ABSTRACT
Today’s novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “culture values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale. The earmark of practical sociological reasoning, wherever it occurs, is that it seeks to remedy the indexical properties of members’ talk and conduct. The culture of critical discourse (CCD) is the latent but mobilizable infrastructure of modern “technical” languages. It is characterized by speech that is relatively more situation-free, more context or field “independent.” This speech culture thus values expressly legislated meanings and devalues tacit, context-limited meanings.
