{"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":78,"pdf_page":82,"physical_index":82,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3739bbc5e747b3935766d8dc5f69689052111bb321c15f8e3304a289c7d61fea"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"Adorno did not despise popular culture. He was for example a fan of Charlie Chaplin and pointed out the critical role of the clown in popular culture (Adorno 1996). Adorno admired and was a ‘fan’ of the clown of all clowns – Charlie Chaplin. ‘Presence of mind and omnipresence of mimetic ability also characterize the empirical Chaplin. […] Incessant and spontaneous change: in Chaplin, this is the utopia of an existence that would be free of the burden of being-one’s-self’ (Adorno 1996, 60). Adorno’s fondness of Chaplin, the figure of the clown, and the circus shows that he was not opposed to entertainment as such. He rather despised capitalism and therefore the commodity form.\n\nEven in the Culture Industry chapter of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the positive elements of popular culture are visible. For example when Adorno writes that ‘traces of something better persist in those features of the culture industry by which it resembles the circus’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 114).\n\n3.2.3. Was Adorno an Elitist Theorist?\n\nWas Adorno a cultural elitist who looked down on everyday people and the working class? Horkheimer and Adorno’s position was fundamentally shaped by the historical defeat of the German working class in Nazism and its support for Hitler. They asked themselves, how could history go so wrong? Given this experience, they also distrusted the assumption that what the mass of working people in Germany was doing and thinking after Auschwitz was automatically right. They distrusted the idealisation of the working class, stressed the role of ideology in everyday life, and argued for institutions and mechanisms that strengthen critical and reflective thought in society. They, however, never gave up on the idea of human emancipation, although they thought emancipation was quite unlikely in post-Nazi Germany. They saw anti-fascist education as a key political task so that Nazism’s history would not repeat itself.\n\nWas Adorno an elitist? In a class-based society, all philosophy and theory is to a certain extent elitist because it is based on a division of labour, where people employed at universities have much more time for intellectual engagement than everyday people. This situation has changed to a significant degree with the rise of precarious intellectual labour under neoliberalism. But certainly university-educated people and university employees have more time and capacities for intellectual engagement than others.\n\nSo as a tendency, critical theorists can aford much more time for the analysis of society than the everyday member of the working class. In a class-based society, critical theory is therefore necessarily privileged and because of its privileged use of time and spaces for critical thought, it is very likely to come up with profound analyses of class-based society’s contradictions. One can therefore not blame Adorno or any other critical theorist for the privileged role they have in the analysis of society, but should rather blame class-based society itself. All critical theory is privileged by necessity in a class-based society. The democratisation of the production of critique requires the abolition of class-based society and its replacement with a free association that replaces the division of labour by well-rounded human activities for all so that, as Marx said,\n\n78\n\nCritical Theory of Communication","previous_page":77,"next_page":79}