Paths of Reconciliation: Nature and the Aesthetic Dimension within Herbert Marcuse’s Theorization of Technology

Ferreira de Souza, Juliano
(2021) International Herbert Marcuse Society (IHMS), 9th Biennial Conference “Alternative Futures: Marcuse’s Dialectic of Technology” — Location: State University of Arizona (7.October.2021)

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The concept of “technological rationality,” that appeared in Marcuse’s critical project in the 1940s, established a speculative path about the modes of subjectivation within the new productive structures of the 20th century. It showed how the industrial apparatus of capitalist society imposes a standardization and a common framework within the contemporary experience of subjectivation (Marcuse 1941:429). This fundamental diagnosis of Marcuse’s theorization of technological rationality was expanded in the 1950s through the encounter with psychoanalysis, as well as with Marcuse’s opening to the reflection of an aesthetic dimension (Raulet 1992). My contribution aims to explore the ways in which aesthetics underlies a new project of technology — gaya scienza — whose goal is (following the German tradition of the idea of reconciliation) a pacification with nature (Feenberg 2001). First, I will take as a starting point the centrality of the idea of a liberation of nature, pointed out by Marcuse in his reading of Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ (Marcuse 1932) and reworked in ‘Counterrevolution and Revolt’ (Marcuse 1973; Vogel 1996). In a second moment, after having shown the importance of the concept of nature in Marcuse, I will try to analyze the specificity of the reconsideration of authors such as Kant and Schiller within Marcuse’s argument for an aesthetical turn, especially in ‘Eros and Civilization’ (1955) and ‘An Essay on Liberation’ (1969) (see Lukes 1985; Kangussu 2008). I will try to show that Marcuse’s advocacy for a interplay between the transcendental faculties and to beautiful in nature as a symbolic element of morality are one of the ways that point to an opening in the face of nature’s virtuality, and that are, for Marcuse, agents of a pacified technological coproduction. Finally, in a third moment, and in light of the first two parts, I will try to show the specificities of the productive configuration resulting from the encounter between aesthetics and technology. This exercise will aim to elaborate a reflection on the ways in which the Marcusean theory of technology can contribute to contemporary debates in the fields of environmental ethics and ecological politics (Biro 2005:160ff; Reitz 2018).
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Ferreira de Souza, J. (2021). Paths of Reconciliation: Nature and the Aesthetic Dimension within Herbert Marcuse’s Theorization of Technology. International Herbert Marcuse Society (IHMS), 9th Biennial Conference “Alternative Futures: Marcuse’s Dialectic of Technology”, State University of Arizona. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/268474