--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" 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" library_document_id: "dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611" source_sha256: "2e02cbad6452f06df1ac7244516cd6cd361926b48645325215ff151a01db1008" pdf_physical_page_count: 236 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 110 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611?start=110&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611.md?start=110&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611.md?start=100&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611.md?start=120&limit=10" --- # Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=110 | PRINTED_PAGE=106 The dialectics just mentioned are all dialectics of identity and non-identity that operate in the constitution, reproduction, and transformation of knowledge. Each one of the poles of the dialectics exists only in itself as identity by relating to and grasping over into its other: the one is identical and non-identical with the other. Each one can only be itself by standing in a relation to an other. But the other is not just non-identical with the one because it is itself also a one that is an other for another one and therefore identical with itself and the other. In modern society, there is a dialectic of general social structures and structures of accumulation. In all class-based societies, we find conflicts of interests that are expressed in general social conflicts that include conflicts between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic knowledge. There is a general conflict between ideological/dominative knowledge and emancipatory knowledge. Often dominant actors have structural advantages in the definition of social knowledge. In class-based societies, it tends to be much harder to difuse critical, emancipatory knowledge throughout society than ideological, dominative knowledge. It is more likely that dominant classes and groups have ideological knowledge than emancipatory knowledge. There is however no mapping of class position onto forms of knowledge. Marx and Engels themselves came from bourgeois families, but created critical knowledge. There is also no guarantee that being part of a dominated group results in non-ideological knowledge, as the phenomenon of racism among a specific share of the traditional working class shows. Adorno, in his works, doesn’t just foreground the power of ideologies, he also stresses the importance that one can learn from Hegel’s antipositivist, dialectical language and thought how to criticise, deconstruct, and struggle against ideologies. Adorno’s works give us hope that instrumental knowledge that expresses partial interests is not the final word and can be changed by critique, which is the very process of the dialectic and dialectical knowledge. ‘Critique of society is critique of knowledge, and vice versa’ (Adorno 1998, 250). Notes 106 Critical Theory of Communication ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=111 | PRINTED_PAGE=107 Kindheit eigentlich mit der Frage beschäftigt: Was ist der Holocaust? Wozu sind die Menschen dort fähig gewesen? Aber wie konnten die Menschen auch weiterleben, die diese Greueltaten erleiden mussten?’ (https://soundcloud. com/mkwprojekt2012/umfrage-unter-den-teilnehmenden-warum-bin-ichhier, accessed on 5 March 2015). 3 See for example: https://70jahrenachauschwitz.wordpress.com/medien beitrage-2/ 4 http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/18cons01.html 5 Translation from German: ‘Stalinschen brutalen Manipulation’. 6 Translation from German: ‘die Stalinsche Ideologie es zustande gebracht hat, den Marxismus selbst zu verdinglichen’. 7 Translation from German: ‘Wichtig ist, daß in allen solchen Fällen Stalin von rein taktischen Erwägungen ausging und die theoretische Analyse der jeweiligen historischen Lage als bloße Propagandamittel für seinen bereits gefällten Beschluß gebrauchte’. 8 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negermusik 9 Data source: http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/subscriptions#SERIES+1, accessed on 20 March 2015. 10 Data source: http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/316345/umfrage/ einnahmen-der-salzburger-festspiele/, accessed on 20 March 2015. References Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge 107 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=112 | PRINTED_PAGE=108 108 Critical Theory of Communication ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=113 | PRINTED_PAGE=109 Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge 109 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=114 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=115 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Herbert Marcuse and Social Media Acknowledgement This chapter combines material from an article published in Radical Philosophy Review and section 2 from my chapter in the collected volume The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Herbert Marcuse and Social Media. Radical Philosophy Review 19 (1): 113–143. DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev20163950. See: https:// www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev Fuchs, Christian. 2017. Herbert Marcuse and Digital Media. In The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, ed. Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson and Peter N. Funke. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. See: http://www.temple.edu/tempress http://www.temple.edu/tempress/ titles/2382\_reg.html 4.1. Introduction Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (2014, 1) argue that ‘Herbert Marcuse synthesized Hegelian, Marxian and other currents of modern philosophy and modern philosophy in an attempt to reconstruct the Marxian theory in accordance with changes in the trajectory of modern culture, politics, and society’. Peter Marcuse (2014, 433) writes that his father’s achievement was that he analysed ‘political conflicts, economic conflicts, and cultural conflicts – and, quite centrally and profoundly, how these conflicts relate to each other’. Given the breadth and depth of Marcuse’s Marxist theory of society, it is rewarding to ask how it can help us to understand aspects of contemporary economy, politics and culture and their interconnections and how we can re-actualise Marcuse’s approach for this purpose. My own contribution has in this respect been to study inspired by Marcuse, Marx, Hegel and others the world of the Internet and digital media. CHAPTER 4 How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 111–152. London: Uni versity of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.d. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=116 | PRINTED_PAGE=112 4.1.1. Philosophy and Sociology of Technology During my time as a PhD student at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, I started teaching philosophy and sociology of technology to informatics students in 2000. I had read Marx and made his analysis of technology in capitalism a centrepiece of my lectures. I however wanted to complement Marx by a critical analysis of the role of technology in the twentieth century. Like most students interested in Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the Germanspeaking world, I had read Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. But I found their approaches did not suficiently engage with the relationship of technology and society. I had at this time only read a couple of Herbert Marcuse’s essays. In the German-speaking world, students interested in critical theory are not so much encouraged to engage with Marcuse and many scholars have the (false) idea that Marcuse only copied Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industrychapter and did not write much more than One-Dimensional Man. Facing the task of teaching Frankfurt School Critical Theory of technology, I discovered the importance of Marcuse’s works. I used parts of One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964b) and Marcuse’s (1941b) essay Some Social Implications of Modern Technology for teaching. Fascinated by Marcuse’s insights, I read more and more of his books and articles and thereby obtained a fuller picture of the breadth and depth of his critical theory. I was especially impressed by Reason and Revolution (Marcuse 1941a) because it opened up an interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical logic that was grounded in a dialectic of subjectivity/objectivity and chance/necessity and helped me to understand the importance of avoiding the twin traps of idealist subjectivism that neglects structural conditions of action and vulgar materialism that sees the world as being determined by natural laws. I wrote three books about the contemporaneity of Marcuse’s works: • Krise und Kritik in der Informationsgesellschaft. Arbeiten über Herbert Marcuse, kapitalistische Entwicklung und Selbstorganisation (Crisis and Criticism of the Information Society. Works on Herbert Marcuse, Capitalist Development and Self-Organisation, Fuchs 2002). • Emanzipation! Technik und Politik bei Herbert Marcuse (Emancipaton! Technology and Politics in the Works of Herbert Marcuse, Fuchs 2005a). • Herbert Marcuse interkulturell gelesen (Herbert Marcuse: An Intercultural Interpretation, Fuchs 2005b). These three works have not been much read because they have not been translated into English and there is much more interest in Adorno, Horkheimer and 112 Critical Theory of Communication ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=117 | PRINTED_PAGE=113 Habermas than Marcuse in the German-speaking world. Having established some conceptual foundations of a critical theory of technology, I moved on and started working on the foundations of a critical theory and a critique of the political economy of the Internet and the media, which resulted in books such as Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Fuchs 2008), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Fuchs 2011), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs 2014a), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (Fuchs 2014b), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Fuchs 2014c), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Fuchs 2015), Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on “Capital Volume I” (Fuchs 2016), as well as collected volumes such as Internet and Surveillance. The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (Fuchs, Boersma, Albrechtslund and Sandoval 2012), Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today (Fuchs and Mosco 2012, see also: Fuchs and Mosco 2016a, 2016b), Critique, Social Media and the Information Society (Fuchs and Sandoval 2014), Philosophers of the World Unite! Theorising Digital Labour and Virtual Work: Definitions, Forms and Transformations (Sandoval, Fuchs, Prodnik, Sevignani and Allmer 2014), Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Trottier and Fuchs 2014), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Fisher and Fuchs 2015). In the work on all of these books, Marcuse, Marx and Hegel’s concepts were tools of critical thought that helped me to understand the antagonisms of the media and communication in twenty-first-century capitalism. In addition to Marcuse, Marx and Hegel, I have especially made use of Dallas W. Smythe and Raymond Williams’ works for grounding foundations of a critical theory of the Internet and social media. In all these years, Marcuse was always there in my works and thinking and has been a crucial influence. 4.1.2. Social Media In this chapter, I reflect on how some of Marcuse’s theoretical thought can help us to critically understand what many today term ‘social media’. ‘Social media are Internet-based platforms such as blogs (e.g. Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, VK, Renren), user-generated content sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Youku), microblogs (e.g. Twitter, Weibo) and wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) (Fuchs 2014c). It is evident that all media are to a certain extent social because they reflect and transmogrify society in complex ways. The actual change that communication systems such as Facebook reflect is that the Internet has, since 2005, become more of a system of co-operative work and community formation than it was before (Fuchs 2014c). These media are social because they enable and are means of sharing, communication, community and collaboration. At the same time they are deeply embedded in capitalism’s commodity logic and therefore reflect individual private property, individualism and structures of exploitation and domination. Capitalist class relations that individualise these social media’s sociality limit the sociality of social media as means of informational production. This chapter focuses on some, but by far not all dimensions of Marcuse’s thoughts for reflecting on social media: the computer (section 2), dialectics (section 3), work and labour (section 4), ideology (section 5), and the dialectical logic of essence (section 6). Herbert Marcuse and Social Media 113 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=118 | PRINTED_PAGE=114 4.2. Herbert Marcuse and the Computer 4.2.1. The Computer as a Tool of Control, Domination and Exploitation Herbert Marcuse lived in a time that saw the rise of the computer and its increasing impacts on the economy, politics, culture and everyday life. Marcuse again and again reflected on the positive potentials and negative realities of the computer. Here are some examples. Marcuse on the one hand stressed the role of the computer as a tool of control, domination and exploitation. The formal rationality of capitalism celebrates its triumph in electronic computers, which calculate everything, no matter what the purpose, and which are put to use as mighty instruments of political manipulation, reliably calculating the chances of profit and loss, including the chance of the annihilation of the whole, with the consent of the likewise calculated and obedient population (Marcuse 1965, 224–225). 4.2.2. The Computer’s Dialectic He (on the other hand) identified liberating potentials of the computer writing that Marx: saw the possibility of reducing alienated labor already in capitalism, namely as a consequence of technical progress or, as we would say today, increasing automation, mechanization, computerization, whatever you want to call it. That, however, is only the anticipation, or the first traces, of the liberation of the human being from full-time alienated labor (Marcuse 1978, 220). So Marcuse saw the dialectic of modern technology (Marcuse 1941b, 1964b) also at play in computer technology: 114 Critical Theory of Communication ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=119 | PRINTED_PAGE=115 An electronic computer can serve equally a capitalist or socialist administration. […] in Marxian theory itself […] the social mode of production, not technics is the basic historical factor. However, when technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality – a “world” (Marcuse 1964b, 157–158). Marcuse, like Marx, considered the antagonism between class relations and productive forces to be at the heart of modern technologies such as the computer: the computer socialises the means of production and communication and is therefore a foundation of a better society. Its capitalist application turns it, however, into a tool for warfare, control, surveillance, advertising’s manipulation of needs, the creation of unemployment and new forms of precarious labour, etc. Marcuse did not think that one must simply abolish capitalism and can then use the same technologies in a socialist society. Rather, he felt that a qualitative change of society would have to come along with a qualitative change of technology: The technological transformation is at the same time political transformation, but the political change would turn into qualitative social change only to the degree to which it would alter the direction of technical progress – that is, develop a new technology. For the established technology has become an instrument of destructive politics (Marcuse 1964b, 232). The technology which the industrial societies have inherited and developed, and which rules our lives, is in its very roots a technology of domination. Consummation of technical progress therefore implies the determinate negation of this technology. […] The idea of qualitatively diferent forms of technological rationality belongs to a new historical project. (Marcuse 1962, 57). 4.2.3. The Computer and Freedom Marcuse argued that modern technology must in a truly free society be dialectically sublated (aufgehoben) – i.e. at the same time eliminated, preserved and lifted to a new qualitative level of existence: If the completion of the technological project involves a break with the prevailing technological rationality, the break in turn depends on the continued existence of the technical base itself. For it is this base which has rendered possible the satisfaction of needs and the reduction of toil – it remains the very base of all forms of human freedom. The qualitative change rather lies in the reconstruction of this base – that is, in its development with a view of diferent ends (Marcuse 1964b, 236). Herbert Marcuse and Social Media 115 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611.md?start=120&limit=10)