Herbert Marcuse - Language Quotes

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Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes. They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply le bonheur.

Herbert Marcuse
The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

Herbert Marcuse
The closed language does not demonstrate and explain—it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes separation of good from evil; it establishes unquestionable

Herbert Marcuse
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Herbert Marcuse
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
Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. … This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception.

Herbert Marcuse
In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

Herbert Marcuse
This 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.

Herbert Marcuse
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

Herbert Marcuse