{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","uuid":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","normalized_title":"criticaltheoryofcommunicationnewreadingsoflukácsadornomarcusehonnethandhabermasintheageoftheinternet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","isbns":["9781911534044","9781911534051","9781911534068","9781911534075"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Critical%20Theory%20of%20Communication%20New%20Readings%20of%20Luk%C3%A1cs%2C%20Adorno%2C%20Marcuse%2C%20Honneth%20and%20Habermas%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20the%20Internet","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/search"},"page":{"printed_page":196,"pdf_page":200,"physical_index":200,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7d5a040e2dc9435ab21d3ddfddd4f23d5a413d03796dff68af95822f14a72fce"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"6.6.4. Niklas Luhmann’s Fetishism of Modern Media\n\nOne must be very careful to distinguish between anthropological and historical means of communication, especially in respect to symbolically generalised media. Money and markets are not eternal, but historical features of communication in societies that are based on exchange-value. Economic relations can also be organised as gifts and co-operatives instead of as exchange and markets. The institutions of liberal democracy are dominant in contemporary modernity, but are not co-extensive with and not the only means of political communication. Liberal democracy contains as the negative dialectic of its own enlightenment also totalitarian tendencies. There are specific historical forms of communication media’s organisation. Economic institutions organising production, distribution and consumption, political institutions organising decision-making, and cultural institutions organising collective meaning-production are the most fundamental symbolically generalised media of communication. Money, markets, parliaments, dictatorships, etc. are only specific historical expressions of these media. In class-based society, such structures and the practices they mediate are contradictory and contested. The problem of Luhmann’s theory of communication is that it is a theory of modern society that presents the structures of modernity as general structures characteristic for all societies.\n\nWe would like to call “symbolically generalized” the media that use generalizations to symbolize the nexus between selection and motivation, that is, represent it as a unity. Important examples are: truth, love, property/ money, power/law; and also, in rudimentary form, religious belief, art, and, today, standardized “basic values”. In all these cases this – in a very diferent way and for very diferent interactive constellations – is a matter of conditioning the selection of communication so that it also works as a means of motivation, that is, so that it can adequately secure acceptance of the proposed selection. […] Further discussion of this must be left to a theory of society, but the general theory of social systems and their communicative processes can serve to draw attention to the highly selective character of these functionally privileged modes of communication. Language, media of dissemination, and symbolically generalized communication media are thus evolutionary achievements that interdependently ground the processing of information and increase what can be produced by social communication. This is how society produces and reproduces itself as a social system (Luhmann 1995, 161–162).\n\nPower is, for Luhmann, a negative form of violence and domination. He speaks of money, power and religion in the context of a theory of generalised communication media and a general theory of social systems. He projects contemporary Western capitalist societies as models for all societies and thereby categorically eliminates theorising non-capitalist societies. He thereby also underestimates the contradictory character of modern society as advancing antagonistic potentials of domination (instrumentalisation) and co-operation. Luhmann’s theory is a fetishistic, uncritical theory of communication and society.\n\n196\n\nCritical Theory of Communication","previous_page":195,"next_page":197}