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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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In his final book The Ontology of Social Being, Lukács (1986) repeats this criticism of Stalinism. He for example speaks in it of ‘Stalin’s brutal manipulation’5 (722) and that ‘Stalin’s ideology brought it about to reify Marxism itself’ (600).6 ‘It is important to note that Stalin in such cases acted based on purely tactical considerations and used the theoretical analysis of the particular historical situation as pure means of propaganda for his already taken decision’ (499).7

Lukács (1991) argues that Stalinism was economically reductionist and focused its politics of how to catch up with and overtake Western capitalism on rapid industrialisation. Questions of socialist democracy were ignored. Stalin argued that the ‘party must commit itself to build the industrial base of socialism with the greatest speed regardless of the human cost to the population and without certainty that these draconian measures would produce the requisite industrial foundation (Lukács 1991, 113). Lukács considers the Soviets that emerged in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 as expressions of grassroots socialist democracy (125–126, 144). Stalin reified the dialectic (130) and ideologically dressed up totalitarian bureaucracy that opposes socialist democracy as Marxism: Stalin destroyed ‘every tendency that might act as a precondition for socialist democracy. The Soviet system practically ceased to exist’ (133). Stalinism

brands every dissenting viewpoint as an enemy of the people. Anyone who does not agree with the oficial, tactically determined party decisions is judged as a subversive, or the direct tool of the agents of imperialism. An efort is made to destroy them with the organized means of the government apparatus. That was the method of the Great Purge Trials. […] The preservation of Stalinism is the greatest barrier to the rise of socialist democratization inside the domains of socialism. It is equally the major barrier to international cooperation and the integrating of all people striving for a renaissance of the genuine method of Marx (169).

All knowledge stands in relations to nature and society because humans act within natural and social environments. Lukács considers only art that is a socialist reflection of political life as true art, whereas Adorno and others see such an understanding as instrumental and stress the importance of abstracted, experimental, and autonomous knowledge in art. Lukács understood the notion of reflection (Widerspiegelung) as a realistic mirroring of reality in art. Mirroring is a category that can create the impression that all knowledge strives to be an exact mapping of nature and society.

3.3.4. Adorno on the Truth of Art

In contrast to Lukács, for Theodor W. Adorno (1997) the truth of an artwork lies in an autonomous aesthetic logic that is not subsumed under the logic of domination so that it constitutes a diferent, non-instrumental logic. Art

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becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful”, it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it (225–226).

‘Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness’ (227). If an artwork becomes instrumental to and a function of something, then for Adorno it loses its truth. Functionlessness is for Adorno the symbol of freedom beyond capitalism and class. So his search for elements that are functionless and his critique of how the commodity form tries to functionalise almost everything is a dialectical anticipation of a free society and the ascertainment of the need of such a society.

For Adorno, the criteria that Lukács’ aesthetics advance are therefore already a form of instrumentalism. He argues that although Lukács tried to broaden the concept of socialist realism, it remained rather dogmatic, rejecting most of modern literature as decadent, sick, or reactionary. ‘Art exists within reality, has its function in it, and is also inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as art, by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the status quo’ (Adorno 1958, 224). Art can display and create illusions and fictitious reality, which for Adorno does not make it bad art. There is an ‘“aesthetic diference” from existence’ (225), a non-immediacy with established facts (227). The ‘work of art does not have something immediately real as its subject matter’ (232). Lukács’ later aesthetic theory would be too close to the catechism of socialist realism, ‘the ideologically sanctioned copy theory of knowledge’ (236). Comparable to Adorno, Ernst Bloch also criticises Lukács’ aesthetics for assuming the existence of a ‘closed […] reality’ and the equation of experimental art ‘with a condition of decadence’ (in: Adorno et al. 1980, 22). Bertolt Brecht also commented that dogmatic art critics like Lukács or Alfred Kurella ‘want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Everyone of their criticisms contains a threat’ (in: Adorno et al. 1980, 97).

3.3.5. Adorno on Jazz

But isn’t Adorno’s assessment of jazz quite comparable to Lukács’ contempt for anti-realistic literature? Some observers think so. So for example Robert W. Witkin (2000, 145) argues: ‘At best Adorno’s attack on jazz seems to be out of sympathy with informed opinion on the subject; at worst it appears to be reactionary and possibly racist’. Jazz originated in the context of black experiences of slavery and segregation. The argument that some make is that Adorno is racist and argues that jazz is problematic because of its black origins and because it lacks ‘whiteness’.

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It is a strange form of reverse elitism and top-down judgement when scholars argue that Adorno, who came from a Jewish family and experienced the consequences of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany when he had to flee, is a racist. Adorno does not make racist arguments about jazz. In his article On Jazz, he criticises the commercial character of jazz ‘as a mass commodity’ (Adorno 1936, 473) that ‘wants to improve its marketability and veil its own commodity character’ (473). Jamie Owen Daniel (1989/1990, 39–40) writes in an introduction to the English translation of the essay that it is ‘not about jazz as such, but rather about […] its commercial production and consumption’. One should certainly refuse allegiance to Adorno when he denies that ‘jazz has anything to do with genuine black music’ (477) and that its arrangement is ‘identical to that of a military band so that it ‘can be easily adapted for use by fascism’ (485). The Nazis prohibited jazz and any music performed by black people. They considered it to be ‘degenerate art and spoke of ‘nigger jazz’.8 Adorno’s assessment is problematic, but not racist.

Also in the essay On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (Adorno 1991, 29–60), Adorno makes clear that his criticism concerns the commodity form of music, art, and culture: ‘The listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser’ (32). He is for example critical of the use of music in advertising:

For all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form; the last pre-capitalist residues have been eliminated. Music […] serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music. If the advertising function is carefully dimmed in the case of serious music, it always breaks through in the case of light music (37–38).

Adorno was not unaware of the fact that it is not just pop and rock music that can be turned into a commodity. He saw that no form of music is immune to the commodity form. So, for example, the Salzburg Festival is considered as one of the world’s primary festivals of classical music. In 2015, the prices for a subscription package for attending a series of 3–5 of the events ranged between €129.60 and €1,231.20.9 In 2013, the Salzburg Festival’s revenues from ticket sales amounted to €28.3 million.10 Classical music is just like pop and rock music a culture industry, which renders the distinction between classical and popular or entertainment/light music and serious music superfluous. Adorno identified this tendency:

The diferences in the reception of oficial “classical” music and light music no longer have any real significance. They are only still manipulated for reasons of marketability. The hit song enthusiast must be reassured that his idols are not too elevated for him, just as the visitor to philharmonic concerts is confirmed in his status (Adorno 1991, 35).

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If all forms of music and culture can be commodified, then they also must have the potential to resist commodification independent of musical style. Music is a common good in the sense that new music reflects the history of music and is influenced by other music. The logical consequence should be to treat all culture and music as commons instead of as commodity. The Internet partly decommodifies music and culture by file sharing and partly creates new strategies of commodification (e.g. iTunes, Spotify). All of this takes however place within capitalist society, which creates contradictions between fans, the culture industry, amateur and professional artists, as well as between the content industry that tries to police copyrights and the ‘openness’ industry (e.g. YouTube) that sells advertisements and therefore welcomes free and open culture as strategy for attracting audiences whose attention is sold as commodities to advertisers.

Heinz Steinert (2003) reminds us that the point of Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is not to criticise specific artistic practices, forms, or contents, but the abstract ‘principle of commodity-form cultural activity’ (10). So we cannot say that Adorno’s view of jazz was racist. His essays on jazz were rather concerned about the commercial form of culture in general.

3.3.6. Knowledge and Communication

We can now try to generalise the conclusions from the debate about aesthetics between Lukács and Adorno for knowledge in general. All individual and collective knowledge takes place in the context of both nature and society. These contexts condition, but do not determine the form and content of knowledge. Humans are part of social systems, in which they communicate, i.e. they exchange knowledge and can thereby create new individual knowledge and reproduce existing individual knowledge. Social groups, organisations, social systems, and society at large also create based on individual knowledge and through communication of collective knowledge that represents and describes important features of these systems. In class-based and dominative societies, these knowledge structures also represent class structures and structures of domination, as well as the struggles for defining how and what these systems communicate to the social environment. Knowledge in class-based societies is class knowledge, which does not mean that the knowledge of the dominant class is always false and the one of the dominated class always true (the opposite can be the case), but rather that knowledge in class-based society is shaped by struggles about how to and who can define reality. Individual knowledge, communication, and social knowledge have specific contents, in which human relationships to nature and society are reflected. This reflection is however not a mirroring, but a complex, non-linear relation, whose character depends on the kind of knowledge that is being formed. So for example paintings can be very realistic trying to portray a part of nature and society in a photographic manner or very abstract so that there is no intention to map nature or society, but where nature and society are only experiential contexts of the artist, who creates abstractions from ideas that are situated in social and natural contexts.

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3.3.7. Adorno on the Dialectic of Subject and Object

In his first study on Hegel’s epistemology, Adorno (1963) discusses the dialectic of subject and object in relation to knowledge. He argues that there is not simply a human subject and an independent outside world as object of thought, but a dialectic of subject and object:

Hegel’s critique strikes at the empty center of the static analysis of knowledge into subject and object […], and the blow he strikes is so deadly because he does not set up an irrational unity of subject and object in opposition to that analysis but instead preserves the distinct moments of the subjective and the objective while grasping them as mediated by one another. The insight that in the realm of the Geisteswissenschaften, wherever the object itself is mediated by ‘spirit’, knowledge becomes fruitful not by excluding the subject but through its utmost exertions, through all its impulses and experiences – this insight […] comes from Hegel’s system (Adorno 1963, 7).

Figure 3.1 generalises Adorno’s insights and visualises the production of knowledge. All human cognition takes place in the context of a social environment, in which humans communicate, and a natural environment, with which humans stand in a physical metabolism. Cognition is the production of new individual knowledge and the reproduction of individual knowledge. Cognition’s objects are nature and society. Individuals do not always have to communicate with other humans in society to form and reproduce thoughts. They can merely observe and thereby gather experiences that form and reproduce knowledge. Individuals also do not have to work in order to cognise, i.e. they do not have to create social use-values out of nature and culture that satisfy general social needs. They can merely act in a social and natural environment without working and thereby form and reproduce knowledge. But of course all work is a dialectical unity of brain and body activity, mental and physical dimensions. Knowledge work in addition creates social knowledge as social use-value, whereas physical work creates physical products.

3.3.8. Adorno on Language and Communication

In his third study of Hegel’s epistemology, Adorno (1963) makes an important contribution on how to understand the relationship of communication and the reality that language and communication express:

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As an expression of the thing itself, language is not fully reducible to communication with others. Nor, however – and Hegel knew this – is it simply independent of communication. Otherwise it would elude all critique, even in its relationship to the matter at hand, and would reduce that relationship to an arbitrary presumption. Language as expression of the thing itself and language as communication are interwoven. The ability to name the matter at hand is developed under the compulsion to communicate it, and that element of coercion is preserved in it; conversely, it could not communicate anything that it did not have as its own intention, undistracted by other considerations. This dialectic plays itself out within the medium of language itself; it is not merely a fall from grace on the part of an inhumane social zeal that watches to make sure that no one thinks anything that cannot be communicated. Even a linguistic approach of the utmost integrity cannot do away with the antagonism between what is in itself and what is for others (105).

In communication, the subject relates to the object via language because language is needed in order to communicate views of the objective world to others. At the same time, the objective world relates to society via the individual languaging being that has an interest in parts of this objective world and appropriates the world linguistically out of personal interest, which enables the communication with others. Adorno shows that there is a dialectic of the social, the individual, and the objective world in the communication process. Communication is the symbolically expressed social relation that allows the individual A to relate to others O and other individuals O to relate to A and other individuals as their others. They together and individually relate to the objective world that consists of nature and society.

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Communication is a form of symbolic interaction, in which humans mutually make meaning of the knowledge others utter. Some, but not all communication processes result in co-ordination and co-operation processes that create knowledge products that satisfy the human need to be informed. Such knowledge products can also be of a more individual nature, for example a novel written by an author. Such a novel is however also a social product because authors form ideas in communication processes with other humans and by reading the works of others. The quality of knowledge products and their specific relations to society and nature depend on the type of knowledge. Adequately understanding knowledge therefore requires a typology of the forms of knowledge.

3.3.9. Fritz Machlup: Types of Knowledge

What types of knowledge are there? Let us have a look at two of the most important approaches, the ones by the economist Fritz Machlup and the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas. Machlup is a very influential social thinker because his 1962 book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States was an early formulation of the claim that there is a transition towards a postindustrial knowledge society.

For Machlup, knowledge production is ‘any human (or human-induced) activity efectively designed to create, alter, or confirm in a human mind a meaningful apperception, awareness, cognizance, or consciousness of anything whatsoever’ (Machlup 1980, 92). He draws a distinction between five classes of knowledge (Machlup 1980, 108; 1962, 21–22):

1) Practical knowledge: Knowledge that is ‘useful in the knower’s work (Machlup 1980, 108);

2) Intellectual knowledge: Knowledge that satisfies ‘intellectual curiosity, regarded as part of liberal education, humanistic and scientific learning, general culture’ (ibid.);

3) Small-talk and pastime knowledge: Knowledge that is ‘satisfying the nonintellectual curiosity or his desire for light entertainment and emotional stimulation, including local gossip, news of crimes and accidents, light novels, stories, jokes, games, etc.’ (ibid.);

4) Spiritual knowledge: Knowledge that is ‘related to his religious knowledge of God and of the ways to the salvation of the soul’ (ibid.),

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5) Unwanted knowledge: Knowledge that is ‘outside of his interests’ (ibid.).

6) Practical knowledge is further subdivided into:

a) professional knowledge

b) business knowledge

c) workman’s knowledge

d) political knowledge

e) household knowledge

f) and other practical knowledge.

There are several problems of Machlup’s theory of knowledge:

• Abstractness: it is abstract and does not stress the class and contested character of knowledge in modern society.

• Arbitrariness: Machlup’s typology of knowledge is arbitrary. He does not provide an underlying theoretical criterion for distinguishing these five types.

• Religious fetishism: the category of spiritual knowledge presupposes that God and salvation of the soul exist. He does not see religious knowledge as a specific form of ethical/moral knowledge, but rather reifies it.

• Elitism: Machlup (1962, 25) says that chamber music is intellectual knowledge because it requires attention, serious strain, and concentration, whereas he classifies rock ’n’ roll as pastime knowledge (Machlup 1962, 25). He makes an elitist distinction between high culture and low/popular culture that reminds one of conservative cultural theorists such as Matthew Arnold, who were criticised by people like Raymond Williams for their elitist concept of culture. Machlup indirectly expresses that he thinks fans of pop culture are stupid and primitive. ‘My decisions may possibly be judged, by my critics, as high-brow or even snobbish’ (Machlup 1962, 25).

3.3.10. Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold defined culture as cultivation that produces individuals who are ‘led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection’ (1869/2006, 81) and are educated by engaging with ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (1869/2006, 5). Culture is:

a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

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Raymond Williams says that such a concept of culture is oriented on reproducing existing capitalist values and thereby society as it is: the ‘culture which is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values’ (Williams 1980, 8).

3.3.11. Habermas: Three Forms of Knowledge

Jürgen Habermas (1971) distinguishes three forms of knowledge:

information that expands our power of technical control; interpretations that make possible the orientation of action within common traditions; and analyses that free consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized powers. These viewpoints originate in the interest structure of a species that is linked in its roots to definite means of social organization: work, language, and power. The human species secures its existence in systems of social labor and self-assertion through violence, through tradition-bound social life in ordinary-language communication, and with the aid of ego identities that at every level of individuation reconsolidate the consciousness of the individual in relation to the norms of the group. Accordingly the interests constitutive of knowledge are linked to the functions of an ego that adapts itself to its external conditions through learning processes, is initiated into the communication system of a social life-world by means of self-formative processes, and constructs an identity in the conflict between instinctual aims and social constraints. In turn these achievements become part of the productive forces accumulated by a society, the cultural tradition through which a society interprets itself, and the legitimations that a society accepts or criticizes. My […] thesis is thus that knowledge-constitutive interests take form in the medium of work, language, and power (313).

Habermas’s (1971) threefold distinction between technical knowledge, emancipatory knowledge, and practical knowledge reflects his later distinction that he draws in the Theory of Communicative Action between the economic system, the political system, and the life-world as the three realms of modern society (Habermas 1984, 1987).

There are, however, also problems in Habermas’ theory of knowledge and human interest and his strict separation of work (economy), power (politics) and language (culture, lifeworld):

• The labour process does not necessarily have to be a form of the control of nature and humans. In an emancipated society, work turns from labour into well-rounded human activity that is a form of freedom beyond necessity.

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• Language and communication are not innocent and pure, but are often also media and processes of control and power.

• Power and power struggles are not just limited to politics, but also take place in culture and the economy.

The point is then to construct a non-dualist theory of knowledge that does not separate work, communication, and power.

3.4. The Dialectics of Knowledge

3.4.1. Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism

We can draw on Habermas’ distinction that knowledge production is not confined to a single dimension of society, but can take place in all of society’s subsystems: the economy, politics, and culture. The economy is the system, in which humans create use-values that satisfy human needs. In the political system, humans make collective decisions on how to shape and regulate society. In the cultural system, they give meanings to the world that help them to define themselves (identity) and to make sense of the world (norms and worldviews relating to others and the world).

Raymond Williams’ approach of Cultural Materialism allows us to understand these three realms not as independent, but as simultaneously identical and non-identical, i.e. as a dialectic (see Fuchs 2015, chapter 2): knowledge work creates economic and non-economic social knowledge that satisfies the human need of information. Knowledge is a material dialectical process, in which humans connect their ideas to each other and create new knowledge structures. This production involves processes of work: social knowledge emerges from knowledge work, which is an economic process. All knowledge production is an economic process. Depending on the type and role of knowledge in society, knowledge does not need to be confined to the economy but can extend to society at large, i.e. also to politics and culture. Economic, political, and cultural knowledge have an economic dimension and a potential noneconomic dimension.

3.4.2. Adorno on Hegel, Knowledge and Work

Adorno (1963), in his first study of Hegel’s epistemology, discusses how Hegel relates knowledge and work and mental and non-mental work. He thereby makes an important contribution to the analysis of how the economy is related to knowledge production. Adorno (1963) stresses that for Hegel, the mind is active and producing (17). ‘The reference of the productive moment of spirit back to a universal subject rather than to an individual who labors is what defines labor as something organized, something social; its own “rationality”, the ordering of functions, is a social relationship’ (18). In the Phenomenology, Hegel would see mind as a form of work (21). ‘The path natural consciousness follows to the identity of absolute knowledge is itself work [“labor” in the original translation]. The relationship of spirit to what is given manifests itself on the model of a social process, a process of work [“labor” in the original translation]’ (21). Adorno argues that for Hegel the mind is a moment of social work, ‘the moment that is separate from physical work [“labor” in the original translation]’ (23). But physical work would also depend on nature: Work cannot ‘be conceived without the concept of nature, any more than can nature without’ work: ‘the two are distinct from and mediated by one another at the same time’ (23).

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