It is a subjection of oneself to self-scrutiny, but surely only painful or humiliating for those who stand to lose from finding that they are not so clever after all. — Grant

I rather like that.

I'd be interested in hearing more from you. What's the story in this transition? It doesn't have to be personal -- at the meat I'm most interested in the the reasoning (broadly understood) that went into this transition

I barely know anything about Marcuse. But for W. I think I could see a possibility for what the article is talking about ,even if I might disagree with the general thrust of the article, and even if I might be uncertain what that would entail or end up being, politically speaking. — Moliere

In my youth in the 1960's Marcuse was hot among student radicals, and I was one. He seemed to have an update on Marxist alienation that made contemporary sense.

Wittgenstein was a recently-dead fogey. I read the Tractatus then, actually, but read it for what it superficially is, 'The world is everything that is the case', and knew nothing about the later Wittgenstein, although I knew gossip about him being rude and misogynistic, and eccentric in his teaching methods (I was at the college he had been at).

Now I'm a near-elderly radical, and Marcuse seems a superficial man to me. I don't accept the 'one dimensional man' analysis any more. One example of his superficiality is that he confused Wittgenstein with the logical positivists, which makes me think he hadn't read any of the subsequent stuff, and had read the Tractatus as superficially as I.

Meanwhile I've become belatedly interested in reading philosophical works more than once, and Wittgenstein's painstaking approach, as outlined in the article you referenced, is my model. It seems to me the converse of what Marcuse thought it to be: it whittles away at philosophical problems, trying to understand what might be to do with language or grammar, and what is not amenable to such an approach. As such it deflates high-sounding pomposity without belittling anything serious.

As a side note, Wittgenstein's personal brand of politics is interestingly peculiar. He gave away a large fortune to his siblings, recommended many students to do 'a proper job' rather than become a philosopher, fretted all his life at the possibility of other careers, and flirted with going to the Soviet Union in the mid-30's though not himself a Marxist.

Wittgenstein pointed out that 'speaking' was 'action'. This may be obvious to us, but maybe the paradigm of his time failed to see that, and he needed to point it out (hence he made a noble attempt at elevating the deplorable mental state of his era).

What Wittgenstein failed to fathom was the role of words - the are mere tools to convey MENTAL IMAGES, which are the underlying goal.

Now consider all the situations where you do not need words - for example when showing someone a task - you can just say, "Now pay attention" and nothing further. Words may 'just get in the way' in this situation.

Words serve as a great 'archive' for communications - whether you are communication action instructions or ideas (possibilities); and even with 'instruction' you must, lacking accompanying pictures, form mental images of what the words are trying to convey.

An associated problem with words are 'emotions' - if you wish to suggest an emotion toward an object or issue (such as when the media is trying to subliminally brainwash you), you need to 'know the culture' - i.e. know which words convey which emotions for that culture.

So with words, you are really trying to convey mental images and emotions, which are the real issues. The term "Language Games" merely addresses (at best) the exploration of the effectiveness of words, which we may or may not need, based on the situation and the message to be conveyed.