Functional language serves to coordinate and subordinate society

Evidence

If the linguistic behavior blocks conceptual development, if it militates against abstraction and mediation, if it surrenders to the immediate facts, it repels recognition of the factors behind the facts, and thus repels recognition of the facts, and of their historical content. In and for the society, 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, One-Dimensional Man, 404

Categorization

• XREF: This is the linguistic mechanism behind the book’s central claim; ties directly to attention-economy debates about how platform discourse shapes thought. — connects to: Utterance types function as rule-governed language games — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 139; Best practices diffuse across governance and business as a shared lingua franca. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 252; Humanity’s reciprocal gift to the world is language and story — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1276 (+2 more)