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# Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

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This chapter has tried to show that although Herbert Marcuse’s works predated Facebook, Twitter, Google and similar online platforms, his critical theory can today provide an epistemology, method and political impetus for understanding and changing capitalist social media’s antagonisms, class structures and ideologies.

The reality of social media in capitalism shows the ‘the tension between potentiality and actuality, between what man and things could be and what they are in fact’ (Marcuse 1937a, 69). Social media points towards, and forms together with other technologies, a material foundation of a democratic socialist society, in which the means of physical and informational production are collectively controlled. Social media’s reality contradicts this potential and the human essence of co-operation by fostering new forms of exploitation and ideology.

Critical theory is ethical. It has a ‘concern with human happiness’ (Marcuse 1937b, 135). It is a critique of domination and exploitation. It holds that ‘man can be more than a manipulable subject in the production process of class society’ (Marcuse 1937b, 153). Corporate social media fosters human play, sociality, fun and happiness in appearance only because it at the same time hides the reality of exploitation. It inverts the commodity fetishism so that the commodity logic is hidden behind social benefits that foster the exploitation of digital labour. At the same time, the use-value dimension of social media points towards commonist forms of ownership, control, democracy and communication and has anticipatory character. These commonist potentials are however limited by the capitalist reality of social media.

If, for instance, it is said that concepts such as wages, the value of labor, and entrepreneurial profit are only categories of manifestations behind which are hidden the ‘essential relations’ of the second set of concepts, it is also true that these essential relations represent the truth of the manifestations only insofar as the concepts which comprehend them already contain their own negation and transcendence – the image of a social organization without surplus value. All materialist conceptions contain an accusation and an imperative. When the imperative has been fulfilled, when practice has created men’s new social organization, the new essence of man appears in reality (Marcuse 1937a, 86).

The concept of social media is a manifestation of class-based society. It hides its own potential and ideologically presents the reality of the exploitation of digital labour as truth, play, fun, democracy, wealth, revolution, rebellion, and participation. Social media as a concept however also points towards its own unrealised essence – a truly social and co-operative society that can never be attained under capitalist rule and in a class-based society. The capitalist reality of social media contradicts its own essence.

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Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory was a dialectical theory in many respects. One of these dimensions was his focus on political praxis as dialectical struggle for democratic socialism and against capitalism. In the world of social media this means that we have not yet attained social media, but that there are potentials in the media and society today for achieving truly social media. Reading Herbert Marcuse today reminds us that truly social media and a true society are still possible and can be attained in and through social struggles.

Capitalist social media is one of the latest proofs of the continuation of exploitation and fetishism. It shows how much an alternative society is urgently needed. Just like always in capitalism and especially in the situation of capitalist crisis, we must today think about how to overcome heteronomy and replace it by a true democracy. Social media and society are not-yet truly social. For doing so, they need to overcome the particularisms that limit human life.

Herbert Marcuse’s theory is not just political in that it provided a politicaleconomic analysis of the repressive organisation of economy, politics and culture. It is also political because it deeply cares about political subjects and struggles and the way revolutionary subjectivity is articulated, constrained, repressed and withheld. Marcuse analysed and politically related especially to the working class movement, the student movement, feminism, the environmental movement, and the civil rights movement. At the end of his life, Marcuse summarised his assessment of political movements of his time by writing that movements ‘such as the worker opposition, citizens’ initiatives, communes, student protests, are authentic forms of rebellion determined by the particular social situation, counterblows against the centralization and totalization of the apparatus of domination’ (Marcuse 1979b, 414). Adding the ‘anti-authoritarian movement, the ecology movement, and the women’s movement’, he argued, that they are ‘the manifestation (still very unorganized and difuse) of an instinctual structure, the ground of a transformed consciousness which is shaking the domination of the performance principle and of alienated productivity’ (Marcuse 1979b, 411).

The capitalist crisis that started in 2008 conditioned new struggles and expressions of political subjectivity. These included especially far left, fascist and religious fundamentalist movements all over the world. In Europe, fascist and far right groups and parties have been growing in many countries, whereas the strengthening of the Left has had particular significance in southern Europe (e.g. Greece, Portugal, Spain) and has expressed itself in other parts of Europe in the form of anti-austerity, Occupy and student movements. A decisive political task is to weaken the far right forces and to strengthen the Left in order to fill the void that the convergence of social democracy and conservatives that is accompanied by a strengthening of the far right has created.

An often-discussed question has in this context been what role social media and the Internet play in new forms of political struggles all over the world (for overviews see Fuchs 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). The positions range from technoeuphoric celebrations that see new struggles such as the Arab Spring as revolutions 2.0 and Facebook or Twitter revolutions to outright neglect and denial of any media-dimension of contemporary protests (‘Protests take place on the streets and occupations on the square, not on the Internet’). A more nuanced dialectical position that can be backed up by empirical research (Fuchs 2014c) is that digital and social media are in contradictory dialectical ways connected to political movements: there is a contradiction between movements’ use of commercial and non-commercial social media and a dialectic of online and ofline communication, in which activists who are on the streets and in the squares use face-to-face communication and online media in mutually enhancing ways for protest information, communication and mobilisation (Fuchs 2014c). Commercial social media pose new potentials for protest mobilisation as well as new risks such as corporate and state surveillance and control of movements. The point is that we understand the contradictions these media entail and that we find institutionalised ways of support for alternative, critical, non-commercial and non-profit media with money, work, personnel, infrastructure, time and space. The task is to create critical, alternative media as counter-institutions, which requires ‘working against the established institutions, while working in them’ (Marcuse 1972, 55). This means specifically in the realm of social media that we need our own alternatives to Google, Facebook and Twitter that are controlled and run by users. Achieving this aim requires political and institutional reforms, support by left-wing parties, groups and governments, and media reforms. Radical reforms of the media system are urgently needed for this purpose (see Fuchs 2014d).

Herbert Marcuse and Social Media

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Notes

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References

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The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory of Reification and Alienation

5.1. Introduction

This chapter asks: what are the potentials of the concept of alienation/reification for a critical theory of society today? Can we hold on to Lukács’ grounding of the notion of alienation in Hegel’s dialectic of essence and existence in the contemporary world or do we have to drop such foundations? How can we understand alienation in the realm of the media?

The basic epistemological assumption underlying this chapter and other of my works (Fuchs 2008, 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2015) is that Internet research is predominantly a positivist science that lacks grounding in social theory and tends not to reflect on the Internet’s larger presuppositions in society. For grounding a social theory and a critical theory of the Internet, we therefore need to profoundly engage with and re-interpret contemporary critical theory approaches in order to reformulate them in such a way that basic concepts can be applied to the realm of digital media that shape and are shaped by contemporary society.

For providing answers to the questions this chapter asks, I first briefly revisit Lukács’ theory of reification and alienation that he set out in History and Class Consciousness (section 2). How to formulate the concept of alienation today has been vividly discussed in contemporary German critical theory. Hartmut Rosa, Rahel Jaeggi and Axel Honneth have made important contributions to this debate. I engage with their notions of alienation in sections 2 and 3. Hartmut Rosa has been professor of sociology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena since 2005. His main interest is the critical theory of modern society’s acceleration. Rahel Jaeggi was a PhD student of Axel Honneth at the University of Frankfurt.

CHAPTER 5

How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 153–175. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.e. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Her dissertation focused on the theory of alienation. She has been professor of philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin since 2009. Axel Honneth was a research assistant to Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt’s Institute of Social Research in the years 1983–19891 and obtained his habilitation with a work on the theory of recognition at the same university in 1990. Honneth became the director of the University of Frankfurt’s Institute of Social Research in 2001 and is Professor of Philosophy.

The Frankfurt School’s first generation, thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, was directly influenced by Lukács’ concept of reification. This notion had impact on Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of instrumental reason and Marcuse’s notion of technological rationality. Habermas as the main representative of the Frankfurt School’s second generation reinterpreted Lukács’ notion in his theory of communicative action as the colonisation of the lifeworld. Honneth is the key thinker in the Frankfurt School’s third generation, whereas Jaeggi and Rosa can be considered to be fourth generation critical theorists. The question arises how the third and fourth generation, the theoretical heirs of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas, understand alienation. I deal with this question in sections 2 and 3.

In section 4, I try to outline some foundations of a dialectical, materialist and Hegelian concept of alienation that is based on Honneth’s approach, but simultaneously quite substantially departs from it. In section 5, I use this approach for reflecting on alienation and the Internet with the help of the example of corporate social media.

5.2. Lukács’ Theory of Reification and Alienation

5.2.1. Objectification and Alienation

Georg Lukács (1971) argues in the preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class Consciousness that he wrote the book before publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and that the latter changed his view of this reification and alienation. It would be necessary to discern between objectification and alienation. The first would be part of any production process in any society: ‘If we bear in mind that every externalization of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear the we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men’ (Lukács 1971, xxiv).

The use of the term ‘commerce’ is unfortunate in the English translation. The German original says ‘Verkehr[s] der Menschen miteinander’ (Lukács 1967, 26), which can best be translated as ‘forms of intercourse among humans’, a term that has often been used in the English translation of Marx’s term ‘Verkehrsform’. Translating ‘Verkehr’ as ‘commerce’ creates the impression that Lukács reifies market societies, although his very thinking is anti-reifying.

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Alienation is for Lukács based on Marx’s chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital Volume 1, a form of objectification that takes on dominative and class character:

Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man’s nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective marks of an internal alienation (Lukács 1971, xxiv).

The commodity structure conceals ‘every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people’ so that ‘a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom objectivity”’ (Lukács 1971, 83). In the modern rationalisation of the labour process, there is a ‘mathematical analysis of work-processes’ so that qualities are reduced to quantities that ‘can be calculated’ (88). The measurement of labour time is decisive in this context. ‘The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of “ghostly objectivity” cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all object for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man’ (100). ‘Reification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange’ (91), which includes ‘the separation of the producer from his means of production’ (91), etc. Reification tries to eliminate qualities, dialectical logic, and non-instrumental action from the economy and society as a whole.

Authors in the newer generation of German critical theory, such as Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi and Hartmut Rosa, have revived Marx’s concept of alienation. Jaeggi and Rosa argue that there is no essence to which one needs to returns to and that is predetermined, but that in appropriation one creates the self and the world. They have problems with Lukács’ objectivist understanding of Marx and a notion of alienation that is grounded in Hegel’s dialectic of essence and existence. Honneth, in contrast, takes an approach more inspired by Hegel and Lukács that assumes that there is an essence of the human and social world that is important for a moral philosophy.

5.2.2. Hartmut Rosa and Rahel Jaeggi on Alienation

For Hartmut Rosa (2012, 300–323), acceleration results in contemporary modernity in a five-fold alienation from space, things, our own actions, time (e.g. lack of time), and social relations. The social theorist would not have to identify ‘true needs’, but to analyse disappointments of human expectations. ‘According to my analysis, we are not alienated from our true inner essence, but from our ability to appropriate the world in its spatial, temporal, social, practical and objective dimensions’2 (Rosa 2012, 322, translation from German).

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