6. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) combines elements from Freud and Marx:

• For Marx, doing away with the conditions of economic repression would allow everyone to express himself or herself artistically.  For Freud, though, our repression (or "sublimation") of antisocial desires (sexuality, aggression) is necessary for society (this is called necessary repression).  But in order to keep certain classes in positions of power, we are asked to repress even more than is needed to achieve social ends; this added repression is surplus repression.  Workers are seduced into becoming part of the very system that uses them up by themselves becoming consumers.  Even anti-establishment activity (e.g., rock music) is co-opted by being transformed into a commodity.  To break free of this cycle of seduction, we need to eliminate surplus repression and decrease necessary repression (through technological advances).  However, just when we are able to cut down on necessary repression, the forces of power increase surplus repression.

• Art escapes the totalitarian effort to co-opt desire precisely by not appealing to reality; it taps into the reservoir of repressed desires, especially surplus repression.  It permits the mind to engage in fantasy, guided by the guiltless pursuit of pleasure (the pleasure principle) and unrestricted by having to deal with reality (the reality principle).  In fact, reality is simply the embodiment of surplus repression.  Fantasy is not controlled by repression; it thus undermines the attempt to make us think of the commodity world as reality.  In short, fantasy is the infantile memory of what civilization denies us.  Classical art reminds us of the difference between the utopian view it espouses and the world in which we live (as consumers of dreary things).  That is, art promises a happiness that cannot be achieved.  In this way all great art is revolutionary and subversive, "the power of the negative."  Even if surplus repression is reduced, total liberation remains a fantasy; so art (as out of touch with reality) will always point to a second dimension of existence, one unwilling to accept current repression and fueling dreams of liberation and gratification.

• For human beings, "existence precedes essence": things-for-us are meaningful not in virtue of some always already (divinely) determined essence or nature; rather, the nature or function of a thing (including ourselves) follows from how we apprehend it

• Our perception of the world is of our own making.  The world is to be understood as an object of art, a product of human creativity.  However, unlike typical works of art (which are completed or finished products), the world and everything in it are never finished.  The world is a work in progress, not something that is being but rather something that is becoming.  The virtue of art is that it highlights this incomplete character indirectly by showing the kind of thing that the world is not.  The becoming of the world displaces us, makes us homeless, requires us to assume our responsibility to create

• Art requires that we pass from the familiar to questions regarding the ultimate meaning of existence (e.g., birth, death, interaction with others).  Art moves us from the typical to the symbolic, thus transcending ordinary life.  The point of art (as Marx says of philosophy, and as Marcuse says of art) is to make us do something, change our lives from the mundane to the meaningful.  Such a change is possible only when we recognize that we are the ones who must do it, no one else

• Just as in the case of "game," there is no necessary and sufficient condition for calling something "art": it is an open concept that ties activities together through overlapping family resemblances.  We could never have a specific definition of art because at some future date something else might be included in it.  We simply have to decide whether to use a certain concept or term to refer to the activity in question.  In contrast to logical or mathematical concepts, concepts that are based on empirical observations or normative judgments are simply stipulated as to their ranges of use.  The decision is based on whether the overlaps in family resemblances are similar enough to warrant calling something art
• Wittgenstein's family resemblances idea works like this.  Imagine that you have three traits (say eye color, hair color, and nose shape), and your sister resembles you regarding the hair color and nose shape but she has different color eyes and ears different from yours.  Her ears are like those of your brother (who happens to have eyes and hair unlike yours), but he has your nose shape, so you resemble him somewhat but not as much as you resemble your sister.  Your brother has more of your dad's traits, but you don't have any traits of your dad.  We still think of you as being in the same family as your dad because your traits and his overlap through their appearances in your brother and sister.  So the pattern looks like this:

        You have traits A, B, C
        Your sister has traits B, C, D
        Your brother has traits C, D, E
        Your dad has traits D, E, F

Wittgensteinians think of art that way.  Some works of art seem so different that it seems hard to imagine what makes them both the same kind of thing.  But they have traits that they have enough in common with other pieces that we think of as works of art that we think of them individually as works of art.  And if those things are art and they are remotely like other things we call art, then it seems sensible to say that they belong to the same family even though they don't share any identical features.

• Institutional theory of art (e.g., George Dickie): The decision about whether to identify something as a work of art is not arbitrary.  Its designation is part of a language, a way or "form of life" (to useWittgenstein's expression) practiced within a social context.  If the "artworld" recognizes something as art, it is; thus, there is some determination as to what is art and it is not as "open" a concept as one originally might have been led to believe.  No individual by himself or herself (except, perhaps, a recognized artist) can simply designate something as art; it must be part of the language game a culture plays (and that means that certain rules of use are maintained).