herbert marcuse on historical reason in the age of technical & managerial rationalization.
…operational rationality has little use for historical reason. Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of ‘mediation’ which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed.
— Herbert Marcuse (h/t Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s)