Fredic Jameson on, respectively, Schiller, Breton & the Surrealists, Herbert Marcuse:
"..it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom, in three such profoundly different moments in history: its reinvention by the historian playwright, dreaming the heroic gestures of political eloquence in his tiny feudal city-state open to the fields, stimulated by the news of revolutionary victories there where in a few years the shock of Napoleanic armies will cause the earth to tremble; by the poet, stalking his magical fun-park for the neon omens of objective chance, behind the hallucinatory rebus of the street scene never ceasing to hear the pop gun volleys of the vicious, never ending military pacification of colonial empire; by the philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing - from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of the freeways and the ominous stape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, and as it were from beyond them, in the future - the almost extinct form of the utopian idea."
Well, it pleases me too, partly as a counter-truth to the ceaseless instrumentalisation of thought within academia, and the transformation of this last into a kind of corporate bureaucracy little different in kind from those other corporations which it mimics and prepares for at a formal level, despite whatever ostensibly radical contents it contains and continues to peddle. And it is perhaps worth adding, for those who dismiss Marcuse and his notion of the recuperation of critical thinking, that this has little to do with the range of opinions on offer per se; it is not the mere existence of a range of 'radical' perspectives but their function and structural position within the system, their transformation, for example, into fads, commodities, 'life-styles', or, precisely, into living illustrations of the impressive tolerance of modern liberal democracy.