Why history serves as a liberating factor

Wynne is probably the irst scholar who has come up with a deinition of what may be considered liberating insight: Instead of attaining a complete cessation of thought, some sort of mental activity must take place: a liberating cognition based on the practice of mindful awareness Wynne, I am grateful to Richard Gombrich for pointing this out to me.

SN It appears that it is not the presence of any term in itself, but the context in which it appears, that decides whether it refers to liberating insight or not. This tentative deinition is general enough to leave room for some new interesting possibilities of understanding liberating insight. To recapitulate: the consensus is that this complicated scheme cannot be accepted as representing the original account of enlightenment Schmithausen, The knowledge of the four noble truths, which probably in itself is pretty authentic, appears to have no place in this context.

Schmithausen has noted the psychological implausibility of insight into the four noble truths bringing an end to desire. I believe that there are good reasons to suppose that, at least at some point, the noble eightfold path may have represented a set of factors which had to be realized in a gradual way.

The order in which these factors appear in the noble eightfold path would therefore correspond to the order in which they should be developed. Several suttas from AN If we are to take the message of this sutta seriously, it would imply that one simply cannot properly develop any of the later factors without having irst developed right view.

On the other hand, the acquisition of right view must be seen as a necessary condition for the further development of the factors that follow it in the set. If we accept the deinition of right view contained in the 3 SN Schmithausen has pointed out a very important thing: that there is a difference between liberating insight and the awareness of liberation.

The latter may be understood as feeling certain of being liberated from suffering and having reached a stage from which one does not fall back. The formulas describing this certitude of liberation seem to bear the marks of authenticity due to their simplicity. Therefore Schmithausen has noted that the inal knowledge or awareness of being liberated seems to have been regarded as an essential element from the very beginning.

They seem to express the immediate results of awakening. Apparently, we cannot infer anything from these formulas about the nature of the cognitive act i. I am indebted to Richard Gombrich for pointing this out to me. This may perhaps suggest that some corruption of the original text occurred during the transmission so that there was uncertainty concerning the verb used in this fragment. These two suttas differ from the ones analyzed above in that they describe a different content of liberating insight and a different mechanism by which liberation occurs.

This results in disenchantment and in turn in the destruction of the efluents. Apparently at this point inal and irreversible liberation no longer seemed so certain, possibly due to the growing confusion about the nature of authentic Buddhist practice.

There are a couple of issues to be considered here. This is in fact yet another argument supporting the relative lateness of the passage in its present form, in addition to those of Schmithausen , or Bronkhorst However, those scholars have also suggested that the present form of the account is probably a result of modiication of a more original, authentic account.

Bronkhorst has stated: Let us see what remains that can be considered authentic Buddhist meditation in view of the conclusions of the present chapter. The second issue deserving consideration is that insight requiring investigation and observation, as mentioned by Gunaratana, may not be the only type of insight. Alexander Wynne has commented that the simpler, non-intellectual versions of liberating insight are likely to be earliest, though the content of liberating insight in the earliest teaching is unclear Wynne, It seems valuable to compare such canonical concepts with the real life experience of modern meditators.

That is because the later concepts present in the suttas may often be a result of doctrinal evolution and polemics, and do not necessarily relect authentic practices and experiences. Although we cannot be sure that the experiences of modern meditators have any connection with the ancient texts, it is nevertheless worthwhile considering whether they might offer a sort of a view from the inside.

Such a view might help to explain some general features of Buddhist meditation, and so clarify the problems and puzzles which abound in the canonical sources. One will be unable to give orders as one normally does.

One cannot even decide when to come out. No decision making process is available. This text rejects the notion of any decision making process on part of the meditator, but bases the moment of emergence on the previous development of the mind. In the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa seems to have realized that such a concept is psychologically implausible. On a practical level, many of these accounts do not seem to serve well either as instructions for practice or as verbalizations of the immediate experience representing the supposed content of the liberating insight.

We do not directly experience the qualities of ire, water, air or earth. We experience feelings resulting from the operations of our senses. It may normally not be directly experienced, probably apart from the cases of medical conditions.

You can study the great people of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, and also ordinary people who teach us lessons in courage, persistence and protest. The study of history is a non-negotiable aspect of better citizenship. This is one of the main reasons why it is taught as a part of school curricula. People that push for citizenship history relationship between a citizen and the state just want to promote a strong national identity and even national loyalty through the teaching of lessons of individual and collective success.

We learn from past atrocities against groups of people; genocides, wars, and attacks. Through this collective suffering, we have learned to pay attention to the warning signs leading up to such atrocities. Society has been able to take these warning signs and fight against them when they see them in the present day. Knowing what events led up to these various wars helps us better influence our future.

The skills that are acquired through learning about history, such as critical thinking, research, assessing information, etc, are all useful skills that are sought by employers. Many employers see these skills as being an asset in their employees and will hire those with history degrees in various roles and industries. Understanding past events and how they impact the world today can bring about empathy and understanding for groups of people whose history may be different from the mainstream.

You will also understand the suffering, joy, and chaos that were necessary for the present day to happen and appreciate all that you are able to benefit from past efforts today. You can refine your reading skills by reading texts from a wide array of time periods. Language has changed and evolved over time and so has the way people write and express themselves. You can also refine your writing skills through learning to not just repeat what someone else said, but to analyze information from multiple sources and come up with your own conclusions.

There are so many sources of information out in the world. What was a victory for one group was a great loss for another — you get to create your own opinions of these events. It helps us understand the many reasons why people may behave the way they do. As a result, it helps us become more impartial as decision-makers.

In the study of history you will need to conduct research. This gives you the opportunity to look at two kinds of sources — primary written at the time and secondary sources written about a time period, after the fact. This practice can teach you how to decipher between reliable and unreliable sources.

There are numbers and data to be learned from history. In terms of patterns: patterns in population, desertions during times of war, and even in environmental factors.

These patterns that are found help clarify why things happened as they did. All people and cultures are living histories. The languages we speak are inherited from the past. Our cultures, traditions, and religions are all inherited from the past.

We even inherit our genetic makeup from those that lived before us. Knowing these connections give you a basic understanding of the condition of being human. Learning about history can be a great deal of fun. We have the throngs of movies about our past to prove it. History is full of some of the most interesting and fascinating stories ever told, including pirates, treasure, mysteries, and adventures.

On a regular basis new stories from the past keep emerging to the mainstream. Better yet, there is a history of every topic and field. Whatever you find fascinating there is a history to go along with it. The theme of the step program is the importance of surrendering to a higher power. Everyone is entitled to their own spiritual outlook.

Revolutionary socialists also believe in a higher power. And that power is the power of the people, millions of people—conscious, active, united and mobilized—in pursuit of emancipation. There are countless examples of the power of masses of people to directly intervene in and transform history, such as the Haitian Revolution, the Great Depression-era union struggles for Social Security and other benefits, the Chinese Revolution, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnamese defense of their homeland and defeat of U.

The oppressors do not voluntarily give up anything. The oppressed, out of necessity, must seize what we deserve. People who work a strong program of recovery have the potential to become powerful organizers because they are principled people.

Journalist Johann Hari explains that a child who suffered abuse is 4, percent more likely to become an addict than a child who never suffered trauma. But they do not engage in a critical assessment of why trauma is so widespread; that is not their purpose. It is a powerful step for someone to admit they are a survivor of sexual violence but the deeper question is: why is there a trans-generational culture of sexual abuse and rape?

Returning veterans, who have lived through war and have PTSD, deserve and need group therapy. The far-reaching question though, is why are hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young men and women sent off thousands of miles away to persecute wars of foreign conquest, sustaining life-debilitating injuries, trauma and death in the process? And in the richest country in the world, why does brutal poverty and a hollow educational order deprive masses of people of a sense of purpose?

There are tens of thousands of NA groups spread across the world in over countries, although the majority are in the United States; there are many more AA groups. These fellowships will continue to grow in response to the profound suffering caused by addiction. These programs will continue to help one addict at a time until revolutionaries address the pivotal questions: how and when will the unhealthy society that we live in—that inevitably produces addiction—be transformed?

Like membership in NA, being a Panther or Young Lord was not a one-hour commitment, once or twice a week. It was a lifestyle. This righteous, inspired lifestyle transformed people. The uplifting of communities necessarily touched masses of people. Oppressed and exploited communities need leadership, organization and centralism.

It is only the mighty centralism of the oppressed that can defeat the centralism of the oppressor the police, the army. It is only through this fight-back movement, that we can forge our liberation. There can be no genuine, collective healing in a society organized against the interests of the vast majority. Until the addict is transformed into a conscious actor on the historical stage, cognizant of the dehumanization he or she has suffered before white supremacy, sexual violence, systematic neglect and all the other features of class society, they will remain a powerless, atomized object of societal scorn.

The breaking away must be both individual and collective. Only a new system, based on a new set of principles, can begin to alleviate our suffering on a mass level. To embrace this historical challenge, arguably the most daunting any people has ever faced, is to bring into motion our people who have fallen by the wayside by the hundreds and thousands. We all have a role to play —no matter how great or small— in this struggle. The author dedicates this article to his cousin Ben 27 and his sister Ellen 46 , both of whom died of heroin overdoses.

No life was lived in vain if it inspires others to nurture and protect the lives of future generations. This is a good starting point for readers who want to read more on this subject. It was only the outpouring of community support that prevented the NYPD from inflicting abuse and legal reprisals at the hands of the state. In recent years, the cost of life saving medications needed to treat hepatitis C, cancer, cholesterol and other illnesses, rose more than percent, creating wider gaps in an already unequal healthcare system.

Andrew Pollack. It serves us to remember this militant example of resistance today, as heroin and other health care epidemics continue to ravage the very communities where Lincoln Hospital is located in the South Bronx. Live Science. August 15 th , Journal of Studies of Drugs and Alcohol. September March 18, This is by design. This distinction, far from being an abstract idea, was guiding the strategy of the Marxist movements; it expressed the necessity transcending the economic struggle of the laboring classes, to extend wage demands and demands for the improvement of working conditions to the political arena, to drive the class struggle to the point at which the system itself would be at stake, to make foreign as well as domestic policy, the national as well as the class interest, the target of this struggle.

The real interest, the attainment of conditions in which man could shape his own life, was that of no longer subordinating his life to the requirements of profitable production, to an apparatus controlled by forces beyond his control. And the attainment of such conditions meant the abolition of capitalism.

It is not simply the higher standard of living, the illusory bridging of the consumer gap between the rulers and the ruled, which has obscured the distinction between the real and the immediate interest of the ruled.

Marxian theory soon recognized that impoverishment does not necessarily provide the soil for revolution, that a highly developed consciousness and imagination may generate a vital need for radical change in advanced material conditions.

The power of corporate capitalism has stifled the emergence of such a consciousness and imagination; its mass media have adjusted the rational and emotional faculties to its market and its policies and steered them to defense of its dominion.

The narrowing of the consumption gap has rendered possible the mental and instinctual coordination of the laboring classes: the majority of organized labor shares the stabilizing, counterrevolutionary needs of the middle classes, as evidenced by their behavior as consumers of the material and cultural merchandise, by their emotional revulsion against the nonconformist intelligentsia.

Conversely, where the consumer gap is still wide, where the capitalist culture has not yet reached into every house or hut, the system of stabilizing needs has its limits; the glaring contrast between the privileged class and the exploited leads to a radicalization of the underprivileged.

This is the case of the ghetto population and the unemployed in the United States; this is also the case of the laboring classes in the more backward capitalist countries. By virtue of its basic position in the production process, by virtue of its numerical weight and the weight of exploitation, the working class is still the historical agent of revolution; by virtue of its sharing the stabilizing needs of the system, it has become a conservative, even counterrevolutionary force.

This theoretical conception has concrete significance in the prevailing situation, in which the working class may help to circumscribe the scope and the targets of political practice.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the radicalization of the working classes is counteracted by a socially engineered arrest of consciousness, and by the development and satisfaction of needs which perpetuate the servitude of the exploited. A vested interest in the existing system is thus fostered in the instinctual structure of the exploited, and the rupture with the continuum of repression a necessary precondition of liberation — does not occur.

It follows that the radical change which is to transform the existing society into a free society must reach into a dimension of the human existence hardly considered in Marxian theory — the -biological- dimension in which the vital, imperative needs and satisfactions of man assert themselves.

Inasmuch as these needs and satisfactions reproduce a life in servitude, liberation presupposes changes in this biological dimension, that is to say, different instinctual needs, different reactions of the body as well as the mind. The qualitative difference between the existing societies and a free society affects all needs and satisfactions beyond the animal level, that is to say, all those which are essential to the human species, man as rational animal.

All these needs and satisfactions are permeated with the exigencies of profit and exploitation. The entire realm of competitive performances and standardized fun, all the symbols of status, prestige, power, of advertised virility and charm, of commercialized beauty — this entire realm kills in its citizens the very disposition, the organs, for the alternative: freedom without exploitation.

Triumph and end of introjection: the stage where the people cannot reject the system of domination without rejecting themselves, their own repressive instinctual needs and values.

We would have to conclude that liberation would mean subversion against the will and against the prevailing interests of the great majority of the people. On the overcoming of these limits depends the establishment of democracy.

It is precisely this excessive adaptability of the human organism which propels the perpetuation and extension of the commodity form and, with it, the perpetuation and extension of the social controls over behavior and satisfaction.

The ever-increasing complexity of the social structure will make some form of regimentation unavoidable, freedom and privacy may come to constitute antisocial luxuries and their attainment to involve real hardships. In consequence, there may emerge by selection a stock of human beings suited genetically to accept as a matter of course a regimented and sheltered way of life in a teeming and polluted world, from which all wilderness and fantasy of nature will have disappeared.

The domesticated farm animal and the laboratory rodent on a controlled regimen in a controlled environment will then become true models for the study of man. Thus, it is apparent that food, natural resources, supplies of power, and other elements involved in the operation of the body machine and of the individual establishment are not the only factors to be considered in determining the optimum number of people that can live on earth.

Just as important for maintaining the human qualities of life is an environment in which it is possible to satisfy the longing for quiet, privacy, independence, initiative, and some open space And in doing so, quantitative progress militates against qualitative change even if the institutional barriers against radical education and action are surmounted.

If this idea of a radical transformation is to be more than idle speculation, it must have an objective foundation in the production process of advanced industrial society, [5] in its technical capabilities and their use.

For freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility — the demands of the life instincts.

Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil. But this gaya scienza is conceivable only after the historical break in the continuum of domination as expressive of the needs of a new type of man.

In the socialist society corresponding to this idea, the free development of individual faculties would replace the subjection of the individual to the division of labor. The early Marxian example of the free individuals alternating between hunting, fishing, criticizing, and so on, had a joking-ironical sound from the beginning, indicative of the impossibility anticipating the ways in which liberated human beings would use their freedom.

However, the embarrassingly ridiculous sound may also indicate the degree to which this vision has become obsolete and pertains to a stage of the development of the productive forces which has been surpassed.

The later Marxian concept implies the continued separation between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, between labor and leisure — not only in time, but also in such a manner that the same subject lives a different life in the two realms. According to this Marxian conception, the realm of necessity would continue under socialism to such an extent that real human freedom would prevail only outside the entire sphere of socially necessary labor.

Marx rejects the idea that work can ever become play. However, the development of the productive forces beyond their capitalist organization suggests the possibility of freedom within the realm of necessity. The quantitative reduction of necessary labor could turn into quality freedom , not in proportion to the reduction but rather to the transformation of the working day, a transformation in which the stupefying, enervating, pseudo-automatic jobs of capitalist progress would be abolished.

But the construction of such a society presupposes a type of man with a different sensitivity as well as consciousness: men who would speak a different language, have different gestures, follow different impulses; men who have developed an instinctual barrier against cruelty, brutality, ugliness.

Such an instinctual transformation is conceivable as a factor of social change only if it enters the social division of labor, the production relations themselves. The imagination of such men and women would fashion their reason and tend to make the process of production a process of creation.

This is the utopian concept of socialism which envisages the ingression of freedom into the realm of necessity, and the union between causality by necessity and causality by freedom.

The first would mean passing from Marx to Fourier; the second from realism to surrealism. A utopian conception? The new sensibility has become a political force. It crosses the frontier between the capitalist and the communist orbit ; it is contagious because the atmosphere, the climate of the established societies, carries the virus.

The new Sensibility has become a political factor. This event, which may well indicate a turning point in the evolution of contemporary societies, demands that critical theory incorporate the new dimension into its concepts, project its implications for the possible construction of a free society.

Such a society presupposes throughout the achievements of the existing societies, especially their scientific and technical achievements.

Released from their service in the cause of exploitation, they could be mobilized for the global elimination of poverty and toil. True, this redirection of the intellectual and material production already presupposes the revolution in the capitalist world; the theoretical projection seems to be fatally premature — were it not for the fact that the awareness of the transcendent possibilities of freedom must become a driving power in the consciousness and the imagination which prepare the soil for this revolution.

The latter will be essentially different, and effective, precisely to the degree to which it is carried forward by this power. The liberated consciousness would promote the development of a science and technology free to discover and realize the possibilities of things and men in the protection and gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of form and matter for the attainment of this goal.

Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated. Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under which a new sensibility and a desublimated scientific intelligence would combine in the creation of an aesthetic ethos. Technique, assuming the features of art, would translate subjective sensibility into objective form, into reality.

This would be the sensibility of men and women who do not have to be ashamed of themselves anymore because they have overcome their sense of guilt: they have learned not to identify themselves with the false fathers who have built and tolerated and forgotten the Auschwitzs and Vietnams of history, the torture chambers of all the secular and ecclesiastical inquisitions and interrogations, the ghettos and the monumental temples of the corporations, and who have worshiped the higher culture of this reality.

If and when men and women act and think free from this identification, they will have broken the chain which linked the fathers and the sons from generation to generation. They will not have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but they will have become free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement.

Chance of reaching the point of no return to the past: if and when the causes are eliminated which have made the history of mankind the history of domination and servitude. These causes are economic-political, but since they have shaped the very instincts and needs of men, no economic and political changes will bring this historical continuum to a stop unless they are carried through by men who are physiologically and psychologically able to experience things, and each other, outside the context of violence and exploitation.

The new sensibility has become, by this very token, praxis: it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself.

The insistence that a socialist society can and ought to be light, pretty, playful, that these qualities are essential elements of freedom, the faith in the rationality of the imagination, the demand for a new morality and culture — does this great anti-authoritarian rebellion indicate a new dimension and direction of radical change, the appearance of new agents of radical change, and a new vision of socialism in its qualitative difference from the established societies?

Is there anything in the aesthetic dimension which has an essential affinity with freedom not only in its sublimated cultural artistic but also in its desublimated political, existential form, so that the aesthetic can become a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft : factor in the technique of production, horizon under which the material and intellectual needs develop?

Throughout the centuries, the analysis of the aesthetic dimension focused on the idea of the beautiful. Does this idea express the aesthetic ethos which provides the common denominator of the aesthetic and the political?

As desired object, the beautiful pertains to the domain of the primary instincts, Eros and Thanatos. The mythos links the adversaries: pleasure and terror. Beauty has the power to check aggression: it forbids and immobilizes the aggressor. The beautiful Medusa petrifies him who confronts her. Kinship of the beautiful, the divine, the poetic, but also kinship of the beautiful and unsublimated joy. Subsequently, the classical aesthetic, while insisting on the harmonious union of sensuousness, imagination, and reason in the beautiful, equally insisted on the objective ontological character of the beautiful, as the Form in which man and nature come into their own: fulfillment.

By virtue of these qualities, the aesthetic dimension can serve as a sort of gauge for a free society. A universe of human relationships no longer mediated by the market, no longer based on competitive exploitation or terror, demands a sensitivity freed from the repressive satisfactions of the unfree societies; a sensitivity receptive to forms and modes of reality which thus far have been projected only by the aesthetic imagination.

For the aesthetic needs have their own social content: they are the claims of the human organism, mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment which can be created only in the struggle against the institutions which, by their very functioning, deny and violate these claims.

The radical social content of the aesthetic needs becomes evident as the demand for their most elementary satisfaction is translated into group action on an enlarged scale. From the harmless drive for better zoning regulations and a modicum of protection from noise and dirt to the pressure for closing of whole city areas to automobiles, prohibition of transistor radios in all public places, decommercialization of nature, total urban reconstruction, control of the birth rate — such action would become increasingly subversive of the institutions of capitalism and of their morality.

The quantity of such reforms would turn into the quality of radical change to the degree to which they would critically weaken the economic, political, and cultural pressure and power groups which have a vested interest in preserving the environment and ecology of profitable merchandising. The aesthetic morality is the opposite of puritanism. It does not insist on a daily bath or shower for people whose cleaning practices involve systematic torture, slaughtering, poisoning; nor does it insist on clean clothes for men who are professionally engaged in dirty deals.

But it does insist on cleaning the earth from the very material garbage produced by the spirit of capitalism, and from this spirit itself. And it insists on freedom as a biological necessity: being physically incapable of tolerating any repression other than that required for the protection and amelioration of life.

For its part, the imagination depends on the senses which provide the experiential material out of which the imagination creates its realm of freedom, by transforming the objects and relationships which have been the data of the senses and which have been formed by the senses.

The freedom of the imagination is thus restrained by the order of the sensibility, not only by its pure forms space and time , but also by its empirical content which, as the object-world to be transcended, remains a determining factor in the transcendence. However, the freedom of the imagination is restrained not only by the sensibility, but also, at the other pole of the organic structure, by the rational faculty of man, his reason.

The most daring images of a new world, of new ways of life, are still guided by concepts, and by a logic elaborated in the development of thought, transmitted from generation to generation. On both sides, that of the sensibility and that of reason, history enters into the projects of the imagination, for the world of the senses is a historical world, and reason is the conceptual mastery and interpretation of the historical world.

The order and organization of class society, which have shaped the sensibility and the reason of man, have also shaped the freedom of the imagination.

It had its controlled play in the sciences, pure and applied, and its autonomous play in poetry, fiction, the arts.

Between the dictates of instrumentalist reason on the one hand and a sense experience mutilated by the realizations of this reason on the other, the power of the imagination was repressed ; it was free to become practical, i. In the great historical revolutions, the imagination was, for a short period, released and free to enter into the projects of a new social morality and of new institutions of freedom; then it was sacrificed to the requirements of effective reason.

If now, in the rebellion of the young intelligentsia, the right and the truth of the imagination become the demands of political action, if surrealistic forms of protest and refusal spread throughout the movement, this apparently insignificant development may indicate a fundamental change in the situation.

The political protest, assuming a total character, reaches into a dimension which, as aesthetic dimension, has been essentially apolitical. And the political protest activates in this dimension precisely the foundational, organic elements: the human sensibility which rebels against the dictates of repressive reason, and, in doing so, invokes the sensuous power of the imagination.

Beyond the limits and beyond the power of repressive reason now appears the prospect for a new relationship between sensibility and reason, namely, the harmony between sensibility and a radical consciousness: rational faculties capable of projecting and defining the objective material conditions of freedom, its real limits and chances.

But instead of being shaped and permeated by the rationality of domination, the sensibility would be guided by the imagination, mediating between the rational faculties and the sensuous needs. The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man. Such a world could in a literal sense! Andre Breton has made this idea the center of surrealist thought: his concept of the hasard objectif designates the nodal point at which the two chains of causation meet and bring about the event.

The aesthetic universe is the Lebenswelt on which the needs and faculties of freedom depend for their liberation. They cannot develop in an environment shaped by and for aggressive impulses, nor can they be envisaged as the mere effect of a new set of social institutions. They can emerge only in the collective practice of creating an environment: level by level, step by step — in the material and intellectual production, an environment in which the non-aggressive, erotic, receptive faculties of man, in harmony with the consciousness of freedom, strive for the pacification of man and nature.

In the reconstruction of society for the attainment of this goal, reality altogether would assume a Form expressive of the new goal. The essentially aesthetic quality of this Form would make it a work of art, but inasmuch as the Form is to emerge in the social process of production, art would have changed its traditional locus and function in society: it would have become a productive force in the material as well as cultural transformation.

This would mean the Aufhebung of art: end of the segregation of the aesthetic from the real, but also end of the commercial unification of business and beauty, exploitation and pleasure.

According to Kant, there are pure forms of sensibility a priori, common to all human beings. Only space and time?

Or is there perhaps also a more material constitutive form, such as the primary distinction between beautiful and ugly, good and bad [14] — prior to all rationalization and ideology,. It has been said that the degree to which a revolution is developing qualitatively different social conditions and relationships may perhaps be indicated by the development of a different language: the rupture with the continuum of domination must also be a rupture with the vocabulary of domination.

The surrealist thesis, according to which the poet is the total nonconformist, finds in the poetic language the semantic elements of the revolution. The surrealist thesis does not abandon the materialistic premises but it protests against the isolation of the material from the cultural development, which leads to a submission of the latter to the former and thus to a reduction if not denial of the libertarian possibilities of the revolution.

It is not, it cannot be, an instrumentalist language, not an instrument of revolution. It seems that the poems and the songs of protest and liberation are always too late or too early: memory or dream. Their time is not the present; they preserve their truth in their hope, in their refusal of the actual. The distance between the universe of poetry and that of politics is so great, the mediations which validate the poetic truth and the rationality of imagination are so complex, that any shortcut between the two realities seems fatal to poetry.

There is no way in which we can envisage a historical change in the relation between the cultural and the revolutionary movement which could bridge the gap between the everyday and the poetic language and abrogate the dominance of the former.

The latter seems to draw all its power and all its truth from its otherness, its transcendence. And yet, the radical denial of the Establishment and the communication of the new consciousness depend more and more fatefully on a language of their own as all communication is monopolized and validated by the one-dimensional society.

Perhaps necessarily so, because through all revolutions, the continuity of domination has been sustained. But in the past, the language of indictment and liberation, though it shared its vocabulary with the masters and their retainers, had found its own meaning and validation in actual revolutionary struggles which eventually changed the established societies. The familiar used and abused vocabulary of freedom, justice, and equality could thus obtain not only new meaning but also new reality the reality which emerged in the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries and led to less restricted forms of freedom, justice, and equality.

Today, the rupture with the linguistic universe of the Establishment is more radical: in the most militant areas of protest, it amounts to a methodical reversal of meaning. It is a familiar phenomenon that sub-cultural groups develop their own language, taking the harmless words of everyday communication out of their context and using them for designating objects or activities tabooed by the Establishment.

But a far more subversive universe of discourse announces itself in the language of black militants. Here is a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined, and places them into the opposite context — negation of the established one.

The ingression of the aesthetic into the political also appears at the other pole of the rebellion against the society of affluent capitalism, among the nonconformist youth. These political manifestations of a new sensibility indicate the depth of the rebellion, of the rupture with the continuum of repression. They bear witness to the power of the society in shaping the whole of experience, the whole metabolism between the organism and its environment.

Beyond the physiological level, the exigencies of sensibility develop as historical ones: the objects which the senses confront and apprehend are the products of a specific stage of civilization and of a specific society, and the senses in turn are geared to their objects.

This historical interrelation affects even the primary sensations: an established society imposes upon all its members the same medium of perception; and through all the differences of individual and class perspectives, horizons, backgrounds, society provides the same general universe of experience. Consequently, the rupture with the continuum of aggression and exploitation would also break with the sensibility geared to this universe.