The Catastrophe of Culture: Art,Critique,and Social Transformation

There is a growing perception that critical theory is no longer critical enough, has become domesticated, or has somehow lost the biting actuality that it once possessed. Proposals for a renewal of this tradition have argued for a critique of its academicized path and a rehabilitation of its political dimension (Thompson, 2016), for a revival of the link between philosophy and social research (Delanty, 2020), or for a focus on bodily activities and relationships to the world that connects with lines of thought developed by the Romantics (Rosa, 2019 [2016]; Rosa et al., 2021, p. 1). While admitting the validity and necessity of these projects, in this article, I maintain that critical theory is not critical because it has ceased to put culture at the center of critique, forgetting the significance of the promise of art for a form of critique that is relevant not just for cultural analysis and interpretation but more widely for the project of critical theory as a whole. Today, this form of cultural critique needs to be rethought because the separation between art and life that was characteristic of modernity no longer exists or has been reconfigured beyond recognition, a type of metamorphosis that is itself also relevant for the reconstructive intention of this article.

Cultural sociology has sought to investigate this transformation by positing the growing significance of a new type of aesthetic capitalism or enrichment economy, focusing on the more prominent role of culture as a prime mover of economic processes. However, it has failed to reflect on the consequences of the exhaustion of modernism, and more generally of the dissolution of the radical disjunction between culture and the socioeconomic structure, already emphasized by Daniel Bell (1978 [1976]). It is precisely this aspect that most profoundly affects sociological conceptualizations of the cultural field. The exhaustion of modernism marks the end of the autonomy that had characterized the culture of modernity, its opposition to the bourgeois social structure, which gave art its creative tension. Our sociological tools are still based on the assumption of such autonomy, whether in the postulates of a post-Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness or in critical theory approaches to art. In this context, it is necessary to consider not just the commodification of art or the aestheticization of the economy, but also to fundamentally reexamine the politics of art.

The notion of the catastrophe of culture contains a double meaning (that to some readers might only become fully apparent toward this article's end) that pushes for a dialectical rethinking of this dimension, a reminder of the forgotten promise of art at a time when it has been seemingly absorbed by an all-powerful capitalism. In this perfected technological age, the humblest cultural products (or perhaps the most daring) retain a connection with our ordinary lived experience and with a history of human transformation that can be instantly regained. That is and remains their most immediate appeal. In what follows, I will employ the tools of critical theory, mainly drawing from the works of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, to specify the significance of an aesthetic dimension for an analysis of the present. The aim is not a systematic overview of these authors and their thought, but rather a selective use in order to actualize their insights toward a renewal of cultural sociology in light of a critical tradition which seems to have been forgotten in the name of sociological critique.

Recovering the Promise of Art

Sociological perspectives that have sought to reveal the interest in disinterestedness (Bourdieu, 1986 [1979], 1995 [1992]) or the usefulness of useless things (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020 [2017]) lose sight of what Adorno approached in terms of art's enigmaticalness, its fundamental incomprehensibility, which is related to the fact that it asserts a reality that does not exist in an imaginary world where instrumental rationality is denied. For Adorno (1997 [1970], p. 119), “As a thing that negates the world of things, every artwork is a priori helpless when it is called to legitimate itself to this world.” This is why all artworks, even the most serious or significant, have a ridiculous or clownish element in them, as part of their condemnation of empirical rationality. It is history—a history of human domination and control over nature and other humans—which turns artworks into enigmas that “say something and in the same breath conceal it” (Adorno, 1997, p. 120).

Even though Adorno tends to emphasize the enigmaticalness of great works, this “remainder” is not associated with an intellectual understanding or decoding of the work's internal elements; in fact, “this empty questioning gaze” that is common to all genuine works, high and low, tends to become more opaque the more such an understanding grows. The artwork's helpless muteness before the question “What's it for?” is not essentially dissimilar from the gaze of the animal that silently looks at us (Derrida, 2008 [2006]; “it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection” (Adorno, 1997, p. 121). As Adorno maintains, only art's form can be deciphered; its enigma cannot be solved. However, a critical sociology that does not attend to this demand, that reduces critique either to an immanent analysis of meaning or to the social uses of art, occluding the work's questioning gaze, cannot but fail to contemplate art's ever broken promise of happiness, a promise which emerges from art's social content.

For Adorno (1997, p. 126), “Art becomes an enigma because it appears to have solved what is enigmatical in existence, while the enigma in the merely existing is forgotten as a result of its own overwhelming ossification.” In One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 2002 [1964], pp. 59–60), Marcuse provides a detailed account of this ossification, specifying the reasons for the paralysis of criticism in a society where technical progress and growing productivity seemingly unite previously antagonistic social classes, and no agents of social change are still discernible. In this totalitarian technological order that is no longer just confined to the factory but claims the entire individual, a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails” that makes all counteraction and protest seem irrational (Marcuse, 2002, p. 3). For Marcuse, “the very idea of qualitative change recedes before the realistic notions of a non-explosive evolution” (2002, p. xliii), an idea more recently popularized by Mark Fisher's (2009) notion of capitalist realism. More generally, a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior emerges in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension (2002, p. 14). In this context, the forgotten enigma refers to the irrationality of advanced industrial society as a whole, which is hidden under its overwhelming efficiency and increased standards of living:

Its productivity is destructive of the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by the constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence—individual, national, and international. (Marcuse, 2002, p. xl).

Marcuse elaborates at length on the characteristics of science as one-dimensional thought, which limits itself to what exists through a linguistic reduction to operational and behavioral concepts, rendering all other concepts illusory or meaningless, as well as on a corresponding integration in the realm of culture, which liquidates its oppositional and transcending element, a process which he addresses as a form of repressive desublimation. In his view,

The achievements and the failures of this society invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development. What is happening now is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this culture by the reality. The reality surpasses its culture. Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. (Marcuse, 2002, pp. 59–60)

Significantly, the “liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values,’ but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 74). Somewhat cryptically, Marcuse affirms, in this respect: “Exchange value, not truth value counts” (2002, p. 61).

But what is the truth value of art, and how is it connected with its elided use value? Here I must proceed against Marcuse himself, who at the time of writing this book believed that the truth of works (their subversive force) had been invalidated by the apparent progress of a one-dimensional society which rendered them superfluous. It is easy to lose sight of the use value of artworks in a society that is exclusively driven by exchange value. However, it is only in the use value of works, which in their lack of instrumentality evoke childlike play, that a social truth can be discerned that no exchange value can fully conquer or erase. The excess of a language that demands a long, painstaking process of learning and training merely for the ability to provisionally go on can be easily discerned in class concerts at music schools, where children of different ages and musical levels perform together. The uncertain success of a work of art, which is worth nothing beyond its own intrinsic accomplishment, is not essentially different.

For an adequate theorization of this aspect, it is necessary to recall the relationship between truth content and the enigmatic character of artworks: “The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content” (Adorno, 1997, pp. 127–128). Artworks cannot by themselves achieve what is objectively sought in them; they are eloquent and, at the same time, hopelessly mute without interpretation. This is the task of sociological, as well as philosophical, critique. ¹ The need for critique thus emerges not from their thorough commodification or from the privileges which they afford in an unequal society, but from their own truth content. Because, as Adorno reminds us, “only failed works are untrue” (1997, p. 130).

Beyond High and Low: Failure of the Avant-Garde?

Sociological critique has also largely failed to adequately address the significance of the blurring of the structural distinction between high and low that characterized the culture of modernity. Whether as a result of the liquidation of high culture as a by-product of the conquest of nature (Marcuse, 2002, p. 74) or of its integration as a basic form of capitalist enrichment (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020), the consequences of the end of what was once conceived as the Great Divide have escaped proper theorization. Yet it is only through this very division that the contradictory position of culture in capitalist society became intelligible, as expressed in the dynamics of autonomy and commodification.

The best sociological accounts conceived both spheres relationally, as in Horkheimer and Adorno's characterization of the culture industry as the social bad conscience of art:

The purity of bourgeois art, hypostatized as a realm of freedom contrasting to material praxis, was bought from the outset with the exclusion of the lower class; and art keeps faith with the cause of that class, the true universal, precisely by freeing itself from the purposes of the false. Serious art has denied itself to those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness and who must be glad to use the time not spent at the production line in being simply carried along. Light art has accompanied autonomous art as its shadow. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter could not apprehend because of its social premises gives the former an appearance of objective justification. The split between them is itself the truth… (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1947], pp. 107–108)

In Bourdieu's more structuralist approach, the field of cultural production was related to the historical emergence of an autonomous space from the position of proponents of l’art pour l’art such as Baudelaire and Flaubert, opposed to both bourgeois art and the social realism of a new generation of middle- and working-class writers. The autonomy conquered by the cult of disinterestedness—“a prodigious reversal, which turns poverty into rejected riches, hence spiritual riches” (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 28)—was the origin of a dualist structure defined by the central opposition between artistic consecration (the autonomous principle of hierarchization) and commercial success (the heteronomous principle). It was precisely the need to unravel the logics of the literary and artistic world as an “anti-economy” or “upside-down economic world” that moved Bourdieu to reveal “the interest in disinterestedness” through sociological critique. Howard Becker is dismissive of Bourdieu's metaphorical adoption of the language of physics to refer to a field of forces where space is limited, and power struggles determine the outcomes of zero-sum games, pointing to the better descriptive value of his own notion of world, where different people do things together (Becker & Pessin, 2008). Yet this view omits Bourdieu's great efforts to also specify what is involved in the production of a collectively shared universe of belief, the social practices underpinning a disavowal of the economy that make possible not only the accumulation of symbolic capital, but also the very idea of the work of art as the creation of an uncreated creator.

Today, the incompatibility between art and money, which once defined the very structure of the field of cultural production, is no longer meaningful. This is best discernible in the artistic field, characterized by an unprecedented cosiness with corporate business that has made of a few very successful figures celebrities while relegating the great majority to the status of failed artists who subsist at the very margins of the art world, an obscure mass that has been differently approached through the notions of dark matter (Sholette, 2011) or the exform (Bourriaud, 2016 [2015]). The social alchemy that once turned artists into bearers of symbolic capital, no matter how destitute they might be in economic terms, now catapults them into the monstrously growing realm of waste. Boltanski and Esquerre's account of the enrichment economy, which lumps together the luxury industry and the arts, is better attuned to this transformed social reality, which can no longer be comprehended following Bourdieu's approach. But whereas it might be more adequately describing the growing significance of culture and narrative in the creation of wealth, it leaves the critical powers of cultural products (and producers) untouched. This is in keeping with Boltanski's avowed pragmatic turn, where critique is disseminated throughout, and perhaps in this form finally dissolved. ²

At this point, it is useful to revisit Peter Bürger's (1984 [1974]) Theory of the Avant-Garde, where a sociologically alert view of art's structural transformation from within is expounded. For Bürger, it is precisely the aestheticist movement of l’art pour l’art through which art is emptied of social and political content and reaches a state of self-reflection that is the precondition of the avant-garde. In other words, the avant-garde's attack on the status of art in bourgeois society is only made possible by the full achievement of artistic autonomy:

As long as art interprets reality or provides satisfaction of residual needs only in the imagination, it is, though detached from the praxis of life, still related to it. It is only in Aestheticism that the tie to society still existent up to this moment is severed. The break with society (it is the society of Imperialism) constitutes the center of the works of Aestheticism. Here lies the reason for Adorno's repeated attempts to vindicate it. The intention of the avant-gardiste may be defined as the attempt to direct towards the practical the aesthetic experience (which rebels against the praxis of life) that Aestheticism developed. What most strongly conflicts with the means-ends rationality of bourgeois society is to become life's organizing principle. (1984 [1974], pp. 33–34)

The reference to Adorno is significant because it is an allusion to his notion of the truth content of art, preserved in the enigmaticalness of its most autonomous works, those that are apparently furthest removed from a social function but retain (indeed, become a sanctuary for) a true experience for which there is no place in capitalist society. ³ It is precisely this experience that the avant-garde wants to bring back to life, reintegrating art into the praxis of life, abolishing aesthetic autonomy, and meaningfully changing reality at the same time.

In its artistic practice, the avant-garde negated not only the idea of individual creation (such as in Duchamp's act of signing mass-produced objects), but also the very notion of organic work of art. Avant-garde works do not aim to recreate a living totality but posit a contradictory relationship of heterogeneous elements, turning their materials into fragments of reality which are then put together through montage techniques; they openly reveal their artificiality, refusing to adopt the semblance of a work of nature and calling attention to their principle of construction, rather than to the meaning of the work as a whole. Such withdrawal of meaning, it is hoped, will shock and direct recipients to change their conduct in ordinary life.

Duchamp's urinal, signed by R. Mutt, did not destroy art as an institution but was rather incorporated into the museum. This signals, for Bürger, the failure of the historic avant-garde movements, which he situates mainly between 1910 and the Second World War. The neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s, even if they proclaimed the same goals, could no longer be taken seriously after the aim of reintegrating art into the praxis of life had been pre-empted by the institutional absorption of avant-garde works on different terms. Rather, the turning of revolutionary acts into artistic acts proved the power of art institutions to determine the social effects of individual works, of reducing even the most politically minded gestures to autonomous forms with no real effects. The avant-garde thus failed in its anti-artistic intention to revolutionize life but, as Burger maintains, it revolutionized art by transforming the work's relation to reality:

Although the total return of art to the praxis of life may have failed, the work of art entered into a new relation to reality. Not only does reality in its concrete variety penetrate the work of art but the work no longer seals itself off from it. It must be remembered, however, that it is art as an institution that determines the measure of political effect avant-garde works can have, and that art in bourgeois society continues to be a realm that is distinct from the praxis of life. (1984 [1974], pp. 91–92)

Nevertheless, our present perspective makes it possible to reverse Bürger's dictum. Today, the endlessly empty repetition of the avant-garde's once meaningful intent to overcome the separation of art from life has successfully transformed our everyday reality, but this new form of artistic or aesthetic capitalism (Bohme, 2017 [2016]; Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2015 [2013]; Murphy & de la Fuente, 2014; Reckwitz, 2017 [2012]) has in turn made unintelligible the political aim of the avant-garde.

Understanding Autonomy: The Politics of Art

The present unintelligibility of the politics of art is not only related to the changes brought about by a new spirit of capitalism which absorbs and responds to, and thereby dismantles, a so-called artistic critique (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005 [1999]), but also to the denial of art's critical and reality-transcending logic. The once profound significance of the divide between high and low culture facilitated a persistent sociological misunderstanding or reduction of the Kantian notion of disinterestedness to a social game that serves to disguise the artist's symbolic gains in an inverted economic world or to present legitimate taste as a gift of nature. Bourdieu's analysis of the cult of disinterestedness in terms of a prodigious reversal has already been briefly referred to above. Disinterestedness is also the principle that he seeks to unmask in his social critique of the judgement of taste, revealing taste as a marker of class, a hierarchy of taste that is the product of social origin, upbringing, and education. Bourdieu approaches legitimate taste with reference to an aesthetic disposition, defined as

the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form rather than function not only the works designated for such an apprehension, i.e., legitimate works of art, but everything in the world, including cultural objects which are not yet consecrated… and natural objects. (Bourdieu, 1986 [1979], p. 3)

A different and productive line of thought based on Simmel's neo-Kantian sociological aesthetics has been explored in connection with processes of aestheticization of reality or “everyday aesthetics” (de la Fuente, 2000, 2007). In this approach, it is social life itself that is seen to obey aesthetic principles, as in Simmel's view of pure sociability, which becomes an autonomous form beyond practical concerns. This not only facilitates the renewal of social bonds, but also the transcendence of individuality and subjectivism toward forms of trans-individuality or universality. Here, the relationship between form and function is posited not in terms of an antithesis but rather as complementary by showing “how apparently purely aesthetic interests are called forth by materialistic purposes, and how, on the other hand, aesthetic motives affect forms which seem to obey only functional purposes” (Simmel, 2020 [1896], p. 99). As Simmel maintains, “we sense that the utility of objects for the preservation and enhancement of the species also forms the starting point of their aesthetic value,” even if this immediate utility has been cleared away and forgotten, thus becoming “pure form” (2020 [1896], p. 103). In this approach, beauty appears as a distillation or idealization of utility, as in the realm of art, which “brings us closer to reality” while introducing “abstractions from the immediacy of material things” (2020 [1896], p. 104). Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Simmel's discussion of the sociology of the meal (1997 [1910]), where the most primitive and material individual interest is reconfigured in more aesthetic, stylized and supra-individually regulated forms. Simmel approaches the differences between lower-class eating culture, more materially centered on food, and the rigid social regulations of educated circles in terms of the elevation of individualism into a higher formal common ground which is also an aesthetic reconciliation with the physical fact of eating, an element which is lost in Bourdieu's programmatic opposition between form and substance in food tastes, where form is seen as “a way of denying the meaning and primary function of consumption” (Bourdieu, 1986 [1979], p. 196).

Nevertheless, the need remains for a reassessment of the logic of disinterestedness in the realm of art. At a time when aesthetic autonomy is threatened in new and unprecedented ways so that it becomes more difficult to posit it as an exteriority to an overwhelming market principle, it is urgent to reexamine its meaning by insisting on an understanding of art's social function as not residing anywhere else than in art itself. This is precisely Marcuse's point in The Aesthetic Dimension:

I argue that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autonomous vis a vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience. (1978 [1977], p. ix)

If one-dimensional society, in Marcuse's earlier account, seemed to have surpassed the literary imagination, making its creations obsolete in a new social reality that far exceeded them, here the aesthetic dimension is seen to express a social truth that both indicts and transcends this oppressive reality. It is important to insist that, as Marcuse maintains, thought is more easily amenable than art to serve the demands of a one-dimensional society because it is already internally driven by the same logic of domination. This is why he dedicated a whole part of his book to critique one-dimensional thought, which both underlies its advanced techniques of manipulation and control and, at the same time, closes itself off to the possibility of generating ideas of a qualitatively different society outside this rationality, which are deemed unscientific and meaningless. This is a science defined by the quantification of nature, which separates reality from all inherent ends and final causes, so that the subject cannot play its scientific role as an ethical, aesthetic, or political agent (Marcuse, 2002, p. 150). By contrast, the disinterestedness of art assumes in Marcuse's later book a most direct connection to the idea of liberation, a theme which was already prefigured and made explicit by Kant's contemporary, Friedrich Schiller, in his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (2016 [1795]). As he argued in the second letter, the needs and tastes of the century do not favor art but utility, which has become the great idol of the age, and “the borders of art shrink as science extends its bounds.” However, what reveals truth to our understanding conceals it from our feeling, and only the aesthetic path can provide a solution to the most pressing practical political problems, “because it is by way of beauty that one approaches liberty” (Schiller, 2016).

For Marcuse, it is precisely the autonomy of aesthetic form that can offer a way out of the rationally totalitarian society, a universe where technology “provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom of man and demonstrates the ‘technical’ impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one's own life” (2002 [1964], p. 162). In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse already pointed out:

There are many more or less satisfactory “technical” definitions of beauty in aesthetics, but there seems to be only one which preserves the experiential content of beauty and which is therefore the least exact definition—beauty as a “promesse de bonheur.” It captures the reference to a condition of men and things, and to a relation between men and things which occur momentarily while vanishing, which appear in as many different forms as there are individuals and which, in vanishing, manifest what can be. (2002 [1964], p. 215)

But this socially significant aspect of beauty is only fully developed in Marcuse's later book, The Aesthetic Dimension:

the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image (schöner Schein) of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality. (1978 [1977], p. 6)

Even if modern art has broken with traditional aesthetics by embracing and integrating ugliness (a step which is not followed by the infinite empty aestheticizing iterations that proliferate today), the law of form can be more generally related to art's purposiveness without a purpose as a concrete image of liberation which puts an end to human suffering, a disinterestedness that persists in art but is alien to science, including the science of sociology, and this is perhaps the reason for the latter's systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life.

Significantly, form is here not opposed to function but rather essentially connected to it, to the political function of art, which is related to its truth content. This is why Marcuse argues that “every authentic work of art would be revolutionary” (1978 [1977], p. xi), a view that recalls Benjamin's somewhat surprising statement that “a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality” (1999 [1934], p. 769). The next section will suggest that the concept of metamorphosis, rather than that of revolution, can better express the political potential of art in a post-revolutionary age. Before, it is necessary to better specify the relationship between autonomy and aesthetic form, which Marcuse tentatively defines as “the result of the transformation of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc.” (1978 [1977], p. 8). By contrast, form without matter, or technique without content, are instances of illusory empty autonomy, which robs art of its own concreteness, of its connection to that which is (1978 [1977], p. 40). ⁴ Thus, form and content are not two separate or opposed realities but are rather defined by an artistic effort of articulation, an effort that connects art with history, with transmitted cultural material, thus limiting aesthetic autonomy. This is why it might be more appropriate to refer to artistic logic rather than to aesthetic form (Aguilera, 2002), an observation that is related to an additional significant articulation of philosophical reflection with accomplished artistic work in both Adorno's musical philosophy and in Aguilera's own photographical philosophy (Aguilera, 2021), a dimension that is absent from Marcuse's strictly philosophical project.

As Marcuse observes, by breaking away from the monopoly of established reality to define what is real, art “is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity,” an achievement which “presupposes a degree of autonomy which withdraws art from the mystifying power of the given and frees it for the expression of its own truth” (1978 [1977], p. 9). And the objective limits to this autonomy, the class character of art, do not invalidate either its aesthetic quality or its truth. This is why it is possible to still refer to the political potential of art in the context of an advanced capitalism that has revealed real possibilities of liberation which are qualitatively different from previous periods, a potential concerning the new radical possibilities of freedom unleashed by technical progress which nevertheless remain unrealized:

This qualitative difference appears today in the protest against the definition of life as labor, in the struggle against the entire capitalist and state-socialist organization of work (the assembly line, Taylor system, hierarchy), in the struggle to end patriarchy, to reconstruct the destroyed life environment, and to develop and nurture a new morality and a new sensibility. (1978 [1977], p. 28)

Because it is precisely an ignored and despised artistic logic that can trigger the transformation of our feelings, needs, and values that is needed for the type of qualitative change that can turn us away from the perfection of waste in advanced capitalist society.

From Revolution to Metamorphosis

Even though Marcuse uses the language of revolution to describe the political potential of the aesthetic dimension, he clearly detects the significance of a notion of change that is different in nature from all previous revolutions. At the very end of The Aesthetic Dimension, he observes: “If the remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolutions” (1978 [1977], p. 73). I will approach this type of qualitative change through the concept of metamorphosis, seeking to offer, by this means, an actualization of Marcuse's thought that connects not only with recent sociological notions of metamorphosis but also with older, more heterodox accounts, as well as with critical theory's own calls for caution with historicist notions of progress, most clearly expressed by Benjamin and Adorno.

Metamorphosis has recently entered sociological discourse and is broadly employed to describe a complete transformation that renders our world unrecognizable in many ways, a notion which appears particularly useful in relation to the climate emergency. According to Ulrich Beck, metamorphosis “challenges our way of being in the world, thinking about the world, and imagining and doing politics” (2016, p. 20). Of particular interest in his account in relation to the otherwise different line of thought that I pursue in this article is the notion of emancipatory catastrophism, through which he alerts us to the potentially emancipating outcomes of a growing consciousness of constant and accumulating failures and impending catastrophe, from which a radically new solution might emerge that will drive humanity toward an as yet untried route. Metamorphosis has also featured prominently in Bruno Latour's approach to politics in the new climatic regime. Because of the impossibility of realizing the great modernization project in a finite Earth, he observes, “all forms of belonging are undergoing metamorphosis” (2018 [2017], p. 16). At the same time, what he calls the terrestrial emerges as a new political actor that reacts to human actions, implying a further sense of metamorphosis: “a metamorphosis of the very definition of matter, of the world, of the Earth” (2018 [2017], p. 61).

Beck and Latour have rightly emphasized the challenges that the metamorphosis of the world poses to contemporary politics. However, by not contemplating how metamorphosis has found a rich cultivating ground in the aesthetic dimension during millennia, the explanatory power of these sociological accounts has remained limited. It is my contention that, in order to respond to the challenges posed by metamorphosis to our political imagination, which require no less than the metamorphosis of politics, we need to turn to older, much more concrete notions of metamorphosis that are intrinsically connected to the literary imagination. Literary accounts remind us with fastidious insistence of metamorphosis’ most surprising feature: the relative ease with which human beings can transform themselves (or others) into anything; the essential fluidity of nature. More generally, the literary imagination offers a space where the transformative powers of humanity are preserved, particularly after the disenchantment brought about by modern science as an endeavor premised on an instrumental and im/partial view of its object of study. This important dimension is not lost to older heterodox approaches to metamorphosis such as those found in Goethe's study of The Metamorphosis of Plants (2009 [1790]) or in Elias Canetti's work on Crowds and Power (1981 [1960]). ⁵

Goethe dedicated his long life to both literary and scientific writing in equal measure, integrating a poetic and a scientific sensibility toward a comprehensive view of nature and the world. In The Metamorphosis of Plants, his purpose is to describe “the laws of metamorphosis by which nature produces one part through another, creating a great variety of forms through the modification of a single organ” (Goethe, 2009 [1790], pp. 5–6). His central proposition is that, despite their apparent diversity, all these forms are in fact metamorphoses of the leaf. Directing his attention to the plant as it develops from the seed, the first organs, the cotyledons, appear unformed and crude, gradually developing into more refined leaves and culminating in flowers and fruits. Metamorphosis is not just a process of refinement of form, but also of the juices or saps that make up the leaf, from coarse to purer liquids, as the plant “reaches the point ordained by nature” (Goethe, 2009 [1790], p. 22). For Goethe, the study of metamorphosis mobilizes “our power of imagination and understanding” (2009 [1790], p. 93), opening our eyes to the secrets of the multiplicity of nature, to the hidden interrelationships between things.

As Adolf Portmann has noted, Goethe “seeks to grasp what can be known of a spiritual world through a full experience of the sensory given” (1987, p. 137), employing a “gentle empiricism” of analogy (1987, pp. 140–141). Goethe's approach to metamorphosis underpins his mature literary investigation of human chemistry in Elective Affinities, which Max Weber later metamorphosed into both an explanation of the spirit of capitalism and a foundation of an interpretative sociology. But here I’d like to emphasize how Goethe's “gentle empiricism” contrasts with the positivism of the hard sciences not because of a lack of intervention, but because it is partially derived from a radically different type of intervention which is rather similar to that of a gardener, whose objective is to help nature develop to its full potential. In fact, the direct inspiration for his account of the metamorphosis of plants comes from both his Italian travels and his intense gardening practice in Weimar. A notion of culture as cultivation, which allows us to explore the profound interconnections between nature and society without their ontological confusion (as in approaches that rely on Latourian hybridism), has been proposed by Simmel and Raymond Williams. ⁶

Goethe's science as an expression of an intimate knowledge of nature and, in more than one sense, as a form of cultivation, contrasts with a specialized science that intentionally limits itself through method in order to produce knowledge as mastery over nature. A similar refusal to restrict himself to disciplinary conventions is present in the work of Canetti, an author who once wrote: “My whole life is nothing but a desperate attempt to overcome the division of labour” (1985 [1973], p. 36). Crowds and Power, which demanded from him a dedication of 30 years, is the best illustration of this ambition. If his intention was “grabbing this century by the throat,” he approached the task through an interpretative and classificatory excess that relied on available descriptions of distant and archaic crowds drawn from the most diverse anthropological and literary sources. Even Adorno considered Canetti's subjective approach “something of a scandal” because of its emphasis on representations and images of crowds, on the work of the imagination, rather than on real crowds and their experiences (Adorno & Canetti, 1996, p. 2).

Canetti dedicates one part of Crowds and Power to examining humanity's talent for transformation, which is considered one of its most mysterious and least well-understood gifts (1981 [1960], p. 337). He follows in this analysis the same scandalous approach that guides the book as a whole through a detailed description of a variety of accounts of metamorphosis, ranging from Bushmen folklore or Australian totemism to delirium tremens and paranoia. Transformation is, according to Canetti, the source of words and objects, the source of all human culture. It relates to the crowd's inherent multiplicity, but it also relates to power, which is first acquired by transformation but then sustained through its prohibition. Primitive societies such as the Aranda preserve an ordinary experience of transformation. In recurring to their myths to unearth their secrets, Canetti's intention is not essentially dissimilar to that of Émile Durkheim, who seeks in Australian totemism the secret of the religious energies of humanity. According to Canetti, modern society has become infinitely impoverished by the limits it imposes on transformation, and that is why a memory of metamorphosis has something important to contribute to the present. ⁷

If we seek a more explicit formulation of what exactly that is, we won’t be able to find it in Crowds and Power, where the crucial significance of metamorphosis remains somewhat mysterious. This is why I now turn to a speech Canetti delivered in 1976, entitled “The Writer's Profession,” to understand this dimension. There, Canetti defines the writer as “the keeper of metamorphosis” (1986 [1976], p. 160) in a twofold sense. First, in the sense of making “mankind's literary heritage, so rich in metamorphoses, his own” (1986 [1976], p. 160). Second, Canetti underscores the historical significance of such a task

In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing but peaks… while scorning and blurring the adjacent things, the many, the real things, which do not offer themselves for any help towards the peaks – in a world that prohibits metamorphosis more and more because it hinders the overall goal of production, which needlessly multiplies the means of its self-destruction… in such a world, which one might label the most blinded of all worlds, it seems of cardinal significance that there are people who, nonetheless, still keep practicing the gift of metamorphosis. (1986 [1976], pp. 161–162)

For Canetti, the gift of metamorphosis is, I repeat, the source of all human culture; the noninstrumental means through which human beings relate to the world. Its nature is obscured by a disciplinary knowledge that privileges reproduction over multiplication, which is inherently related to metamorphosis. Scientific and societal progress are premised on a mode of production that reduces nature (viewed principally in terms of resources) and human beings to commodities, subjecting them in equal measure to the logic of profit, which becomes the real subject of history. Metamorphosis contains a memory of a different relationship between humans and the world, whose “resurrection to our life are up to the poet, the Dichter” (1986 [1976], p. 161).

The cognitive and emancipatory power of art is a result of its relation to reality in terms of what can be approached as a process of transformative mimesis: “Mimesis is representation through estrangement, subversion of consciousness. Experience is intensified to the breaking point” (Marcuse, 1978 [1977], p. 45). In this way, art “communicates truths not communicable in any other language”; its cognitive power is an “image of suffering that has come to an end” (Marcuse, 2002 [1964], pp. 10, 59). Nevertheless, “The object of art's longing, the reality of what is not, is metamorphosed in art as remembrance” (Adorno, 1997, p. 132). Marcuse is essentially following Adorno when he approaches the sensuous force of the beautiful as a “memory of the happiness that once was, and that seeks its return” (1978 [1977], p. 68). This is a

recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not—and may not ever—come to pass. (Adorno, 1997, p. 135)

And it is precisely this aspect of metamorphosis that fills us with expectation for things still unknown to us, as Canetti also remarks (1986 [1976], p. 161).

Metamorphosis as recollection cannot itself bring about the true metamorphosis of the world, to which it points, understood as a catastrophic end to human civilization as we know it, a radical undoing of the rationality of domination so that a free human history can finally start. Because only a truly catastrophic change can bring about an end to a history of accumulating failures and impending catastrophe:

I submit that such a new direction of technical progress would be the catastrophe of the established direction, not merely the quantitative evolution of the prevailing (scientific and technological) rationality but rather its catastrophic transformation, the emergence of a new idea of Reason, theoretical and practical. (Marcuse, 2002, p. 232)

The final chapter of One-Dimensional Man, entitled “The catastrophe of liberation,” already posited the significance of what can only be approached as the higher rationality of art to transform scientific rationality so that final causes become the proper domain of science and the conquest of nature is replaced by the reconstruction of nature and society:

The rationality of art, its ability to “project” existence, to define yet unrealized possibilities could then be envisaged as validated by and functioning in the scientific-technological transformation of the world. Rather than being the handmaiden of the established apparatus, beautifying its business and its misery, art would become a technique for destroying this business and this misery. (2002 [1964], pp. 243–244)

In Marcuse's approach to catastrophe, the destructive in art—the aim of the historic avant-garde which has since become unintelligible—is mobilized by science to break with scientific rationality in its established direction and to open the possibility of an essentially new human reality: existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled vital needs (2002 [1964], p. 235). This presupposes both the continued existence of the technical base, which is put to serve different political ends, and a break with the logic of side-effects that has become so prominent in Beck's more recent notion of emancipatory catastrophism, which considers negative features as inevitable by-products of a logic of growth and progress. Because liberation can only be achieved by taking into our hands the possibilities unleashed by human transformative powers and directing them toward rational ends. “The function of Reason then converges with the function of Art’ (Marcuse, 2002, p. 242).

At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote a lasting reflection on revolution as catastrophe:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake. (Benjamin, 2003 [1940], p. 402)

Conclusion

Sociology has made a valuable contribution in unmasking the art world as a world of make-believe, where an emphasis on innate talent and individual genius serves to disallow the social character of objects and reputations, a world that not only decorates and beautifies an unjust reality but also serves to legitimize existing social inequalities. But this has often been at the price of reducing the things of art to the things of life because of the persisting failure to properly engage with the aesthetic dimension. Consequently, sociological critique often becomes an external instance that ignores and, at the same time, devalues a different type of social critique that is articulated in the aesthetic form itself.

At present, when art primarily appears as a refined means for the generation of wealth and for aestheticizing the endless repetition of the ever-same, it becomes more necessary than ever to recover its broken promise of happiness from the dustbin of history. To this end, I have reread the work of those authors from the Frankfurt School that most directly engaged with this aspect with a view to their actualization, to specifying the enduring significance of their insights in the light of our present conditions. As I have argued in this article, sociology should seek to articulate what in the aesthetic form demands interpretation, thus wresting it from its eloquent muteness, from its irresolvable enigma. Bourdieu's calls for a rigorous science for the analysis of the production and consumption of cultural goods were necessary to bring attention to the practical negations that constituted the field of cultural production as a universe of belief, as well as the social relations which structurally determined the aesthetic struggles that took place within it. It is my contention that at present, an even more rigorous science cannot close itself off to the social truths that cannot find expression within it, that it needs to reflect on what a higher form of rationality can open up in the realm of knowledge to contribute to urgently needed forms of sociological critique.