German authors who worked on the foundations of the Marxist political economy of communication. Wulf Hund (1976, 273) argues that traditional communication theories separate work and interaction and assume that ‘society is essentially constituted through communication’.15 ‘Just like any work, communication occurs always just as production’16 (163). Based on Rossi-Landi, Hund argues for a materialist theory of communication that analyses ‘the work character of communication’17 (271).
6.5.4. Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism
Raymond Williams18 (1921–1988) was a Welsh literary critic, cultural and communication theorist, and novelist. He developed the approach of Cultural Materialism and not just worked on British literature, but also on topics such as communications, television, everyday culture, the sociology of culture, political theory, ecology, language, etc.
In his later works, Raymond Williams advanced the insight that most critical theories are not ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92) because they separate culture and the economy (for a detailed discussion, see: Fuchs 2015, chapter 2). Culture understood as ‘language, ideas, values, beliefs, stories, discourses and so on’ is ‘itself material’ (McGuigan and Moran 2014, 176). Williams (1977, 78) argues that Marx opposed the ‘separation of “areas” of thought and activity’. He formulates as an important postulate of Cultural Materialism that ‘[c] ultural work and activity are not […] a superstructure’ (111). The importance of cultural labour in the information society would be one of the reasons why the separation of the economy and culture cannot be upheld:
Thus a major part of the whole modern labour process must be defined in terms which are not easily theoretically separable from the traditional ‘cultural’ activities. […] so many more workers are involved in the direct operations and activations of these systems that there are quite new social and social-class complexities (Williams 1981, 232).
Williams (1977) in Marxism and Literature’s chapter on language to a certain extent brings together insights from Vygotsky, Vološinov and Rossi-Landi. He argues that Vygotsky and Vološinov enabled a break with mechanic reflection theory in Marxist theory, ‘a new starting point’ (34) for ‘the way to a new kind of theory’ (35) by stressing language as social activity and creation. For both authors, signification would be ‘a practical material activity; it is indeed, literally, a means of production’ (38). Vygotsky and Vološinov have provided foundations for understanding language as dialectic of structural conditioning and productive agency. This becomes for example evident when Vološinov says that communication is a dialectic of introspection and utterance and a dialectic of refracted reflection and creativity. The exact relation between work and communication remains however unexplained in both approaches. Williams indicates that Rossi-Landi takes steps towards overcoming such limits (43).
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