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

Also in his main work, The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas (1984a, 1987) draws a distinction between strategic action (as for example in labour) and communicative action. For Habermas (1984a, 85), teleological action (that he also terms purposive-rational action, see page 285) means that an ‘actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner’. Strategic action is teleological action in a social situation, instrumental action teleological action in a non-social situation (1984a, 85).

6.4.2. Teleological Action and Communicative Action

Habermas strictly separates teleological action and its steering media of money and power from communicative action and language:

Finally the concept of communicative action refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations [whether by verbal or by extraverbal means]. The actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement. The central concept of interpretation refers in the first instance to negotiating definitions of the situation which admit of consensus. As we shall see, language is given a prominent place in this model (Habermas 1984a, 86).

I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding. In communicative action participants are not primarily oriented to their own individual successes; they pursue their individual goals under the condition that they can harmonize their plans of action on the basis of common situation definitions (Habermas 1984a, 285–286).

Linguistic communication is for Habermas inherently non-dominative, oriented on understanding and reaching a good society. He essentialises linguistic communication as naturally pure, fair, good, etc.:

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Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. Naturally, speech and understanding are not related to one another as means to end. But we can explain the concept of reaching understanding only if we specify what it means to use sentences with a communicative intent. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another (Habermas 1984a, 287).

Habermas does not deny that money and power are forms of communication. He however sees them as alienated media of communication that colonize, delinguistify, control, steer, dominate, replace and curtail authentic communicative action in the lifeworld and thereby create social pathologies:

The transfer of action coordination from language over to steering media means an uncoupling of interaction from lifeworld contexts. Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties; they encode a purposive-rational attitude toward calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalized, strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication (Habermas 1987, 183).6

Teleological-purposive action (as in labour or exchange) could also take place through language, but language would only be authentic in communicative action:

The teleological model of action takes language as one of several media through which speakers oriented to their own success can influence one another in order to bring opponents to form or to grasp beliefs and intentions that are in the speakers’ own interest. […] Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation (Habermas 1984a, 95).

The concept of communicative action presupposes language as the medium for a kind of reaching understanding, in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise validity claims that can be accepted or contested (Habermas 1984a, 99).

So in these formulations it becomes again evident that, for Habermas, language and linguistic communication are authentic forms of social relations that he considers to be expressions of the normative good and potentials for a good society.

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6.4.3. Media Dualism

Habermas bases his theory on a ‘media dualism’ (Habermas 1987, 281) that separates money and power on the one hand from linguistic communication on the other hand. The world of labour and politics are conceptually split of from the world of communication. There are several theoretical limits of Habermas’ work/communication-dualism:

• Habermas connects linguistic communication to human speech and thereby neglects that there are also other forms of language, which is why Marx (1867, 143) describes money as the ‘language of commodities’.

• In a general sense, we can say that reaching communicative understanding and any form of communication is a form of purposeful action: the means of language is used for achieving the goal of relating oneself to other humans and reaching a joint understanding of the world.

• Communication in modern society is not an immune or innocent sphere: ideologies are forms of communication and language that are highly instrumental. Ideologies instrumentalise language and meanings for justifying exploitation and domination. Communication thereby becomes an instrument of domination. Within communication studies, a specific field called strategic communication has developed. It studies how communication can be used for influencing and persuading specific audiences of particular purposes, especially in marketing and politics (see Hülsmann and Pfefermann 2011, Paul 2011). Strategic communication is just another term for propaganda that serves capitalist and bureaucratic ends. So communication is not immune from the logic of the instrumentalisation of humans and speech for domination, but can serve quite diferent purposes.

• Work not only serves strategic-instrumental purposes, but can be quite altruistic and motivated by helping others and fostering the common good that benefits all. Marx was convinced that an entire society could be built on the logic of common goods. Limiting the notion of work to strategic-instrumental action deprives theory of a vocabulary for conceptualising social activities that produce use-values in a society based on solidarity, common goods and voluntary work.

6.4.4. Horst Holzer on Habermas

Horst Holzer7 (1935–2000) was a German sociologist of the media and one of the most prominent victims of the occupational ban in public services that was enforced against members of the German Communist Party (DKP). Holzer criticises Habermas for claiming that Marx reduces ‘the self-generative act of the human species to labor’ and has a ‘restricted conception of the species’ selfreflection through work alone’ (Habermas 1971, 42). Marx rather would see work as all forms of “societal production”8 (Holzer 1987, 23). Habermas ‘is not able to see societal production’s essential determination, namely that not only the productive forces are developed in the process of production, but also the societal relations, including communication and interaction, that humans enter in this production process’9 (Holzer 1987, 27).

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Communication is neither automatically good nor bad. It is not the moral essence of society. Just like a voluntary fire brigade has to communicate in order to save a child from a burning house as an act of altruistic social action, so too does a group of suicide bombers have to communicate in order to co-ordinate mass killings as a sinister form of social action. Communication is a necessary symbolic mediation of all social relations. It is a form of symbolic production that creates and sustains social relations. It is basic to all social systems and societies and serves the rational goal of organising social relations. If one wants to draw a moral distinction between diferent forms of rationality, as Habermas does, then the dualism of teleological action and communicative action fails. A more appropriate distinction is the one between instrumental action that aims at instrumentalising humans and society for fostering the domination of some over others and co-operative action that is based on the logic that actions benefit all (Fuchs 2008). Habermas (1984b, 477–490) discusses Marxist humanists’ criticisms of his theory. They advance the argument that he overlooks the fundamental importance of work as creative production in society and its potentials for a non-alienated society of well-rounded individuals. He describes these approaches as romantic and doubts that work is as essential for society as communication.

Habermas’ theory strictly separates communication and labour, the lifeworld and the economy. It is, as he says himself, based on a media dualism.

6.5. Towards a Dialectic of Labour and Communication: Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Raymond Williams

6.5.1. Lev Vygotsky’s Activity Theory

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)10 was a Marxist psychologist from Belarus. He developed a theory of activity, whose basic point is that human cognition and language are grounded in human activity.

Vygotsky (1978) argues, based on Marx, that human speech and practical activity develop in dialectical interconnection with each other. ‘The sign acts as an instrument of psychological activity in a manner analogous to the role of a tool in labor’ (Vygotsky 1978, 82). Tools as means of labour and signs as means of communication have for Vygotsky in common that they are both forms of mediated activity. The diference is for him that the tool is externally oriented on changing nature and the sign is internally oriented: the sign ‘is a means of internal activity aimed at mastering oneself’ (55). In sign use, external events are internalised.

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Vygotsky’s approach is a step to conceiving labour and communication not in a reductionist or determinist, but a dialectical manner. The dialectic is for Vygostky that work and communication have common and diferent aspects at the same time. Vygotsky however ascertains an overall dualist approach that keeps the realms of work and communication separate: labour is oriented on nature, on ‘mastering, and triumphing over, nature’ (55), and not also on culture. And sign production is for him not a specific form of work. Cultural work that produces information can on such foundations not be adequately understood.

6.5.2. Valentin Vološinov: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Valentin Vološinov11 (1895–1936) was a Russian linguist. He was interested in establishing foundations of the Marxist philosophy of language. The foundations of this approach have been formulated in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.

Vološinov (1986, 9) argues that a sign is not part of the natural or social reality, but ‘reflects and refracts another reality outside itself’. The Leninist theory of reflection’s basic assumption is that there is a reflection of the outside reality in consciousness and knowledge. Vološinov argues in contrast that a sign ‘is also itself a material segment of that very reality’ (11), from which it is diferent and that it reflects and retracts. Vološinov (1986, chapter 2) explicitly asks the question about the relationship of base and superstructure in the context of his theory of signs and language. The basic argument is that the sign’s materiality are the social relations, in which humans communicate with the help of signs. The ‘forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction. When these forms change, so does sign’ (21).

Horst Holzer makes an argument similar to Vološinov by saying work is a form of social production in society and that by creating use-values, work also produces a social environment of meanings and for meaning-making: ‘Societal work (that takes place physically and mentally) creates a “meaningful” environment in so far as through the purposes that are objectified in societal labour with the goal of securing and developing life, meaning is realised’12 (Holzer 1987, 62).

In class-based societies, signs would also form an ‘arena of the class struggle (Vološinov 1986, 23) so that signs are contradictory. Vološinov distinguishes between inner and outer signs and argues that both are social in nature. Communication can, based on this distinction, be understood as the dialectic of the externalisation of inner signs (utterance) and the internalisation of outer signs (introspection) (36). For Vološinov, communication and language are therefore activity and ‘meaningful creativity’ (48). It also means a ‘we-experience’ that is based on an ‘I-experience’ (88).

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Vološinov’s theory of language is not a mechanic theory of reflection, in which thought is part of the superstructure and a linear reflection and copy of material reality that is communicated from A to B. Lenin, for example, wrote: ‘Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them’ (Lenin 1908, 130). In such an understanding, language and communication are separate from material reality and matter in a linear way determines the content of thought and speech.

Vološinov in a at a first glance rather counterintuitive manner says that a sign is part and not-part of reality. He thereby wants to express that the world of signs is its own world that is part of material reality and is mediated dialectically with other realities through cognition and communication. Symbolic interaction of humans with the outside social and physical reality is non-linear (‘refracted’), which means that it is not calculable, but shaped in a complex way by social and societal contexts. With the notion of linguistic creativity (98), Vološinov points out the fact that communication is a form of production, the production of signs in human interaction. But he leaves open the question how communication and signs relate to work and labour. The term ‘labour’ is in fact only used twice in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. So although Vološinov provided some foundations for a dialectical-materialist theory of communication, he never clarified the relationship of communication and signs to labour.

6.5.3. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s Marxist Semiotics

Ferruccio Rossi-Landi13 (1921–1985) was an Italian Marxist semiotician. His main theoretical insight is that language and communication are not just semiotic production processes, but specific forms of work.

Rossi-Landi’s semiotic theory is partly problematic (see Fuchs 2016, 61–63), but at the same time helps to clarify the dialectic of work and communication: language-use and communication are work that produce words, sentences, interconnected sentences, arguments, speeches, essays, lectures, books, codes, artworks, literature, science, groups, civilisation and the linguistic world as totality (Rossi-Landi 1983, 133–136). As ‘words and messages do not exist in nature’ (Rossi-Landi 1983, 36), they must be the products of human work that generates use-values. They are use-values because they satisfy the human needs of expression, communication and social relations (Rossi-Landi 1983, 37). ‘Like the other products of human work, words, expressions and messages have a use-value or utility insofar as they satisfy needs, in this case, the basic needs for expression and communication with all the changing stratifications that have historically grown up around them (Rossi-Landi 1983, 50).

Wulf D. Hund14 is a professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg. He specialises in the critical theory of racism and in the 1970s was among those

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German authors who worked on the foundations of the Marxist political economy of communication. Wulf Hund (1976, 273) argues that traditional communication theories separate work and interaction and assume that ‘society is essentially constituted through communication’.15 ‘Just like any work, communication occurs always just as production’16 (163). Based on Rossi-Landi, Hund argues for a materialist theory of communication that analyses ‘the work character of communication’17 (271).

6.5.4. Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism

Raymond Williams18 (1921–1988) was a Welsh literary critic, cultural and communication theorist, and novelist. He developed the approach of Cultural Materialism and not just worked on British literature, but also on topics such as communications, television, everyday culture, the sociology of culture, political theory, ecology, language, etc.

In his later works, Raymond Williams advanced the insight that most critical theories are not ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92) because they separate culture and the economy (for a detailed discussion, see: Fuchs 2015, chapter 2). Culture understood as ‘language, ideas, values, beliefs, stories, discourses and so on’ is ‘itself material’ (McGuigan and Moran 2014, 176). Williams (1977, 78) argues that Marx opposed the ‘separation of “areas” of thought and activity’. He formulates as an important postulate of Cultural Materialism that ‘[c] ultural work and activity are not […] a superstructure’ (111). The importance of cultural labour in the information society would be one of the reasons why the separation of the economy and culture cannot be upheld:

Thus a major part of the whole modern labour process must be defined in terms which are not easily theoretically separable from the traditional ‘cultural’ activities. […] so many more workers are involved in the direct operations and activations of these systems that there are quite new social and social-class complexities (Williams 1981, 232).

Williams (1977) in Marxism and Literature’s chapter on language to a certain extent brings together insights from Vygotsky, Vološinov and Rossi-Landi. He argues that Vygotsky and Vološinov enabled a break with mechanic reflection theory in Marxist theory, ‘a new starting point’ (34) for ‘the way to a new kind of theory’ (35) by stressing language as social activity and creation. For both authors, signification would be ‘a practical material activity; it is indeed, literally, a means of production’ (38). Vygotsky and Vološinov have provided foundations for understanding language as dialectic of structural conditioning and productive agency. This becomes for example evident when Vološinov says that communication is a dialectic of introspection and utterance and a dialectic of refracted reflection and creativity. The exact relation between work and communication remains however unexplained in both approaches. Williams indicates that Rossi-Landi takes steps towards overcoming such limits (43).

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The works of Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Raymond Williams are important foundations for a dialectical critical theory of communication. They give some insights into the dialectical relations between structures/agency, technology/practices, reflection/production, sociality/individuality, externalisation/internationalisation, economy/culture that are crucial for such a theory. In the final section, I will try to bring together some of these insights.

6.6. Towards a Dialectical Critical Theory of Communication

6.6.1. What is Communication?

Communication is the social production of meaning in society. It is the social process of shared and joint meaning-making with the help of symbol production and symbolic interaction. All social relations are communicative. Humans via communication together make sense of the world, i.e. of nature, society and each other. Not all behaviour is communicative. Non-social behaviour is not communicative. Singing alone in your bathtub while taking a shower and thinking about the world is a form of self-reflection, self-understanding and symbol production, but it is not communication because it lacks a social context. Other than the professional singer, in the shower you only sing for yourself, not for others. If, however, someone listens and finds the quality of your singing appalling and complains to you (‘Stop making such horrible noises while showering’), then your individual singing turns into communicative social action.

The boundary between the individual and the social is also the boundary between non-communication (behaviour) and communication. Behaviour and communication are not separate, but there is a dialectic of the individual and the social: the individual is the social being that can only individualise himself/ herself in relations to others. The social is the productive relation between individuals that produces and reproduces structures in society and social systems. The individual/social dialectic is also one between cognitive information and social information. The individual constantly produces and reproduces cognitive information that is a foundation of communication, in which social information is jointly co-constructed. Social information enables and constrains an individual’s information and cognition.

6.6.2. Structure and Agency

Communication is based on a structure/agency-dialectic. It is neither a mechanic reflection of the world nor an isolated individual behaviour. Meaningful information is not simply a passive cognitive resource that is expressed and transmitted. It is also not simply a copy of outside reality. Communication is, as Vološinov says, a dialectic of the utterance of inner signs (cognitive/ individual information) in processes of externalisation that share information in a social environment and the introspection of outer signs (social information) that internalise social information and transform individual information. Communication is a meaningful, productive and creative social activity.

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6.6.3. Communication and Communications: Practices and Media Systems

In order to stress the dialectic of structure and agency, Raymond Williams distinguishes between communications (communication systems, means of communication) and communication. Communications are the ‘institutions and forms in which ideas, information, and attitudes are transmitted and received. I mean by communication the process of transmission and reception’ (Williams 1976, 9). He draws a distinction between structures and practices of communication. Such structures that Williams terms communications can also be termed media, information and communication technologies, or means of communication.

There is no communication without a medium of communication and no medium without communication. A separation between media studies and communication studies is therefore artificial. It is rather an expression of institutional power struggles in the academic world. A medium is a structure that helps humans to organise communication. It conditions, i.e. enables and constrains communication. Even in face-to-face communication there is a medium: the air that transmits light and sound waves so that humans can see and hear each other in a social situation of co-present individuals who communicate at the same time in the same place. There are diferent kinds of media in human communication. Information technologies are the structures or media of communication. They are means of communicative production. The body is a medium of non-verbal communication. Language is a means of textual and verbal communication. Nature is a medium of interpersonal communication (the air as medium for communicating sound and light wave). Socio-technical structures such as computer networks, broadcast technologies, printed paper, etc. are media of socio-technologically mediated communication. Money, power, love, collective beliefs, etc. are symbolically generalised media of communication. Symbolically generalised media are social structures that have the role of sign systems in non-verbal communication. Money, for example, communicates the exchange-value of commodities on markets.

In the Sociology of Culture, Williams (1995/1981, 88) discerns means of communication that use the human body and those that use non-human material objects. He further subdivides this division and so distinguishes seven means of cultural production (Williams 1995/1981, 89–91): bodily resources (e.g. human speech), the combination of external and bodily resources (e.g. use of masks in theatre performance), performance instruments (e.g. musical instruments), culturally significant objects (e.g. sculptures), material systems of signification (e.g. writing), and complex amplificatory, extending and reproductive technical systems (e.g. television, telephone, radio). In another work, Williams (1989, 174–175) distinguishes between amplifying, storage and instrumentally alternative media (alternatives to bodily resources). Elsewhere he speaks of amplificatory, durative and alternative media (Williams 1980, 55). In a fourth form, humans only make use of the body for verbal and non-verbal communication (Williams 1989, 174; Williams 1980, 54–55).

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Williams does not provide a true media typology because the features he identifies can overlap. He rather identifies some possible features of communications systems. A computer network for example is not primarily based on the human body. It can potentially multiply and thereby amplify the attention given to voices, texts, images, videos, etc. It is also a storage medium that stores content as digital data that is transmittable at high speed. It provides textual, visual and audio-visual alternatives to human activity: it can, for example, record, store and transmit a short story that a storyteller invented so that s/he only needs to tell the story once and not repeatedly in order for it to become available to a wider public.

Communication requires media for the encoding, difusion and decoding of information (production, distribution, consumption). Media in each of these steps can be technologised and/or based on nature and human capacities. Production, distribution and consumption of information can be based on pure human activities or be technologically mediated. The networked computer is a medium, in which the production, distribution and consumption of information converge. Digitisation makes the computer a universal machine for universal communication. In computer-mediated communication, the production, distribution and consumption of information are all three based on technology. Consumption can at the same time be production of information. Digital communication is, however, not simply technological, but based on human activities, i.e. writing, typing, human speech and bodies that are recorded in audiovisual digital formats (digital images, digital videos, etc.). So we here have an example of how the media of the human body, the human mind and computer technology work together. Social systems are organised in space and time. Not all of them are based on face-to-face communication, in which humans are in the same place at the same time. Communication can be mediated and stretched in time and over space. If such a stretching takes place, then communication is either spatially (synchronous communication with spatial distance) or temporally (asynchronous communication without spatial distance) or spatio-temporally distanced (asynchronous communication with spatial distance). All technological and symbolically generalised media spatio-temporally distanciate communication, but are at the same time grounded in and dialectically mediated with the media of the human body and the human mind.

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