The Frankfurt School grounded these notions in Lukács’ concept of reification. In the Ontology, Lukács generalises his analysis of reification into a critical theory of society. The struggle for a human society is the struggle for a negation of class-based society’s negativity. It is the struggle for a society, in which humans’ teleological positing, i.e. human production, is a self-determined end-in-itself, not an instrument that benefits the dominant class and dominant groups. Such a society presupposes the abolishment of class, domination, exploitation, and toil. Lukács’ Ontology is not a substitution, but a dialectical sublation of History and Class Consciousness.
7.3. Theodor W. Adorno: The Dialectics of Knowledge
Theodor W. Adorno had already died when Lukács’ Ontology was published. For Adorno, the term ontology was associated with Heidegger’s philosophy that he saw as a fascist, racist and anti-dialectical theory. He argued against Heidegger’s ontology for a dialectical theory of society. He may have disapproved of Lukács’ use of the term ontology, but certainly both Adorno and Lukács were interested in the creation of a dialectical critical theory of society.
Adorno was not just a critic of the culture industry, but also a dialectical philosopher. He rejected a linear and mechanistic theory of knowledge, in which knowledge reflects and is determined by the outside world. In his studies on Hegel, Adorno provides a dialectical-realist alternative to such mechanistic reflection theories. All knowledge production is based on a dialectic of human subjects and an external objective environment (nature, society). In the same essays, Adorno also theorises communication. Language is, for Adorno, a dialectic of the individual’s naming and communication of an object. Adorno furthermore stresses the dialectic of structure and agency and the dialectic of the individual and the group in the production of knowledge.
Lukács’ Ontology and Williams’ Cultural Materialism help us to understand that modernity’s dualities such as culture/economy, communication/work, mind/body, ideology/labour, leisure/labour, consumption/production, private/ public, play/labour, society/nature, subject/object, etc. are not dual categories that are separate from each other or reducible to each other. In both readings, they are identical and non-identical at the same time: culture is part of the economy because there is cultural work, or what Lukács terms ‘mental work’ as a specific form of teleological positing, that creates cultural products. And culture is at the same time separate from the economy because cultural meanings take efect not just in the economy, but all over society.
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Critical Theory of Communication