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

1.4. Linking the Frankfurt School and other Critical Theories: Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams

One must also see the limits of Habermas’ theory. This book advances the argument that Habermas’ theory of communicative action is a dualist theory that separates the system from the lifeworld and thereby also work from communication. It in contrast argues for taking a dialectical cultural materialist position in order to elaborate some foundations of a dialectical critical theory of communication. In order to establish such foundations, I draw on two theoretical sources. On the one hand, I engage with Frankfurt School thinkers, who are often thought of as not having much to say on communication, but whose thought reveals interesting undercurrents that can be productively used and further developed in a dialectical critical theory of communication – Georg Lukács (especially his final book The Ontology of Social Being), Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Axel Honneth. On the other hand, I also draw on other critical social theories that standing in the Marxist tradition have contributed to critically theorizing culture, signification, information and communication: Lev Vygotsky’s activity theory, Valentin Vološinov’s Marxist philosophy of language, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s Marxist semiotics, and Raymond Williams Cultural Materialism.

None of these approaches has elaborated a systematic dialectical critical theory of communication, but we can build on certain elements of these thinkers and set them in a dialogue with Frankfurt School thinkers for grounding a dialectical cultural materialist position that allows us to think critically and dialectically about communication. I will do so by, on the one hand, theorising reification, knowledge, the relationship of the economy and culture, the relationship of work and communication, the relationship of labour and ideology in more general terms at the levels of society and capitalism, and by, on the other hand, applying these more general foundations to the concrete case of digital and social media in order to critically understand phenomena such as digital labour, online alienation, and social media ideologies.

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Not every reader will be familiar with all of the thinkers just mentioned: Lev Vygotsky’s, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams.

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)3 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. Valentin Vološinov4 (1895–1936) was a Russian linguist. He was interested in establishing foundations of the Marxist philosophy of language. Foundations of this approach have been formulated in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi5 (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. Raymond Williams6 (1921–1988) was a Welsh literary critic, cultural and communication theorist, and novelist. He developed the approach of Cultural Materialism and worked not just on British literature, but also on topics such as communications, television, everyday culture, the sociology of culture, political theory, ecology, language, etc.

Vygotsky, Vološinov, Rossi-Landi and Williams share with the Frankfurt School not just the interest in critical dialectical thought, but also the application of the dialectic for critically understanding how the economy and culture are related. Discussing the relations between all of these approaches is therefore an interesting task for open cultural Marxism. It should also be stressed that the list of relevant thinkers is incomplete and that, in the spirit of an open Marxism the thoughts and writings of other Marxist thinkers should also be used in cultural Marxism today.

1.4.1. Raymond Williams and the Frankfurt School

Raymond Williams (1983) commented on Georg Lukács’ works, especially his later ideas on aesthetics. Williams describes these works as having ‘some remarkable resemblances to a familiar nineteenth-century idealism of art’ because of linking of works of art to ‘general human liberation’ (273). He also describes his own approach of Cultural Materialism as ‘a diametrically opposite answer to the questions which Lukács and other Marxists have posed’ (273). In his book Marxism and Literature, Williams (1977, 102) comments that Lukács’ theory of art faces the ‘danger of reducing this theory to art as the typification (representation, illustration) not of the dynamic process but of its (“known”) laws’.

Williams (1977, 98–99) also argues that, for the Frankfurt School, being and consciousness are mediated. ‘The Frankfurt School, with its special emphasis on art, undertook a sustained re-examination of “artistic production”, centred on the concept of “mediation”’ (Williams 1977, 53). It would see mediation as ‘a positive process in social reality, rather than a process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpretation’.

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It is no surprise that Williams engages in more detail with Lukács than with the other thinkers discussed in this book because Williams and Lukács were both not just general critical theorists, but also literary critics, for whom aesthetics was very important. Williams’ reading of literature is indeed considerably diferent from Lukács often socialist-realist position. But for example also Adorno strongly disagreed with Lukács’ theory of art, as I discuss in detail in section 3.3 (chapter 3) of this book. Lukács’ oeuvre is quite heterogeneous and therefore involves manifold, often contradictory strands of theory. His concept of reification had a positive influence on all Frankfurt School thinkers. Therefore Lukács’ (1923/1971) History and Class Consciousness is often seen as one of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual starting points. It is ‘the founding text of the entire tradition of Western Hegelian Marxism’ (Žižek 2000, 152)

In Marxism and Literature, Williams discusses various concepts that Marxist theories have used for conceptualising the relationship of the economy and culture: determination, reflection, reproduction, mediation, and homology. He argues that these concepts all assume a relationship between the economy and culture that to a varying degree is shaped by causal determination or mutual causality. But all of them would share the assumption of ‘the separation of “culture” from material social life’ (Williams 1977, 19) that Williams (1977, 59) considers to be ‘idealist’. In Williams’ view, the problem of these approaches is not that they are too economistic and materialist, but quite on the contrary that they are not ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92). For Williams, culture is not a superstructure independent from an economic base, but rather culture understood as ‘language, ideas, values, beliefs, stories, discourses and so on’ is for him ‘itself material’ (McGuigan and Moran 2014, 176).

Williams (1977) criticises the ‘idealist separation of “ideas” and “material reality”’ (59). The reflex against ‘idealist dualism’ would often be a ‘mechanical materialism’ that ‘leads directly to simple reductionism: “consciousness” and “its” products can be nothing but “reflections” of what has already occurred in the material social process’ (61). But consciousness and its products would always be ‘parts of the material social process itself’(61).

The basic insight of Williams’ Cultural Materialism is that the economy and culture are identical and non-identical at the same time (Fuchs 2015a, chapters 2 and 3). Culture is part of the economy and at the same time goes beyond it. There is an economy that produces culture, but neither can we reduce the economy to culture nor culture to the economy. Williams’ approach is a dialectical Cultural Materialism.

Williams considered the Frankfurt School’s focus on mediation as too dualist and not dialectical and not materialist enough. But his knowledge of the Frankfurt School’s works was certainly limited and for certain reasons had to remain limited. I argue in this book that there are certain works in the Frankfurt School tradition that, just like Williams, take a dialectical cultural materialist position on the question of how the economy and culture as well as work and communication are related to each other. I focus in this respect especially on Georg

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Lukács’ (1986a, 1986b) final book The Ontology of Social Being, Adorno’s (1963) book Hegel: Three Studies, and Adorno’s essay On Subject and Object (Adorno 1998, 245–258).

Williams (1969) reviewed Marcuse’s (1988/1968) book Negations. He finds Marcuse’s approach of trying to combine Freud and Marx confused and argues that these two approaches do not go together. But Williams found particular interest in Marcuse’s essay ‘The Afirmative Character of Culture’. He argues that this essay is very close to his own materialist understanding of culture because it questions ‘the separation of ideal and material life’ (Williams 1969, 165). Marcuse would show how this separation turns into an ideology he terms the afirmative culture. Williams’ interest in Marcuse is an indication that there are certain parallels between Williams and the Frankfurt School’s understandings of culture. Drawing on both of these traditions therefore promises to be a fruitful approach for a critical theory of communication and culture.

Williams was also aware of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. In Marxism and Literature, Williams (1977, 98) stresses that Adorno is a representative of a position in Marxist theory that sees mediation as the key concept for relating the economy and culture. Williams commented that the notion of mediation other than the one of reflection ‘indicates an active process’, but ‘perpetuates a basic dualism’ (99). So his criticism was that it is not dialectical enough.

1.4.2. Habermas: Theory of Communicative Action

Habermas’ theory is one of the most influential communication theories of the twentieth century. For example, the Encyclopedia of Communication Theory lists the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action as a milestone in a chronology of the field and says that it has had ‘huge impact’ and ‘greatly influences critical communication theory’ (Littlejohn and Foss 2009, lxv). Jürgen Habermas built his approach on the classical Frankfurt School and at the same time worked out the concept of communicative rationality, by which he went beyond the classical tradition. Habermas (1984, 285–286) distinguishes between instrumental (non-social, success-oriented), strategic (social, success-oriented) and communicative action (social, oriented on understanding). Habermas (1987, 333) argues that ‘Horkheimer and Adorno failed to recognize the communicative rationality of the lifeworld’. For Habermas (1987, 375), critical theory questions the fact that steering media (money, power) attack ‘the communicative infrastructure of largely rationalized lifeworlds’. Habermas (1971, 53) conceives instrumental action and communicative action as the two fundamental aspects of social praxis. What Habermas wants to express is that the human being is both a labouring and a communicating being: ‘the reproduction of life is determined culturally by work and interaction’ (Habermas 1971, 196). Dallas Smythe expressed the same idea as foundation of a Marxist theory of media and communication: ‘there will be no general Marxist theory of communication until Marxism comes to comprehend man as a message system- and symbol-using animal as well as a working animal’ (Smythe 1994, 258).

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For Habermas, emancipatory interest ‘aims at the pursuit of reflection’ (Habermas 1971, 198), it enables ‘liberation from dogmatic dependence (Habermas 1971, 271). In those passages, where Habermas tries to define what critical theory is all about (Habermas 1987, 375; Habermas 1971, 198, 271), his formulations remain abstract and vague. He mainly points out the emancipatory role of communication and that the goal is undistorted communication. He thereby falls short of the concreteness of Lukács’, Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s and Marcuse’s notions of critical theory. These thinkers left no doubt that such a theory is all about questioning all structures of domination and exploitation. In a way, Habermas retains the classical Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, but inverts it by putting the stress on communication. Doubts arise if work can be so strictly separated from communication in a dualistic way. The twentieth and twenty-first century have seen a rising importance of communicative and cultural work in the economy. But if such activity takes on value-generating form, then culture and communication must be part of the economy themselves, base and superstructure become integrated, labour and communication cannot be separated.

Communication is one of the crucial foundations of the economy: the latter is not just a system of the production of use-values and in class-based societies of exchange values. It is also a social system because production in any society takes on complex forms beyond individual self-sustenance. The only way for organising the relational dimension of the economy is via communication, in the form of symbolic interaction and/or anonymous forms of indirect communication (as for example via money, markets, the price system, etc.). Human thought is a precondition for human communication and existence. When humans produce in the economy, they do so with a purpose in mind, which means that they anticipate the form of the object and how it will be put to use. The economic existence of man requires anticipative thinking just like it requires communication. It is in these two specific senses – the importance of communication and thought – that the economy is always and fundamentally cultural. Capitalism’s history has also been a history of the commodification of culture and communication, especially since the twentieth century. This is not to say that culture and communication necessarily take on the form of a commodity, but that in capitalism they frequently do so in the form of content commodities, audience commodities and cultural labour power as commodity. In this sense culture has been economised, or, to be more precise commoditised, i.e. put under the influence of the commodity logic.

Communication is certainly an important aspect of a domination-less society. Communication is, however, in capitalism also a form of interaction, in which ideology is with the help of the mass media made available to the dominated groups. Communication is not automatically progressive. For Habermas, the diferentiation is between instrumental/strategic reason and communicative reason, whereas for Horkheimer the distinction is between instrumental reason and critical reason (Horkheimer 1947) and based on it between traditional and critical theory (Horkheimer 2002).

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Habermas splits of communication from instrumentality and thereby neglects that in capitalism communication just like technology, the media, ideology or labour is an instrument that is used by the dominant system to defend its rule. Communication is not pure and left untouched by structures of domination, it is antagonistically entangled into them. For Horkheimer (based on Marx), critical theory’s goal is man’s ‘emancipation from slavery’ (Horkheimer 2002, 249) and ‘the happiness of all individuals’ (248). Horkheimer has the emancipation of communication just like the emancipation of work, decisionmaking and everyday life, in mind. His notion of critical rationality is larger than Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality that risks becoming soaked up by non-critical approaches that use Habermas’ stress on communication for instrumental purposes. The concept of communication can be critical, but is not necessarily critical, whereas the concept of a critique of domination is necessarily critical.

1.5. The Frankfurt School and Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy⁷

Martin Heidegger has influenced some critical theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse, Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Bernhard Stiegler, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Because he was not just a philosopher, but also a philosopher of technology, he has influenced studies of media and culture and continues to today influence the study of digital media, including critical studies. At the same time, many critical scholars, including Adorno, Marcuse, Anders and Habermas, have always been very sceptical of Heidegger because of his membership in the Nazi party.

The publication of Heidegger’s philosophical notebooks, the Black Notebooks, as the final volumes in the collected Heidegger works, has since 2014 resulted in heavy debates about anti-Semitism and Heidegger. As a result, for example the President of the Heidegger Society Günter Figal stepped down. Explaining this move, he argued that he was shocked and that the revelations meant the end of Heideggerianism.8 Given that Heidegger remains influential in critical theories of digital media, I want to discuss why I think his approach is highly problematic and that Heidegger scholarship can after the Black Notebooks not simply continue as it did before.

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1.5.1. Heidegger and Digital Media

In his book Critical Theory and the Digital, David M. Berry (2014) provides thoughts on how to use critical theory. I find this project feasible and can relate to it to the extent that Berry uses Frankfurt School concepts such as instrumental reason and the dialectic of the enlightenment in order to criticise what he terms computational ideology, authoritarian-computational epistemology, and computationality. New communication technologies have often come along with enthusiastic optimistic ideologies or cultural pessimistic ideologies, in which these tools are presented either as solving humanities’ problems and bringing about a much better society or as causing the decline of culture and society. Ideology critique of digital technologies is therefore a much-needed important endeavour. My own approach, however, diverges from Berry in respect to the fact the he is ‘drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, to create new concepts for thinking the digital, indeed, contributing to a critical theory for the digital’ (Berry 2014, 19).

I do not have the space here to detail the full argument of why I think Heidegger and a critical theory of technology and communication are incompatible, and therefore have to refer the reader to two essays that I have written on this topic (Fuchs 2015b, 2015c). I can here only point out some aspects of this complex topic in a necessarily brief manner. I recommend to those who are further interested in Heidegger, anti-Semitism and the philosophy of technology, to read my two articles in full and to also engage with related works that I reference there.

1.5.2. Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger (2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015) argues that Jews have a calculating, instrumental form of reason. Two examples:

Jewry’s temporary increase in power is, however, grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, furnishes the starting point for the difusion of a generally empty rationality and calculative ability, which in this way provides a refuge in “spirit”, without being able grasp the hidden decision regions on their own9 (Heidegger 2014c, 46 [XII, 67–68]).

The Jews “live” by their marked talent for calculation second only to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence10 (Heidegger 2014c, 56 [XII, 82–83]).

Heidegger sees Jews as a powerful group, which plays with the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy. Furthermore, he argues that this group has a specific quality, namely a calculative rationality that is grounded in Western metaphysics. He does not argue that this is a biological characteristic, but a socio-natural one, i.e. he constructs ‘the Jews’ as a homogenous collective, attributes to them and blames them for qualities of capitalism. The identification of Jews with instrumental rationality has a double feature: instrumental rationality, on the one hand, is an expression of the drive to accumulate capital and power, and on the other hand, the operating principle of modern technology. Heidegger blames Jews for both the logic of capitalism and industrialism.

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Heidegger in the Black Notebooks employs six of the seven elements of anti-Semitism that Adorno (2002) identified: he sees Jews and Germans as forming two races (I), identifies Jews with modernity, capitalism, and modern technology (II, III), makes use of mystical and naturalistic logic by arguing that Jews are uprooted and threaten the Germans’ rootedness (V), and describes Jews as a powerful ‘world Jewry’ that rules the world (VI) as well as a homogenous collective to which he ascribes negative biological, social, and political characteristics (VII). The only feature of anti-Semitism that is not present is the religious element (IV), which can be explained by the circumstance that Christian religion does not play a role in Nazi ideology.

1.5.3. Heidegger’s Philosophy

Heidegger (1927) already in Sein und Zeit advanced a conservative critique that sees modern technology as such as a problem. The problem is formulated abstractly as das Man (the they), but its causes and context remain unclear in the phenomenology that Heidegger formulated in Sein und Zeit. It is for Heidegger certainly not the capitalist use and design of and bureaucratic shaping of technology that form this context because class, the state, and capitalism are categories that are absent from his analysis. Heidegger does not argue for a redesign of modern technology and modern society, but for their abolishment. Heidegger’s most important works on technology are the two essays The Question Concerning Technology and The Turning that go back to a series of lectures that he gave in the years 1949, 1950, and 1955 in Bremen and Munich. They were published together as the book Die Technik und die Kehre (Heidegger 1962) in German and The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Heidegger 1977) in English. In this work, Heidegger characterises modern technology as ‘Ge-stell’ (the Enframing).

The power of capitalism and the modern state, or what Habermas (1984, 1987) terms the systems of modern society that colonise the lifeworld, are absent both in Being and Time and The Question Concerning Technology. This circumstance is idiosyncratic, given that modern society is based on the accumulation of capital and bureaucratic power, two structures that frame the development and use of modern technology. So a major problem of Heidegger’s approach is that it is not a political economy, but merely a phenomenology of technology. He describes attributes of modern technology, such as instrumental logic, calculation, physics, the exact sciences, mathematics, in both books, but leaves open the question what the structural context of modern technology is. Heidegger’s phenomenology in both books does not give an answer to the question what the causes of the problems he ascertains are. But he makes clear that the problem is not technology itself: ‘What is dangerous is not technology. There is no demonry of technology’ (Heidegger 1977, 28). The danger would rather be the Ge-stell (Heidegger 1977, 28). The Ge-stell is however not an explanation in-itself, but an attribute of modern society. Heidegger neglects the analysis of capital and state power, two main features of modern society. So the two books leave open the question of the contexts of modernity’s problems.

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The Black Notebooks are a work, in which Heidegger provided an answer to the question of the structural contexts of modernity and modern technology. He says that the logic of calculability is Jewish. Heidegger identifies instrumental reason with Jews. So for him the cause and context of modernity and modern technology’s problems – the rise of world-lessness and alienation – is seen in Jews.

There is a logical link between the Black Notebooks, Being and Time, and The Question Concerning Technology. The first provide the missing link and grounding for the second and the third. The Black Notebooks help explaining a theoretical void in the other two books. Das Man (the they) and das Ge-stell (the enframing) have in the Black Notebooks a grounding for Heidegger, namely what he and others term ‘world Jewry’, i.e. the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy.

1.5.4. Heidegger and the Critical Theory of Society, the Media and Technology

The Frankfurt School’s works form a critique of instrumental reason, a critique of capitalism’s reduction of humans to instruments whose labour serves capital accumulation, a critique of domination questioning the instrumentalisation of humans for fostering the rule and power of the few, and a critique of ideology questioning the instrumentalisation of human thinking. The Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason is however fundamentally diferent from Heidegger’s analysis. Whereas Critical Theory’s context is political economy, Heidegger’s phenomenology is short-circuited and therefore prone to turn into an instrumental ideology itself. If one wants to ground a critique of modern technology and media, then approaches that are much better grounded in the analysis of society and political economy than Heidegger’s phenomenology are available.

Heidegger and the critical theory of society, the media and technology are irreconcilable. Such a theory can in contrast in a feasible manner be grounded in Karl Marx’s dialectic of technology, Georg Lukács’ notion of reification, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of instrumental reason, and Herbert Marcuse’s category of technological rationality.

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1.5.5. Heidegger and Lukács

On Being and Time’s concluding page, Heidegger (2010, 414) says:

We have long known that ancient ontology deals with ‘reified concepts’ and that the danger exists of “reifying consciousness”. But what does reifying mean? Where does it arise from? Why is being “initially” conceived’ in terms of what is objectively present [Vorhanden], and not in terms of things at hand [Zuhanden] that do, after all, lie still nearer to us? Why does this reification come to dominate again and again?11

Lucien Goldmann (1913–1970) was a French Marxist philosopher. He argues in respect to this passage in his book Lukács and Heidegger (Goldmann 1977, chapter 1) that Heidegger refers to Lukács without naming him. He says that Lukács and Heidegger both criticise positivist thought and knowledge that is based on the separation of object and subject (Goldmann 1977, 29–31). Heidegger’s concept of Vorhandenheit would parallel Lukács’ notion of reification, Heidegger’s concept of Zuhandenheit would parallel Lukács’ category of praxis (35–39).

Lukács in contrast to Heidegger sees reification as a consequence of classbased society and capitalism, whereas Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit is a much more abstract category, devoid of class relations, capitalism, and commodity fetishism. Goldmann hints at this fundamental diference: He says that whereas Lukács speaks of praxis in relation to ‘social classes’ (8), for Heidegger ‘historical action is the privilege of élitists to the exclusion of the masses’ so that ‘only a certain number of élite individuals are creators of history’ (9). ‘Contrary to Lukács who, starting from commodity fetishism and the collective subject, succeeds in explaining the genesis of the given world as a spectacle, Heidegger does not go beyond a phenomenological description of the world of evil and of inauthenticity, and has not succeeded in explaining its historical source’ (45). For Goldmann, Heidegger and Lukács are not irreconcilable, which in my view is a mistaken conclusion.

In contrast to Heidegger, Lukács (1923/1971) leaves no doubt about the source and context of reification in modern society, arguing that it is ‘growing out of the fetish character of commodities’ (84). ‘Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society’ (197). Marx’s

chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity [Capital Volume 1, chapter 1, section 4; see Fuchs 2016, chapter 1.4, pp. 41–47] contains within itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist society (and of the societies that preceded it) (170).

We today know that the Black Notebooks’ anti-Semitism is the ideology that fills the void that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit creates in respect to the question of how reification is grounded. Heidegger thought that Jewry is the cause of reification. Given Heidegger’s philosophy, it is dificult to see parallels between Lukács and him. Goldmann’s (1977, 17) mistaken characterisation also leads him to underestimate Heidegger when he writes that for Heidegger, ‘anti-Semitism could only be regarded as a profound and regrettable error, the biological having no place in ontology and being totally unable to limit or further the Being-there’s possibilities of choosing between the authentic and the inauthentic’.

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