4.3.6. Hegelian Dialectics and Communications
A critical theory of the media, communication, culture, technology, and the Internet requires a dialectical-philosophical foundation and therefore a renewed engagement not just with Marx, Marcuse and Lukács, but also Hegel (Fuchs 2014e). Hegel understands the dialectic in the Science of Logic as a process, in which a posited reflection-in-itself externalises itself into a negative other so that there is what Hegel calls external reflection. The determining reflection is ‘the unity of positing and external reflection’ (Hegel 2010, 351). The sublation of the contradiction between one thing and another thing determines the emergence of what Hegel terms ‘Gesetzsein’ (Hegel 1813– 1816/1969, 32) – the ‘posited’ (Hegel 2010, 351). Positedness is a reflectionin-and-for-itself:
It is positedness – negation which has however deflected the reference to another into itself, and negation which, equal to itself, is the unity of itself and its other, and only through this is an essentiality. It is, therefore, positedness, negation, but as reflection into itself it is at the same time the sublatedness of this positedness, infinite reference to itself.’ (Hegel 2010, 353).
But for Hegel, the sublation that is positedness repels itself in an absolute recoil so that it posits its own presuppositions and starts the dialectical process all over again (Fuchs 2014e). For Hegel, the world is dialectical and therefore dynamic and unfinished.
Marcuse, in his own magnum opus Reason and Revolution, showed how to best dialectically interpret Hegel’s dialectical laws of reflection in order to posit the dialectic of reflection-in-itself, reflection-in-another, and positedness as the dialectic of the subjective dialectic and the objective dialectic, in which the ‘negativity and its negation are two diferent phases of the same historical process, straddled by man’s historical action’ (Marcuse 1941a, 315).
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Critical Theory of Communication