Remarks on aesthetics and politics. Or, the tip of the Jean Seberg

I was having a discussion the other day, with a good friend of mine, M, on the topic of favourite films. I had told him of my new blog, and how I can list my favourite films in the profile section. I tried to explain why I enjoyed what is, I am told, one of Godard's least accomplished films (A Bout de Souffle). I should explain that my way of watching films is rather naive. Insofar as a movie entertains me, I consider it 'good'. Godard's mastery (of what, I don't know) aids my appreciation without a doubt, but I feel incapable, or at least disinclined, to analyse in any detail the impression a film has made on me.
Now, M has lately become interested in the notion of recuperation, whereby art, or anything which stands outside the capitalist value system, is subsumed under just this system, commodified and thus neutralised. (An ad coming soon to a TV near you: "Revolucion o muerte! As a Marxist revolutionary, I ask a lot of my soft-drink: that's why I prefer Sprite.")
His point is that anything which might be considered art, but which is easily consumed – in a comfortably pleasant way - is easily recuperable.
Marcuse has discussed this in some detail in his marvellous One-Dimensional Man, and it is clear that this is perhaps the main problem facing intellectuals in the near future. But what are we to say about the 'aesthetic' emotions elicited by popular entertainment? Can I explain away my surprisingly powerful responses to mediocre televisual stimuli by calling it a kind of nostalgia? Nostalgia for what: the good old days of ignorance?

Surely this whole issue cannot be reduced to the faintly ridiculous question of whether ignorance is bliss or not. We find ourselves asking whether Dostoyevsky is correct when he writes that "any consciousness at all is a sickness". Why mightn't we go further and say that any life at all is an illness? Because we raise the question of pessimism (whether it can be called weak or strong); one which I have no inclination to answer at the present moment.
At any rate, that question is a distraction from what concerns us here.

In essence, the problem that seems to haunt a commitment to resisting recuperation, is that of the (tacit?) acceptance of Mill’s hackneyed dictum: that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. In other words, the hierarchizing of pleasures.
Works which resist commodification are those which, almost literally, resist consumption. Marcuse acknowledges this when he objects to the sale of philosophy books in ‘drug-stores’.
However, thinking ahead, we find that a paradox is beginning to form: on the one hand, we must recognise that people are unfree, that they cannot think, because of the stultifying effects of total immersion in ‘popular culture’ – Hollywood movies, Big Brother, and even ‘high-brow’ papers like the Times. On the other hand, we find ourselves adopting an unusual sort of elitism. Art must resist consumption; the very condition of a man’s emancipation is at once that which must be denied him.

Say it ain’t so!