Marcuse on the Hypnosis of Language Employed by Politicians and Business

"FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE here reveals its magic element, which is also its essentially political element. [...] Such language is at one and the same time 'intimidation and glorification'; propositions tend to assume the form of suggestive commands; they are evocative rather than demonstrative; prediction becomes prescription - the whole communication has a hypnotic character. [...] The powerless individuals are constantly called upon to identify themselves with the goods, and the politicians incessantly summon them to meet a challenge and to face an issue which is not theirs."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 70.

Marcuse on the Restrictions of Analytic Language

"On the other side, transgression beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different. In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies, actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference. The analytic structure insulates the governing nouns from the negation which their concept in the synthetic proposition involves [...] In this sphere, to identify things with their function is to identify them with their function in their society, and if this identification affects the animate things, men, it may be a highly restrictive and even destructive procedure: although it may have the merit of certainty, it may also succeed in arresting thought."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 69.

Marcuse on Language's use as a Authoritarian Organizer

"On the other side of the fence, ordinary language still is haunted by the big words of higher culture: by the dignity of the individual and the inalienable rights and the philosophy of democracy, etc. However, the defense laboratories and the executive offices, the time keepers and managers, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlors (which provide the leaders with the appropriate make up) speak a different language, and for the time being they seem to have the last word. And from these centers of organization and manipulation, the word is transmitted and incorporated into the common universe of discourse and behavior. The words thus transmitted is the word which orders and organizes, which induces people to do and to buy and to accept what is offered, to identify themselves with the function they perform in established society, to release all frustration in the (equally organized and controlled) realm of leisure and relaxation. As a consequence, whole dimensions of communication atrophy, or they are ritualized."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), pp. 67-68.

Marcuse on the Production of Language

"Language is literally made by corporate and national Business, by hired researchers, entertainers, press agents, etc. The more blatantly production for profit demands manipulation of needs, the more obviously it depends on mass hypnosis and autosuggestion, the more vanishes the difference between the 'ethics' of business and those of the racket, between selling and cheating, between promoting and poisoning, between truth and lie, sense and non-sense."

Herbert Marcuse, "Language and Technological Society" (Beacon Press), p. 67.

Brecht on Radio

"radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let listeners speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 52.

Brecht on Film and Capitalism

"What the film really demands is external action and not introspective psychology. Capitalism operates in this way by taking given needs on a massive scale, exorcizing them, organizing them and mechanizing them so as to revolutionize everything. Great areas of ideology are destroyed when capitalism concentrates on external action, dissolves everything into processes, abandons the hero as the vehicle for everything and mankind as the measure, and thereby smashes the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel."


Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 50.

Bertolt on the Pallatives that Distract us from Real Life

"The life imposed on us is too hard; it brings us too many agonies, disappointments, impossible tasks. In order to stand it we have to have some kind of palliative. There seems to be three classes of these: overpowering distractions, which allow us to find our sufferings unimportant, pseudo-satisfactions which reduce them and drugs which make us insensitive to them. The pseudo-satisfactions offered by art are illusions if compared with reality, but are none the less psychologically effective for that, thanks to the part played by the imagination in our inner life. (Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kulter, page 22.) Such drugs are sometimes responsible for the wastage of great energy which might have been applied to bettering the human lot."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 41.

Brecht on the Significance of the Open Exchange of Ideas

"Why the refusal to discuss? Answer: nothing can come of discussion. To discuss the present form of our society, or even of one of its least important parts, would lead inevitably and at once to an outright threat to our society's form as such."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 41.

Brecht Bashing Wagnerites

"Those composers who stem from Wagner still insist on posing as philosophers. A philosophy which is of no use to man or beast, and can only be disposed of as a means of sensual satisfaction."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 39.

Brecht on Innovating Opera's Social Function

"Once the context becomes, technically speaking, an independent component, to which text, music and setting 'adopt attitudes'; once illusion is sacrificed to free discussion, and once the spectator, instead of being enabled to have an experience, is forced as it were to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for the first time to affect the theatre's social function."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 39.

Brecht on the Relationship between Intellectuals and Business

"For a long time now they have taken the handiwork (music, writing, criticism, etc.) of intellectuals who share in their profits - that is, of men who are economically committed to the prevailing system but are socially near-proletarian - and processed it to make fodder for their public entertainment machine, judging it by their own standards and guiding it into their own channels; meanwhile the intellectuals themselves have gone on supposing that the whole business is concerned only with the presentation of their work, is a secondary process which has no influence over their work but merely wins influence for it. [...] Their output becomes a matter of delivering the goods."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 34.

Brecht on Der Flug der Lindberghs and the Radio

"Der Flug der Lindberghs is not intended to be of use to the present-day radio but to alter it. The increasing concentration of mechanical mean and the increasingly specialized training - tendencies that should be accelerated - call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer."

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 32.

Benjamin on Baudelaire

"Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. The semblance of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flâneur, had faded for him. To heighten the impression of the crowd's baseness, he envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcasts, would readily espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd - with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of the immediate experience to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience. He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience. He paid dearly for consenting to the disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry. This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as 'a star without atmosphere.'"

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 343.

Benjamin - Gaze and Aura

"Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us."

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 338

Benjamin - The Absence of Beauty in Technological Reproduction

"Insofar as art aims at the beautiful and, on however modest a scale, 'reproduces' it, it retrieves (as Faust does Helen) out of the depths of time. This does not happen in the case of technological reproduction. (The beautiful has no place in it.)"

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 338

Benjamin - Technology's Training of the Human Subject

"Whereas Poe's passers-by cast glances in all directions, seemingly without cause, today's pedestrians are obliged to look about them so that they can be aware of traffic signals. Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned shock was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film."

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 328.

Benjamin - War, Alienation, Annilhilation, and Aestheticization

"Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 270

Benjamin - War and the Uprising of Technology

"Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology, which demands repayment in 'human material' for the natural material society has denied it."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 270

Benjamin - War as an Organizing Force for the Masses

"All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest of scale while preserving traditional property relations."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 269.

Benjamin - Fascism, Property, Relations, and Aestheticization of Political Life

"Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strove to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses - but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping those relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 269.

Benjamin - Contemplation and Habit as Modes of Reception

"For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means - that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually - taking their cue from tactile reception - through habit."

"Reception in distraction - the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception - finds in film its true training ground. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of reception."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 268-269.

Benjamin - Scientific and Artistic Fucntions of Film

"Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses - these two dimensions having usually been separated until now - will be one of the revolutionary functions of film."

"It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 265-266.

Benjamin - Reproducibility led to the Disappearance of Art's seeming Autonomy

"The nineteenth-century dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting and photography seems misguided and confused today. But this does not diminish its importance, and may even underscore it. Insofar as the age of technological reproducibility separated art from its basis in cult, all semblance of art's autonomy disappeared forever."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 258.

Benjamin - The Reception of Art as either Cultic or Exhibitionistic

"With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase."

"In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image finds its last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 257-258.

Benjamin - the Demise of Ritual and Rise of Politics

"technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. [...] But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics."


Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 257.

Benjamin - Art and Ritual

"it is highly significant that the artwork's auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words: the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 256.

The Power of Persistence

This painting was created by Marc Chagall, who is sometimes referred to as the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century. He was not only a pioneer, but a synthesizer of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. His work largely influenced the rise of surrealism and expressionism. This work, "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel", is a powerful illustration of our emotional turmoil as we try to understand and wrestle with the divine, particularly in prayer.

Luke 18:1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ² He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³ In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” ⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ⁸ I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Sermon:

This morning’s parable is often paired with another, very similar, parable. That parable is about the Insistent Friend and can be found in Luke 11:5-13. Today’s is about the Stubborn Widow and both center around one of the meaning and power inherent to prayer. Yet, these two parables are also different from one another. The one we just heard is not just a story of knocking on a door waiting to receive something we need from a friend. It’s not a story about asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. No! There’s something far more pressing in today’s parable. It’s a parable about injustice, contrasts, and eschatological hope.[1]

This is a story about Torah.[2] The unjust judge that we hear about in this story embodies the misuse of the law that God gave Israel. He embodies the antithesis to God Himself and everything that God had taught the Israelites about fairness, justice, and the responsibilities a community has towards its weakest members. In 2 Chronicles God tells Israel, and us, what a judge should be:

“You judge not on behalf of human beings but on the Lord’s behalf… Now, let the fear of the Lord be upon you; take care what you do, for there is no perversion of justice with the Lord our God, or partiality, or taking of bribes.” (2 Chronicles 19:6-7)

Likewise, God embodies all that is opposite to what we hear about the judge in this story. As one commentary from the intertestamental period exhorts:

“Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it… for the Lord is the judge, and with him there is no partiality. […] He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan, or the widow when she pours out her complaint. Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek as she cries out against the one who causes them to fall?” (Sirach 35:14-19)[3]

In other words, God gets pissed off when the weakest among us are taken advantage of. In God’s Law we find that widows, orphans, and sojourners are placed under special protection – God goes out of His way to tell Israel that these people are to be treated well, precisely because they are weak. “In the patriarchal societies of the ancient world they were structurally the first victims of economic and social injustice and of legal maneuverings, and they were the objects of treachery and attempts at exploitation.”[4]

          In the parable that Jesus tells here, the widow is treated unjustly on two levels. First, she is victimized by a man who has exploited her economic insecurity. He is simply referred to in this parable as the “opponent.”[5] She tries, like most of us would, to get justice in the court system and goes before a judge. But, she becomes the victim of a second injustice – a judicial decision that has no regard for her rights. The parable tells us that the judge has repulsed her many times. As the parables tells us, the judge did not fear God. If he had, he would have given her justice on her first attempt.

          But this widow, who has been victimized, returns again and again to the judge – apparently becoming more objectionable every time she returns. So the judge finally relents and does justice for her, not because it is just, but because he wants to avoid trouble for himself.[6] The widow’s cries, then, become an example for us of how one might protest. “She resists injustice by drawing the judge’s attention to her rights, that is, to the Torah.”[7] She is obstinate and persistent precisely because she knows that God’s law is on her side. So on each occasion as she returns to court, seeking justice, she ups the ante by going one step further in violating social boundaries – she behaves loudly and aggressively in public, so much so that it seems to embarrass the judge and makes him eager to draw attention away from himself.[8] The judge’s internal conversation, that he has within his own mind, reflects this transgression of boundaries.

This is, in many ways, a story about the spotlight of attention. When injustices are laid bare before everyone’s eyes the unjust retreat and try to hide. They deflect attention away from themselves, before the public’s eye can see too deep, and incite the hand to crush those who seek inly to enrich themselves.

Many of us, here this morning, are wrestling with questions. We all have anxieties and fears, but some of us might have more than that sitting on our hearts. Some of us are wondering why we are still seeing children being crushed under the weight of bombs. Others might be wondering why we still see men and women alike thrown into the chains of sex trafficking and slavery.[9] Some of us might be wondering why some injustice happened to us; or, perhaps, why someone was so easily able to take advantage of our children or grandchildren without consequence. We all have a yearning for justice deep in our souls and those inclinations, those ideas about justice, that we have are often expressed in God’s Law – where he talks about these sorts of things.

This is why I put the Chagall painting on the back of today’s bulletin. It doesn’t correlate directly with today’s passage from scripture, but it does express the emotions that we might be wrapped up in when we try to make sense of our world. We are wrapped up in the deeply intense, reddish, emotions as we wrestle with our minds through prayer and doubt. Yet, we also encounter the tranquility and assurance of God that’s intrinsic to His nature. The sun, the represents God’s light, shines upon all things; and illuminates what God offers, even insofar as we can turn a reflection of God’s light – in terms of attention – upon the injustices of the world.

I want to conclude by having us reflect on the same questions that Jesus’ audience was reflecting on. Just prior to this parable, the Pharisees asked when the Kingdom of God will come. The disciples asked, “where” it will come.[10] Both audiences are longing for a rapid liberation from their pains – perhaps we are too. Yet, Jesus highlights the illusionary character of these questions. He tells them that now is the time for the Son of Man’s suffering, that the judgment of the world is not set for this time, but is instead something to follow this period, which is like the days of Noah before the Great Flood.[11] We often live short-sighted and violent lives (17:26-33) as though things will go on like this forever. But they will not go on like this forever. God will judge.

This parable is “an admonition to do what is necessary in this situation, in which so much violence is [our] experience.”[12] Our task is to pray and cry to God for justice, even if it means that we have to reflect His light and shine it upon the injustices of this world. Our time is a time of repentance because we are all disdaining God’s will for justice, which is expressed in His Law.[13] As the last verse of the parable suggests, fidelity to God has become rare.[14] The unjust judge is the image of everything that is diametrically opposite to God – including the structures of oppression from which the people to whom Jesus is speaking are suffering.[15]

This passage, along with Romans 8:15 and 26, suggests that the task of believers is to pray and cry out to God against injustice – to protest and place our trust in God. We are to cry out like women in labor, not giving up, but maintain the patient power of resistance that comes from hope in the nearness of God.[16] It’s a stubborn and persistent hope in the coming of God’s justice. May we emulate the widow and reflect the light of God, just as she did.

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[1] ‘Eschatology’ is any system of doctrines concerning last, or final, matters, as death, the Judgment, the future state, etc.

[2] ‘Torah’, or Pentateuch, is the central reference of the religious Judaic tradition. It is constituted by the first five books of the Bible.

[3] Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, was written between 200 and 175 BCE by the scribe Shimon ben Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira of Jerusalem. It is considered canonical by Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and most of the Oriental Orthodox. It is also included in many Protestant Lectionary readings, even though it is not considered canonical, but simply an important and instructive intertestamental text.

[4] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 191.

[5] Luke 18:3

[6] Luke 18:5

[7] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 192.

[8] Luke 18:7 can be understood in this way.

[9] There are approximately 30 million people still in slavery. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/modern-slavery_n_4124496.html

[10] Luke 17:37

[11] Luke 17:25

[12] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 193.

[13] Luke 18:9-14

[14] Luke 18:8

[15] Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), p. 193.

[16] Ibid.