of book-keeping, administration, annual reports and balance sheets, important sessions and business trips, is set in motion to confer on commercial interests the semblance of a general necessity elicited from the depths. The self-induced motion of such office work is called research only because it has no serious influence on material production, still less goes beyond it as critique. In research the spirit of this world plays by itself, but in the way children play bus conductors, selling tickets that lead nowhere. The assertion of such spirit's employees that one day they will bring off their synthesis of theory and factual material, they just lack the time at present, is a foolish excuse that backfires on them in tacitly acknowledging the priority of practical obligations. The table-embroidered monographs could hardly ever, and then only in a sardonic mode, be elevated to theory by mediating mental operations. The endless collegial hunt, careering between the 'hypotheses' and 'proofs' of social science, is a wild-goose chase, since each of the supposed hypotheses, if inhabited by theoretical meaning at all, breaks through precisely the shaky façade of mere facticity, which in the demand for proofs prolongs itself as research. That music cannot be really experienced over the radio is, to be sure, a modest theoretical idea; but as translated into research, for instance by the proof that the enthusiastic listeners to certain serious music programmes cannot even recall the titles of the pieces they have consumed, yields the mere husk of the theory it claims to verify. Even if a group meeting all the statistical criteria knew all the titles, that would no more be evidence of the experience of music than, conversely, ignorance of the names in itself confirms its absence. The regression of hearing can only be deduced from the social tendency towards the consumption process as such, and identified in specific traits. It cannot be inferred from arbitrarily isolated and then quantified acts of consumption. To make them the measure of knowledge would be oneself to assume the extinction of experience, and to operate in an 'experience-free' way while trying to analyse the change of experience: a primitive vicious circle. As gauche miming of the exact sciences, beside whose results the social sciences seem paltry, research clings fearfully to the reified plaster cast of vital processes as a guarantee of correctness, whereas its only proper task -- one thereby improper to the methods of research -- would be to demonstrate the reification of the living through those methods' immanent contradiction.

Imaginative excesses -- Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive images of the proper society, of its members, even of

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