Marcuse Technology

8/2/2019 Marcuse Technology

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L A N G U A G E A N D T E C H N O L O G I C A L S O C I E T Y

Herbert Marcuse

This article is taken from a forthcoming book dealing with theideology of advanced industrial society, to be published by BeaconPress.

Communication in and about daily performances, re-lationships, arrangements is ordinarily "non-controversial": it takesthings for granted. The world is established, and one has to put upwith it; the com mon projects and aspirations do not essentially questionit and do not go beyond it; they aim at rearrangements within it;the apophan tic* function of languag e is reactivated only in eme rgencysituations, when the normal state of affairs breaks or is being broken.But the extent to which the apophantic function remains alive in theevery-day universe of discourse is perhaps a token of the actual extentto which freedom of thought prevails in a given society. Freedom ofthought is freedom of speech also in the sense that the speaker iscapable of expressing and communicating ideas which contradict andtranscend the established meaning, and do so not by virtue of somepoetic or personal connotation, but by virtue of a soberly realistic andrealizable content. Such non-conformist expression and comm unicationpresuppose an open universe of discourse, in which the meaning ofthe key terms is not preempted by their reference to a specific set ofconditions, events, and relations. For example, "freedom of thoughtand speech" must be understood to mean, not only the constitutionalguarantee and the actual exercise of this liberty, but also the possibilityand a bility to think independe ntly, the con sciousness and the conscienceof the difference between individual and social needs and interests,between the hum an and the national purposein other w ords, the termmu st be understandable as containing the negation of its given content.The apophantic function of communication manifests itself inthe ability of language to convey, in its current usage, notions and imagesqualitatively different from those designating established conditionsand opportunities, to discover not only that which is but also the presenceof that w hich is not, to reveal the nega tivity of the positive. In the one- The term denotes a feature of an essentially pre-technological consciousness whichis discussed in a preceding chapter of the book. The world is experienced not asthe neutral stuff of transformation and domination but as cosmos in its own truthand its own right. The modes of thought expressing this consciousness reveal anddemonstrate truth and falsehood, right and wrong as ontological conditions.66


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dime nsionality of advan ced techn ological civilization, this apophan ticfunction declines, and with the decline of the apophantic function,language tends to be appropriated by and adapted to the requirementsof the status quo. Language is literally m ade by corporate and nationalBusiness, by h ired researchers, entertainers, press agents, etc. The m oreblatantly production for profit demands manipulation of needs, themore obviously it depends on mass hypnosis and autosuggestion, themore vanishes the difference betw een the "ethics" of business and thoseof the racket, between selling and cheating, between promoting andpoisoning, between truth and lie, sense and non-sense. A s the rising ex-penditures for expanding and insuring business enter into the verystructure of the economy, theytogether with their moronic featuresand consequences becom e beneficial and rational. They help to pro-cure the comforts and luxuries, material and cultural, they embellishthe life of the whole. The economist justly comes to their defense:...uch of the criticism of the vast activity of selling and advertising inthe American economythat which concerns economics rather than taste orthe devastation of the countryside by billboardshas missed the point. . . .

Our proliferation of selling activity is the counterpart of comparative opulence.Much of it is inevitable with high levels of well-being. It may be waste butit is waste that exists because the community is too well off to care.An d the m ore the grow ing productivity of industrial civilization seem sto be capable of dispensing with this sort of rationality, the more vitalfor the status quo becomes its retention. Hegel's formula, which wasat least partly ironical when it was stated, now finds its adequate re-formulation:

Was unvernunftig ist, das ist wirklich;Und was wirklich ist, das ist unvernunftig.THE EVERY-DAY LANGUAGE of this state of affairs is of an infiniterichness and vitality. Slang and the colloquial have rarely been socreative as if the comm on man (or his anonymous spokesman) w ouldin this speech assert his humanity against the powers that be, as if the

rejection and the revolt, subdued in the political sphere, would burstout in the vocabulary that calls things by their names: headshrinkerand egghead, beat it and dig it, you are cooked and you are gone, etc.On the other side of the fence, ordinary language still is haunted bythe big words of higher culture: by the dignity of the individual andthe inalienable rights and the philosophy of dem ocracy, etc. However,the defense laboratories and the executive offices, the time keepers andmanagers, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlors (whichprovide the leaders with the appropriate make up) speak a differentlanguage, and for the time being they seem to have the last word.And from these centers of organization and manipulation, the wordis transmitted and incorporated into the com mon universe of discourseand behavior. The w ord thus transmitted is the word w hich orders and John K. Galbraith, A m erican Capitalism , p. 96.

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organizes, which induces people to do and to buy and to accept whatis offered, to identify themselves w ith the function they perform in theestablished society, to release all frustration in the (equally organizedand controlled) realm of leisure and relaxation. As a consequence, wholedimensions of communication atrophy, or they are ritualized. Thislanguage closes and seals the m eaning of w ords; it fixes not only theirvalue but also their function within a narrow framework of behavior,shutting off all transcendence. The elements of autonomy, discovery,evaluation recede before designation, imitation, repetition, acceptanc e;and communication is permeated with magic, authoritarian, and ritualelements. I shall presently try to indicate some of them and to showtheir interconnection. Common to them seems a trend toward func-tionalization of languageit may serve as a starting point for the dis-cussion.Functionalization of language is germane to the technological-scientific discourse. There, it means the rationalization of the voca-bulary through functional or operational terms. This is Stanley Gerr'sformulation of one of the "main features of our evolving scientificlanguage"; * Gerr derives his conception from the principle that "anoperation 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 mea sured; whichis to say, only w hen a d evice exists for measuring it."** It follows thata tool or instrument is "identical" with its partcular function, and that"no operation can be conceived apart from the mech anism with whichit is executed." Gerr sees the effect of this attitude on the language ofscience and technology in the "tendency to identify things and theirfunctions," or, linguistically, "to consider the nam es of things as beingindicative at the same time of their manner of functioning, and thename of properties and processes as symbolical of the apparatus usedto detect or produce them." f

THE QUESTION whether this extreme linguistic operationalismis characteristic of the contemporary language of science is of no re-levance in m y context; I use Gerr's exposition only in order to illustratethe decline of apophantic communication in the publicized languageof our day. It is one of its features that words and concepts tend tocoincide, or rather the concept tends to be absorbed by the word: theformer has no other content than that designated by the word inthe publicized and standardized usage, and the wo rd is expected to haveno other response than the publicized and standardized behavior (re-action). The word becom es cliche and, as cliche, governs the speech orthe writing; the communication thus precludes genuine developmentof meaning. To be sure, any language contains innumerable termswhich do not require development of their meaning, such as the terms" "Language and Science" in Philosophy of Science, April 1942, P. 151. loc. cit., p. 156 .t loc. cit.

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designating the objects and implements of daily life, visible nature,vital needs and wants. These terms are generally understood so thattheir mere appearance produces a response (linguistic or operational)adequate to the pragmatic context in which they are spoken.The situation is very different with respect to terms which denotecontents beyond this non-controversial context. The self-validating,strictly analytical propositions, which appear as the nodal points inthe pu blic universe of discourse, have their strictly no n-analytic, politi-cal connotation: they are like magic-ritual formulas which, hamm eredand re-hammered into the recipient's mind, produce the appropriateeffect of enclosing it within the circle of established conditions. Eastand West show the same tendencies. Thus, "freedom," "equality,""democracy," "peace" imply, analytically, a specific set of predicatesor attributes which occ ur invariably whe n the noun is spoken or w ritten.In the West, the appropriate predication is in such terms as free enter-prise, public opinion, adequate deterrents, popular elections, the in-dividual; in the East, it is in term s of rule by the w orkers and p easants,socialism, a bolition o f hostile classes, etc. O n either side, transgressionbeyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, al-though the mea ns of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishme ntare very different.In this universe of public discourse, speech move s in synonym s andtautologies, actually, it never mo ves towa rd the qualitative difference.The ana lytic structure insulates the governing nouns from the negationwh ich their concept in the synthetic proposition involves, for example,the negation of peace by the prevailing mode of peace, the negationof the individual by the prevailing mode of individuality, etc. In thissphere, to identify things with tneir function is to identify them withtheir function in their society, and if this identification affects theanimate things, men, it may be a highly restrictive and even destructiveprocedure: although it may have the merit of certainty, it may alsosucceed in arresting thought.

Ti-it ANALYTIC and functional structure of public discoursepoints up the new role of the cliche. As such, the cliche is one of theoldest ingredients of public, and, especially, of political language. Th etransformation of concepts into cliche spreads with the weakeningof the p olitical opposition in advanc ed industrial society: as alternativerealizations are being de feated or aband oned, the rem aining realizationis being stabilized and made immune against qualitative change. Andthe weakening of the opposition, which is not the result of terroristicregimes, constitutes the novel element. The great liberal ideas of themodern era have come to fruition in the improved conditions and ex-pectations of life the rest belongs to the past. As the material groundfor the further and alternative realization of these ideas is cut off bytheir present realization, as the political representation of qualitativechange succum bs, they lose the "excess" of me aning, the non-analyticalelement which would enable them to appear in synthetic propositions69


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and judgments. The ideas congeal to "self-sufficient" nouns, the con-creteness of which (their "functional" meaning) is the very token oftheir petrification.The prototype of this language is, of course, the advertisement.Here, the syntactical form of the proposition is the tautology perdictum: the advertised object is by definition the best, the most power-ful, the cheapest. Since the validation is the sale (and not the use),we are this side of logic. The terms are slogans, and the speech ispropagandadevoid of all apophantic function. In the last analysis,Business provides the closed operational context in which things (andpersons) are identified with their functionsthe instruments of de-struction as well as of production. One learns the meaning (= func-tion) of a new "nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile-firing submarine"when one hears that this almost "ultimate weapon," which is "openingthe door on a new era in national power, national power [sic!] forpeace," "carries a price tag of $120,000,000" (New York Times, Dec.31, 1959; and radio broadcast of the same date) . Novel are not thefacts (including the identification of peace with the function of pro-ducing for war) but their total commercialization and their total ef-fectiveness and acceptance.

FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE here reveals its magic element, whichis also its essentially political element. In politics as well as in busi-ness, it is methodically used for "establishing an image" which sticksto the mind and to the product and helps to sell the men and thegoods that offer themselves. Speech and writing are grouped around"impact lines" and "audience rousers" which convey the image. Thisimage may be "freedom" or "peace," or the nice "guy" or the "com-munist" or "Miss Rheingold," the reader or listener is expectedto associate (and does associate) with them a fixated structure ofinstitutions, attitudes, aspirations and to react in a fixated, specificmanner. This may not be explicitly indicated in writing or talkingthe result is the same. Such language is at one and the same time "in-timidation and glorification";* propositions tend to assume the formof suggestive commands; they are evocative rather than demonstrative;predication becomes prescriptionthe whole communication has ahypnotic character. It shows forth most clearly in the personalized lan-guage, which presents generally superimposed and standardized thingsand performances as "especially for you." It is your Congressman,your favorite stretch of highway, your favorite drug store, your cardealer, your newspaper; it is "brought to you," "made for you"; itinvites you, etc. The powerless individuals are constantly called uponto identify themselves with the goods, and the politicians incessantlysummon them to meet a challenge and to face an issue which is nottheirs. Roland Barthes, Le Degrd zero de L'ecriture, Paris, editions du Seuil, 1953, p. 33." See Leo Loewenthal, in Radio Research, ed. Lazarsfeld and Stanton, New York,1944, p. 543f.

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IN THE MOST ADVANCED SECTORS of functional and manipulat-ing communication, language expresses in truly striking constructionsthe totalitarian identification of person and function. Time magazinemay serve as an extreme example of this trend. Its use of the inflectionalgenitive makes individuals appear as mere appendices or properties oftheir place, their job. their employer or enterprise. They are introducedas Virginia's Byrd, U.S. Steel's Bough, Egypt's Nasser. A hyphenatedattributive construction creates a fixed syndrome:

Georgia's high-handed. low-browed governor . . . had the stage all set forone of his wild political rallies last week.The governor, his function, his physical features, and his politicalpractices are fused together into one indivisible and immutable struc-ture which, in its natural innocence and immediacy, overwhelms thereader's mind. The structure leaves no space for distinction, develop-ment, differentiation of meaning: it moves and lives only as a whole.If we would dissolve the structure into a series of narrative and de-monstrative predications, we would have to describe the governor,relate his career and his policy, follow the preparations for the rally;then, the equivocal identification of physical and political featureswould only he the result of preceding syntheses. 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 otherconnotations. Thus, a sentence like "the governor is a high-handed,low-browed politician ... " would link the individual features of thesubject with the general features of the class to which he belongsitwould point to a universal which is suppressed in the abridged construct.Use of the hvnhenized abridgment is widespread. For example,"brush-browed" Teller, the "father of the H-bomb," "bull-shoulderedmissileman von Braun," "science-military dinner"* and the "nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile-firing" submarine. Such constructions are,perhaps not accidentally, frequent in the "military-political" sphere.Terms designating quite different spheres or qualities are forced to-gether into a solid, unchangeable whole which literally sticks in themind. The effect is again a magic and hypnotic one: the abridgmentof elaboration, the freezing of qualitative differences produces sloganswell suited to cause the desirable effect: reconciliation of opposites,harmony of contradictions. Thus the loved and feared Father, thespender of life, generates the H-bomb for the annihilation of life;"science-military" joins the efforts to reduce anxiety and suffering withthe job of creating anxiety and suffering. Or, without hyphen, theFreedom Academy of cold war specialists,** and the "clean bomb"uniting irreconcilable opposites in a harmony of terror. People whospeak and accept such language seem to be immune to everythingandsusceptible to everything. The last three items quoted in The Nation, Feb. 22, 1958.A suggestion of Life magazine, as quoted in The Nation, August 20, 1960.

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THIS STYLE is of an overwhelming concreteness. The "thingidentified with its function" is more real than the thing distinguishedfrom its function, and the linguistic expression of this identification(in the functional substantive, and the abridged fusion of the sub-stantive with its attributes) creates a conc rete vocabu lary which cou n-teracts development of abstraction. Com pared with these constructions,the non-functional substantive, the noun-subject, and the demonstrativeand narrative predication are rather abstract forms; they express thetranscending universality of the concept, the "excess" of its intentover the term (word) in current usage; thus they retain the tension be-tween the particular and the genus, which is greatly attenuated in thefunctional co nstruction.According to the old philosophy of grammar, the noun is some-thing that "can enter into certain relationships,"* but is not identicalwith these relationships. Moreover, it rather remains what it is inand "against" these relationships; it is their "universal" subject andcenter: the propositional synthesis links the action (or state) with thesubject in such a manner that the subject remains the actor (orbearer) and thus remains distinguished from the state or function inwhich it happens to be. In saying: "lightning strikes," one "thinksnot merely of the striking lightning, but of the lightning itself whichstrikes," there is a subject which "passed into action."** The gram-ma tical form thus retains the dialectical distinction betwe en the subjectand its functions; the proposition contains the negation of the givenfact: it links that which is happening to the conditions which madeit happen, and allows the reader or listener to follow and reconstructthe development.

THE PETRIFIED CONCRETENESS which pervades the m anipulateduniverse of discourse may also be called a "misplaced concreteness"misplaced in so far as it is achieved at the expense of repressing thepast (and surpassed) factors which once made men and things whatthey are here and now, and which circumscribe the alternative pos-sibilities of human existence. To be sure, the effective and magicalimages may well evoke the past (as a candidate for office may evokethe 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 theyserve to obliterate the decisive difference: the boy who ground thehamburgers in his father's little shop now wants to rule one of thetwo m ost powerful countries of the wo rld, and neither Marx nor Leninis the determining historical antecedent of Khrushchev.

Functional language is an unhistorical language: the tendency toidentify things with their function destroys the m eta-physical gramm arwhich ha d linked noun-subject-substance-essence, linked in such a m an-* W. v. Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, re-print Berlin 1936, p. 254.' loc cit., p. 252.

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ner that the essence was the permanent First Principle. Ground, andReason of the entire structure. This metaphysics offended against theformalization of logic and grammar, not least by introducing into thesedisciplines the dimension of Time: the "essence" appeared not onlyas the permanent structural but also as the permanent historical apriori of the subject.In contrast, technological rationality is unhistorical rationality,and as such it may well serve the interests of manipulation, especiallyin a society which has been made aware of the subversive content ofreleased memory, and of the technique of rationalising these contents.It may not he altogether fantastic to associate the renression of de-velopment in the fnnctionalized universe of discourse with social repres-sion. With its ahrido-ments and closures of meaning, with its efficientreifications. this universe joins the great social struggle against thedangers of Remembrance:Das "S-hrerkhild einer Menschheit ohne Erinnernng . . . ist kein blossesVerfallsprodnkt...ondern es ist mit der Fortschrittlichkeit des biirgerlichenPrinzips notwendie verkniipft." (Industrial production can increasingly dis-pense with accumulated experiencel: "nekonomen und Sozinlogen vie WernerSnmhart and Max Weber haben this Prinzip des Traditionalismus den feudlalenGesellschaftsformen zueeordnet and das der Rationalitat den bOrgerlichen.Das sae-t aber nirht wenicer, als dass Erinnerung, Zeit Gedachtnis von derfortschreitenden birgerlichen Gesellschaft selber als eine Art irrationalerRest liquidiert wird.. . . '

THE PR ECEITN G nr c.uscTON aimed at identifying some of thewa ys in which the so cial and political controls characteristic of advancedtechnological civilization are translated into language. The latter notonly reflects these controls but becomes itself an instrument of controleven where (and precisely where) it does not transmit orders but in-formation, where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submissionbut freedom. This language controls by reducing the linguistic formsand symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction: itdenies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary which evokes a qualita-tivelv different dimension of thought and qualitatively different pos-sibilities of action. Thus the closed universe of discourse tends toparalyze the expression of the political negation, which demands anapophantic language in the strictest sense, truly a "langage de la con-naissance" (Roland Barthes): demonstration, insight into the processof mediation in which facts are made what they are, distinction betweenthe thing and its function, between the subject and its realizationin Th. W. Adorno, "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?," in Bericht fiberdie Erzieherkonferenz am 6. and 7. November in Wiesbaden; 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 bourgeoisprinciple. Industrial production can increasingly dispense with accumulated experi-ence. Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber haveattributed the principle of traditionalism to feudal society while reserving the prin-ciple of rationality to bourgeois society. This, however, implies nothing less thanthat progressing bourgeois society itself liquidates as an irrational remnant thefaculties of recollection, time and memory.

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short, the open universe of discourse in which the historical possibili-ties become explicable, in w hich the contradiction can find its adequatelinguistic and mental representation.This political language re flects most con spicuously the closing ofa political universe. For exam ple, a linguistic com parison betw een thespeeches of Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln on the one side, and their con-tempo rary successors or would-be successo rs on the other, could showthe petrification of concepts to cliches, of demonstrative to hypnoticpropositions; the substitution of magic-ritual images for synthetic de-velopment, etc. Since the substance is not in alternative issues whichwould make a qualitative difference, it comes to rest in the alterna-tive techniques of manipulation. This change is progress: the tech-nological reality cancels politics as a separate and independent func-tionpolitical problems become technical problems. But the perver-sion of the capabilities of technological reality reveals itself in thefact that the function of politics is joined with that of the entertain-ment and beauty parlor industrya fatally premature juncture. Whena candidate for the highest political office appears in the televisionshow of a popular comedian, he re-enacts the satyr-play after the an-cient tragedy. Finis tragoediaebut it is not so much the hero as thepeople who w ould make the ritual sacrifice.The transform ation of an open into a closed political universe alsocharacterizes the development of communist discourse from Marx toStalin. The Marxian language is a highly cognitive language even inthe manifestos: it argues, dem onstrates, examine s alternatives. In con-trast, the Stalinist language is no longer "discourse" at allit is self-validating enunciation. The explicatory function of discourse disap-pears, or rather, the syntactical form of e xplication serves to com mu ni-cate (and ve il) dictum, decision, comm and. Traditionally neutral terms(such as internationalism, cosmopolitanism) are made into tokens ofunquestionable rights or w rongs, and the definition becom es separationof Good from Evil. "There is no more any respite between denotationand judgment, and the closure of the language is complete since, inthe last analysis, a value is given as ex plication of another va lue." Thediscourse thus m oves in tautologies. It is no longer concerned with ex-plaining facts but with "presenting the real in prejudged form," withpronouncing cond em nations. For example, the objective content of theterm "deviationist" is "of a penal order." This kind of discourse func-tions "like a good conscience and serves to establish a fraudulous co-incidence between the origin of the fact and its most remote manifes-tation."* It seem s that these cha racteristics of the "Stalinist language"are not confined to terroristic communication; they appear also in thefree areas of advanced industrial society which tend toward total co-ordination.*** Roland Barthes, op. cit., pp. 37-40.* For West Germany, a similar tendency is revealed by the intensive studies under-taken in 1950-195 1 by the Institut fiir Sozialforschung, Fran kfurt/Main. See GruppenExperiment, ed. F. Pollock, especially the summ ary of "Aspekte der Sprache ," p. 545 f.

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