ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, the defining feature of humankind often becomes “symbolic activity,” a broader term encompassing any use of communicative means to represent one’s experience. This behavior can include painting, music, and overtly linguistic behaviors, such as writing and speaking. For Romantics, the alienation of human nature caused by modern civilization is evident in forms of technical labor, which reflects the bifurcation and incompleteness. The Romantic interpretation of affect seeks to overcome the modern bifurcation of sensibility and reason by recovering the “lost” affective dimension of human life. In a sense, art recalls a primordial experience of the objects that took place prior to man’s entry into civilization and the resulting bifurcation of his senses and intellect. For Herbert Marcuse, art cannot become part of the existing order of society without losing its critical function and exists primarily as a critique of the society aimed at creating “a new sensibility,” or a new way of thinking and feeling.
