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The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.

Herbert Marcuse

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Herbert Marcuse
Age: 81 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 19
Died: 1979
Died: July 29
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Berlin
Germany
Culture
Discourse
Political
Commercial
Many
Protest
Way
Opposites
Make
Communication
Characterizes
Expression
Unification
Style
Refusal
Ways
Immune

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Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.
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The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
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The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.
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Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
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The people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
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This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.
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The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification.
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Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
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The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
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The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
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Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
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Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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Precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt , it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt . It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.
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Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
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This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.
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In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.
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Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
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Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
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