Not every reader will be familiar with all of the thinkers just mentioned: Lev Vygotsky’s, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams.
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)3 was a Marxist psychologist from Belarus. He developed a theory of activity, whose basic point is that human cognition and language are grounded in human activity. Valentin Vološinov4 (1895–1936) was a Russian linguist. He was interested in establishing foundations of the Marxist philosophy of language. Foundations of this approach have been formulated in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi5 (1921–1985) was an Italian Marxist semiotician. His main theoretical insight is that language and communication are not just semiotic production processes, but specific forms of work. Raymond Williams6 (1921–1988) was a Welsh literary critic, cultural and communication theorist, and novelist. He developed the approach of Cultural Materialism and worked not just on British literature, but also on topics such as communications, television, everyday culture, the sociology of culture, political theory, ecology, language, etc.
Vygotsky, Vološinov, Rossi-Landi and Williams share with the Frankfurt School not just the interest in critical dialectical thought, but also the application of the dialectic for critically understanding how the economy and culture are related. Discussing the relations between all of these approaches is therefore an interesting task for open cultural Marxism. It should also be stressed that the list of relevant thinkers is incomplete and that, in the spirit of an open Marxism the thoughts and writings of other Marxist thinkers should also be used in cultural Marxism today.
1.4.1. Raymond Williams and the Frankfurt School
Raymond Williams (1983) commented on Georg Lukács’ works, especially his later ideas on aesthetics. Williams describes these works as having ‘some remarkable resemblances to a familiar nineteenth-century idealism of art’ because of linking of works of art to ‘general human liberation’ (273). He also describes his own approach of Cultural Materialism as ‘a diametrically opposite answer to the questions which Lukács and other Marxists have posed’ (273). In his book Marxism and Literature, Williams (1977, 102) comments that Lukács’ theory of art faces the ‘danger of reducing this theory to art as the typification (representation, illustration) not of the dynamic process but of its (“known”) laws’.
Williams (1977, 98–99) also argues that, for the Frankfurt School, being and consciousness are mediated. ‘The Frankfurt School, with its special emphasis on art, undertook a sustained re-examination of “artistic production”, centred on the concept of “mediation”’ (Williams 1977, 53). It would see mediation as ‘a positive process in social reality, rather than a process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpretation’.
Introduction: Critical Theory of Communication
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