Language as an Instrument of Control

A nice little piece on language by Marcuse in "One Dimensional Man."  (the photo to the left, is just a bit of language that caused me a bit of shock when entering Singapore) 

The excerpt below considers how we are constructed by our language...He's no E.B. White in terms of writing style. Still worth a tiny slog through-- it's sometime he work freedom requires, n'est ce pas?

"The ritual-authoritarian language spreads over the contemporary world, through democratic and non-democratic, capitalist and non-capitalist countries. According to Roland Barthes, it is the language "propres à tous les régimes d'authorité" and is there today, in the orbit of advanced industrial civilization, a society which  is not under an authoritarian regime? As the substance of various regimes no longer appears in alternative modes of life, it comes to rest in alternative techniques of manipulation and control. Language not only reflects these controls but becomes an instrument of control even where it does not transmit orders but information; where it demands, not obedience but choice, not submission but freedom.

This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood..." (pgs 102-103- 1992 Beacon edition)

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