People can no longer unambiguously say yes or no.

Evidence

We used to be able to justifiably find fault with the fact that many people found it presumptuous to say ‘I’. This has taken on a new quality in that these people can no longer even unambiguously say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Today, ‘exactly’, ‘correct’, or ‘nope, not really’ sputters out of them. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1005

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the debate over Adorno’s pessimistic vs. continuing-critical reading; also resonates with the reader’s interest in revisionist scholarship. — connects to: Middle-class refusal actually states a truth that cannot now be spoken — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 166
• SHARE: Niche for anyone studying linguistic hedging and epistemic capture in late capitalism.