Society as a Work of Art (interview question #19)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
Your defence of aesthetic education is coherent, but you never suggest that societal transformation can be achieved solely at the personal or cultural level. In your engagement with Herbert Marcuse, you speak of an ‘aesthetics of revolt’. What did Marcuse have to offer us in terms of understanding the political relevance of art and aesthetics? What did he mean when he spoke of ‘Society as a Work of Art’?
One of the dangers of aesthetic philosophy is that it can drift into quietism, individualism, or cultural idealism – as though changing consciousness alone were sufficient to transform society. I have tried very consciously to avoid that mistake. Aesthetic transformation and structural transformation must occur together. That is one reason Herbert Marcuse became such an important figure for me. He understood more clearly than almost anyone that aesthetics is political precisely because domination penetrates consciousness, desire, imagination, and everyday life itself.
Marcuse begins from the insight that advanced industrial capitalism is not sustained merely through force or economic necessity. It also reproduces itself by shaping subjectivity. Consumer societies manufacture desires, integrate dissent into spectacle and consumption, and train people to identify freedom with participation in systems of production and consumption that actually diminish human flourishing. This creates what Marcuse famously called the ‘one-dimensional’ society – a civilisation in which imagination and critical consciousness become flattened.
What fascinated Marcuse was that art retains the capacity to negate the existing order. Great works of art reveal possibilities of experience and modes of being that exceed the dominant reality principle. Art preserves the memory and anticipation of freedom. It discloses what life could be like beyond alienation, domination, and instrumental rationality.
This is why Marcuse speaks of the ‘Great Refusal’. Authentic art refuses to reconcile itself fully with the existing social order. Even (or especially) when not overtly political, art can become politically significant by preserving experiences of beauty, sensuality, play, reconciliation, and freedom that capitalist society systematically represses or commodifies. I found this very illuminating because it helped me connect aesthetics to ecological and civilisational critique. Consumer capitalism does not merely exploit ecosystems externally; it colonises the imagination internally. It narrows the horizon of possible futures. Many people literally struggle to imagine a meaningful life beyond consumer affluence and economic growth. That imaginative captivity is one of the greatest obstacles to ecological civilisation.
Marcuse helps us understand, therefore, why aesthetics matters as a political force. Art can rupture the seeming inevitability of the present. It can awaken what he called the ‘new sensibility’ – a transformed mode of perception and desire no longer organised around domination, accumulation, and repression. In my own terms, aesthetic experience can help cultivate the transition from homo economicus to homo aestheticus.
And this is where the idea of an ‘aesthetics of revolt’ emerges. Revolt is not only political in the narrow institutional sense; it is existential and aesthetic as well. It involves refusing the degraded forms of life imposed by industrial consumer civilisation and creating alternative forms of living grounded in beauty, sufficiency, creativity, solidarity, and ecological belonging.
Importantly, however, Marcuse was not advocating art as propaganda. He was very wary of reducing art to direct political messaging because that collapses art back into instrumentality. Art’s radical potential lies largely in its autonomy – its ability to disclose experiences and possibilities irreducible to the logic of the market or the state. A poem, a piece of music, or a beautiful way of life can become politically subversive precisely because it reveals dimensions of human flourishing excluded by the dominant system.
Now, when Marcuse speaks of ‘Society as a Work of Art’, he is extending this aesthetic principle or metaphor beyond individual artworks toward civilisation itself. He imagines a form of society in which the aesthetic dimensions of existence – beauty, play, creativity, sensuous fulfillment, harmony with nature, meaningful labour – become organising principles of social life rather than marginal luxuries. I sympathise with this view very much. In SMPLCTY, I maintain that ecological civilisation must become aesthetic at its foundations. By this I do not mean superficial beautification or lifestyle consumerism. I mean restructuring society so that work, production, technology, architecture, education, agriculture, politics, and community life are organised around the cultivation of meaningful and beautiful forms of existence.
Marcuse understood that capitalism treats both nature and human beings instrumentally – as resources to be exploited for productivity and growth. ‘Society as a Work of Art’ points toward another civilisational logic entirely. Instead of maximising production and consumption, society would seek to maximise opportunities for flourishing, creativity, play, contemplation, and sensuous experience while minimising domination and ecological destruction. This aligns very closely with my conception of SMPLCTY. I describe ecological civilisation as a society where life itself increasingly becomes an aesthetic project. Human beings would live more simply in material terms while cultivating immense richness in culture, art, community, philosophy, ritual, music, craft, and ecological participation. As we’ve discussed, the ‘poet-farmer’ becomes the archetype for this transformed form of subjectivity.
Marcuse also helped me see that the ecological crisis is not only a problem of excessive consumption but of distorted desire. Industrial civilisation channels immense human energies toward accumulation, competition, status, and domination. But if those same energies were redirected aesthetically – toward art, beauty, play, contemplation, and creative participation – then humanity could potentially flourish with vastly reduced material and energetic throughput. This is one reason I say that art and aesthetic experience may be among the best ways of ‘living more with less’.
There is also a utopian dimension here that I think is crucial. Marcuse insisted that without utopian imagination, politics becomes purely administrative – trapped within the assumptions of the existing order. Art preserves the image of reconciliation even when reality falls tragically short of it. Of course, neither Marcuse nor I believe a perfect society is achievable. Tragedy, conflict, suffering, and finitude remain part of the human condition. But SMPLCTY offers itself as an orienting vision – a way of imagining civilisation not as an engine of endless growth and domination, but as a collective experiment in creating more beautiful, free, and ecologically integrated forms of life.
I admit that ‘imagineers’ like me are easily dismissed as utopian dreamers or escapists who lack a sense of political reality. But just as vision without politics is naïve, politics without vision is dangerous. We must dream before we shape our politics, or else we will never awaken from the existing nightmare of pragmatism without principle. In any case, utopian thinkers should never expect anyone to accept their dreams. The purpose of presenting a utopian vision like SMPLCTY is to provoke people to dream for themselves.
Ultimately, what Marcuse teaches us is that aesthetics is not politically irrelevant because it concerns beauty and pleasure. Quite the opposite. The struggle over beauty, desire, imagination, and sensibility is one of the deepest political struggles of all, because it concerns the question of what human beings might yet become.
