{"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":209,"pdf_page":213,"physical_index":213,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7a83ba337910ce86d1c7490703eaa67d699e5ceb9bc713a5a590dccf3621d392"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"So for both Marx and Lukács, humans are inherently active, creative, selfconscious, anticipatory social beings. Lukács implicitly distinguishes between physical and information work when he argues that one type of teleological positing produces changes of nature, the other changes of the social. He also uses the term mental work in the latter context.\n\nThere are also obvious parallels between Lukács’ Ontology and Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism. Williams stresses that all culture is material. He highlights the ‘material character of the production of a social and political order’ and describes the concept of the superstructure as an evasion (Williams 1977, 93). Williams (1977, 111) argues that ‘[c]ultural work and activity are not […] a superstructure’. Cultural Materialism sees ‘the complex unity of the elements’ required for the existence of culture: ideas, institutions, formations, distribution, technology, audiences, forms of communication and interpretation, worldviews (Williams 1977, 138–139). Williams stresses that especially the emergence of a significant share of information labour in the economy requires rethinking the separation of culture and the economy: The ‘productive forces of “mental labour” have, in themselves, an inescapable material and thus social history’ (Williams 1989, 211). ‘[I]nformation processes […] have become a qualitative part of economic organization’ (Williams 1981, 231).\n\nWilliams just like Lukács was interested in Marx’s question of what the materiality of culture is. Both implicitly reached the same answer, namely that social production is the unifying human activity that creates all use-values, including cultural ones such as ideas, artworks, entertainment, advertisements and ideologies. But whereas Williams lacked the elaboration of specific concepts that expressed this connection of culture and the economy, Lukács made Cultural Materialism more concrete with the help of the notion of teleological positing. Lukács stresses that mental work and ideology are not the same. He considers a subset of mental work as the labour of the ideologists that Marx speaks about that produce, reproduce and spread dominative ideas that justify class and domination.\n\nLukács is not just interested in a theory of teleological positing, but also in the forms that such human activity takes on in class-based society. And here he connects the Ontology back to the concepts of reification and alienation that he first introduced in History and Class Consciousness. In class-based societies, humans are instruments for the dominant class’ achievement of advantages, power and profit. Exploitation turns human labour-power into an instrument of class relations. Ideology tries to instrumentalise human thoughts by spreading ideas that justify exploitation and domination. Teleological positing thereby is not oriented on humanity as end-in-itself, but its means and ends are reversed: in class-based society, humans become means and instruments for the privileges of a dominant class. In class-based society, there is the dominance of what Max Horkheimer called ‘instrumental reason and what Herbert Marcuse described as ‘technological rationality’.\n\nConclusion\n\n209","previous_page":208,"next_page":210}