• Language and communication are not innocent and pure, but are often also media and processes of control and power.
• Power and power struggles are not just limited to politics, but also take place in culture and the economy.
The point is then to construct a non-dualist theory of knowledge that does not separate work, communication, and power.
3.4. The Dialectics of Knowledge
3.4.1. Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism
We can draw on Habermas’ distinction that knowledge production is not confined to a single dimension of society, but can take place in all of society’s subsystems: the economy, politics, and culture. The economy is the system, in which humans create use-values that satisfy human needs. In the political system, humans make collective decisions on how to shape and regulate society. In the cultural system, they give meanings to the world that help them to define themselves (identity) and to make sense of the world (norms and worldviews relating to others and the world).
Raymond Williams’ approach of Cultural Materialism allows us to understand these three realms not as independent, but as simultaneously identical and non-identical, i.e. as a dialectic (see Fuchs 2015, chapter 2): knowledge work creates economic and non-economic social knowledge that satisfies the human need of information. Knowledge is a material dialectical process, in which humans connect their ideas to each other and create new knowledge structures. This production involves processes of work: social knowledge emerges from knowledge work, which is an economic process. All knowledge production is an economic process. Depending on the type and role of knowledge in society, knowledge does not need to be confined to the economy but can extend to society at large, i.e. also to politics and culture. Economic, political, and cultural knowledge have an economic dimension and a potential noneconomic dimension.
3.4.2. Adorno on Hegel, Knowledge and Work
Adorno (1963), in his first study of Hegel’s epistemology, discusses how Hegel relates knowledge and work and mental and non-mental work. He thereby makes an important contribution to the analysis of how the economy is related to knowledge production. Adorno (1963) stresses that for Hegel, the mind is active and producing (17). ‘The reference of the productive moment of spirit back to a universal subject rather than to an individual who labors is what defines labor as something organized, something social; its own “rationality”, the ordering of functions, is a social relationship’ (18). In the Phenomenology, Hegel would see mind as a form of work (21). ‘The path natural consciousness follows to the identity of absolute knowledge is itself work [“labor” in the original translation]. The relationship of spirit to what is given manifests itself on the model of a social process, a process of work [“labor” in the original translation]’ (21). Adorno argues that for Hegel the mind is a moment of social work, ‘the moment that is separate from physical work [“labor” in the original translation]’ (23). But physical work would also depend on nature: Work cannot ‘be conceived without the concept of nature, any more than can nature without’ work: ‘the two are distinct from and mediated by one another at the same time’ (23).
Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge
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