From Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin’s (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna:

When Kraus called for a critique of language, as the crucial instrument of thought, he did so with a moral hatred for that slovenliness in thought and expression which is the enemy of individual integrity, and leaves one defenseless against the political deceptions of corrupt and hypocritical men. But Kraus’s one-man crusade to restore the honesty of social debate had wider implications also. Very soon it woke echoes in other fields of intellectual and artistic activity, and broadened into the demand for a critique of the means of expression used in all fields – for example, for a stripping-away of all that conventional and meaningless decoration with which sentimentality had encumbered the creative arts, so as to restore the expressive capacities they needed in order to fulfill their original and proper functions once again. How could any ‘medium’ be adequate to any ‘message’? How could anything whatever serve as a means of expressing or symbolizing anything else? All over the artistic and intellectual field, we find men taking up this same critique. In what sense if any could music (for example), or painting, or architecture, or everyday language, be regarded as a ‘representation,’ or Darstellung? And what alternative ‘symbolic function’ could it be said to have? All those issues which Marshall McLuhan has popularized in the last few years were debated with far greater seriousness and rigor in the Vienna of Kraus and Boltzmann, Loos and Schonberg.