Books: One-dimensional man: chapter seven

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     control. Language not only reflects these controls but becomes itself an
     instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information;
     where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom.
+
+    [...]
+
+    What is taking place is a sweeping redefinition of thought itself, of its
+    function and content. The coordination of the individual with his society
+    reaches into those layers of the mind where the very concepts are elaborated
+    which are designed to comprehend the established reality. These concepts are
+    taken from the intellectual tradition and translated into operational terms—a
+    translation which has the effect of reducing the tension between thought and
+    reality by weakening the negative power of thought.
+
+### Science and technology of domination
+
+    The principles of modern science were a priori structured in such a way that
+    they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-propelling,
+    productive control; theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical
+    operationalism. The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective
+    domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the
+    instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of man by man through
+    the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral,
+    entered into the service of practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to
+    both. Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through
+    technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of
+    the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture.
+
+    In this universe, technology also provides the great rationalization of the
+    unfreedom of man and demonstrates the “technical” impossibility of being
+    autonomous, of determining one’s own life. For this unfreedom appears neither
+    as irrational nor as political, but rather as submission to the technical
+    apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of
+    labor. Technological rationality thus protects rather than cancels the
+    legitimacy of domination, and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a
+    rationally totalitarian society:
+
+        “One might call autocratic a philosophy of technics which takes the technical
+        whole as a place where machines are used to obtain power. The machine is only a
+        means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces
+        through a primary enslavement: The machine is a slave which serves to make
+        other slaves. Such a domineering and enslaving drive may go together with the
+        quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by
+        transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines; to rule over a
+        population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all
+        rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection.” Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode
+        d’existence des objets techniques (Paris, Aubier, 1958), p. 127.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political
+    content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued
+    servitude. The liberating force of technology—the instrumentalization of
+    things—turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of man.
+
+    [...]
+
+    No matter how one defines truth and objectivity, they remain related to the
+    human agents of theory and practice, and to their ability to comprehend and
+    change their world. This ability in turn depends on the extent to which matter
+    (whatever it may be) is recognized and understood as that which it is itself in
+    all particular forms. In these terms, contemporary science is of immensely
+    greater objective validity than its predecessors. One might even add that, at
+    present, the scientific method is the only method that can claim such validity;
+    the interplay of hypotheses and observable facts validates the hypotheses and
+    establishes the facts. The point which I am trying to make is that science, by
+    virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in
+    which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man—a
+    link which tends to be fatal to this universe as a whole. Nature,
+    scientifically comprehended and mastered, reappears in the technical apparatus
+    of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of the
+    individuals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus. Thus the
+    rational hierarchy merges with the social one. If this is the case, then the
+    change in the direction of progress, which might sever this fatal link, would
+    also affect the very structure of science—the scientific project. Its
+    hypotheses, without losing their rational character, would develop in an
+    essentially different experimental context (that of a pacified world);
+    consequently, science would arrive at essentially different concepts of nature
+    and establish essentially different facts. The rational society subverts the
+    idea of Reason.
+
+    I have pointed out that the elements of this subversion, the notions of another
+    rationality, were present in the history of thought from its beginning. The
+    ancient idea of a state where Being attains fulfillment, where the tension
+    between “is” and “ought” is resolved in the cycle of an eternal return,
+    partakes of the metaphysics of domination. But it also pertains to the
+    metaphysics of liberation—to the reconciliation of Logos and Eros. This idea
+    envisages the coming-to-rest of the repressive productivity of Reason, the end
+    of domination in gratification.
+
+    [...]
+
+    By way of summary, we may now try to identify more clearly the hidden subject
+    of scientific rationality and the hidden ends in its pure form. The scientific
+    concept of a universally controllable nature projected nature as endless
+    matter-in-function, the mere stuff of theory and practice. In this form, the
+    object-world entered the construction of a technological universe—a universe of
+    mental and physical instrumentalities, means in themselves. Thus it is a truly
+    “hypothetical” system, depending on a validating and verifying subject.
+
+    The processes of validation and verification may be purely theoretical ones,
+    but they never occur in a vacuum and they never terminate in a private,
+    individual mind. The hypothetical system of forms and functions becomes
+    dependent on another system—a pre-established universe of ends, in which and
+    for which it develops. What appeared extraneous, foreign to the theoretical
+    project, shows forth as part of its very structure (method and concepts); pure
+    objectivity reveals itself as object for a subjectivity which provides the
+    Telos, the ends. In the construction of the technological reality, there is no
+    such thing as a purely rational scientific order; the process of technological
+    rationality is a political process.
+
+    Only in the medium of technology, man and nature become fungible objects of
+    organization. The universal effectiveness and productivity of the apparatus
+    under which they are subsumed veil the particular interests that organize the
+    apparatus. In other words, technology has become the great vehicle of
+    reification—reification in its most mature and effective form. The social
+    position of the individual and his relation to others appear not only to be
+    determined by objective qualities and laws, but these qualities and laws seem
+    to lose their mysterious and uncontrollable character; they appear as
+    calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality. The world tends to
+    become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the
+    administrators. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and
+    this society is fatally entangled in it. And the transcending modes of thought
+    seem to transcend Reason itself.
+
+### Positive and Negative Thinking
+
+    In terms of the established universe, such contradicting modes of thought are
+    negative thinking. “The power of the negative” is the principle which governs
+    the development of concepts, and contradiction becomes the distinguishing
+    quality of Reason (Hegel). This quality of thought was not confined to a
+    certain type of rationalism; it was also a decisive element in the empiricist
+    tradition. Empiricism is not necessarily positive; its attitude to the
+    established reality depends on the particular dimension of experience which
+    functions as the source of knowledge and as the basic frame of reference. For
+    example, it seems that sensualism and materialism are per se negative toward a
+    society in which vital instinctual and material needs are unfulfilled. In
+    contrast, the empiricism of linguistic analysis moves within a framework which
+    does not allow such contradiction—the self-imposed restriction to the prevalent
+    behavioral universe makes for an intrinsically positive attitude. In spite of
+    the rigidly neutral approach of the philosopher, the pre-bound analysis
+    succumbs to the power of positive thinking.
+
+    Before trying to show this intrinsically ideological character of linguistic
+    analysis, I must attempt to justify my apparently arbitrary and derogatory play
+    with the terms “positive” and “positivism” by a brief comment on their origin.
+    Since its first usage, probably in the school of Saint-Simon, the term
+    “positivism” has encompassed (1) the validation of cognitive thought by
+    experience of facts; (2) the orientation of cognitive thought to the physical
+    sciences as a model of certainty and exactness; (3) the belief that progress in
+    knowledge depends on this orientation. Consequently, positivism is a struggle
+    against all metaphysics, transcendentalisms, and idealisms as obscurantist and
+    regressive modes of thought. To the degree to which the given reality is
+    scientifically comprehended and transformed, to the degree to which society
+    becomes industrial and technological, positivism finds in the society the
+    medium for the realization (and validation) of its concepts—harmony between
+    theory and practice, truth and facts. Philosophic thought turns into
+    affirmative thought; the philosophic critique criticizes within the societal
+    framework and stigmatizes non-positive notions as mere speculation, dreams or
+    fantasies.1
+
+    [...]
+
+    The contemporary effort to reduce the scope and the truth of philosophy is
+    tremendous, and the philosophers themselves proclaim the modesty and inefficacy
+    of philosophy. It leaves the established reality untouched; it abhors
+    transgression.
+
+    Austin’s contemptuous treatment of the alternatives to the common usage of
+    words, and his defamation of what we “think up in our armchairs of an
+    afternoon”; Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy “leaves everything as it
+    is”—such statements2 exhibit, to my mind, academic sado-masochism,
+    self-humiliation, and self-denunciation of the intellectual whose labor does
+    not issue in scientific, technical or like achievements. These affirmations of
+    modesty and dependence seem to recapture Hume’s mood of righteous contentment
+    with the limitations of reason which, once recognized and accepted, protect man
+    from useless mental adventures but leave him perfectly capable of orienting
+    himself in the given environment. However, when Hume debunked substances, he
+    fought a powerful ideology, while his successors today provide an intellectual
+    justification for that which society has long since accomplished—namely, the
+    defamation of alternative modes of thought which contradict the established
+    universe of discourse.
+
+### Language, philosophy and the restricted experience
+
+    The almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common is made
+    into a program: “if the words ‘language,’ ‘experience,’ ‘world,’ have a use, it
+    must be as humble a one as that of the words ‘table,’ ‘lamp,’ ‘door.’
+
+    [...]
+
+    The self-styled poverty of philosophy, committed with all its concepts to the
+    given state of affairs, distrusts the possibilities of a new experience.
+    Subjection to the rule of the established facts is total—only linguistic facts,
+    to be sure, but the society speaks in its language, and we are told to obey.
+    The prohibitions are severe and authoritarian: “Philosophy may in no way
+    interfere with the actual use of language.”9 “And we may not advance any kind
+    of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We
+    must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its
+    place.”10
+
+    One might ask what remains of philosophy? What remains of thinking,
+    intelligence, without anything hypothetical, without any explanation? However,
+    what is at stake is not the definition or the dignity of philosophy. It is
+    rather the chance of preserving and protecting the right, the need to think and
+    speak in terms other than those of common usage—terms which are meaningful,
+    rational, and valid precisely because they are other terms. What is involved is
+    the spread of a new ideology which undertakes to describe what is happening
+    (and meant) by eliminating the concepts capable of understanding what is
+    happening (and meant).
+
+    To begin with, an irreducible difference exists between the universe of
+    everyday thinking and language on the one side, and that of philosophic
+    thinking and language on the other. In normal circumstances, ordinary language
+    is indeed behavioral—a practical instrument. When somebody actually says “My
+    broom is in the corner,” he probably intends that somebody else who had
+    actually asked about the broom is going to take it or leave it there, is going
+    to be satisfied, or angry. In any case, the sentence has fulfilled its function
+    by causing a behavioral reaction: “the effect devours the cause; the end
+    absorbs the means.”11
+
+    In contrast, if, in a philosophic text or discourse, the word “substance,”
+    “idea,” “man,” “alienation” becomes the subject of a proposition, no such
+    transformation of meaning into a behavioral reaction takes place or is intended
+    to take place. The word remains, as it were, unfulfilled—except in thought,
+    where it may give rise to other thoughts. And through a long series of
+    mediations within a historical continuum, the proposition may help to form and
+    guide a practice. But the proposition remains unfulfilled even then—only the
+    hubris of absolute idealism asserts the thesis of a final identity between
+    thought and its object. The words with which philosophy is concerned can
+    therefore never have a use “as humble … as that of the words ‘table,’ ‘lamp,’
+    ‘door.’ ”
+
+    [...]
+
+    Viewed from this position, the examples of linguistic analysis quoted above
+    become questionable as valid objects of philosophic analysis. Can the most
+    exact and clarifying description of tasting something that may or may not taste
+    like pineapple ever contribute to philosophic cognition? [...] The object of
+    analysis, withdrawn from the larger and denser context in which the speaker
+    speaks and lives, is removed from the universal medium in which concepts are
+    formed and become words. What is this universal, larger context in which people
+    speak and act and which gives their speech its meaning—this context which does
+    not appear in the positivist analysis, which is a priori shut off by the
+    examples as well as by the analysis itself?
+
+    This larger context of experience, this real empirical world, today is still
+    that of the gas chambers and concentration camps, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of
+    American Cadillacs and German Mercedes, of the Pentagon and the Kremlin, of the
+    nuclear cities and the Chinese communes, of Cuba, of brainwashing and
+    massacres. But the real empirical world is also that in which all these things
+    are taken for granted or forgotten or repressed or unknown, in which people are
+    free. It is a world in which the broom in the corner or the taste of something
+    like pineapple are quite important, in which the daily toil and the daily
+    comforts are perhaps the only items that make up all experience. And this
+    second, restricted empirical universe is part of the first; the powers that
+    rule the first also shape the restricted experience.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Ordinary language in its “humble use” may indeed be of vital concern to
+    critical philosophic thought, but in the medium of this thought words lose
+    their plain humility and reveal that “hidden” something which is of no interest
+    to Wittgenstein. [...] Such an analysis uncovers the history13 in everyday
+    speech as a hidden dimension of meaning—the rule of society over its language.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Orienting itself on the reified universe of everyday discourse, and exposing
+    and clarifying this discourse in terms of this reified universe, the analysis
+    abstracts from the negative, from that which is alien and antagonistic and
+    cannot be understood in terms of the established usage. By classifying and
+    distinguishing meanings, and keeping them apart, it purges thought and speech
+    of contradictions, illusions, and transgressions. But the transgressions are
+    not those of “pure reason.” They are not metaphysical transgressions beyond the
+    limits of possible knowledge, they rather open a realm of knowledge beyond
+    common sense and formal logic.
+
+    In barring access to this realm, positivist philosophy sets up a
+    self-sufficient world of its own, closed and well protected against the
+    ingression of disturbing external factors. In this respect, it makes little
+    difference whether the validating context is that of mathematics, of logical
+    propositions, or of custom and usage. In one way or another, all possibly
+    meaningful predicates are prejudged. The prejudging judgment might be as broad
+    as the spoken English language, or the dictionary, or some other code or
+    convention. Once accepted, it constitutes an empirical a priori which cannot be
+    transcended.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The therapeutic character of the philosophic analysis is strongly emphasized—to
+    cure from illusions, deceptions, obscurities, unsolvable riddles, unanswerable
+    questions, from ghosts and spectres. Who is the patient? Apparently a certain
+    sort of intellectual, whose mind and language do not conform to the terms of
+    ordinary discourse. There is indeed a goodly portion of psychoanalysis in this
+    philosophy—analysis without Freud’s fundamental insight that the patient’s
+    trouble is rooted in a general sickness which cannot be cured by analytic
+    therapy. Or, in a sense, according to Freud, the patient’s disease is a protest
+    reaction against the sick world in which he lives. But the physician must
+    disregard the “moral” problem. He has to restore the patient’s health, to make
+    him capable of functioning normally in his world.
+
+    The philosopher is not a physician; his job is not to cure individuals but to
+    comprehend the world in which they live—to understand it in terms of what it
+    has done to man, and what it can do to man. For philosophy is (historically,
+    and its history is still valid) the contrary of what Wittgenstein made it out
+    to be when he proclaimed it as the renunciation of all theory, as the
+    undertaking that “leaves everything as it is.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    The neo-positivist critique still directs its main effort against metaphysical
+    notions, and it is motivated by a notion of exactness which is either that of
+    formal logic or empirical description. Whether exactness is sought in the
+    analytic purity of logic and mathematics, or in conformity with ordinary
+    language—on both poles of contemporary philosophy is the same rejection or
+    devaluation of those elements of thought and speech which transcend the
+    accepted system of validation. This hostility is most sweeping where it takes
+    the form of toleration—that is, where a certain truth value is granted to the
+    transcendent concepts in a separate dimension of meaning and significance
+    (poetic truth, metaphysical truth). For precisely the setting aside of a
+    special reservation in which thought and language are permitted to be
+    legitimately inexact, vague, and even contradictory is the most effective way
+    of protecting the normal universe of discourse from being seriously disturbed
+    by unfitting ideas. Whatever truth may be contained in literature is a “poetic”
+    truth, whatever truth may be contained in critical idealism is a “metaphysical”
+    truth—its validity, if any, commits neither ordinary discourse and behavior,
+    nor the philosophy adjusted to them.
+
+    This new form of the doctrine of the “double truth” sanctions a false
+    consciousness by denying the relevance of the transcendent language to the
+    universe of ordinary language, by proclaiming total non-interference. Whereas
+    the truth value of the former consists precisely in its relevance to and
+    interference with the latter.
+
+### Philosophy and science
+
+    This intellectual dissolution and even subversion of the given facts is the
+    historical task of philosophy and the philosophic dimension. Scientific method,
+    too, goes beyond the facts and even against the facts of immediate experience.
+    Scientific method develops in the tension between appearance and reality. The
+    mediation between the subject and object of thought, however, is essentially
+    different. In science, the medium is the observing, measuring, calculating,
+    experimenting subject divested of all other qualities; the abstract subject
+    projects and defines the abstract object.
+
+    In contrast, the objects of philosophic thought are related to a consciousness
+    for which the concrete qualities enter into the concepts and into their
+    interrelation. The philosophic concepts retain and explicate the pre-scientific
+    mediations (the work of everyday practice, of economic organization, of
+    political action) which have made the object-world that which it actually is—a
+    world in which all facts are events, occurrences in a historical continuum.
+
+    The separation of science from philosophy is itself a historical event.
+    Aristotelian physics was a part of philosophy and, as such, preparatory to the
+    “first science”—ontology. The Aristotelian concept of matter is distinguished
+    from the Galilean and post-Galilean not only in terms of different stages in
+    the development of scientific method (and in the discovery of different
+    ‘layers” of reality), but also, and perhaps primarily, in terms of different
+    historical projects, of a different historical enterprise which established a
+    different nature as well as society. Aristotelian physics becomes objectively
+    wrong with the new experience and apprehension of nature, with the historical
+    establishment of a new subject and object-world, and the falsification of
+    Aristotelian physics then extends backward into the past and surpassed
+    experience and apprehension.15
+
+### A funny paragraph
+
+    The neglect or the clearing up of this specific philosophic dimension has led
+    contemporary positivism to move in a synthetically impoverished world of
+    academic concreteness, and to create more illusory problems than it has
+    destroyed. Rarely has a philosophy exhibited a more tortuous esprit de sérieux
+    than that displayed in such analyses as the interpretation of Three Blind Mice
+    in a study of “Metaphysical and Ideographic Language,” with its discussion of
+    an “artificially constructed Triple principle-Blindness-Mousery asymmetric
+    sequence constructed according to the pure principles of ideography.”17
+
+    Perhaps this example is unfair. [...] Examples are skillfully held in balance
+    between seriousness and the joke
+
+[Three Blind Mice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice) is a crusty rhyme.
+
+### A suspect language
+
+    Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and
+    investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do
+    you mean when you say …? 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. We shall teach you to say what you have in
+    mind, to “come clear,” to “put your cards on the table.” Of course, we do not
+    impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you
+    like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us—in our
+    language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must
+    be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry—that is all
+    right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we can do so
+    only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of
+    ordinary language.
+
+    The poet might answer that indeed he wants his poetry to be understandable and
+    understood (that is why he writes it), but if what he says could be said in
+    terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.
+    He might say: Understanding of my poetry presupposes the collapse and
+    invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which
+    you want to translate it. My language can be learned like any other language
+    (in point of fact, it is also your own language), then it will appear that my
+    symbols, metaphors, etc. are not symbols, metaphors, etc. but mean exactly what
+    they say. Your tolerance is deceptive. In reserving for me a special niche of
+    meaning and significance, you grant me exemption from sanity and reason, but in
+    my view, the madhouse is somewhere else.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Under these circumstances, the spoken phrase is an expression of the individual
+    who speaks it, and of those who make him speak as he does, and of whatever
+    tension or contradiction may interrelate them. In speaking their own language,
+    people also speak the language of their masters, benefactors, advertisers. Thus
+    they do not only express themselves, their own knowledge, feelings, and
+    aspirations, but also something other than themselves. Describing “by
+    themselves” the political situation, either in their home town or in the
+    international scene, they (and “they” includes us, the intellectuals who know
+    it and criticize it) describe what “their” media of mass communication tell
+    them—and this merges with what they really think and see and feel.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But this situation disqualifies ordinary language from fulfilling the
+    validating function which it performs in analytic philosophy. “What people mean
+    when they say …” is related to what they don’t say. Or, what they mean cannot
+    be taken at face value—not because they lie, but because the universe of
+    thought and practice in which they live is a universe of manipulated
+    contradictions.
+
+### Metalanguage
+
+    Here the problem of “metalanguage” arises; the terms which analyze the meaning
+    of certain terms must be other than, or distinguishable from the latter. They
+    must be more and other than mere synonyms which still belong to the same
+    (immediate) universe of discourse. But if this metalanguage is really to break
+    through the totalitarian scope of the established universe of discourse, in
+    which the different dimensions of language are integrated and assimilated, it
+    must be capable of denoting the societal processes which have determined and
+    “closed” the established universe of discourse. Consequently, it cannot be a
+    technical metalanguage, constructed mainly with a view of semantic or logical
+    clarity. The desideratum is rather to make the established language itself
+    speak what it conceals or excludes, for what is to be revealed and denounced is
+    operative within the universe of ordinary discourse and action, and the
+    prevailing language contains the metalanguage.
+
+### Ordinary universe of discourse
+
+    The crimes against language, which appear in the style of the newspaper,
+    pertain to its political style. Syntax, grammar, and vocabulary become moral
+    and political acts. Or, the context may be an aesthetic and philosophic one:
+    literary criticism, an address before a learned society, or the like.
+
+    [...]
+
+    For such an analysis, the meaning of a term or form demands its development in
+    a multi-dimensional universe, where any expressed meaning partakes of several
+    interrelated, overlapping, and antagonistic “systems.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    in reality, we understand each other only through whole areas of
+    misunderstanding and contradiction. The real universe of ordinary language is
+    that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure
+    universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such
+    clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would
+    become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.
+
+    Philosophy approaches this goal to the degree to which it frees thought from
+    its enslavement by the established universe of discourse and behavior,
+    elucidates the negativity of the Establishment (its positive aspects are
+    abundantly publicized anyway) and projects its alternatives. To be sure,
+    philosophy contradicts and projects in thought only. It is ideology, and this
+    ideological character is the very fate of philosophy which no scientism and
+    positivism can overcome. Still, its ideological effort may be truly
+    therapeutic—to show reality as that which it really is, and to show that which
+    this reality prevents from being.
+
+    In the totalitarian era, the therapeutic task of philosophy would be a
+    political task, since the established universe of ordinary language tends to
+    coagulate into a totally manipulated and indoctrinated universe. Then politics
+    would appear in philosophy, not as a special discipline or object of analysis,
+    nor as a special political philosophy, but as the intent of its concepts to
+    comprehend the unmutilated reality. If linguistic analysis does not contribute
+    to such understanding; if, instead, it contributes to enclosing thought in the
+    circle of the mutilated universe of ordinary discourse, it is at best entirely
+    inconsequential. And, at worst, it is an escape into the non-controversial, the
+    unreal, into that which is only academically controversial.