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

Hegel (1807/1977) discusses these aspects of knowledge and work in the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit. Philosophical knowledge would be obtained through mental work: ‘True thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won through the work [“labour” in the original translation] of the Notion’ (Hegel 1807/1977, 43). He argues that knowledge is connected to non-knowledge. Mental work would turn experience into knowledge.

It is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge, that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit. Knowledge in its first phase, or immediate Spirit, is the non-spiritual, i.e. sense-consciousness. In order to become genuine knowledge, to beget the element of Science which is the pure Notion of Science itself, it must travel a long way and work its passage (Hegel 1807/1977, 15).

For Hegel, mental and physical work stand in a dialectical relationship, they are identical and non-identical, just like there is a dialectic of work and nature. Adorno (1963) argues that the separation of mental and physical labour in class-based societies comes along with a labour ideology that ascribes to labour ‘inherent value’. ‘The metaphysics of labor and the appropriation of the labor of others are complementary’ (24). ‘For the absolutization of labor is that of the class relationship: a humankind free of labor would be free of domination’ (26). One problem with Hegel would be that in the final instance he ‘dissolves labor into a moment of spirit’ (24) so that the concept of the absolute spirit reifies bourgeois society’s class-based forms of labour.

3.4.3. Power

Power is human actors’ capacity to influence the development of the social systems that afect their lives. Power is therefore not limited to the political system, but has economic, political, and cultural dimensions (see table 3.1).

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3.4.4. Individual and Social Knowledge

Economic, political, and cultural structures are regularities that emerge from co-ordinated social production, enable and constrain individual and social human practices that produce new structures and reproduce existing ones. All social systems and societies are based on a dialectic of structure and agency: Humans produce social structures that enable and constrain human practices that again produce and reproduce social structures. This dialectic of structure and agency is situated in specific economic, political or cultural contexts, in which certain structures are produced and reproduced (Fuchs 2008): Usevalues are the key economic structures, rules the key political structures, and collective meanings the key cultural structures. Modern society is a society that is based on the accumulation of money (that mediates the production of usevalues) in the economic system, political influence in the political system, and reputation in the cultural system (Fuchs 2008, chapter 3). In modern society, structures take on a duality of general features and roles in accumulation that correspond to a generalisation of the duality of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value that Marx (1867) identified for the modern economy. Modern society is based on a dialectic of general social structures and structures of accumulation: the modern economy is shaped by a dialectic of use-values and monetary capital, the modern political system by a dialectic of rules and influence, and the modern cultural system by a dialectic of collective meaning and reputation (table 3.2). General social structures become subsumed under the logic of accumulation (Fuchs 2008, chapter 3).

Work, political engagement, and cultural activity produce and reproduce use-values, rules, and meanings (table 3.2). The structures produced by such social practices are combinations of physical resources and knowledge. All usevalues are objectification of activities of the human body and the human brain and they are to specific degrees tangible or intangible. Rules such as laws are intangible social conventions that are written down in texts and enforced by concrete human beings. Collective meanings can be more or less tangible and intangible. A tradition, for example, is mainly intangible, but it is carried out by humans with the help of artefacts. Concrete human beings acting socially in their social environment and physically in the natural environment produce and reproduce general social structures. As part of their practices (work, political engagement, cultural activity), they draw on their individual knowledge and create new social knowledge. The dialectic of individual knowledge and social knowledge products is part of the dialectic of structure and agency that is at the heart of society and all social system (Fuchs 2008, chapter 3). Knowledge structures are dialectically mediated with general social structures (table 3.2).

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3.4.5. The Individual and the Species-Being

Adorno (1998) reflects on the dialectics of structure and agency and individual and social knowledge in his article On Subject and Object, where he speaks of a dialectic of the individual subject and the human species-being as subject:

No concept of the subject can have the element of individual humanity […] separated from it in thought; without any reference to it, subject would lose all significance. Conversely, the particular human individual, as soon as one reflects upon it under the guise of the universality of its concept, which does not signify merely something particular being hic et nunc, is already transformed into a universal, similar to what was expressed in the idealist concept of the subject; even the expression ‘particular person’ requires the concept of species simply in order to be meaningful (Adorno 1998, 245).

The dependence of ‘cognitive subjects upon space, time, and forms of thought marks their dependence on the species’ (Adorno 1998, 252). Adorno comments on the dialectic of the universal and the particular: ‘Neither one can exist without the other, the particular only as determined and this universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of a nonidealist dialectics’ (Adorno 1998, 257). So for Adorno, the human being is universal and particular at the same time: it can only be an individual by being a social species-being and only social by also being individual. There is a dialectic of the individual and the social.

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Table 3.2 gives an overview of society’s three subsystems’ key structures and their forms of individual and social knowledge. This typology of knowledge has in contrast to Machlup’s, the advantage that it is systematic and not a simple list of various forms of knowledge. It is based on the distinction of three distinct, but interconnected subsystems of society, which is an insight that we take from Habermas’ theory.

How is table 3.2 related to figure 3.1? Individuals based on their individual knowledge (skills in the economy, political knowledge, cultural tastes) enter social systems, in which they, through communication processes, create and reproduce individual knowledge. Such communication can also result in the production and reproduction of social knowledge: collective knowledge products in the economy, collective political worldviews in the political system, and collective identities in the cultural system. These social knowledge structures enable and constrain the production and reproduction of individual knowledge. The dialectic of individual and social knowledge shapes and is shaped by the production and reproduction of use-values in the economy, rules in the political system, and meanings in the cultural system. A specific social system or organisation always has economic, political, and cultural dimensions. One of these dimensions can however be dominant. So, for example, a factory producing chairs is predominantly an economic organisation, but also has a company identity as a cultural feature, and specific decision structures as a political characteristic.

3.4.6. Dominative Knowledge and Emancipatory Knowledge

Modern society is inherently competitive and based on structures of accumulation so that both general social structures and knowledge structures have a subsumed character and are instruments for the accumulation of money, political influence, and reputation. Structures of accumulation result in interest conflicts between those who control power and those who are excluded from it. Modern society is therefore both a class and a dominative society. Habermas argues that emancipatory knowledge is constituted in struggles that question dominant powers in the political system. I have argued that power is not just political, but a more general social structure. Emancipatory power struggles question social structures of accumulation and domination that benefit one group at the expense of others. Knowledge is one form of power. Therefore emancipatory struggles have the power to create alternative, emancipatory knowledge that question dominative knowledge.

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Table 3.3 gives an overview of the conflict between dominative, ideological knowledge and emancipatory knowledge. Concrete individuals and groups in social relations produce knowledge. Knowledge structures are not abstract, but grounded in social relations between human actors. Knowledge workers create social knowledge products that have economic and non-economic roles inside the economy and in society at large. Table 3.3 shows both the actors creating dominative and emancipatory knowledge and the type of social knowledge they create.

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3.4.7. The Dialectics of Knowledge

The production of social knowledge is dialectical in a manifold way: social systems are based on a dialectic of general social structures and knowledge structures and a dialectic of individual knowledge and social knowledge. In dominative social systems, there are interest conflicts about the control of power that also result in a conflict between dominative and emancipatory knowledge. Knowledge in such systems is therefore dialectical in the sense that it is contested in interest conflicts. Struggles for the definition and control of knowledge tend to be asymmetrical in that dominant actors, who control money, influence, and reputation have structural advantages. They can try to mobilise these resources in order to legitimate their dominance and hinder struggles and alternatives. They can exert physical, structural, and ideological violence in order to uphold their dominant position. There is no guarantee that alternative structures and alternative, emancipatory knowledge can emerge or that actors and movements organising such alternatives can exert enough power to become significant counter-hegemonic forces. There is a political economy of resource asymmetry inherent in modern society that poses structural disadvantages for alternative movements, alternative structures, and emancipatory knowledge. This becomes evident in the realm of social media: Facebook dominates the world of social networking sites by attracting billions of users, whereas non-commercial alternatives such as Diaspora or Crabgrass have thus far remained marginal and only attract comparatively few users.

3.4.8. Johan Galtung: Violence

Based on the works of Johan Galtung (1990), violence can be defined as ‘avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible’ (Galtung 1990, 292). Violence can according to Galtung (1990) be divided into three principal forms: direct violence (through physical intervention; an event), structural violence (through state or organizational mandate; a process), and ideological violence (dehumanizing or otherwise exclusionary representations; an invariance). These forms operate through the denial of four basic needs: survival needs (through killing and exploitation), well-being needs (through maiming, sanctions, and exploitation), identity needs (through desocialization, resocialization and segmentation), and freedom needs (through repression, detention, expulsion, marginalization and fragmentation) (Galtung 1990).

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3.4.9. Ideology as Cultural Violence

Ideology as specific form of knowledge is according to Galtung a form of violence. Habermas (1971) assumes that there is an inherent connection of knowledge and human interests. He argues that critical knowledge has the potential to understand the variant and invariant dimensions of reality and to use ideology critique for unmasking ‘ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed’ (310) so that unreflected consciousness is substituted by reflected knowledge and has a potential to become ‘critically mediated knowledge’ (310) that can become the foundation of transformations of reality. Ideology furnishes ‘our actions with justifying motives in place of the real ones’ (311)

Ideology is a semiotic level of domination and exploitation – it practices the production and spread of information and meanings in the form of ideas, belief systems, artefacts, systems and institutions so that domination and exploitation are justified or naturalised. An ideology is a social knowledge product that represents and justifies one group’s or individual’s power, domination or exploitation of other groups or individuals by misrepresenting, one-dimensionally presenting or distorting reality in symbolic representations.

Adorno has described ideology in a Lukácsian sense as ‘a consciousness which is objectively necessary and yet at the same time false, as the intertwining of truth and falsehood’ (Adorno 1954, 189). Ideology:

is justification. It presupposes the experience of a societal condition which has already become problematic and therefore requires a defense just as much as does the idea of justice itself, which would not exist without such necessity for apologetics and which has as its model the exchange of things which are comparable (Adorno 1954, 189–190).

From the existence of ideology in class-based society follows for the Frankfurt School the necessity of the critique of ideology, which Adorno defines as ‘the confrontation of ideology with its own truth’ (Adorno 1954, 190). The critique of ideology ‘is the negation defined in the Hegelian sense, the confrontation of the spiritual with its realization, and has as its presupposition the distinction of the truth or falsity of the judgment just as much as the requirement for truth in that which is criticized’ (Adorno 1954, 191).

3.4.10. Ideological Knowledge, Identity and Non-Identity

Also Adorno’s second and third study of Hegel’s epistemology make important contributions to the question what ideological knowledge is and how it can be deconstructed. In the second study, he discusses the non-identity of the immediate and the mediated. Adorno (1963) stresses that for Hegel immediacy is not really immediate. ‘One can no more speak of mediation without something immediate than, conversely, one can find something immediate that is not mediated’ (59). For Hegel, existence is not what it appears to be, its essence is hidden behind appearances. The ‘concept and the thing itself are not one and the same’ (70–71). Existence is for Hegel only actual if it becomes true. Hegel’s critique of immediacy ‘becomes the figure of a comprehensive commitment to a lack of naiveté’ (64). Hegel’s philosophy would be anti-positivist (65). He ‘demonstrated that concept, judgement, and conclusion, unavoidable instruments for ascertaining through consciousness something that exists, always end up contradicting that existing thing; that all individual judgements, all individual concepts, all individual conclusions, are false by the criterion of an emphatic idea of truth’ (76). Ideologies in contrast are identity thinking, they aim to deny and delegitimise non-identical moment that can go beyond immediate existence and have potentials for the transformation of society.

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This truth however lies for Hegel in the absolute spirit, in which the nonidentity of subject and object is sublated into identity:

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself (Hegel 1807/1977, 11).

Adorno (1963) argues that the irrationality of the society founded on exchange, the irrationality of modern rationality that has enabled Auschwitz, shows that Hegel has to be turned from head to toe: ‘The whole is the untrue’ (87). This falseness of the modern totality would however contain glimpses of hope that the totality can be made reasonable: ‘The ray of light that reveals the whole to be untrue in all its moments in none other than utopia, the utopia of the whole truth, which is still to be realized’ (88).

In the third study of Hegel’s epistemology, Adorno (1963) argues that Hegel rejects positivism also by the dialectical language he uses in his works, in which a concept always reflects an other and is at the same time identical and nonidentical with this other:

Through the explication of the concepts, in other words through what, according to traditional logic and epistemology, is accomplished by analytic judgements, the concept’s Other, the nonidentical, becomes evident within the concept itself, something implied in its meaning, without the scope of the concept being infringed upon. The concept is turned this way and that until it becomes clear that it is more than what it is (133).

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Hegel would compel the reader to think dialectically and in a non-identical manner. Dialectical thinking in the way that Hegel and Adorno conceive it has the potential to deconstruct instrumentality and ideology by stressing nonidentity and the dialectic of identity and non-identity.

Knowledge as ideology is violent and repressive. This violence takes on diferent forms in the economy, politics, and culture (see table 3.3). In the knowledge economy, ideology operates as the fetishism of commodities that alienates humans from the immediate experience of the subject and the social by veiling the abstract, the subject, and the social behind objects, namely the money and commodities. Knowledge commons that transcend the commodity form of knowledge stand in a contradiction to knowledge commodities.

The digitisation of knowledge has taken this contradiction to a new level and has resulted in complex antagonisms between professional knowledge creators, consumers, citizen and amateur knowledge producers, the traditional media industries that sell content and access, and the openness industry that sells audiences and user data and provides open access to content. In the political world, ideological worldviews try to justify domination, whereas emancipatory worldviews challenge domination and struggle for participatory democracy. In the cultural world, ideological forms of culture are one-dimensional, do not significantly engage people, lack autonomy and therefore often represent partial interests of dominative groups.

3.4.11. Artistic Knowledge

In art, realistic art takes actual persons, societies, or times as their subject matter, whereas in experimental art there is an abstraction from actual reality. Abstract and experimental art is however according to Adorno not ideological, but tries to strengthen audiences’ imagination, which makes it anti-ideological. Realist and political art is not automatically ideological, but becomes ideological if it identifies itself with a particular ideology and dominative group. Artworks’ relation to social reality is complex and ranges from a continuum with realist art on one end and abstract art on the other. One must also bear in mind that there are diferent forms of art that foreground diferent senses in artistic knowledge: the literary arts (texts), the visual arts (visual objects), the performing arts (socially performed artworks), the digital arts, in which texts, the visual, and the social can converge. Art is economically non-autonomous if it is dependent on marketing, branding, advertising, and the commodity form to survive. It is politically non-autonomous if it is commissioned by dominative powers in order to glorify their power. This was for example the case with a lot of artworks in traditional empires, in which art served the purpose of displaying the power of religion and emperors.

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3.4.12. Academic Knowledge

In the academic system, there is, as Machlup (1980) stresses, a diference between knowledge in the natural sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. Knowledge of natural sciences is positivist and aims to discover laws that allow mapping and predicting reality. The humanities and cultural sciences (languages, literature, philosophy, religion, ethics, arts) develop critical judgements by interpreting and creating texts. The social sciences focus on human action just like the humanities, but are bound up in a conflict between critical and administrative academic knowledge. They take the humanities and/or the natural sciences as models, which results in conflicts and relations between the qualitative/the quantitative, theory/empirical research, a priori/a posteriori knowledge, reason/experience, etc. Habermas (1971, 303) argues that positivist knowledge dissociates normative values from facts and claims that knowledge is value-free. It is an ideological denial of the inherent connection of knowledge and social conflicts.

Academic knowledge is a systematic and coherent creation of knowledge about nature, humans, or society that is based on previous academic knowledge and tries to obtain insights about dimensions of reality that are thus far unknown, unexplored, or need further exploration. Artistic knowledge is systematic like academic knowledge, but more practical. It appeals to human imagination, creativity, interpretation, and intuition. It is inherently open for interpretation and for the creation of meaning. Science has more fixed meanings, whereas art more directly and as an immanent feature invites judgements of taste on the side of viewers, spectators, audiences, listeners, readers, etc.

3.5. Conclusion

This chapter has argued that Adorno’s works are an important foundation for a critical theory of knowledge. It maintains that Adorno’s theory of knowledge is not, as often claimed in media and cultural studies, a form of media and cultural pessimism that sees humans as passive, manipulated by ideologies, and incapable of resisting a society without alternatives. He saw alternative and critical potentials of the media and popular culture and identified a role for the media in education after Auschwitz. The interested reader will find quite a few radio broadcasts of Adorno’s talks and discussions with him online, which shows that he did not despise the media as such, but rather saw their educational potential and made very active use of media, especially radio broadcasts, himself.

Adorno’s criticism of Georg Lukács’ aesthetic theory shows the dangers of assuming that knowledge is or should be a simple mapping of outside reality. Adorno saw this relationship as complex and dialectical. Based on his insights, foundations of a dialectical model of knowledge were developed that involves dialectics of the subject and the object, agency and structures, the individual and the social, society and nature, the economic and the non-economic (knowledge work creates social knowledge that not just has economic dimensions, but can play a role in all realms of society), mental and physical work, general social structures and knowledge structures, individual knowledge and social knowledge. Adorno stresses the importance of the dialectic of identity and non-identity in Hegel’s work.

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