Journal of Modern Education Review, ISSN 2155-7993, USA

January 2018, Volume 8, No. 1, pp. 64–69

Doi: 10.15341/jmer(2155-7993)/01.08.2018/008
© Academic Star Publishing Company, 2018
http://www.academicstar.us

Art, Emancipation and the Colombian Reconciliation

after the Peace Process

Sergio Bedoya Cortés

(University of Los Andes, Colombia)

Abstract: The following paper seeks to expose under what precepts the relationship between art and
emancipation can be given meaning within the framework of the Marxian theory. Here, I would like to present a
critique to Marx’s passivity in the relationship with the emancipatory potential which the aesthetic dimension and
even artist have. Also, here the spectator can see how Marcuse’s and Adorno’s theories differ just in the first view,
but both of them have seen the Aesthetic dimension as a form of increased freedom and subjectivity. The
discussion with Soviet and Orthodox Marxism is always latent here, but this will not be an impediment to be able
to address the role of the aesthetic dimension, the artist and any creator in today’s neoliberalism. All of the
theoretical approaches are a guide to the answer the following question: How art can guide Colombian society to a
freer kind of society after fifty years of war and the past process of peace that ended the longest conflict in the
Western Hemisphere?
Key words: aesthetics, peace, politics, Marcuse, critical theory

First of all, I would like to show you what inspired me to write this paper, and also to focus my master’s
dissertation on the relationship between art and emancipation: It is the important political and cultural moment we
are facing today in my country, Colombia. We are ending the longest war in western hemisphere between a
communist guerrilla and the Colombian State. Now we must figure out how we, left militants, have to change
weapons and violence to a democratic sphere. I do believe, because of the war we faced for more than fifty years,
that art and aesthetic dimension is one of those ways. Through art we can show how the war was, we can expose
the real State’s spirit, and illustrate why many people decided to fight a war that was, just in appearance, not
theirs… But also, through art, we can show different ways of how we believe society should be, with justice,
without discrimination and equality

1. Why Review the Relationship between Art and Emancipation Today?

As times have passed, the role of art has diminished more and more. In ancient times the world of art and
aesthetics had a crucial role as a form of catharsis, learning and example for society; let us remember here Plato’s
reflection in Book II of the Republic: “Are we to allow children to hear so easily any myths forged by any authors,

Sergio Bedoya Cortés, Political Scientist, Master Student of Philosophy, University of Los Andes; research areas/interests: Marx
and 20th century Marxism, social-cultural studies, political philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics and Latin-Americans philosophy.
E-mail: sergiobc937@gmail.com.

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and that in their souls receive opinions for the most part opposed to those we think should have when you get big?
— We will not allow it” (Plato, The Republic, 1988, p. 135), or Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as an art: “let us
understand by rhetoric the faculty of theorizing what is appropriate in each case to convince. This is certainly not
work in any other art, since each of the other deals with education and persuasion concerning their own stuff [...]
The rhetoric is also coated with the form of politics” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1999, pp. 173–179), or remember that
Hegel, for example, is already the need for art is not explicitly uplifting. “Art should be [one] moral order,
implicitly, [so] that morality should be the ultimate, but not developed, without appearing as a doctrine, law or
precept” (Hegel, 2006, p. 75). But now, in advanced industrial society, art has lost that edifying dimension, but
even so, aesthetics rests in society and forms one of the highest moments of the spirit: absolute spirit. Similarly,
art has lost its emancipatory and cathartic paper and focused only on the dimension of consumption and
production. Marxist orthodox thought has focused on asserting that the role of art is only to express the path of
revolution, that is, to awaken the attention to emancipation in the masses, but has neglected the descriptive and
critical role of art in relation to established reality; examples of this current abound in the world of literature,
cinema and aesthetics; examples espoused by the so-called real socialism and directed by the vanguard of socialist
realism; vanguard that we will review later.
Similarly, it should be emphasized that these types of art have been used as memory mechanisms, which have
recorded political, cultural, social, etc. events, and it is in this sense that this work seeks to identify some authors
who over time have performed works of art that manage to exemplify revolutionary movements or “revolutionary
paths” in their art; as explained above is said art music, painting or literature, and that, in addition, in their works
have managed to specify pathologies or moments of alienation in society. It is, therefore, necessary to mention
that it is not a question of giving a purely normative and objective standard of the functions of art, but, on the
contrary, it seeks to show how art has served and must serve to bring humanity to an emancipation and liberation
of humanity itself, i.e., it is no longer in prehistory of man for man to start making history. Thus, we focus on the
plane of an art that was, is and will be, but not in the must be of contemporary art or any previous art form.

2. For a Genealogy of Art in Marxism

The theme and concept of art itself have played a fundamental role in the development of Marxist thought
throughout its history. It is not in vain that thinkers such as Lenin, Gramsci or Marcuse have devoted so many
pages of their writings to these subjects, which they have focused on how art presents itself before society, what is
its relation to the human being and what is their task in particular historical moment.
For Plekhanov, for example, the relation between art and emancipation is engendered in the development of
social life, but under a Hegelian budget, Plekhanov’s question for this relation does not focus on how art should or
should not denounce, or how art should be or not to be, but it concentrates in how art is and has been: where artist
observe the need for changes observed, and raises accompanies this need in their work. But, on the other hand,
there are cases where art is completely disconnected from reality and “the tendency to art for art’s sake arises
when there is a divorce between artists and the social environment around them” (Plekhanov, 1976, p. 20). For
example, during the regime of Nicholas I Pushkin renounces the relationship of his work with society? After the
catastrophic defeat of the aristocratic revolt on December 14 of 1825 against the tsarist autocracy, Nicholas I
pardoned Pushkin for his “youth activities” and went on to become his “noble” protector. Even “Nicolas expected
Pushkin works” patriotic by the style of the piece “The hand of the Almighty has saved the homeland of Kukolnik”

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(Plekhanov, 1976, p. 11).

On the other hand, for Lenin, as practice demands of the revolutionary struggle in a particular situation, in
Czarist Russia in the early 90- lead him to emphasize the ideological function of the work of a populist writer,
seeks how to raise awareness of the class of the proletariat by means of literature, art, and that is why he criticizes
the idealization of society in art. Lenin does not pose a kind of reflection of the society in art, as this would be in
total contradiction with its theory of knowledge present in Materialism and Empirocriticism: It is necessary to
continue with the accession of the cultural project — what they called Proletkult — the People’s Commissariat of
Education as subsidiary bodies, and should reject the creation and invention of its own special culture. This is
because the proletariat as the highest expression of humanity embraces human totality, so that, although the
proletarian revolution was located at that time in some countries such as the USSR or China, it should appeal to
human totality Russian and non-Russian representation in the governing bodies of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU), and more specifically in relation to art, in the People’s Commissariat of Instruction.
Similarly, for Mao, the state of the art, literature and the press at the beginning and subsequent achievement
of the Cultural Revolution it was precarious (Tse-tung, 1972, p. 190), so it was work of the Chinese Communist
Party (PCC ) to redirect both the content and the form of these dimensions in order to abolish feudal and capitalist
culture; which means that members of the PCC “should be kept in the Party’s position, fit the spirit of party and
politics of the Party” (Tse-tung, 1972, p. 96), so you could say that the role of art, literature and the press here is
something more propagandistic. On the other hand, it is in Mao where the question is directly asked whether art
and literature should praise or denounce. For Mao, praise or denunciation in art depends specifically on who the
art is directed to, or in other words, about the work: “In the face of our enemies [...] the task of revolutionary
artists and writers is to reveal their cruelty [...] and to point out the inevitability of their defeat ... With regard to
our various allies in the united front our attitude must be of alliance and criticism [And our own people] we must
educate them and help them, patiently and for a long period, for deriving from that ballast [petty] and fight its own
defects and errors” (Tsetung, 1972, pp. 98–99).
In Gramsci, on the contrary, “every man, considered outside his profession, awakens a certain intellectual
activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist, a man of good taste, participates in a conception of the world, has a
line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain or modify a conception of the world and provoke new
ways of thinking” (Gramsci, 2010, p. 15), so, one can say at first that the artist contributes to sustaining or
molding a certain conception of the world. But, similarly, intellectual — Category of which the artist becomes a
participant should appear in practical life as a builder, as an organizer, as an organic intellectual; but why organic
intellectual? If “the work of art includes [...] historicist elements, in addition to the specific cultural and emotional
world” (Gramsci, formation of the Intellectuals 1967, p. 118), and if “the historical movement cannot be done
rather than the “Collective man”, which presupposes the attainment of a cultural-social unity (Gramsci, 1967, p.
90), it is the organic intellectual, the intellectual who is part of the political party, who through “criticism of
customs, feelings and conceptions of life combined with aesthetics and art criticism.” (Gramsci, 1967, p. 108)
may establish and develop a new vision of the world, and may well generate a fight for a new culture, a new
society, but not only for the creation of a new art (Gramsci, 1967, p. 109). Thus, Gramsci gives the artist the
power to guide and to explain the masses — as an organic intellectual who is — but, unlike his predecessors like
Lenin or Mao, does not restrict this ability to the framework of the Communist Party.

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3. The Aesthetics in Marx and Engels

Through the work of Marx is a great concern on the part of the author on the question of aesthetics; whether
in Holy Family, in The German Ideology or in the Manuscripts of Economics and Philosophy in 1844, Marx asks
about the place of art — and the artist both in advanced industrial society and communist society. Thus, for Marx,
the role of the artist in any type of society is extremely important, for if in Marxism we had to define the
characteristic that makes the human being human-being is his capacity to create — homo faber — but the human
being models his spirit into two types of objects: a first object that seeks to satisfy humanized natural needs, and
second objects that seek to satisfy new humanized needs — as aesthetic necessity — (Sánchez Vásquez, 2013).
Much of Marx’s work focuses on the criticism of the conditions and the realization of the human being who
performs objects arranged for the satisfaction of humanized natural needs — the worker — but his work touches
tangentially only on the role and development of who realizes the objects arranged to supply the aesthetic
necessity. Marx’s role in art is that of the realization of the spirit, but, he argues, that “in order to cultivate oneself
spiritually with greater freedom, a people needs to be exempt from the slavery of its own bodily necessities. That
above all it leaves time to create and enjoy spiritually” (Marx, 2005, p. 61).
For Marx, the aesthetic fact does not possess — or at least does not mention it throughout his work — a
concrete emancipatory value, but, on the contrary, Marx is in charge of discussing the role of art and artist in
communist society: It is not that “everyone can work by replacing Rafael, but that everyone who has a Rafael
inside can develop unfettered” (Marx & Engels, Sobre el Arte, 2009, p. 121). Thus, for Marx, one of the most
important tasks of the proletarian revolution is to leave the being-artistic, being-creator, but this being-artistic does
not have a clearly emancipatory dimension in capitalist society, but an emancipated character in the communist
society, so it is to our view a failure in the work of Marx the lack of the emancipatory component in the role of the
artist and the work itself.

4. The Frankfurt School and the Absolute or True Art

By relying on Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, it is thought that the relation
between art and emancipation in contemporaneity can develop much more theoretically and enrich the debate
about the relation between aesthetics and politics, so it must be said in First, the Frankfurt school — and more
specifically Herbert Marcuse — does give an emancipatory character to art, not mechanically or directly, but it
does manage to identify two emancipatory dimensions — one clearer than the other — of art: the dimension of
Clearly ideological and partisan expression — what was called in Soviet times socialist realism — and the
dimension of the description of social pathologies. Marcuse explains that for him the Marxist orthodoxy of art can
be understood as “the interpretation of the category and truth of a work of art in terms of the totality of the
relations of production ... This interpretation argues that the work of art represents the interests and worldview of
the different social classes more or less accurate” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 53), position it would seek to distance
himself in his work the aesthetic dimension because That under its interpretation is the Marxist orthodoxy who has
limited the emancipatory dimension aesthetic of the art.
Marcuse also argues that the true revolutionary work of art is presented, posed and developed “when, by
virtue of aesthetic transformation, it represents through the exemplary destiny of individuals the lack of prevailing
freedom and the forces that are revealed, Thus opening a path between the mystified social [...] reality and

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discovering the horizon of change (liberation)” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 54), that is, that the true work of art must
represent the lack of freedom. Social, which can be represented in alienation, alienation, economic dependence,
war of the insurgents, violence, etc., so that the work of art, therefore, represents reality while denouncing, and is
that, according to Adorno, “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and that position does not adopt it until
it is autonomous” (Adorno, 2011, p. 300), but the social — is “his manifest position”.
On the other hand, Marcuse argues that one of the problems of orthodox Marxism was the annulment of the
subjectivity of the individual thanks to the massification of the community and society, which has generated some
disinterest and displacement of human beings in the project of emancipation. Human, since these were not seen as
part, nor reflected, of the revolutionary process; There was no inspiration to and with the individual, so Marcuse
and Adorno will emphasize that “the need for radical transformation must be rooted in the subjectivity of
individuals themselves, their intelligence, their passions, their feelings and their goals” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 59), so
that “the experience of art, its truth or falsity, is more than a subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity
in the subjective consciousness” (Adorno, 2011, p. 323), but not only in the social sphere, since if applied only in
the social sphere would give “the reductionist notion of consciousness that annuls the particular content of
individual consciousness and, with it, the subjective revolutionary potential” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 59). Thus, we
focus on the pursuit of human freedom; Emphasizing subjectivity as well as objectivity: “the transcendence of
immediate reality [would] shatter the reified objectivity of established social relations and [would] open a new
dimension of experience: the rebirth of rebellious subjectivity” (Marcuse, 2007, p. 62).
The critical reading that he proposes to make of the Frankfurt School would focus, in my way of seeing this
paradigm, in the criticism of Adorno: A criticism that focuses first on the transition that he poses of an irruption of
objectivity in consciousness subjective, because it is, in my view, a proposal that although it has to mean,
possesses a potential “little realizable” or in more concrete words a little pretentious since the objective totality —
which in terms of Hegel and Adorno is known as The Wirklichkeit — cannot be expressed at different moments of
consciousness, but in religion and art — in Hegel — where it has its highest expression (in the absolute spirit). On
the other hand, lack of a positive dialectic in Adorno generates a certain space of possibility that is invalidated as
impossibility since, if “art has the capacity to express what has not happened and what could happen” — the
utopian (Ουκ τοποσ: what has not taken place) — the same aesthetic dimension could offer a proposal in relation
to this aspect as, in the case of Marcuse, it is outlined under the concept of the emergence of rebel subjectivity.
Similarly, in the case of Marcuse, the proposal of a rebel subjectivity does offer a “positive” or propositional
aspect, but in a reduced way.

5. Conclusions

Now, after the end of the armed conflict in Colombia, in a world where democracy has been co-opted by
sectors of the bourgeoisie that seek to remain in power and do not allow the full exercise of Democracy, where
political parties are increasingly less representative and there are increasingly maneuvers by the liberal and
bourgeois governments to limit the actions of the so-called social movements, it is necessary to look for another
horizon; as Marcuse once mentioned in his classes at the Vincennes de la Sorbonne University in 1974: “the
impossible is not impossible, but very realistic”. Just as the racial struggles in the United States, the student
struggles in France, and the feminist and liberating sex struggles around the world distanced themselves from the
old and orthodox communist parties of the planet because they only saw in the world the proletarian-bourgeois

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dichotomy , we must move from the first dimension, to a dialectical game between the third and fourth dimension,
from the first dimension that focuses on barbarism and violent aggression, to the second dimension that focuses on
liberation, the requirement of an alternative, and the construction of a democracy as a real expression of the
human dignity of all (Marcuse, 2017).
Thus, aesthetics offers us this possibility. It offers us the possibility of generating a critical analysis in a
society that manages to reflect on the more than 2700 abducted citizens, the more than 2300 selective murders, the
more than 11,000 victims of massacres during the armed conflict in the country. Likewise, aesthetics allows us to
generate memory, to generate the irruption of objectivity in our subjectivities, but, above all, it will achieve the
rebirth of thousands of rebellious subjectivities, to build a different country, to build a different society... Through
an art, which is political, which denounces and takes a stand against historical and social events, and no longer by
means of arms or through a democracy that does not allow the participation of the marginal sectors of society, a
Colombia will be achieved differently, a Colombia far from barbarism — a mixture that corresponds to both the
first (Reality of the present) (Marcuse, 2017) and the third dimension (barbarism of the right) (Marcuse, 2017) in
Marcusian terms — and increasingly closer to the utopia, the liberation and of the revolution — characteristic of
the second dimension (Concrete Utopia of the left) (Marcuse, 2017).
Let us encourage ourselves to create, to remember, to forgive, but, above all, to build a society, a country and
a better world.

References
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Adorno T. (2011). Aesthetic Theory, Madrid, Spain: Akal.
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Gramsci A. (2010). Cuadernos de la cárcel: Los intelectuales y la organización de la cultura, México D. F.: Juan Pablo Editor.
Lenin V. (1968). La Literatura y el Arte. Moscú, Editorial Progreso.
Marcuse H. (2007). The Aesthetic Dimension, Madrid, Spain: Biblioteca Nueva.
Marcuse H. (2015). Eros and Civilization, Ariel.
Marcuse P. (April 2017). “Marcuse’s concept of dimensionality: A political interpretation”, Radical Philosophy Review.
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