the second marcuse post, in which the author employs a quotation.

"The unscientific, speculative character of critical theory derives from the specific character of its concepts, which designate and define the irrational, in the rational, the mystification in the reality."


It's quite true. It's just written in a really heavy jumble of fancy language that Marcuse doesn't feel inclined to define very often. The funny thing is that the copy I'm reading was scanned and OCR'd back in a time when scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) software didn't really do their jobs well. So the word "our" appears as "Dur", "all" as "an" or the surprisingly elite "a1l". Even the word "word" tends to turn into "ward". It's like a little demon has taken control of transmissions.

Incidentally, did Pynchon lift the phrase "project a world" from Marcuse? Seems a relatively unlikely pairing of concepts.

Also incidental: I started reading "A Very Short Introduction"'s "Philosophy of Science" alongside 1-d man, and it's actually helping a bit... if making Marcuse look like a boob on occasion.