Language And Technological Society
Marcuse, Herbert
This article is taken from a forthcoming book dealing with the ideology of advanced industrial society, to be published by Beacon Press. Communication in and about daily performances,...
...Communication in and about daily performances, relationships, arrangements is ordinarily "non-controversial": it takes things for granted...
...The transformation of concepts into cliche spreads with the weakening of the political opposition in advanced industrial society: as alternative realizations are being defeated or abandoned, the remaining realization is being stabilized and made immune against qualitative change...
...Lazarsfeld and Stanton, New York, 1944, p. 543f...
...THE PRECEITNG nr c.uscTON aimed at identifying some of the ways in which the social and political controls characteristic of advanced technological civilization are translated into language...
...This may not be explicitly indicated in writing or talking— the result is the same...
...in the East, it is in terms of rule by the workers and peasants, socialism, abolition of hostile classes, etc...
...In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies, actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference...
...This change is progress: the technological reality cancels politics as a separate and independent function— political problems become technical problems...
...To be sure, the effective and magical images may well evoke the past (as a candidate for office may evoke the grinding of good hamburgers in his father's little grocery shop, or the Founding Fathers, or, on the other side, Marx and Lenin), but such evocations amount to a suppression of history because they serve to obliterate the decisive difference: the boy who ground the hamburgers in his father's little shop now wants to rule one of the two most powerful countries of the world, and neither Marx nor Lenin is the determining historical antecedent of Khrushchev...
...this universe joins the great social struggle against the dangers of Remembrance: Das "S-hrerkhild einer Menschheit ohne Erinnernng . . . ist kein blosses Verfallsprodnkt...
...For example, a linguistic comparison between the speeches of Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln on the one side, and their contemporary successors or would-be successors on the other, could show the petrification of concepts to cliches, of demonstrative to hypnotic propositions...
...On either side, transgression beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different...
...The Marxian language is a highly cognitive language even in the manifestos: it argues, demonstrates, examines alternatives...
...their employer or enterprise...
...Hegel's formula, which was at least partly ironical when it was stated, now finds its adequate reformulation: Was unvernunftig ist, das ist wirklich...
...designating the objects and implements of daily life, visible nature, vital needs and wants...
...A hyphenated attributive construction creates a fixed syndrome: Georgia's high-handed...
...Gerr derives his conception from the principle that "an operation is acceptable to technological science only when a device (tool, mechanism, instrument, apparatus) exists for carrying it out, and a process or physical property only when it can be measured...
...THE EVERY-DAY LANGUAGE of this state of affairs is of an infinite richness and vitality...
...With its ahrido-ments and closures of meaning, with its efficient reifications...
...Time magazine may serve as an extreme example of this trend...
...In contrast, technological rationality is unhistorical rationality, and as such it may well serve the interests of manipulation, especially in a society which has been made aware of the subversive content of released memory, and of the technique of rationalising these contents...
...The situation is very different with respect to terms which denote contents beyond this non-controversial context...
...Slang and the colloquial have rarely been so creative—as if the common man (or his anonymous spokesman) would in this speech assert his humanity against the powers that be, as if the rejection and the revolt, subdued in the political sphere, would burst out in the vocabulary that calls things by their names: headshrinker and egghead, beat it and dig it, you are cooked and you are gone, etc...
...This language closes and seals the meaning of words...
...The effect is again a magic and hypnotic one: the abridgment of elaboration, the freezing of qualitative differences produces slogans well suited to cause the desirable effect: reconciliation of opposites, harmony of contradictions...
...Ti-it ANALYTIC and functional structure of public discourse points up the new role of the cliche...
...This kind of discourse functions "like a good conscience and serves to establish a fraudulous coincidence between the origin of the fact and its most remote manifestation...
...To be sure, any language contains innumerable terms which do not require development of their meaning, such as the terms " "Language and Science" in Philosophy of Science, April 1942, P. 151...
...Since the substance is not in alternative issues which would make a qualitative difference, it comes to rest in the alternative techniques of manipulation...
...the communication thus precludes genuine development of meaning...
...They are introduced as Virginia's Byrd, U.S...
...the substitution of magic-ritual images for synthetic development, etc...
...the common projects and aspirations do not essentially question it and do not go beyond it...
...low-browed governor . . . had the stage all set for one of his wild political rallies last week...
...it is "brought to you," "made for you...
...cit., pp...
...The world is experienced not as the neutral stuff of transformation and domination but as cosmos in its own truth and its own right...
...Or, without hyphen, the Freedom Academy of cold war specialists,** and the "clean bomb"— uniting irreconcilable opposites in a harmony of terror...
...Steel's Bough, Egypt's Nasser...
...Use of the hvnhenized abridgment is widespread...
...f THE QUESTION whether this extreme linguistic operationalism is characteristic of the contemporary language of science is of no relevance in my context...
...It is one of its features that words and concepts tend to coincide, or rather the concept tends to be absorbed by the word: the former has no other content than that designated by the word in the publicized and standardized usage, and the word is expected to have no other response than the publicized and standardized behavior (reaction...
...In doing so, however, we would not only require more time and space (which is expensive), but also change the intent of the statement, by making room for other connotations...
...The analytic structure insulates the governing nouns from the negation which their concept in the synthetic proposition involves, for example, the negation of peace by the prevailing mode of peace, the negation of the individual by the prevailing mode of individuality, etc...
...t loc...
...F. Pollock, especially the summary of "Aspekte der Sprache," p. 545 f...
...This image may be "freedom" or "peace," or the nice "guy" or the "communist" or "Miss Rheingold," the reader or listener is expected to associate (and does associate) with them a fixated structure of institutions, attitudes, aspirations and to react in a fixated, specific manner...
...The discourse thus moves in tautologies...
...THIS STYLE is of an overwhelming concreteness...
...FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE here reveals its magic element, which is also its essentially political element...
...The last three items quoted in The Nation, Feb...
...The modes of thought expressing this consciousness reveal and demonstrate truth and falsehood, right and wrong as ontological conditions...
...thus they retain the tension between the particular and the genus, which is greatly attenuated in the functional construction...
...Our proliferation of selling activity is the counterpart of comparative opulence...
...One learns the meaning (= function) of a new "nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile-firing submarine" when one hears that this almost "ultimate weapon," which is "opening the door on a new era in national power, national power [sic!] for peace," "carries a price tag of $120,000,000" (New York Times, Dec...
...Traditionally neutral terms (such as internationalism, cosmopolitanism) are made into tokens of unquestionable rights or wrongs, and the definition becomes separation of Good from Evil...
...The more blatantly production for profit demands manipulation of needs, the more obviously it depends on mass hypnosis and autosuggestion, the more vanishes the difference between the "ethics" of business and those of the racket, between selling and cheating, between promoting and poisoning, between truth and lie, sense and non-sense...
...As a consequence, whole dimensions of communication atrophy, or they are ritualized...
...It follows that a tool or instrument is "identical" with its partcular function, and that "no operation can be conceived apart from the mechanism with which it is executed...
...THE PETRIFIED CONCRETENESS which pervades the manipulated universe of discourse may also be called a "misplaced concreteness"— misplaced in so far as it is achieved at the expense of repressing the past (and surpassed) factors which once made men and things what they are here and now, and which circumscribe the alternative possibilities of human existence...
...These terms are generally understood so that their mere appearance produces a response (linguistic or operational) adequate to the pragmatic context in which they are spoken...
...dimensionality of advanced technological civilization, this apophantic function declines, and with the decline of the apophantic function, language tends to be appropriated by and adapted to the requirements of the status quo...
...they aim at rearrangements within it...
...As such, the cliche is one of the oldest ingredients of public, and, especially, of political language...
...Thus, a sentence like "the governor is a high-handed, low-browed politician...
...Ground, and Reason of the entire structure...
...would link the individual features of the subject with the general features of the class to which he belongs—it would point to a universal which is suppressed in the abridged construct...
...The word thus transmitted is the word which orders and • John K. Galbraith, American Capitalism, p. 96...
...But the perversion of the capabilities of technological reality reveals itself in the fact that the function of politics is joined with that of the entertainment and beauty parlor industry—a fatally premature juncture...
...cit., p. 156...
...Thus the loved and feared Father, the spender of life, generates the H-bomb for the annihilation of life...
...it is their "universal" subject and center: the propositional synthesis links the action (or state) with the subject in such a manner that the subject remains the actor (or bearer) and thus remains distinguished from the state or function in which it happens to be...
...they appear also in the free areas of advanced industrial society which tend toward total coordination.** * Roland Barthes, op...
...Freedom of thought is freedom of speech also in the sense that the speaker is capable of expressing and communicating ideas which contradict and transcend the established meaning, and do so not by virtue of some poetic or personal connotation, but by virtue of a soberly realistic and realizable content...
...This political language reflects most conspicuously the closing of a political universe...
...they express the transcending universality of the concept, the "excess" of its intent over the term (word) in current usage...
...As the material ground for the further and alternative realization of these ideas is cut off by their present realization, as the political representation of qualitative change succumbs, they lose the "excess" of meaning, the non-analytical element which would enable them to appear in synthetic propositions and judgments...
...If we would dissolve the structure into a series of narrative and demonstrative predications, we would have to describe the governor, relate his career and his policy, follow the preparations for the rally...
...loc cit., p. 252...
...The apophantic function of communication manifests itself in the ability of language to convey, in its current usage, notions and images qualitatively different from those designating established conditions and opportunities, to discover not only that which is but also the presence of that which is not, to reveal the negativity of the positive...
...Thus, "freedom," "equality," "democracy," "peace" imply, analytically, a specific set of predicates or attributes which occur invariably when the noun is spoken or written...
...It is your Congressman, your favorite stretch of highway, your favorite drug store, your car dealer, your newspaper...
...This metaphysics offended against the formalization of logic and grammar, not least by introducing into these disciplines the dimension of Time: the "essence" appeared not only as the permanent structural but also as the permanent historical a priori of the subject...
...Here, the syntactical form of the proposition is the tautology per dictum: the advertised object is by definition the best, the most powerful, the cheapest...
...22, 1958...
...For example, the objective content of the term "deviationist" is "of a penal order...
...The powerless individuals are constantly called upon to identify themselves with the goods, and the politicians incessantly summon them to meet a challenge and to face an issue which is not theirs...
...On the other side of the fence, ordinary language still is haunted by the big words of higher culture: by the dignity of the individual and the inalienable rights and the philosophy of democracy, etc...
...It shows forth most clearly in the personalized language, which presents generally superimposed and standardized things and performances as "especially for you...
...A suggestion of Life magazine, as quoted in The Nation, August 20, 1960...
...The self-validating, strictly analytical propositions, which appear as the nodal points in the public universe of discourse, have their strictly non-analytic, political connotation: they are like magic-ritual formulas which, hammered and re-hammered into the recipient's mind, produce the appropriate effect of enclosing it within the circle of established conditions...
...Common to them seems a trend toward functionalization of language—it may serve as a starting point for the discussion...
...ner that the essence was the permanent First Principle...
...In contrast, the Stalinist language is no longer "discourse" at all—it is selfvalidating enunciation...
...This article is taken from a forthcoming book dealing with the ideology of advanced industrial society, to be published by Beacon Press...
...and radio broadcast of the same date) . Novel are not the facts (including the identification of peace with the function of producing for war) but their total commercialization and their total effectiveness and acceptance...
...loc...
...IN THE MOST ADVANCED SECTORS of functional and manipulating communication, language expresses in truly striking constructions the totalitarian identification of person and function...
...much of the criticism of the vast activity of selling and advertising in the American economy—that which concerns economics rather than taste or the devastation of the countryside by billboards—has missed the point...
...Gerr sees the effect of this attitude on the language of science and technology in the "tendency to identify things and their functions," or, linguistically, "to consider the names of things as being indicative at the same time of their manner of functioning, and the name of properties and processes as symbolical of the apparatus used to detect or produce them...
...I use Gerr's exposition only in order to illustrate the decline of apophantic communication in the publicized language of our day...
...Das sae-t aber nirht wenicer, als dass Erinnerung, Zeit Gedachtnis von der fortschreitenden birgerlichen Gesellschaft selber als eine Art irrationaler Rest liquidiert wird...
...It may be waste but it is waste that exists because the community is too well off to care.• And the more the growing productivity of industrial civilization seems to be capable of dispensing with this sort of rationality, the more vital for the status quo becomes its retention...
...organizes, which induces people to do and to buy and to accept what is offered, to identify themselves with the function they perform in the established society, to release all frustration in the (equally organized and controlled) realm of leisure and relaxation...
...and communication is permeated with magic, authoritarian, and ritual elements...
...But the extent to which the apophantic function remains alive in the every-day universe of discourse is perhaps a token of the actual extent to which freedom of thought prevails in a given society...
...The explicatory function of discourse disappears, or rather, the syntactical form of explication serves to communicate (and veil) dictum, decision, command...
...There, it means the rationalization of the vocabulary through functional or operational terms...
...The transformation of an open into a closed political universe also characterizes the development of communist discourse from Marx to Stalin...
...which is to say, only when a device exists for measuring it...
...This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction: it denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary which evokes a qualitativelv different dimension of thought and qualitatively different possibilities of action...
...In saying: "lightning strikes," one "thinks not merely of the striking lightning, but of the lightning itself which strikes," there is a subject which "passed into action...
...The grammatical form thus retains the dialectical distinction between the subject and its functions...
...The structure leaves no space for distinction, development, differentiation of meaning: it moves and lives only as a whole...
...The latter not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an instrument of control even where (and precisely where) it does not transmit orders but information, where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom...
...Terms designating quite different spheres or qualities are forced together into a solid, unchangeable whole which literally sticks in the mind...
...Speech and writing are grouped around "impact lines" and "audience rousers" which convey the image...
...Compared with these constructions, the non-functional substantive, the noun-subject, and the demonstrative and narrative predication are rather abstract forms...
...It may not he altogether fantastic to associate the renression of development in the fnnctionalized universe of discourse with social repression...
...Roland Barthes, Le Degrd zero de L'ecriture, Paris, editions du Seuil, 1953, p. 33...
...Its use of the inflectional genitive makes individuals appear as mere appendices or properties of their place, their job...
...Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber have attributed the principle of traditionalism to feudal society while reserving the principle of rationality to bourgeois society...
...This, however, implies nothing less than that progressing bourgeois society itself liquidates as an irrational remnant the faculties of recollection, time and memory...
...As the rising expenditures for expanding and insuring business enter into the very structure of the economy, they—together with their moronic features and consequences—become beneficial and rational...
...However, the defense laboratories and the executive offices, the time keepers and managers, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlors (which provide the leaders with the appropriate make up) speak a different language, and for the time being they seem to have the last word...
...According to the old philosophy of grammar, the noun is something that "can enter into certain relationships,"* but is not identical with these relationships...
...The governor, his function, his physical features, and his political practices are fused together into one indivisible and immutable structure which, in its natural innocence and immediacy, overwhelms the reader's mind...
...In the last analysis, Business provides the closed operational context in which things (and persons) are identified with their functions—the instruments of destruction as well as of production...
...I shall presently try to indicate some of them and to show their interconnection...
...Frankfurt 1960, p. I4: The spectre of mankind without memory .. . is not a mere product of decadence . but is necessarily connected with the progressive development of the bourgeois principle...
...And the weakening of the opposition, which is not the result of terroristic regimes, constitutes the novel element...
...Such non-conformist expression and communication presuppose an open universe of discourse, in which the meaning of the key terms is not preempted by their reference to a specific set of conditions, events, and relations...
...East and West show the same tendencies...
...For West Germany, a similar tendency is revealed by the intensive studies undertaken in 1950-1951 by the Institut fiir Sozialforschung, Frankfurt/Main...
...then, the equivocal identification of physical and political features would only he the result of preceding syntheses...
...See Leo Loewenthal, in Radio Research, ed...
...Thus the closed universe of discourse tends to paralyze the expression of the political negation, which demands an apophantic language in the strictest sense, truly a "langage de la connaissance" (Roland Barthes): demonstration, insight into the process of mediation in which facts are made what they are, distinction between the thing and its function, between the subject and its realization—in • Th...
...The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing distinguished from its function, and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the functional substantive, and the abridged fusion of the substantive with its attributes) creates a concrete vocabulary which counteracts development of abstraction...
...it invites you, etc...
...37-40...
...science-military" joins the efforts to reduce anxiety and suffering with the job of creating anxiety and suffering...
...Finis tragoediae—but it is not so much the hero as the people who would make the ritual sacrifice...
...Industrial production can increasingly dispense with accumulated experience...
...The word becomes cliche and, as cliche, governs the speech or the writing...
...the proposition contains the negation of the given fact: it links that which is happening to the conditions which made it happen, and allows the reader or listener to follow and reconstruct the development...
...This is Stanley Gerr's formulation of one of the "main features of our evolving scientific language...
...It is no longer concerned with explaining facts but with "presenting the real in prejudged form," with pronouncing condemnations...
...It seems that these characteristics of the "Stalinist language" are not confined to terroristic communication...
...short, the open universe of discourse in which the historical possibilities become explicable, in which the contradiction can find its adequate linguistic and mental representation...
...Moreover, it rather remains what it is in and "against" these relationships...
...Functional language is an unhistorical language: the tendency to identify things with their function destroys the meta-physical grammar which had linked noun-subject-substance-essence, linked in such a man * W. v. Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, reprint Berlin 1936, p. 254...
...In the one • The term denotes a feature of an essentially pre-technological consciousness which is discussed in a preceding chapter of the book...
...And from these centers of organization and manipulation, the word is transmitted and incorporated into the common universe of discourse and behavior...
...Since the validation is the sale (and not the use), we are this side of logic...
...the apophantic* function of language is reactivated only in emergency situations, when the normal state of affairs breaks or is being broken...
...See Gruppen Experiment, ed...
...Und was wirklich ist, das ist unvernunftig...
...The economist justly comes to their defense...
...The elements of autonomy, discovery, evaluation recede before designation, imitation, repetition, acceptance...
...For example, "brush-browed" Teller, the "father of the H-bomb," "bull-shouldered missileman von Braun," "science-military dinner"* and the "nuclearpowered, ballistic-missile-firing" submarine...
...31, 1959...
...In this sphere, to identify things with tneir function is to identify them with their function in their society, and if this identification affects the animate things, men, it may be a highly restrictive and even destructive procedure: although it may have the merit of certainty, it may also succeed in arresting thought...
...they are evocative rather than demonstrative...
...Language is literally made by corporate and national Business, by hired researchers, entertainers, press agents, etc...
...For example, "freedom of thought and speech" must be understood to mean, not only the constitutional guarantee and the actual exercise of this liberty, but also the possibility and ability to think independently, the consciousness and the conscience of the difference between individual and social needs and interests, between the human and the national purpose—in other words, the term must be understandable as containing the negation of its given content...
...W. Adorno, "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?," in Bericht fiber die Erzieherkonferenz am 6. and 7. November in Wiesbaden...
...Industrial production can increasingly dispense with accumulated experiencel: "nekonomen und Sozinlogen vie Werner Snmhart and Max Weber haben this Prinzip des Traditionalismus den feudlalen Gesellschaftsformen zueeordnet and das der Rationalitat den bOrgerlichen...
...In politics as well as in business, it is methodically used for "establishing an image" which sticks to the mind and to the product and helps to sell the men and the goods that offer themselves...
...Such constructions are, perhaps not accidentally, frequent in the "military-political" sphere...
...predication becomes prescription—the whole communication has a hypnotic character...
...In the West, the appropriate predication is in such terms as free enterprise, public opinion, adequate deterrents, popular elections, the individual...
...Such language is at one and the same time "intimidation and glorification";* propositions tend to assume the form of suggestive commands...
...The ideas congeal to "self-sufficient" nouns, the concreteness of which (their "functional" meaning) is the very token of their petrification...
...Much of it is inevitable with high levels of well-being...
...Functionalization of language is germane to the technologicalscientific discourse...
...The world is established, and one has to put up with it...
...They help to procure the comforts and luxuries, material and cultural, they embellish the life of the whole...
...There is no more any respite between denotation and judgment, and the closure of the language is complete since, in the last analysis, a value is given as explication of another value...
...People who speak and accept such language seem to be immune to everything—and susceptible to everything...
...The prototype of this language is, of course, the advertisement...
...The terms are slogans, and the speech is propaganda—devoid of all apophantic function...
...The great liberal ideas of the modern era have come to fruition in the improved conditions and expectations of life—the rest belongs to the past...
...it fixes not only their value but also their function within a narrow framework of behavior, shutting off all transcendence...
...When a candidate for the highest political office appears in the television show of a popular comedian, he re-enacts the satyr-play after the ancient tragedy...
...sondern es ist mit der Fortschrittlichkeit des biirgerlichen Prinzips notwendie verkniipft...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
