Fogarasi implicitly applies Lukács’ critique of reified consciousness to the capitalist press. In the capitalist press, the focus is often not on the dialectic of totality, particularity, and individuality, but merely on individual, isolated pieces of news. According to Fogarasi, strategies of the capitalist press include to report a multitude of isolated facts that shall quench the readers’ thirst for knowledge, de-politicisation, and sensationalism that work systematically in the service of distraction, and pseudoobjectivity. In contrast, the communist press tries to advance the consciousness of society as totality and of the relation of single events with each other and broader contexts, the unmasking of the capitalist press, and the participation of readers as producers of reports.
Fogarasi not just applied Lukács’ concepts of reification and the totality to journalism, but also in 1921 anticipated Benjamin’s (1934, 777) idea of turning “consumers […] into producers” and “readers or spectators into collaborators” as well as Brecht’s (1932, 42) idea of a radio that lets “the listener speak as well as hear”. Fogarasi’s essay also points out aspects of ideology in the media that resonate with Lukács notions of ideology and reified consciousness.
The next two sub-sections will show that Lukács’ analyses of news and journalism as reified consciousness remain topical in the contemporary age of the Internet, social media, and fake news.
The New Spirit of Capitalism
In contemporary capitalism, creative workers’ love of the content of their labour and the high degree of self-determination has become a new ideology that veils the fact that those, who can do what they love, often do so under precarious conditions. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) speak in this context of the “new spirit of capitalism”. The new spirit of capitalism is a management ideology that promises to workers to conduct labour that features “autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking (in contrast to the narrow specialization of the old division of labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experiences, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts” – qualities that “are taken directly from the repertoire of May 1968” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 97).
Chapter Three | History and Class Consciousness 2.0
89
Journalism and Reification