1.4. Linking the Frankfurt School and other Critical Theories: Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams
One must also see the limits of Habermas’ theory. This book advances the argument that Habermas’ theory of communicative action is a dualist theory that separates the system from the lifeworld and thereby also work from communication. It in contrast argues for taking a dialectical cultural materialist position in order to elaborate some foundations of a dialectical critical theory of communication. In order to establish such foundations, I draw on two theoretical sources. On the one hand, I engage with Frankfurt School thinkers, who are often thought of as not having much to say on communication, but whose thought reveals interesting undercurrents that can be productively used and further developed in a dialectical critical theory of communication – Georg Lukács (especially his final book The Ontology of Social Being), Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Axel Honneth. On the other hand, I also draw on other critical social theories that standing in the Marxist tradition have contributed to critically theorizing culture, signification, information and communication: Lev Vygotsky’s activity theory, Valentin Vološinov’s Marxist philosophy of language, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s Marxist semiotics, and Raymond Williams Cultural Materialism.
None of these approaches has elaborated a systematic dialectical critical theory of communication, but we can build on certain elements of these thinkers and set them in a dialogue with Frankfurt School thinkers for grounding a dialectical cultural materialist position that allows us to think critically and dialectically about communication. I will do so by, on the one hand, theorising reification, knowledge, the relationship of the economy and culture, the relationship of work and communication, the relationship of labour and ideology in more general terms at the levels of society and capitalism, and by, on the other hand, applying these more general foundations to the concrete case of digital and social media in order to critically understand phenomena such as digital labour, online alienation, and social media ideologies.
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Critical Theory of Communication