Jürgen Habermas has made important contributions for theorising communication, but his dualist idealisation of communication falls short of a dialectical critical theory of communication. It is therefore time to go beyond Habermas in critically theorising communication. This goal can be achieved by drawing on the diverse tradition of cultural Marxism in an open manner that is curious about less well-known texts, tries to connect thoughts from various authors, including the Frankfurt School and other versions of cultural Marxism, and relates to new developments in society and theory.
Notes
1 Sectors in the Forbes 2000 data included in the information sector for this calculation were: advertising, broadcasting, communications equipment, computer and electronic retail, computer hardware, computer services, computer storage devices, consumer electronics, electronics, Internet shopping and distribution, printing and publishing, semiconductors, software and programming, telecommunications.
2 The mobilities industry included for this calculation the following industries: car industry, railroad construction, transport, logistics, oil and gas, airlines.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred\_Sohn-Rethel
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean\_Baudrillard
5 See: Exchange, in: Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline. com/index.php?term=exchange (accessed on 12 December 2015).
6 Compare also the following formulations: ‘modern societies attain a level of system diferentiation at which increasingly autonomous organizations are connected with one another via delinguistified media of communication: these systemic mechanisms – for example, money – steer a social intercourse that has been largely disconnected from norms and values, above all in those subsystems of purposive rational economic and administrative action that, on Weber’s diagnosis, have become independent of their moral-political foundations’ (Habermas 1987, 154). ‘I have distinguished the steering media that replace language as a mechanism for coordinating action from the forms of generalized communication that merely simplify an overly complex nexus of communicative action, and that in doing so remain dependent on language and on a lifeworld, however rationalized’ (Habermas 1987, 277).
7 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst\_Holzer
8 ‘gesellschaftliche Produktion’ (translation from German)
9 Translation from German: Habermas ist ‘nicht imstande, die wesentliche Bestimmung der gesellschaftlichen Produktion zu erkennen: daß im Prozeß der Produktion eben nicht nur die Produktivkräfte entwickelt werden, sondern auch die gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen – eingeschlossen:
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