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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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‘Teleological positing’ means that ideas are a guiding and goal-setting dimension of work so that culture is immanent in work itself. The human brain defines goals that are conditioned by economic and social needs and for realising them guides human activities. Culture however is not the same as the economy, but is a guiding feature of the economy that created by work goes beyond the economy and takes efect in the form of collective meanings all over society. Culture is simultaneously economic and non-economic.

For Lukács, consciousness is not reality, but a form of objectivity that reproduces reality (1978c, 26). ‘Ontologically, social being divides into two heterogeneous moments, […] being and its reflection in consciousness’ (26). Human consciousness was ‘called into being in work, for work, and by work’ (52). There is no photographic copying of reality in consciousness, but reflection is ‘conditioned by the posited goals’ and ‘the social reproduction of life, originally by work’ (27). Consciousness and work have at the same time a relationship of ‘linkage and autonomy’ (52). So consciousness alone is not behaviour and work, but a foundation of both. Consciousness has an important role in society because it ‘sets goals’, masters the human body, and allows a ‘distanced and critical’ relationship of the person to him-/herself and to others (109). ‘And the origin of this mastery lies undoubtedly in work’ (109).

All work and action has an aspect of consciousness. Before engaging in work and action, humans reflect on what they want to achieve and how. Ideas and material changes of the world are therefore not independent, but inherently connected (Lukács, 1986b, 297). Lukács criticises that theorists such as Georgi Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky, Max Adler, and Stalin have separated the economy from the world of ideas in a dualist manner (298–299). He in this discussion points to the fact that human thought is not work itself, but one of its necessary preconditions and parts. Reflection precedes and enables both physical work that creates physical goods and mental work that creates informational usevalues in society.

2.2.6. Cultural Work and Ideology

Lukács says that ideology is not the same as cultural work, but can emanate from it. In making this argument, he argues for a true dialectic of the culture and economy: on the one hand, he sees all culture and ideology produced by work, i.e. there is an economic foundation of cultural work. Culture and ideology also take on an emergent quality that goes beyond the economy so that the meanings cultural work produces take efect all over society. This explains why Lukács speaks of the identity and non-identity of work and culture.

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Mental work is, also as a moment of society’s division of labour, by no means identical to ideology. Their connection is therefore very deep: The result of any mental work can turn into ideology in certain social situations, society’s division of labour constantly creates situations in which such turns become necessary and permanent (Lukács 1986b, 427).5

2.2.7. The Emergence of Language

Lukács argues that communication already exists in higher animals for the purposes of ‘danger, food, sexual desire, etc.’ (1978c, 100). Human language and communication would arise out of economic necessity when humans are required to say something to each other in order to master the rising complexity of the organisation of production. So for example hunting requires co-operation because it is a complex process, for which co-ordination is necessary. ‘Its [co-operation’s] mere existence, albeit on a low level, results in the emergence of another key determination of social being from work, the precise communication of humans united in work: language’6 (Lukács, 1986b, 118). Language enables teleological positings that have the intention to ‘encourage other people to conduct a teleological positing that is desired by the predicating subject’7 (Lukács, 1986b, 119). Language develops with the development of work, cooperation, and the division of work (119).

Communication is based on the fact that the human is an ‘answering being’8 (Lukács, 1986b, 339). An answer, however, presupposes a question. Humans have the capacity to find answers posed by nature and to ask questions about nature, themselves, and society. We can therefore say in expanding Lukács’ thought that communication is based on a dialectic of questioning and answering, in which a question produces answers, which produces further questions, and so on.

2.2.8. The Spatio-Temporality of Communication

Words that form a language are abstractions and generalisations of reality (Lukács, 1986b, 346, 419). The description of a specific circumstance is concrete and therefore requires a complex linguistic combination of words (1986b, 346). Language enables the ‘distancing of the object from the subject’ (1978c, 100) and enables this distancing.

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In this way what is depicted by the verbal sign is separated from the objects it describes, and hence also from the subject uttering it, becoming the mental expression for an entire group of particular phenomena, so that it can be applied in a similar way in completely diferent contexts and by completely diferent subjects (100).

Human language allows the repetition and development of production processes in the same or diferent spaces at diferent times. Lukács, at a high level of theoretical abstraction, hints at the facts that the development of production technologies allows the spatio-temporal distancing of production, that the development of transport and distribution technologies enables the spatiotemporal distancing of distribution, and that the development of conservation and preservation technologies fosters the distancing of consumption. ‘In its further development, work constantly interposes whole series of mediations between man and the immediate goal which he is ultimately concerned to achieve. In this way, work gives rise to a diferentiation between immediate and more mediated goal positings’ (101–102).

The spatio-temporal distancing of production requires physical and linguistic technologies of production, distribution, and consumption. Communication is an important means of organising work and human activity in spacetime and over spatio-temporal distances. ‘The mental distancing of objects by language only makes the real distancing that thus arises communicable, making possible its establishment as the common possession of a society’ (102). The storage of information enables the organisation of the economy and society over spatio-temporal distances and across generations. Society’s development is therefore connected to the development of information technologies that store and distribute information about human social relations. They include, for example, human memory, tradition, myths, art, writing, lists, timetables, the book, libraries, archives, schools, universities, newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, cinema, the database, computers, computer-mediated communication, the Internet, records, tapes, CDs, DVDs, Bluray discs, digital hard disks, servers, FTP, cloud storage, etc. (see Fuchs, 2003).

Language is a complex in society that mediates both the human metabolism with nature as well as the relations between humans in society (Lukács, 1986b, 18). It helps distancing human subjects from objects and from other subjects and at the same time helps to co-ordinate the production of new objects out of existing objects and the emergence and reproduction of social relations between humans.

2.2.9. Freedom Within Necessity

For Lukács, consciousness enables a form of freedom within necessity (Lukács 1986b, 308), i.e. human choices between diferent actions based on conditions that are not self-chosen. Conscious human action opens up the world to chance and makes it to a certain degree undetermined and shapeable by humans. To illustrate this circumstance, Lukács (1986b, 304) quotes in this context Marx (1867, 208–209): ‘No one can sell unless someone else purchases. But no one directly needs to purchase because he has just sold’. If someone who has money chooses to buy or to save, what exactly s/he buys in the case of a purchase, and from whom, is not determined, but rather depends on an interaction of complex conditions and choices, the ‘mutual dialectical polarity of the ideal and the real’9 (Lukács, 1986b, 306). Market supply, local accessibility, wages and prices, class struggles, transport structures, etc. condition the possible choices that the potential purchaser makes based on his/her evaluation of these structures. The ideal moves the real, but it can only move ‘real possibilities of being-in-itself’10 (343).

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2.2.10. Cultural Work

Based on Lukács’ idea that mental work creates culture that is simultaneously economic and transcends the economy, we can design a dialectical model of cultural work (see figure 2.1, see also Fuchs 2015, chapter 2).

Using a stage model allows us to identify and relate diferent levels of cultural work (see figure 2.1). Cultural work is a term that encompasses organisational levels of work that are simultaneously distinct and dialectically connected: cultural work has an emergent quality, namely information work that creates content and is based on and grounded in physical cultural work, which creates information technologies through extractive and industrial work processes. Physical work takes place inside and outside of culture: it creates information technologies and its components (cultural physical work) as well as other products (noncultural physical work) that do not primarily have symbolic functions in society (such as cars, toothbrushes or cups). Cars, toothbrushes, or cups do not primarily have the role of informing others or enabling communication with others, but rather help humans achieve the tasks of transport, cleanliness, and nutrition. Culture and information work however feedback on these products and create symbolic meanings used in contemporary society by companies for marketing them. Cultural work is a unity of physical cultural work and information work that interact with each other, are connected and at the same time distinct.

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All culture involves cultural work and efects of cultural products in society (meaning-making). The production and communication of meanings, social norms and morals are work processes: they create cultural use-values. Culture requires on the one hand human creativity for creating cultural content and on the other hand specific forms and media for storage and communication. The creation of information and communication through language is specific for work conducted in the cultural system: informational and communication work. For having social efects in society, humans with the help of information and communication technologies, such as computers, TV, radio, newspapers, books, recorded films, recorded music, language, etc., organise (i.e. store, process, transport, analyse, transform, create) information and communication. Physical cultural work produces information technologies. Culture encompasses a) physical cultural work that creates cultural technologies (information and communication technologies) and b) information work that creates information and communication.

Think of the example of a piano player. Playing the piano as a human activity is not possible without a piano and without composed music. The activity of playing the piano therefore presupposes the work of the composer and the piano maker. Culture is a manifold production process that involves the work of the piano maker, the composer and the player. In the capitalist culture industry, the commodity form shapes all three forms of cultural production: a piano is a musical instrument sold as a commodity. Composers and musicians tend to be wage-labourers, who are employed by and exploited by large multimedia corporations, especially the ‘big three’ – Universal, Sony and Warner Music. And also audiences, who listen to music for example on YouTube or on commercial radio, tend to become audience workers when cultural corporations sell audiences and users’ attention and usage behaviour data is sold as a commodity to advertising clients (see Fuchs 2014, chapters 4 and 11).

2.2.11. Digital Work

The term digital labour emerged for understanding value-creation on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Weibo (see the contributions in Scholz, 2013). It would however be idealistic to limit the notion of digital labour to the exploitation of users’ online activities by commercial platforms that use targeted advertising or to the creation of digital content that is sold as a commodity. The creation of digital content requires a technological infrastructure that is produced and maintained by labour processes (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Digital labour is all paid and unpaid labour that helps creating digital technologies, content, and data that is sold as a commodity. It includes diverse activities such as slave-labour extracting minerals that form the physical foundation of information technologies, the labour of militarily controlled and highly exploited hardware assemblers who work under conditions of Taylorist industrialism, a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious digital service workers as well as imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, workers conducting the industrial recycling and management of e-waste, or highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Such forms of digital labour form an international division of digital labour that creates the digital media industry’s profits (ibid.). Why is it important to have such a unified concept of digital labour? Nick Dyer-Witheford (2014, 175) provides an answer: ‘To name the global worker is to make a map; and a map is also a weapon’. So what Nick Dyer-Witheford points out is the political relevance of a critical theory of digital media: it names and analyses the problem and can thereby point citizens, classes and social groups towards what is wrong and what contradictions they face.

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Digital work is a specific organisational form of cultural work that creates digital media, content, or data (see figure 2.2, see also Fuchs 2015, chapter 6).

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2.2.12. Digital Labour

Digital labour is alienated digital work: it is alienated from itself, from the instruments and objects of labour and from the products of labour. Digital labour is digital work that is organised within class relations. Figure 2.3 shows a model of the international division of digital labour. Each production step involves human subjects (S) using technologies/instruments of labour (T) on objects of labour (O) so that a product emerges.

The international division of digital labour, for example, involves Congolese slave workers, who mine minerals that form the physical foundation of mobile phones, computers and laptops. Assemblage workers, such as the highly exploited Foxconn workers in China, assemble the ICT components created out of minerals into whole technologies. Such technologies are put to use both by consumers and workers; low-paid software engineers in countries such as China and India as well as highly paid and highly exploited programmers at Google, Microsoft and other large software companies make use of computers for coding application software, operating systems, etc. Consumers put to use both hardware and software for various purposes. On advertising-driven Internet platforms, these users are also workers, whose usage labour creates a data commodity that advertisement-driven platforms, such as Facebook, Weibo, Twitter or YouTube, sell as commodities to their advertising clients. There is also a whole range of precarious online labour that is conducted on the Internet. An example are the users of freelance platforms, who create cultural products and find their clients online at sites such as Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk, PeoplePerHour, or TaskRabbit. The international division of digital labour involves diverse forms of exploited digital labour.

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Physical digital labour creates minerals and ICT components that are assembled into digital media technologies. It involves extractive and industrial digital labour. Digital information workers use this technological infrastructure in order to create digital contents and data that are sold as commodities. Physical and informational digital work can take place within various social relations of production, including slavery, freelance labour, wage labour, feminised labour, unpaid labour, etc. In the case that these relations are class relations, we speak of digital labour. In contrast, if we have to do with communist relations of production, in which there are no class relations but common property and common production, we merely speak of digital work. Digital work is a more general term than digital labour. All digital labour is digital work, but not all digital work is digital labour. Table 2.1 shows an overview of relations of production into which digital work can be embedded. It is based on a distinction between diferent forms of ownership (self-control, partly self-control and partly alien control, full alien control).

Lukács’ Ontology is a general theory of society that draws attention to the importance of work, language, and communication in general. However, it is also an ontology of class-based society, in which he analyses the role of labour and ideology.

2.3. Labour and Ideology

2.3.1. Ideological Labour

We have seen in the previous section that for Lukács, cultural workers create culture, which means that also ideologies are created by labour, namely ideological labour. Lukács makes clear that not every cultural work creates ideology, but cultural products can turn into ideology if they serve dominative interests in classbased societies. Critiques of ideology such as Critical Discourse Analysis, often with the help of text and visual analysis, focus on uncovering the structure of ideologies, but neglect the working conditions under which concrete humans and organisations create ideologies, whereas labour studies often focus on the study of working conditions and neglect how ideologies frame labour and capital (see: Fuchs, 2015, chapter 3). Lukács’ approach allows us to understand that labour and ideology are inherently connected: there is ideology-producing and -communicating labour – ideological labour – just like there are ideologies of and about labour.

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Lukács (1978c) argues that use-value can exist independently from exchangevalue as ‘a product of work which man is able to make use of in the reproduction of his existence’ (v). With the rise of capitalism, use-value has however become the antagonist of exchange-value. ‘The more general the exchange-value, the clearer and more precisely socially necessary labour time comes into the limelight as the economic foundation of its respective quantity’11 (Lukács, 1986b, 124). Lukács says that ‘the division of labour mediated and brought about by exchange-value produces the principle of control by time by a better subjective use of it’ (1978c, 83). Exchange-value is a contradictory form that in capitalism ‘assumes the leading role in human social intercourse’ and therefore subsumes use-value, but at the same time ‘can only come to prevail by being based on use-value’ (87).

2.3.2. Alienation and Ideology

Lukács (1986b, 635) argues that for Marx, reification and the alienation of humans and capitalist labour that results from it are connected to labour-time. Humans are reduced to a cog in the accumulation process that aims at creating as much profit per unit of time as possible: ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day’ (Marx 1847, 127). The modern form of instrumental reason has its origin in the logic of quantification and the reduction of humans to instruments for quantitative increases of the ruling and owning elites’ power. The psychological reasons why humans reproduce ideologies would have to do with fear and hope (Lukács 1986b, 643).

Lukács connects the existence of ideologies as cultural phenomena to the existence of alienated labour in the economy. The reification of labour power necessitates ideologies that justify the existence of alienation. Ideologies attempt to alienate the human mind. They try to instrumentalise consciousness in the interest of dominant powers. Lukács (1986b, 397) is sceptical of Gramsci’s theory of ideology, in which ideologies are understood as individual worldviews. For Lukács, ideology in capitalism has its foundation in the masking of the subject by the object, for example the masking of surplus value produced in social relations as an expenditure of a specific amount of labour-time by monetary profit (Lukács, 1986b, 319–321). Ideology is made up of thoughts, practices, ideas, words, concepts, phrases, sentences, texts, belief systems, meanings, representations, artefacts, institutions, systems or combinations thereof that represent and justify one group’s or individual’s domination and power by misrepresenting, one-dimensionally presenting or distorting reality in symbolic representations (Fuchs 2015, chapter 3).

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Ideology exists for Lukács (1986b) only where there are social struggles, i.e. in societies with antagonistic interests (398). They are ‘theoretical or practical vehicles for fighting out societal conflicts’12 (400). Ideology presupposes ‘societal structures, in which diferent groups and conflicting interests act and strive to impose their interest onto the totality of society as its general interest. To put it concisely: The emergence and difusion of ideologies appears as the general characteristic of class societies’13 (Lukács, 1986b, 405).

One should note that Lukács’ engagement with ideology in the Ontology shows that he did not discard History and Class Consciousness, but that he sublated the latter into a more general critical theory of society.

2.3.3. Ideology, Advertising and the Religion of Consumption

Lukács (1986b, 581) points out that commodity fetishism contains elements of religious ideology/alienation: money and commodities appear as quasi-Gods. Religion is sublated in capitalist ideology. Religion is for Lukács the archetype of all ideological alienation (605). Lukács argues that ideologies that the ontology of everyday life is the ‘all-sided medium of immediacy’14 (556) that connects ideologies to the objective world of phenomena. In everyday life communication, humans get in touch with culture and ideologies.

Lukács says that ideology has, in capitalism since the rise of mass consumption in the twentieth century, taken on a transition from the power of nothaving to the power of having:

In workers’ everyday life, the power of having does not appear as simple privation, the fact that they are not-having the most important means necessary for the everyday satisfaction of needs influences regular life. This power in contrast appears as direct having, as the race with other humans and groups in the attempt to raise personal prestige by the quantity and quality of having15 (Lukács, 1986b, 699).

Advertising plays a crucial role in this process:

The efect on humans is primarily oriented on the belief that the purchase of particular hair tonics, ties, cigarettes, cars, etc., the visit to specific holiday resorts etc. results in one’s personality being truly acknowledged in one’s environment. The promotion of commodities as originally in ad promotion is not primary here, but rather the consumer’s personal prestige that shall be attained by purchasing. Underlying is a double tendency: on the one hand the intention to influence humans into a specific direction and to form them, on the other hand the intention to breed the particularity of humans, to enforce their perception that this superficial diferentiation of particularity that has been purchased on the world market is the sole way of how humans become personalities, i.e. how they can achieve personal recognition16 (701).

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