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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.

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
Organization
Rationality
Dialectical
Importance
Transcendent
Operational
Elements
Serves
Absorbs
Negative
Discourse
Behavioral
Language
Vehicle
Subordination
Reason
Vital
Coordination
Anti
Functional
Critical
Unified
Oppositional

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Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
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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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Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
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Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
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To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.
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Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
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By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
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Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.
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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
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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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A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).
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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.
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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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There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
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In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave.
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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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The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
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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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This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
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The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
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