions, and social behaviour from that which is socially constructed as vulgar or deviant. Microsocially people distinguish themselves in their interactions from that which is not consistent with what has to be loved (1993). The yield of such distinction strategies is to produce a distinction from themselves, that which is common. In one such example of this form of existential production is the utilization of technology for the creation of art and the harnessing of human creativity. For Bourdieu states in Sociology in Question,
I have myself shared in the illusion of ‘cultural (or linguistic) communism. Intellectuals spontaneously understand the relationship to a work of art as mystical participation in a common good, without rarity. My whole book argues that access to a work of art requires instruments that are not universally distributed. And consequently that the possessors of those instruments secure profits of distinction for themselves, and the rarer these instruments are (such as those needed to appropriate avant-garde works), the greater the profits. (1993)
In analysis of this idea of distinguishing that which is common and meaningless in the social, a correlation to Marcuse’s notion that our technological relationship reifies our existence as alienated can be drawn. For Marcuse, technology is accessed for all productive purposes. For Bourdieu art and creativity, even microsocially is meaningless if it is produced for all who exist in the social. For Marcuse, nonalienation is the activity of labour utilized for the organization of very different relations and moral structures than for profit and commercial productivity (Marcuse, 1964). To alienate labour from that which it produces reifies the redundancy of human existence and the power of political economic hegemony. If labour and human existence connects under a different set of goals that intend for technology to return to being extensions of creativity and artistic expression, then what will only ever produced is the liberating alternative.
Consider Bourdieu’s thoughts on popular culture as correlative to his ‘cultural communism’ idea. He addresses the question of whether popular culture exists, particularly if dominant classes are passive to strategies of distinction. That which in reality resembles what people in discourse explicate as popular culture and thus popularized artistic products through linguistic means, is questionable. Popular culture is common culture. Popular culture serves the dominant classes under the lens of cultural communistic thinking. Commonality in culture only reifies commonality. For Bourdieu, popular culture is incongruent with art. Popular culture is produced for commonality and common access. The relationship between the artist and that which he or she produces becomes problematic. Art and cultural capital is created. ‘Creation’ for Bourdieu is the convergence of that which makes one an artist and that which makes possible the division of labour for cultural production (1993).
The labour through which the artist makes his work and, inseparably from this, makes himself as an artist…can be described as the dialectical relationship between his ‘post’…and [that] which more or less predisposes him to occupy that post or…more or less completely to transform it. (1993).
This in essence defines the artist’s ‘post’ as determined by the social conditions of his or her creative production, and as being subject to the social demands and constraints inscribed in the position he or she occupies in production (1993).
To bring connectivity to the concept of Bourdieu’s cultural communism and Marcuse’s rationality is possible. For Marcuse, art and culture is unilateral in concept; a realm of one-dimensional thought systemically regulated by the purveyors of knowledge and mass information (Marcuse, 1964).
Reason, in its application to society, has thus far been opposed to art, while art [is] granted the privilege of being rather irrational – not subject to scientific, technological, and operational Reason. The rationality of domination has separated the Reason of science and the Reason of art into the universe of domination (1964).
Therein lies the tragedy of rationalization when thinking about the artist and artistic production. Reason converges with the function of art, as technology is itself “the instrumentality of pacification” (1964). The artist possesses insight, vision, creative wisdom, love, desire, sensuality, expressive ethos, access to technology, potential access to the public and the social, and a need to create art. All of these guide the artist to conceive and create the vision of technology and thus the construction of the machinery of art and expression. In this thinking, the essential relationship between technology and art, and the conceptual practices of the two points to an explicit “rationality of art” (1964).
It seems in Marcuse’s book, art creates a universe of thought of which he posits it against the existing hegemonic principles of art and technology. That art, as convergent and connected to human existence, is also rationalized and alienated in a technical universe. In contrast to a technical universe, the artistic universe is one of illusion and resembles “a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one” (1964). As Bourdieu intends for the artist to distinguish himself or herself from the commonality of the social and from what is culturally constructed as artistic, he also calls for sociology to shift from measuring and giving account of cultural consumption to measuring and examining cultural production. Sociology accepts this distinction, but not favours it when empirically analysing what art means to the social in regards to cultural communism. Sociology and it’s bedfellow, statistics, “belittle and crushes, flattens and trivializes artistic creation: that is sets the great and the small on the same footing, at all events fails to grasp what makes the genius of the greatest artists” (Bourdieu, 1993). Malraux philosophically implied that art imitates art. Sociology only then imitates and thus reifies it’s own limits as sociology. Sociology of art fails tragically to account for what is important in art, that artistic creation cannot be nor should it be explained wholly in conditions and language of demand. Art is not merely an aesthetic, just as artists in the social are not simply fragments in the social they wish to express about. Artists, as sociologists are also subjective texts, struggling to strategize their own critical distinction from the commonality of postmodern human reality (1993). Yet, in reality when measuring the meaning of art in the social, Bourdieu posits an important explanation of the nature of the artist’s identity within the social.
In the encounter between a work of art and the consumer, there is an absent third party, the person who produced the work, who has made something to his taste through his capacity to transform his taste into an object, to transform it from a state of mind, or rather, a state of body, into something visible corresponding to his taste. The artist is the professional practitioner of the transformation of the implicit into the explicit, the objectification that transforms taste into an object, who realizes the potential, in other words a practical sense of beauty that can know itself only be realizing itself (1993).
Yet for Bourdieu, it is seemingly impossible for sociology to separate this conceptual utopian image of the artist with that objectification he or she is ascribed to reify. For art cannot ever realize itself. Art is not subjective in cultural communism. Art is fashioned to be common. Only through strategies of distinction can the rationality of art be dismissed or halted, and thus art as an institutional construct is therefore only ever objectified.
In comparison, for Marcuse the artist must negotiate his or her identity with the Hegelian notion that the “technological rationality of art seems to be characterized by an aesthetic ‘reduction’” (Marcuse, 1964). Marcuse aligns the rationality of the artist to the reduction of art to an object, or a “totality of objects” as he calls it, to a state in which,
The object [art] takes on the form and quality of freedom. Such transformation is reduction because the contingent situation suffers requirements which are external, and which stand in the way of its free realization…thus, the artistic transformation violates the natural object, but the violated is itself oppressive; thus the aesthetic transformation is liberation (1964).
This reduction of the aesthetic pacifies the artist into believing he or she truly engages in real artistic expression and creativity. However this reduction signifies their oppression of which the artist as an extension of technocapitalism and technology is blind to. The developing one-dimensional society changes the association between rational and irrational thought. In lieu of what Marcuse claims is the insanity of rationality, that which is rational becomes the place on which irrationality exists. As for the artist, the ideas that promote love, creation, expression, and desire – the art of life, is reduced to the irrational. This Hegelian reduction of the aesthetic makes the imagination of the artist an instrument of progress (1964). Through rationalization in a one-dimensional society, like all other established societies, art as methodologically progressive is subject to social and corporate abuse. The power of imagination when used for the productive purposes and function of art far exceeds any political voice that may stand up to this form of oppression. For thinking of technology on the basis of imagination, technological advancement accompanies progressive rationalization, or even more so, the realization of the imaginary (1964).
Art has not been impervious to the process of reification. All art reifies all other art in a one-dimensional, socially common society. All art reifies its own existence but only as much to a reduction of something less than itself. The tragedy of reification is that it simply portrays art, as the very essence of human existence, love, and desire as confined to one-dimensional thought. For both Marcuse and Bourdieu, to liberate the imagination from those institutions that pacify it is a political activity. The dialectical representation of art in sociology pronounces it’s own hopelessness. This is what makes the conflict productive. This is why tension fuels the artist for both Marcuse and Bourdieu. The artist’s greatest struggle is to deal with the social fact that freedom of thought, the freedom of creativity, and the freedom of expression in the symbolic sense can only be free in the administered material world. Without the material forces that shape the drive for resources and production, even the most profound artistic awareness and consciousness in the social will remain incapable and immobile.
References:
Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in Question. (R. Nice, Trans.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
Richard Birch
Modern Sociological Theories SOCI 3016
Professor Vardalos
Friday, Nov 25 2005
When considering the meaning of cultural creativity in the social, the meanings and their conceptual connotations of art, the meanings of creative expression, and the identity of the artist as both an objectified fragment and distinctive subject, it is interesting to examine the very tragic nature of the artist as perceived in sociology. What is an artist in the social? Is an artist a fragmentary entity disconnected to culture in order to create new cultural productions? Is artistic expression truly a freely constructed thing immune to the confines and restraints of technocapitalism and social hegemonic ideologies? Is an artist immune from the rationality of postmodern production and consumerist demand that in turn influences the evolution and direction of artistic freedom and expression? These are questions the sociology of art never answers. These are questions that ring as most profound and subjectively important for an artist to have as entities within the social. These are questions ignored by the very nature of sociology itself in its empirically quantitative character. These represent the tragedy of the sociology of art. Yet there are two important theorists who have attempted, though not as the primary thrust of their research, to engage critical thought with explicating art in the social. By conflating artistic production with technological production, Herbert Marcuse and Pierre Bourdieu transcend the typical in social thinking on the sociology of art. In Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man, he engages in critical analysis of art as an extension of technology and technocapital ethos, constructing connectivity to artistic alienation with the rationalization of labour and oppression. Artists are producers, labourers essentially chained to having to sell their labour as artists in order to continue artistic production, not artistic expression. Bourdieu in his book Sociology in Question depicts artists as components of the social constrained by the commonality of what art is mediated from. The artist eventually breaks from the everyday socially constructed symbolic representation of the artist as a creator, and adopts immediate complicities the term artist must bring forth from creator to the consumer (1993).
If we are to embark on a discourse of the meaning of art in the social, one has to confirm the identity of art and artistic creation as a form of production. The very term production is used in all forms of artistic technical definitions, from music, film, literature, architecture, dance, and dramatics. Without production there would be no art as either of a humanist form of expression, or as a commodified institutional enterprise, that is if there really is any distinction to be made between these two. The question is, can art be separated from those aspects of human technocapitalist existence that are rationalized? Is art in essence, essential in true artistic form? Is there really any true artistic subjectivity for the artist and for those who experience it as consumers? In other words, is art essentially one-dimensional and can it be applied to strategies of distinction if artists are extensions of technology and postmodern capitalism? Therefore for purposes of constructing connectivity between art and production, it is useful to conflate the impact of technology on artistic creativity in human existence with rationalization. Herbert Marcus’s book One-Dimensional Man defines people as extensions of technology. It could also be argued in analysis that people are not merely extensions of technology, but we are also subsequent to the relationship between technology and labour. We are as thus extensions of corporations, especially corporations that own and control the means of commercial and non-commercial artistic production in society. Therefore in this thinking we are also products of the relationship between corporate culture and labour culture, not precursors to either one of them. Artists do not live individual human lives as subjective entities. Artists live as objects as constructed by the corporatization of human existence. In this way artists are controlled as objects, made to believe they are subjects of their own creation and postmodern design. “Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances” (Marcuse, 1964). This is what Marcuse calls the Freedom of Enterprise, where non-conformity to technocapitalism is essentially socially useless especially “when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole” (1964). This Freedom of Enterprise is about a bilateral choice universal to economic and political socialization. One can choose the liberty of selling one’s labour, or the liberty and inevitability of starving to death (1964). Marcuse claims in his book that if people were allowed to exist without having to be subject to the mechanization and technological processes involved in the marketing of their labour, then they would become free economic agents, essentially free from this form of freedom. But freedom of enterprise is contingent on alienation according to Marcuse. For without the alienation of the labour force, it can be argued that the rationalization of human existence could not be achieved to serve technocapitalism. In analysis the risk for the established processes of global oppression and the relationship between labour and the ownership of production is not the eradication of labour and of the necessity for one to sell his or her labour in order to consume, but the potential creation of nonalienated labour as the foundation of society.
Pierre Bourdieu saw this relationship of labour to human existence in a somewhat different fashion in his book Sociology in Question. He does not believe that rationalization of human existence was a product of alienation from labour and production, but more so an ethos of what he calls “distanciation” (Bourdieu1993). Distanciation is a result of strategies of distinction, where cultural practices are “always strategies for distancing oneself from what is ‘common’ and ‘easy’” (1993). Strategies for distinction are typically active in non-dominant classes for dominant classes by definition are already distinct to political economical structures as in control of that which is common epistemology. Distinction for Bourdieu is about distinguishing knowledge, institutions, and social behaviour from that which is socially constructed as vulgar or deviant. Microsocially people distinguish themselves in their interactions from that which is not consistent with what has to be loved (1993). The yield of such distinction strategies is to produce a distinction from themselves, that which is common. In one such example of this form of existential production is the utilization of technology for the creation of art and the harnessing of human creativity. For Bourdieu states in Sociology in Question,
I have myself shared in the illusion of ‘cultural (or linguistic) communism. Intellectuals spontaneously understand the relationship to a work of art as mystical participation in a common good, without rarity. My whole book argues that access to a work of art requires instruments that are not universally distributed. And consequently that the possessors of those instruments secure profits of distinction for themselves, and the rarer these instruments are (such as those needed to appropriate avant-garde works), the greater the profits. (1993)
In analysis of this idea of distinguishing that which is common and meaningless in the social, a correlation to Marcuse’s notion that our technological relationship reifies our existence as alienated can be drawn. For Marcuse, technology is accessed for all productive purposes. For Bourdieu art and creativity, even microsocially is meaningless if it is produced for all who exist in the social. For Marcuse, nonalienation is the activity of labour utilized for the organization of very different relations and moral structures than for profit and commercial productivity (Marcuse, 1964). To alienate labour from that which it produces reifies the redundancy of human existence and the power of political economic hegemony. If labour and human existence connects under a different set of goals that intend for technology to return to being extensions of creativity and artistic expression, then what will only ever produced is the liberating alternative.
Consider Bourdieu’s thoughts on popular culture as correlative to his ‘cultural communism’ idea. He addresses the question of whether popular culture exists, particularly if dominant classes are passive to strategies of distinction. That which in reality resembles what people in discourse explicate as popular culture and thus popularized artistic products through linguistic means, is questionable. Popular culture is common culture. Popular culture serves the dominant classes under the lens of cultural communistic thinking. Commonality in culture only reifies commonality. For Bourdieu, popular culture is incongruent with art. Popular culture is produced for commonality and common access. The relationship between the artist and that which he or she produces becomes problematic. Art and cultural capital is created. ‘Creation’ for Bourdieu is the convergence of that which makes one an artist and that which makes possible the division of labour for cultural production (1993).
The labour through which the artist makes his work and, inseparably from this, makes himself as an artist…can be described as the dialectical relationship between his ‘post’…and [that] which more or less predisposes him to occupy that post or…more or less completely to transform it. (1993).
This in essence defines the artist’s ‘post’ as determined by the social conditions of his or her creative production, and as being subject to the social demands and constraints inscribed in the position he or she occupies in production (1993).
To bring connectivity to the concept of Bourdieu’s cultural communism and Marcuse’s rationality is possible. For Marcuse, art and culture is unilateral in concept; a realm of one-dimensional thought systemically regulated by the purveyors of knowledge and mass information (Marcuse, 1964).
Reason, in its application to society, has thus far been opposed to art, while art [is] granted the privilege of being rather irrational – not subject to scientific, technological, and operational Reason. The rationality of domination has separated the Reason of science and the Reason of art into the universe of domination (1964).
Therein lies the tragedy of rationalization when thinking about the artist and artistic production. Reason converges with the function of art, as technology is itself “the instrumentality of pacification” (1964). The artist possesses insight, vision, creative wisdom, love, desire, sensuality, expressive ethos, access to technology, potential access to the public and the social, and a need to create art. All of these guide the artist to conceive and create the vision of technology and thus the construction of the machinery of art and expression. In this thinking, the essential relationship between technology and art, and the conceptual practices of the two points to an explicit “rationality of art” (1964).
It seems in Marcuse’s book, art creates a universe of thought of which he posits it against the existing hegemonic principles of art and technology. That art, as convergent and connected to human existence, is also rationalized and alienated in a technical universe. In contrast to a technical universe, the artistic universe is one of illusion and resembles “a reality which exists as the threat and promise of the established one” (1964). As Bourdieu intends for the artist to distinguish himself or herself from the commonality of the social and from what is culturally constructed as artistic, he also calls for sociology to shift from measuring and giving account of cultural consumption to measuring and examining cultural production. Sociology accepts this distinction, but not favours it when empirically analysing what art means to the social in regards to cultural communism. Sociology and it’s bedfellow, statistics, “belittle and crushes, flattens and trivializes artistic creation: that is sets the great and the small on the same footing, at all events fails to grasp what makes the genius of the greatest artists” (Bourdieu, 1993). Malraux philosophically implied that art imitates art. Sociology only then imitates and thus reifies it’s own limits as sociology. Sociology of art fails tragically to account for what is important in art, that artistic creation cannot be nor should it be explained wholly in conditions and language of demand. Art is not merely an aesthetic, just as artists in the social are not simply fragments in the social they wish to express about. Artists, as sociologists are also subjective texts, struggling to strategize their own critical distinction from the commonality of postmodern human reality (1993). Yet, in reality when measuring the meaning of art in the social, Bourdieu posits an important explanation of the nature of the artist’s identity within the social.
In the encounter between a work of art and the consumer, there is an absent third party, the person who produced the work, who has made something to his taste through his capacity to transform his taste into an object, to transform it from a state of mind, or rather, a state of body, into something visible corresponding to his taste. The artist is the professional practitioner of the transformation of the implicit into the explicit, the objectification that transforms taste into an object, who realizes the potential, in other words a practical sense of beauty that can know itself only be realizing itself (1993).
Yet for Bourdieu, it is seemingly impossible for sociology to separate this conceptual utopian image of the artist with that objectification he or she is ascribed to reify. For art cannot ever realize itself. Art is not subjective in cultural communism. Art is fashioned to be common. Only through strategies of distinction can the rationality of art be dismissed or halted, and thus art as an institutional construct is therefore only ever objectified.
In comparison, for Marcuse the artist must negotiate his or her identity with the Hegelian notion that the “technological rationality of art seems to be characterized by an aesthetic ‘reduction’” (Marcuse, 1964). Marcuse aligns the rationality of the artist to the reduction of art to an object, or a “totality of objects” as he calls it, to a state in which,
The object [art] takes on the form and quality of freedom. Such transformation is reduction because the contingent situation suffers requirements which are external, and which stand in the way of its free realization…thus, the artistic transformation violates the natural object, but the violated is itself oppressive; thus the aesthetic transformation is liberation (1964).
This reduction of the aesthetic pacifies the artist into believing he or she truly engages in real artistic expression and creativity. However this reduction signifies their oppression of which the artist as an extension of technocapitalism and technology is blind to. The developing one-dimensional society changes the association between rational and irrational thought. In lieu of what Marcuse claims is the insanity of rationality, that which is rational becomes the place on which irrationality exists. As for the artist, the ideas that promote love, creation, expression, and desire – the art of life, is reduced to the irrational. This Hegelian reduction of the aesthetic makes the imagination of the artist an instrument of progress (1964). Through rationalization in a one-dimensional society, like all other established societies, art as methodologically progressive is subject to social and corporate abuse. The power of imagination when used for the productive purposes and function of art far exceeds any political voice that may stand up to this form of oppression. For thinking of technology on the basis of imagination, technological advancement accompanies progressive rationalization, or even more so, the realization of the imaginary (1964).
Art has not been impervious to the process of reification. All art reifies all other art in a one-dimensional, socially common society. All art reifies its own existence but only as much to a reduction of something less than itself. The tragedy of reification is that it simply portrays art, as the very essence of human existence, love, and desire as confined to one-dimensional thought. For both Marcuse and Bourdieu, to liberate the imagination from those institutions that pacify it is a political activity. The dialectical representation of art in sociology pronounces it’s own hopelessness. This is what makes the conflict productive. This is why tension fuels the artist for both Marcuse and Bourdieu. The artist’s greatest struggle is to deal with the social fact that freedom of thought, the freedom of creativity, and the freedom of expression in the symbolic sense can only be free in the administered material world. Without the material forces that shape the drive for resources and production, even the most profound artistic awareness and consciousness in the social will remain incapable and immobile.
References:
Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in Question. (R. Nice, Trans.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
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