The World Of Immediate Experience The World

The Strains And Stresses Suffered By The Individual In Society Are Grounded In The Normal Functioning Of That Society (and Of The Individual!) Rather Than In Its Disturbances And Diseases.

This Society Turns Everything It Touches Into A Potential Source Of Progress And Exploitation, Of Drudgery And Satisfaction, Of Freedom And Of Oppression.

Obscenity Is A Moral Concept In The Verbal Arsenal Of The Establishment, Which Abuses The Term By Applying It, Not To Expressions Of Its Own Morality But To Those Of Another.

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.

The Neo-conservative Critics Of Leftist Critics Of Mass Culture Ridicule The Protest Against Bach As Background Music In The Kitchen, Against Plato And Hegel, Shelley And Baudelaire, Marx And Freud In The Drugstore. Instead, They Insist On Recognition Of The Fact That The Classics Have Left The Mausoleum And Come To Life Again, That People Are Just So Much More Educated. True, But 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.