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🪵 The Threshold

Society's institutions constitute a real whole abstraction from which falsifies data.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, deepthinking, xref, definitional_content, trade, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@marcuse_one-dimensional_1964, loc. 692

2 min read

Society’s institutions constitute a real whole abstraction from which falsifies data.

Evidence

Society is indeed the whole which exercises its independent power over the individuals, and this Society is no unidentifiable “ghost.” It has its empirical hard core in the system of institutions, which are the established and frozen relationships among men. Abstraction from it falsifies the measurements, interrogations, and calculations—but falsifies them in a dimension which does not appear in the measurements, interrogations, and calculations, and which therefore does not conflict with them and does not disturb them. They retain their exactness, and are mystifying in their very exactness. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 692

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Definition of the ‘Society’ as a real hypostatized whole with empirical hard core in institutions — the chapter’s key concept.
  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘they are mystifying in their very exactness’ — precision itself as the medium of ideology — is the chapter’s most paradigm-shifting inversion.
  • XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on attention/consumption: individual data points remain perfectly precise while abstracting from the institutionally structured whole that determines them. — connects to: Real society is a system that is abstract and non-organic in unification. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1171; Logical abstraction is simultaneously a sociological abstraction. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 528; Abstraction is the essential instrument for revealing structures invisible to direct observation — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 199

Broader Connections

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