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

Conclusion

The task of this book is to present readings on specific works of selected Frankfurt School thinkers and to thereby open up the discussion on cultural Marxism to new frontiers. These openings are the opening of Marxism to culture and communication, the opening of the way we read cultural Marxism from single, dominant texts towards alternative, less well-known works, and the opening of discourse in cultural Marxism from the focus on single thinkers towards a plural dialogue and unity in diversity. The chapters in this book can be read independently, but are also connected to each other. The conclusion aims to help the reader to connect the single chapters’ lines of thought.

7.1. The Starting Point: Karl Marx

In the German Ideology, Marx discusses foundations of a materialist theory of culture and ideology. He stresses as a critique of the Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner that the critique of religion and concepts is not suficient, but that rather also a critique of politics and the economy, i.e. a critique of capitalism’s political economy, is needed. Marx emphasises that materialism means in society that human beings living in particular social relations actively produce society’s social relations. Matter in society means social relations and the social production of reality. ‘By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 37). The means of subsistence not only include food, shelter and technology, but also means of communication that humans use for organising their social relations through communication. Life involves ‘eating and drinking, housing, clothing, and various other things’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 47). Communication is one of these various other key phenomena.

CHAPTER 7

How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 207–219. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.g. License: CC-BY 4.0

The production and communication of ideas is therefore for Marx not detached from material social life, but is itself material and social: ‘Men are producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 42). Culture is a social product of human social relations in society.

Marx applies this materialist concept of culture also to the world of ideology understood as a ‘camera obscura’ that makes humans and their social relations ‘appear upside-down’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 42). Ideologies are not abstract ideas existing eternally outside of history. They are produced and reproduced by specific ideological workers such as consultants, managers, bourgeois journalists and intellectuals, etc. Marx therefore speaks of a division of labour within the ruling class ‘so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), whereas the others in this class have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 68).

7.2. Georg Lukács: Teleological Positing

So Marx in this part of the German Ideology asks profound questions about society: how are the economy and culture related? What is the connection of labour and ideology? Georg Lukács in his Ontology of Social Being, the subject of this book’s second chapter, re-poses Marx’s questions. He felt that in his History and Class Consciousness he did not ask questions about the role of labour in society and focused too much on ideology. He therefore posed a foundational question of cultural Marxism, namely the one about the relationship of culture and economy, in his final book. The ontological critical theory of society that he worked out in the Ontology does not eliminate the ideology critique Lukács formulated in History and Class Consciousness. Ideology is a profound part of the Ontology. So one can say that the Ontology subsumes History and Class Consciousness and generalises Lukács’ critical theory of society.

Lukács argues that human production is a teleological positing with a purpose, orientation and goal. This means that humans are inherently creative beings, who reflect on the potential outcomes before undertaking an activity. Marx formulated this circumstance of teleological positing in diferent words in Capital Volume 1’s chapter 7 (see Fuchs 2016, chapter 7):

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only efects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it (Marx 1867, 284).

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So for both Marx and Lukács, humans are inherently active, creative, selfconscious, anticipatory social beings. Lukács implicitly distinguishes between physical and information work when he argues that one type of teleological positing produces changes of nature, the other changes of the social. He also uses the term mental work in the latter context.

There are also obvious parallels between Lukács’ Ontology and Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism. Williams stresses that all culture is material. He highlights the ‘material character of the production of a social and political order’ and describes the concept of the superstructure as an evasion (Williams 1977, 93). Williams (1977, 111) argues that ‘[c]ultural work and activity are not […] a superstructure’. Cultural Materialism sees ‘the complex unity of the elements’ required for the existence of culture: ideas, institutions, formations, distribution, technology, audiences, forms of communication and interpretation, worldviews (Williams 1977, 138–139). Williams stresses that especially the emergence of a significant share of information labour in the economy requires rethinking the separation of culture and the economy: The ‘productive forces of “mental labour” have, in themselves, an inescapable material and thus social history’ (Williams 1989, 211). ‘[I]nformation processes […] have become a qualitative part of economic organization’ (Williams 1981, 231).

Williams just like Lukács was interested in Marx’s question of what the materiality of culture is. Both implicitly reached the same answer, namely that social production is the unifying human activity that creates all use-values, including cultural ones such as ideas, artworks, entertainment, advertisements and ideologies. But whereas Williams lacked the elaboration of specific concepts that expressed this connection of culture and the economy, Lukács made Cultural Materialism more concrete with the help of the notion of teleological positing. Lukács stresses that mental work and ideology are not the same. He considers a subset of mental work as the labour of the ideologists that Marx speaks about that produce, reproduce and spread dominative ideas that justify class and domination.

Lukács is not just interested in a theory of teleological positing, but also in the forms that such human activity takes on in class-based society. And here he connects the Ontology back to the concepts of reification and alienation that he first introduced in History and Class Consciousness. In class-based societies, humans are instruments for the dominant class’ achievement of advantages, power and profit. Exploitation turns human labour-power into an instrument of class relations. Ideology tries to instrumentalise human thoughts by spreading ideas that justify exploitation and domination. Teleological positing thereby is not oriented on humanity as end-in-itself, but its means and ends are reversed: in class-based society, humans become means and instruments for the privileges of a dominant class. In class-based society, there is the dominance of what Max Horkheimer called ‘instrumental reason and what Herbert Marcuse described as ‘technological rationality’.

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The Frankfurt School grounded these notions in Lukács’ concept of reification. In the Ontology, Lukács generalises his analysis of reification into a critical theory of society. The struggle for a human society is the struggle for a negation of class-based society’s negativity. It is the struggle for a society, in which humans’ teleological positing, i.e. human production, is a self-determined end-in-itself, not an instrument that benefits the dominant class and dominant groups. Such a society presupposes the abolishment of class, domination, exploitation, and toil. Lukács’ Ontology is not a substitution, but a dialectical sublation of History and Class Consciousness.

7.3. Theodor W. Adorno: The Dialectics of Knowledge

Theodor W. Adorno had already died when Lukács’ Ontology was published. For Adorno, the term ontology was associated with Heidegger’s philosophy that he saw as a fascist, racist and anti-dialectical theory. He argued against Heidegger’s ontology for a dialectical theory of society. He may have disapproved of Lukács’ use of the term ontology, but certainly both Adorno and Lukács were interested in the creation of a dialectical critical theory of society.

Adorno was not just a critic of the culture industry, but also a dialectical philosopher. He rejected a linear and mechanistic theory of knowledge, in which knowledge reflects and is determined by the outside world. In his studies on Hegel, Adorno provides a dialectical-realist alternative to such mechanistic reflection theories. All knowledge production is based on a dialectic of human subjects and an external objective environment (nature, society). In the same essays, Adorno also theorises communication. Language is, for Adorno, a dialectic of the individual’s naming and communication of an object. Adorno furthermore stresses the dialectic of structure and agency and the dialectic of the individual and the group in the production of knowledge.

Lukács’ Ontology and Williams’ Cultural Materialism help us to understand that modernity’s dualities such as culture/economy, communication/work, mind/body, ideology/labour, leisure/labour, consumption/production, private/ public, play/labour, society/nature, subject/object, etc. are not dual categories that are separate from each other or reducible to each other. In both readings, they are identical and non-identical at the same time: culture is part of the economy because there is cultural work, or what Lukács terms ‘mental work’ as a specific form of teleological positing, that creates cultural products. And culture is at the same time separate from the economy because cultural meanings take efect not just in the economy, but all over society.

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Adorno adds to this analysis by his reading of Hegel. He helps us to understand how culture is not just dialectical in relation to the economy, but is in itself a manifold dialectical process: Cultural production is based on dialectics of subject/object, individual/social group, agency/structure, individual knowledge/social knowledge. Adorno is a negative dialectician. The structure of knowledge as negative dialectic can be described by the fact that the subject, the individual, agency and individual knowledge are never a pure identity, but non-identical with themselves: they are related to an object, a social group, structures and social knowledge.

Adorno’s analysis does not remain abstract, but is a critique of the class structures of knowledge that try to make knowledge identical. Ideologies try to reduce the dialectic of knowledge so that the possibility that society could be diferent is hidden. Ideology tries to present class-based society as identical with society itself. It proclaims a false identity of subject and object and thereby denies the dialectical character of all social reality and all knowledge. Ideologies are for Adorno anti-dialectical forms of knowledge. His critique of the culture industry is a specific application of his dialectical critical theory of knowledge. The political task is then to deconstruct ideologies and to find ways in society that can strengthen the production of dialectical, critical knowledge.

7.4. Herbert Marcuse: The Meta-Dialectic and the Dialectical Logic of Essence

Marcuse engaged systematically with Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and applied it to various phenomena of twentieth-century capitalism. Whereas Williams’ Cultural Materialism deals with the dialectic of culture and the economy, Marcuse was in his general works such as Reason and Revolution concerned with how the dialectic works in society in general and in capitalism in particular. The very concept of this approach is certainly related to Lukács’ dialectical ontology and Adorno’s dialectic of the subject and the object. The aim is a dialectical critical theory of society. Marcuse’s main philosophical concern was to ground a dialectic that is non-deterministic and non-mechanistic and thereby opposes and avoids the pitfalls of Soviet dialectics that turned into a totalitarian ideology.

Marcuse was interested in a humanistic dialectic, a truly dialectical dialectic. He worked out a meta-dialectic of the subjective dialectic and the objective dialectic that stresses that capitalism and class-based society’s contradictions condition, but do not determine the future. It is human praxis that shapes the future, especially in situations of rupture and crisis in society. So Marcuse’s point is, paraphrasing Marx (1852,103), that humans make the dialectic, but they do not do so just as they please, but under objective, structural dialectic circumstances set in the past.

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An example of how this meta-dialectic works: in the mid to late 1990s, lots of new Internet-based businesses were emerging. Many of them attracted venture capital investments and started being listed on the stock market. A substantial amount of them struggled to make profits and with continuous losses a divergence between stock market values and real accumulation emerged. Financialisation resulted in a structural antagonism between real and virtual economic values in the Internet economy. This financial bubble exploded in 2000 and caused the so-called ‘dot-com crisis’. According to estimates, this crisis resulted in a loss of US\$5 trillion in stock market value on the NASDAQ stock exchange, on which many tech corporations’ stocks are traded.1 The structural force of the objective dialectic that resulted in the crisis compelled actors in the Internet economy to rethink and revise their economic strategies. In such situations of crisis, the future is relatively open and depends on the choices made. There would for example have been the choice that Internet corporations turn into non-profit co-operatives in order to reduce the digital economy’s crisis-proneness. Especially in situations of crisis, collective human action as the subjective dialectical force matters in determining the future. But a chance was missed. The most common reaction was rather a new capital accumulation strategy, namely to foster social media businesses that are based on targeted advertising, which has created new economic contradictions centred around the question of how profitable targeted advertising can actually be (Fuchs 2014b).

Just like Lukács and Williams and to a lesser degree Adorno, Marcuse also studies the role of cultural work in society. He adds a psychoanalytic dialectic to the analysis by exploring the relationship of play and labour. In the age of prosumption (consumption that is at the same time labour and production of commodities), the Internet and neoliberalism, the boundaries between play and labour have become blurred. Playbour has become a new management strategy and ideology. Examples are the Google ofices that look like playgrounds and have entertainment and relaxation areas, which hides the fact that the employees work very long hours (Fuchs 2014b, chapter 6). Play has become subsumed under the logic of labour exploitation, i.e. class.

Marcuse speaks of technological rationality as the attempt to turn consciousness into a machine and an instrument that legitimates domination and exploitation. What Adorno based on Horkheimer’s concept of instrumental reason terms identity thinking is in Marcuse’s theory termed one-dimensional thought. Ideology reduces the complexity of reality’s dialectics to just a single dimension.

Marcuse was particularly interested in grounding ethical foundations of critical theory. He did so with the help of Hegel’s dialectic of essence and existence. A state of afairs can only be true if its existence corresponds to its essence. Ideas that try to for example create the impression that reality and interests are diferent from what they are in essence are for example an ideology, the attempt to make reality appear diferent from its essence in order to justify dominant interests. The logic of essence in a more general understanding points towards the potentials of what society could be, its not-yet. The logic of essence can ground a critical ethics of co-operation that allows people to politically question domination and class as forms of alienation. In the world of Facebook, we are confronted with the social, whereas the commodity form is not immediately visible to the user. We do not directly experience how personal data is traded as commodity. This inverse commodity fetishism hides the commodity form behind the social. Communication’s essence appears as ideology that masks Facebook’s commodity form and the exploitation of users’ digital labour. In the world of corporate social media, exploitation is real, but tends to become invisible and only indirectly experienceable.

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7.5. Axel Honneth Revisits Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness: The Critical Theory of Recognition, Alienation and Reification

Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of instrumental reason as well as Marcuse’s category of technological rationality have in the Frankfurt School mainly been used for analysing how ideology creates one-dimensional and identical consciousness. The very idea that humans are turned into machines and instruments that serve the particular interests of the dominant class is, however, of broader relevance and is also important outside the realm of ideology. It goes back to Lukács’ concept of reification that he formulated in History and Class Consciousness and that is based on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and alienation. Axel Honneth has explored the relevance of Lukács’ concept of reification for grounding a critical theory of recognition.

For Lukács, reification in very general terms means that there are social structures that treat humans not as real humans, but turn them into instruments serving particularistic interests by dominating, exploiting or trying to manipulate them. Honneth is interested in combining moral philosophy and critical theory. He does so in contrast to other contemporary theorists of alienation by reinterpreting Lukács’ concept of reification. Whereas Honneth in his earlier works tends to speak of love, rights and esteem as the three realms of human recognition in society, in his later works he identifies the recognition of needs, equality and the achievements of work. Reification is for Honneth forgetfulness of recognition. Whereas reification is the process that implements domination, alienation is the condition that results from reification.

Honneth’s theory of recognition can be connected to the Marxian concept of social production and thereby also be related to Lukács’ notion of teleological positing: humans have the interest to engage with others and produce a social world in the economy, politics and culture because they aim to achieve recognition. Recognition is a key goal of humans’ teleological positings in society. They produce use-values, decisions and meanings as a social process not just in order to survive, but also in order to lead a good life, which includes to be recognised by others and to recognise others. Such a distinction of three forms of recognition is based on a distinction among three realms of society: the economy, politics, and culture. Reification and alienation deny humans social recognition by fostering exploitation, control and exclusion. There are economic, political and cultural forms of reification/alienation. Each of them operates on three levels: the subject, intersubjectivity, and the object. Struggles against these nine forms of alienation are struggles for the appropriation of the control over the conditions, under which humans socially produce their lives and society.

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A theory of alienation and appropriation that is grounded in and goes beyond the works of Lukács and Adorno is also connected to the works of Marcuse and Adorno discussed in this book: Marcuse is concerned with the dialectical logic of essence. If we assume that co-production and co-operation form an essential feature of humans in society, from which we can derive the ethicopolitical right that humans should collectively control the economy, politics and culture, then this means that economic, political and cultural alienation are false conditions of society that negate human essence in society. Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality and Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of instrumental reason can be interpreted not just at the ideological level, but in general as processes of reification in society that result in and reproduce alienated social conditions.

7.6. Beyond Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory of Communication

Habermas has established the most influential critical theory of communication. Any critical engagement with communication must take Habermas as one of its starting points. But it certainly does not have to end with or stop at Habermas.

Habermas distinguishes between instrumental and non-instrumental dimensions of society: work/interaction, system/lifeworld, system integration/social integration, instrumental rationality/communicative rationality, teleological action/communicative action, steering media (money and power)/ language. His theory is dualist and leaves the realms of the economy and culture separated. Such an approach is ontologically as unsatisfying as economic reductionism and cultural reductionism. Communication is not immaculate, unadulterated, authentic, immune, innocent, and sacred. It is not intrinsically morally good, enlightening, or liberating.

The common ground of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being and the cultural Marxist approaches of Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and Raymond Williams presented in chapter 6 is that humans actively produce signs, information and communicative relations. Communication is a domain of social production. Rossi-Landi and Williams suggest in a manner comparable to Lukács that communication is a specific form of work, the production of symbols that are used in the production and reproduction of social relations.

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7.7. Towards a Dialectical Critical Theory of Communication

What conclusions can we draw from the critical approaches in cultural Marxism discussed in this book and its single chapters?

Marx argues in the German Ideology that society is a ‘real process of production’, in which humans engage in the ‘material production of life itself’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 61). The material character of society is that it is a human realm of social production. Lukács characterises social production as teleological positing: Humans do not just produce, but they produce based on their capacity to define specific goals and purposes of social life. And they do not do so in isolation, but together with others. Co-operation is therefore what Hegel, Marx, Lukács and Marcuse term the essence of society. The ‘production of life is ‘a social relation – social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 48–49). The logic of co-operation contradicts the logic of instrumental reason.

Social production takes place in the economy, politics and culture. Humans produce use-values, collective decisions and meanings. The economy and work are not limited to the production of physical goods. Also culture and politics are on the one hand part of the economy: humans produce and communicate meanings and collective decisions in social processes. But culture and politics are not identical with the economy. They are simultaneously part and no-part of the economy. Once produced, rules and meanings take efect all over society.

Communication is a fundamental symbolic production process in all these realms of society that helps bringing about and reproducing social relations. We can learn from Adorno and Vološinov that communication and the production and sharing of knowledge are based on dialectics of subject/object, individual/social group, agency/structure, individual knowledge/social knowledge, internalisation/externalisation. If we look at the logic of development of society, all of its subsystems and knowledge, then a Marcusean version of the dialectic applies: development is neither mere necessity, nor mere chance, but a dialectic of chance and necessity, in which the objective structural dialectic conditions the possibilities for human praxis so that humans in the subjective dialectical process make history.

Lukács and Honneth show that alienation and reification in societies structured by class and domination bring about structures that are not controlled by all humans, but by the particularistic interests of specific groups. Alienated societies violate human essence in society. It denies humans recognition. What Horkheimer/Adorno call instrumental reason and what Marcuse calls technological rationality describes structures of alienation and reification that try to turn humans into instruments that are dominated, controlled, exploited, excluded and manipulated so that an elite controls society. An alternative is a co-operative society, in which humans appropriate the economy, politics and culture, i.e. are in collective control of the social life they produce and reproduce in society.

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