Hegel would compel the reader to think dialectically and in a non-identical manner. Dialectical thinking in the way that Hegel and Adorno conceive it has the potential to deconstruct instrumentality and ideology by stressing nonidentity and the dialectic of identity and non-identity.
Knowledge as ideology is violent and repressive. This violence takes on diferent forms in the economy, politics, and culture (see table 3.3). In the knowledge economy, ideology operates as the fetishism of commodities that alienates humans from the immediate experience of the subject and the social by veiling the abstract, the subject, and the social behind objects, namely the money and commodities. Knowledge commons that transcend the commodity form of knowledge stand in a contradiction to knowledge commodities.
The digitisation of knowledge has taken this contradiction to a new level and has resulted in complex antagonisms between professional knowledge creators, consumers, citizen and amateur knowledge producers, the traditional media industries that sell content and access, and the openness industry that sells audiences and user data and provides open access to content. In the political world, ideological worldviews try to justify domination, whereas emancipatory worldviews challenge domination and struggle for participatory democracy. In the cultural world, ideological forms of culture are one-dimensional, do not significantly engage people, lack autonomy and therefore often represent partial interests of dominative groups.
3.4.11. Artistic Knowledge
In art, realistic art takes actual persons, societies, or times as their subject matter, whereas in experimental art there is an abstraction from actual reality. Abstract and experimental art is however according to Adorno not ideological, but tries to strengthen audiences’ imagination, which makes it anti-ideological. Realist and political art is not automatically ideological, but becomes ideological if it identifies itself with a particular ideology and dominative group. Artworks’ relation to social reality is complex and ranges from a continuum with realist art on one end and abstract art on the other. One must also bear in mind that there are diferent forms of art that foreground diferent senses in artistic knowledge: the literary arts (texts), the visual arts (visual objects), the performing arts (socially performed artworks), the digital arts, in which texts, the visual, and the social can converge. Art is economically non-autonomous if it is dependent on marketing, branding, advertising, and the commodity form to survive. It is politically non-autonomous if it is commissioned by dominative powers in order to glorify their power. This was for example the case with a lot of artworks in traditional empires, in which art served the purpose of displaying the power of religion and emperors.
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Critical Theory of Communication