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

Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication

6.1. Introduction

6.1.1. Information Society or Capitalism?

One can often hear that we live in an information or knowledge society. These claims are overstated and often driven by businesses expectations that digital media is an investment area that can help achieving large profits. In 2014, 13.1 per cent of the 2,000 largest transnational corporations’ revenues and 17.3 per cent of their profits were located in the information sector.1

The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector held 19.8% of the revenues, 24.0 per cent were held by the mobilities industry,2 and 21.7 per cent by the classical manufacturing sector. These sectors’ shares of the 2,000 largest TNCs combined profits were 33.5 per cent (FIRE), 19.0 per cent (mobilities) and 18.6 per cent (manufacturing). It would therefore be an overestimation to characterise contemporary capitalism as information capitalism. Contemporary global capitalism is not just an information capitalism, it is also a financial capitalism, mobilities capitalism, hyperindustrial capitalism, etc. It is, however, also a mistake to ignore that labour that creates information plays a significant role in contemporary capitalism. The analysis that information labour has become more important in capitalism is not simply a post-industrial ideology. Critical political economy and critical theory should not dismiss this hypothesis as ideology, but use its own theoretical categories for interpreting it. A key question that arises in this context and that this chapter asks is: what is the relationship of labour and communication? If there is a significant role of information and communication labour in the contemporary economy, then a separation of the economy as base and the realm of meaningful information that is communicated among humans (culture) as superstructure cannot be held up so easily.

CHAPTER 6

How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 177–205. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.f. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

6.1.1. Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action and Beyond…

Jürgen Habermas has drawn attention to the importance of integrating communication into a critical theory of society. Any critical theory of communication must therefore inevitably take Habermas’ works as one of its starting points. However, this does not imply that Habermas’ theory is the ultimate truth of communication theory. It should be read in a critically constructive manner so that we can build on Habermas and go with Habermas beyond Habermas. In this chapter, I will engage with Habermas and other critical theorists’ notions of communication and will especially look at how communication in these approaches relates to the economy.

Given that information labour and the culture industry collapse the boundary between base and superstructure, we have to ask the question how the economy and culture are related. This chapter does so by discussing several approaches: Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams. These are important critical theory approaches that have dealt with the question of how work and communication are related. It is not possible to give a complete discussion of all approaches that exist, which is why engagement with the mentioned authors must sufice for the purpose of this chapter.

They are representatives of four diferent approaches. There are four ways, two categories (such as labour and communication) can be related (Hofkirchner 2013):

1. B is reduced to A (reductionism, in which A is dominant),

1. A is reduced to B (reductionism, in which B is dominant),

1. A and B are separate (dualism),

1. A and B are identical and non-identical at the same time (dialectic).

This chapter therefore discusses examples four diferent theoretical ways of how labour and communication can be related: economic reductionism, cultural reductionism, dualism, and the dialectic.

6.2. Economic Reductionism: Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Alfred Sohn-Rethel3 (1899–1990) was a Marxist economist and philosopher. He stood in close academic contact with Adorno. After having fled from Germany, he lived in Great Britain and moved back to Germany in the early 1970s. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology is his main book.

Sohn-Rethel (1978) is interested in how economic forms and thought forms are related. He conceptually connects the base and the ‘mental superstructure (2) by constructing mental production in analogy to commodity abstraction.

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Marx would not have worked out a theory of mental and manual labour, which would however be important because abolishing the division of labour is a ‘precondition of a classless society’ (21).

6.2.1. Real Abstraction

Commodity abstraction means that for Marx, value-generating labour (abstract labour) abstracts from single use-values and exchange ‘excludes use’ (28). Human minds in such exchange are however concretely reflecting on what they are doing. ‘The abstractness of their action will […] escape the minds of the people performing it. In exchange, the action is social, the minds are private (29). Sohn-Rethel terms the abstraction that can be found in the capitalist process itself a real abstraction (20). Speaking of a real abstraction also implies that this kind of abstraction is distinct from what Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘thought abstraction in the theory of knowledge’ (21).

Sohn-Rethel distinguishes communication ‘by signs’ from commodity exchange (40). Commodity exchange would be practical solipsism:

commodity exchange does not depend on language, on what we communicate to each other. Nothing regarding the essence of things need be communicated. Some semantics for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, for pointing to this or that, and to indicate quantity, is suficient to the essentials of a transaction of exchange whether it is carried on between two village gossips or between two strangers who do not speak each other’s language’ (41).

Commodity exchange ‘impels solipsism’ (41–42).

6.2.2. Conceptual Abstraction

For Sohn-Rethel, the equivalent to exchange abstraction in the world of knowledge is abstract thinking (58) and conceptual thought (67). The separation between head and hand would in the thought world have found its first manifestation in Greek philosophy (66). Abstract conceptual thinking would find its typical expression in mechanistic, quantifying, mathematical reasoning that for Sohn-Rethel consists of ‘concepts deriving from exchange abstraction’ and is based on the ‘logic of intellectual labour divided from manual labour’ (73). The separation of intellectual and manual activities would be a consequence of class-based societies (4).

According to Sohn-Rethel, twentieth-century capitalism’s abstract thought in the form of the separation of manual and mental labour found its expression in Taylorism and automation. The ‘unity of mental and manual work’ (181), the abolition of the division of labour, would be a precondition for the establishment of socialism.

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Sohn-Rethel’s approach is politically important because it stresses that mechanistic thinking and the division of labour are problematic dimensions of classbased societies that need to be thought of in socialist strategies. But he situates communication and knowledge outside of the economy, which becomes evident in his distinction between the economy’s real abstraction and knowledge and communication’s conceptual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel makes a strict separation between the economy and culture. The phenomenon of cultural and communication labour makes it dificult to separate these two spheres. A software engineer creates a highly abstract and mechanistic form of conceptual knowledge: software code. This code is an intellectual product. It is part of the Sohn-Rethelian real economy in a double sense: a) Abstract and concrete labour produce software that b) is sold as a commodity. The abstract logic of the commodity and of exchange and the abstract logic of thought cannot be separated in this case. The one can also not be reduced to the other. Abstract thought and labour rather collapse into one: the software commodity is objectified abstract thought and the result of abstract labour.

6.2.3. Knowledge and the Economy

Sohn-Rethel does, however, not separate the economy and knowledge in a dualist manner. He rather reduces knowledge to the economy by arguing that the economic world determines the thought world. He speaks in this context of a conversion, replication and correlation: ‘the real abstraction [is] being converted to its ideal reflection into intellectual form’ (61, see also 31). The ‘basic categories of intellectual labour […] are replicas of the elements of real abstraction’ (76). ‘Capital and mathematics correlate: the one wields its influence in the fields of economy, the other rules the intellectual powers of social production’ (112). Formulations such as the ones in which the real abstraction is converted into the ideal reflection, or where the intellectual is a replica of the real, or in which there is a correlation, imply that the economy’s real abstraction determines culture’s intellectual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel’s approach in the last instance is a form of economic reductionism and determinism.

6.2.4. Money as the Language of Commodities

Sohn-Rethel’s dual separation of the real and knowledge also results in the fact that he considers economic exchange as being separate from communication. He argues that commodity exchange is a practical solipsism that does not need communication. This separation is not just questioned by informational exchange-values such as commercial software, but also by the communicative logic of exchange-value itself. Money is a particular form of communication that is instrumental, non-verbal, mediated, anonymous, impersonal, abstract, fetishised (abstracted from direct social relations), reified, and void of meaning. Money communicates commodity prices on the market. Money is the form of communication that facilitates the abstract equalisation of commodities on the market in the exchange process. Marx therefore speaks of value as the ‘language of commodities’:

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We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat; Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e. is value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity as a value difers from its stif and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the coat are as like as two peas. Let us note, incidentally, that the language of commodities also has, apart from Hebrew, plenty of other more or less correct dialects. The German word ‘Wertsein’ (to be worth), for instance, brings out less strikingly than the Romance verb ‘valere’, ‘valer’, ‘valoir’ that the equating of commodity B with commodity A is the expression of value proper to commodity A. Paris vaut bien une messe! (Marx 1867, 143–144).

In Marx’s equation (20 yards of linen = 1 coat = 2 ounces of gold), money has the role that it makes commodities commensurable and comparable in the exchange process by communicating prices. Marx, other than Sohn-Rethel, saw money as a peculiar form of economic communication.

6.3. Cultural Reductionism: Jean Baudrillard

6.3.1. Baudrillard against Marx

Jean Baudrillard4 (1929–2007) was a postmodern French philosopher. He specialised in theorising the world of signs and consumer culture. Whereas there is some positive influence of Marx visible in Baudrillard’s early works, he later became profoundly anti-Marxist. Jean Baudrillard (1975) developed a fundamental criticism of Marx and Marxism. ‘All the fundamental concepts of Marxist analysis must be questioned’ (Baudrillard 1975, 21). ‘Marx ofers only a critical theory of exchange value. The critical theory of use value, signifier, and signified remains to be developed’ (Baudrillard 1981, 129)

Baudrillard claims that Marxist concepts such as labour, production, productive forces, class relations of production, capitalism, mode of production, base/ superstructure cannot explain the radical novel logic of the sign, the symbolic realm, culture, and language. Marxism ‘never challenges human capacity of production’ (Baudrillard 1975, 31) and would celebrate labour. It would disregard ‘non-work or play’ (Baudrillard 1975, 38). The Marxist understanding of social wealth as material ‘has nothing to do with symbolic wealth’ (Baudrillard 1975, 42–43). Whereas labour would put something into value, the symbol would put something into play (Baudrillard 1975, 44). The ‘real rupture’ is ‘between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)’ (Baudrillard 1975, 45).

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Marxism would focus on nature as the reality in the economic process (Baudrillard 1975, 54). For Baudrillard, society has been transformed so radically by the importance of the sign, that Marxism is no longer an adequate means for understanding reality. In the symbolic realm, the distinctions between producer/product, producer/user, producer/labour-power, users/ needs and product/utility (Baudrillard 1975, 102–103) would become blurred. So for example in language, there would be no separation between producers and consumers (Baudrillard 1975, 97). Also the distinction between base and superstructure would break down (Baudrillard 1975, 118).

6.3.2. The Material and the Immaterial

The ‘Marxist theory of production is irredeemably partial, and cannot be generalized. Or again: the theory of production […] is strictly homogeneous with its object – material production – and is non-transferable, as a postulate or theoretical framework, to contents that were never given for it in the first place’ (Baudrillard 1981, 165). One implication of Baudrillard’s approach is that he draws a boundary between the material and the immaterial. It is therefore no surprise that in another work he says: ‘The content of the messages, the signifieds of the signs are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but ofer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real’ (Baudrillard 1998, 34).

Baudrillard argues that Marxism is a productivism that frames the whole world in the language of production and disregards symbolic exchange. But he overlooks the dynamic nature of the world: everything that exists must come into existence. It is produced. The world is not static, but is at some level of organisation always in movement. Even if things at one level remain the same, they can only do so because of underlying changes. Reproduction requires and reproduces production, and production produces reproduction. Communication and signs do not simply exist, but need to be produced and reproduced. Communication is not a form of exchange, but humans’ social production of shared meanings through which they interpret each other and the natural, social, economic, technical, political and cultural world.

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Baudrillard basically argues that the economy and production are material, whereas culture and consumption are for him immaterial. The most basic question that philosophy and indeed also religion ask is: What is the world? Why does it exist? How does it exist? There can either be one or several fundamental substances that the world is made of and through which it transforms itself. If there is more than one, then there must be some causal relation between them. If one assumes that a spiritual substance (such as God) either exists besides and outside of matter or determines matter, then the world cannot be explained in the first instance because the question arises: who created the God-like spirit?

If we in contrast assume that matter is the process-substance of the world, is its own cause (causa sui), and has the capacity to produce and organise itself, then a diferent explanation of the world becomes possible: The world is matter-in-process that produces itself, is its own origin, and has the capacity to produce new organisational levels. Such reasoning also implies that there is no God because any assumption of the existence of God is an over-specification of theory that is unnecessary. Separating mind from matter, as Baudrillard does, cannot adequately explain the world’s origin and development.

The human brain is a material system connected to the human body. A human’s semiosis ceases when s/he dies. S/he can then no longer interpret the world and give meaning to it. We cannot see thoughts, but they are tied to a material substratum (the brain) that makes them material. They are intangible and non-physical, but material. We can also materialise thoughts in the form of textual, visual, audio, audio-visual forms that are stored in some material. The immaterial does not exist. Information is a specific form of matter. It is real and material, although it is more often non-physical and intangible than physical and tangible.

6.3.3. Sign Value as Replacement, Collapse and Abolition of Economic Value

Baudrillard does not, as for example Habermas, dualistically separate the economic and the symbolic, but rather reduces labour and the economic to the sign and culture. Sign value would replace economic value, symbolic manipulation would replace exploitation:

It is a matter of the passage of all values to exchange-sign value, under the hegemony of the code. […] [The sign] is an operational structure that tends itself to a structural manipulation compared with which the quantitative mystery of surplus value appears inofensive. The superideology of the sign […] has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system (Baudrillard 1975, 121–122).

The sign would have become the hegemonic reality. ‘The sign no longer designates anything at all. […] All reality then becomes the place of a semi-urgical manipulation, of a structural simulation’ (Baudrillard 1975, 128). All reality has for Baudrillard become symbolic. The economic would collapse into the symbolic: the ‘structural configuration of value simply and simultaneously puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy, representation and signs. With the code, all this collapses into simulation’ (Baudrillard 1993, 8). Production would collapse into culture and consumption: ‘The entire sphere of production, labour and the forces of production must be conceived as collapsing into the sphere of “consumption”, understood as the sphere of a generalised axiomatic, a coded exchange of signs, a general lifestyle’ (Baudrillard 1993, 14). The economy and politics would turn into hyperreality: ‘the two spheres are abolished in another reality or media hyperreality’ (Baudrillard 1993, 65).

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When Baudrillard speaks of replacement, collapse and abolition, then he means that the whole world today is symbolic, cultural, and ideological. There is for him outside to the world of signification. Signification is for Baudrillard the world. Baudrillard claims that Marxism is a theoretical imperialism of the economy. His theoretical answer to Marxism is a cultural imperialism that dissolves everything into the world of signs, the media, communication, language, thought, and consumption. By rejecting Marxism he turns against materialism and aims to revive philosophical idealism. The social world is in human society always at the same time economic, political and cultural: all social systems have resources, decision-making mechanisms, and social meanings. Society and social systems can never be dissolved into pure information. A university is a social system, in which non-information resources (buildings, classroom furniture, food and drinks in the cafeteria, etc.) and informational resources (teachers and students’ knowledge and skills, books in the library, research databases, etc.) form an economy, specific rules determine the institution’s politics, and certain pedagogical and research norms shape its culture. Researchers and students together in this economic, political and cultural environment produce systematic knowledge about the world. This is not simply possible because of pre-existing information, but also because of a diverse infrastructure.

6.3.4. Why Communication is Not Symbolic Exchange

Baudrillard argues that the mass media are not real media because they do not enable responses and reciprocity. They are ‘anti-mediatory and intransitive and ‘fabricate non-communication’ (Baudrillard 1981, 169). He defines communication in this context as ‘a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility […] We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission reception of a message’ (Baudrillard 1981, 169). Mass media would make ‘all processes of exchange impossible (Baudrillard 1981, 170). It is paradoxical that Baudrillard argues that the media world eliminates the economy, but at the same time uses the term ‘exchange for describing communication’s essence. The modern use of the English term exchange and the French term échanger goes back to the late fourteenth century and took on the meaning of barter and mercantile business.5 So the terms are in both languages in modern times bound up with markets and the commodity form x commodity A = y commodity B, in which a certain amount of one commodity is exchanged for a certain amount of another one.

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When we form sentences or speak with others, we do not perform measurements and do not weigh one word or sentence against another word or sentence in a quantitative manner. Money has the role of expressing and representing the amount of average labour objectified in commodities so that they can be exchanged. It quantifies the value of commodities. Human language is fundamentally diferent from money. It is first and foremost qualitative in character, it has certain general rules agreed by custom over hundreds of years (syntax), operates with meanings of combinations of symbols (semantics), and is used in specific contexts that interact with meanings (pragmatics). It is a combination of linguistic form and structure, social interpretation, and societal efects. Language does not function based on the logic x commodity A = y money M. Its essence is that it is qualitative and transcends the logic of measurement. This does, however, not mean that the products of labour cannot be turned into commodities. In commodity-producing societies, the access to linguistic products can certainly be commodified, which then results in exchange-relationships and measurements such as: 1 hour of psychological consultation = £60, 1 hour of financial advice = £100, entry to 1 theatre performance = £12.50, translation costs per word a text = £0.1, etc. Communication as such is alien to the commodity form. It can in a capitalist society, however, be force-fit into measurements such as 1 linguistic unit = £y.

Baudrillard is a prototypical representative of a cultural reductionism that reduces and dissolves labour and production into culture and sign systems.

6.4. Labour/Communication Dualism: Jürgen Habermas

Habermas’ theory of communicative action makes a sharp distinction between on the one hand purposive (instrumental, strategic) action (including labour) that is orientated on success and on the other hand communicative action that is orientated on reaching understanding (Habermas 1984, 285–286). Work is for Habermas always an instrumental, strategic and purposive form of action, whereas communication’s goal is to reach understanding. Habermas separates work and communication. This separation goes back to Hegel’s philosophy.

6.4.1. Work and Interaction

In the article Arbeit und Interaktion (Work and Interaction), Habermas (1968) argues that Hegel (1803/1804, 1805/1806) in his Jena lectures on the philosophy of spirit argued that work and interaction are two ways by which human beings relate to the world, organise the relationship between subject and object, and thereby constitute their self-conscious minds. Habermas (1968) based on Hegel’s Jena system of philosophy argues that consciousness and the mind would be media of communication. The diference between work and interaction would be that the first is a form of strategic action and the second oriented on understanding. Strategic action would make decisions without trying to reach understanding with others (Habermas 1968, 22).

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