Technological/instrumental rationality in capitalism has a dual character. For Marx, the commodity and capital accumulation are based on the exploitation of labour power, it is the production and appropriation of surplus-value. Classbased society turns humans into instruments that in capital serve the dominant class’ need of capital accumulation. At the same time, the commodity has a specific aesthetic and subjective appearance: the labour involved in its production disappears behind the commodity and money form. One can only see a thing devoid of social relations. The social is hidden behind the commodity form that appears natural and endless. Ideology operates the same way: it naturalises domination and exploitation by presenting them as best option, essential, natural, and without alternatives.
4.5.2. Capitalist Media and Technological Rationality
Capitalist media are modes of reification and therefore expressions of instrumental/technological rationality in a dual sense. First, they reduce humans to the status of consumers of advertisements and commodities. Second, culture is in capitalism to a large degree connected to the commodity form: there are cultural commodities produced by cultural wage-workers that are bought by consumers and audience commodities that the media consumers become themselves by being sold as an audience to capitalist media’s advertising clients. Third, in order to reproduce its existence, capitalism has to present itself as the best possible (or only possible) system and makes use of the media in order to try to keep this message (in all its diferentiated forms) hegemonic. The first and the second dimension constitute the economic dimension of instrumental reason, the third dimension the ideological form of instrumental reason. Capitalist media are necessary means of advertising and commodification and spaces of ideology. Advertisement and cultural commodification make humans an instrument for economic profit accumulation. Ideology aims at instilling the belief in the system of capital and commodities into human subjectivity. The goal is that human thoughts and actions do not go beyond capitalism, do not question and revolt against this system and thereby play the role of instruments for the perpetuation of capitalism. It is of course an important question to what extent ideology is successful and to what degree it is questioned and resisted, but the crucial aspect about ideology is that it encompasses strategies and attempts to make human subjects instrumental in the reproduction of domination and exploitation.
132
Critical Theory of Communication