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

46

Critical Theory of Communication

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being

Acknowledgement

This chapter was first published as article in the journal Media, Culture and Society. The final, definitive version can be found in Media, Culture & Society, Volume 38 (2016), Issue 4, pp. 506–524, SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/38/4/506. The version published in this book contains some further updates of the addressed topic.

2.1. Introduction

The task of this chapter is to apply thoughts from Georg Lukács’ final book, the Ontology of Social Being, for the analysis of cultural and digital labour. Section 2 discusses Lukács’ concept of work and communication and relates them to the analysis of cultural and digital work. Section 3 focuses on his analysis of labour and ideology and points out how we can make use of it for the critical understanding of social media ideologies. Section 4 draws some conclusions. This chapter also introduces the Ontology’s main ideas on work and culture, which is important because large parts of the book have not been translated from the German original into English.

CHAPTER 2

How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 47–73. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.b. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

2.1.1. History and Class Consciousness

Georg Lukács was one of the twentieth century’s most well known Marxist philosophers. His book History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Lukács 1923/1971) is among the most influential studies of the proletariat and reified consciousness. History and Class Consciousness focuses on the analysis of class-consciousness, ideology, and reification. Labour is a strongly subordinated and rather neglected topic in the book. Language and communication play no role at all in it. In a preface written for the new 1967 edition, Lukács (1923/1971, xvii) acknowledges the neglect of labour in the book: ‘It is true that the attempt is made to explain all ideological phenomena by reference to their basis in economics but, despite this, the purview of economics is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labour as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing’.

Lukács had an ambivalent position towards his own book. In the 1967 preface, he characterised History and Class Consciousness as ‘ethical idealism’ (1923/1971, x), ‘revolutionary messianism’ (xiv). He writes that it did not begin ‘its analysis of economic phenomena […] with a consideration of work’ (xx) and that it ‘equates alienation with objectification’ (xxiv). One should, however, see that these comments do not refute the importance of ideology critique and the understanding of ideology as reified thought in class-based societies. Rather, Lukács expresses the need that ideology critique is part of a larger critical theory of society that he did not elaborate in the 1920s. The project of establishing such a theory was undertaken in his last book, in the Ontology of Social Being. It is a theory of production in society, including the production of use-value and value, physical and cultural commodities as well as the production of ideologies. One could say that the Ontology is a broader framework that encompasses History and Class Consciousness.

Lukács died in 1971. Shortly before his death in 1971, some of his students conducted interviews with him that together with a New Left Review interview from 1971 was published as his autobiography (Lukács 1983). In it, Lukács (1983, 77) repeats his criticism of History and Class Consciousness, but also says that it ‘is even today better and more intelligent than many of the things that bourgeois writers scrawl about Marx’ (77). He also says that in the Ontology, the ‘concept of labour is the hinge of my analysis’ (173) and stresses the importance of ontology in Marxist philosophy.

2.1.2. Adorno, Lukács and Ontological Philosophy

The Ontology of Social Being was as entire book first published in German in the year 1986. Excerpts from it were published in English in 1978 (Lukács 1978a, 1978b, 1978c). Adorno died in 1969 and Horkheimer in 1973. They therefore had no opportunity to read and comment on Lukács’ final book. One can, however, certainly say that Lukács’ approach formulated in this book encompasses ideology critique in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In 1960/1961, Adorno gave lectures on the overall topic of Ontology and Dialectics (Ontologie und Dialektik) at the University of Frankfurt. These lectures have posthumously been published in German (Adorno 1960/1961).

48

Critical Theory of Communication

Adorno in these lectures undertakes a profound critique of Heidegger’s philosophy. He argues that Heidegger is the main representative of an ontological philosophy. Adorno in these lectures opposes dialectical philosophy to ontology (114) and when he speaks of ontology he means Heidegger’s philosophy. Adorno criticises that for Heidegger, being dominates the subject. As a consequence, this ‘extreme objectivism that more or less neutralises the subject’ (200) results in an archaic (239) and mythological (246) philosophy that has ‘sympathy with barbarism’ (240). Heidegger’s philosophy is for Adorno undialectical. He argues that being ‘becomes for Heidegger an undialectical essence’ (315). Adorno says that dialectical philosophy that stresses nonidentity is not an alternative ontology, but the latter’s anti-pole (325). But he also stresses that there is not a strict choice between ontology or dialectical philosophy (10) and that dialectical philosophy is the ‘critical self-reflection of ontology’ (12–13) and the ‘dialectic is in itself mediated through ontology (13). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno (2004) formulates the same critique of Heidegger’s ontology. He argues that ‘dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things’ (Adorno 2004, 11).

Given that ontology is a theory of being, Adorno’s concern is that formulating an ontology automatically posits being as static and is prone to justifying the bad reality that exists today. So his concern is that ontology neglects reality’s dynamic and historical character. In a dialectical ontology, any being is however always tied to its negative other that contradicts it, by which the foundations of change are automatically given. The One is always related to the Other, Being to Nothingness, and the unity of both constitutes becoming. So there can be no being without becoming. Being is only because it becomes. Becoming is being in dialectical motion. Adorno hints at this relation of ontology and dialectic, but unlike Lukács does not speak of a dialectical ontology. Adorno was interested in a dialectical critical theory of society. Lukács called such a theory in his final work a ‘dialectical ontology of social being’. We do not know if Adorno would have agreed on such a title, but Lukács and Adorno certainly both share the interest in how to combine the critical theory of society and dialectical philosophy.

2.1.3. Lukács Scholarship: The Unfortunate Neglect of the Ontology of Social Being

The Ontology of Social Being is in contrast to History and Class Consciousness a critical theory of society and capitalism and is therefore much more concerned with the relationship between work and culture, as well as that between labour and ideology. It also gives attention to communication and language, which makes it particularly interesting for reflections from a media and communications perspective. In the reception of Lukács’ works, there has been a very strong focus on History and Class Consciousness, overlooking that he also wrote other important works, such as the Ontology of Social Being. This also becomes evident in more recent publications on Lukács.

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar

49

Andrew Feenberg (2014, viii) argues in his book The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School that History and Class Consciousness is the ‘pivotal text of [the] philosophy of praxis’. He therefore focuses the entire book on this work and its relevance and does not mention the Ontology once. The book Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (Bewes and Hall 2011) is a collection of 13 essays. They contain just one reference to the Ontology and 127 to History and Class Consciousness. The collected volume Georg Lukács Reconsidered (Thompson 2011) consists of 13 essays. They in total make 13 references to the Ontology and contain hundreds of references to and quotes from History and Class Consciousness. Chris Nineham’s (2010) Capitalism and Class Consciousness: The Ideas ofGeorg Lukács focuses on History and Class Consciousness and does not mention the Ontology.

In the first volume of Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas (1984) devotes chapter IV to the topic ‘From Lukács to Adorno: Rationalization as Reification.’ He shows the influence that Lukács had on the Frankfurt School and focuses his analysis on Lukács’ concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness. Habermas argues that Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘critique of instrumental reason understands itself as a critique of reification that takes up Lukács’ reception of Weber without accepting the implications of his objectivistic philosophy of history’ (Habermas 1984, 366). Habermas’ criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno is that they lack a theory of communicative rationality that negates instrumental rationality. In formulating this critique however, because of his pure focus on History and Class Consciousness and his neglect of the Ontology of Social Being, Habermas does not realise that the importance of communication in society can be grounded in Lukács’ works itself, which may be a better way for a critical theory than using concepts of communication that stem from bourgeois approaches such as John L. Austin and John Searle’s speech act theories and George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism. Habermas (1984, 365) concludes that Lukács’ theory is a return to objective idealism. He, however, ignores in this context that in the Ontology Lukács was very much concerned with the relationship of culture and the economy. Habermas’ judgement is based solely on a reading of History and Class Consciousness and the complete neglect of the Ontology.

Ricardo Antunes (2013) compares Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Lukács’ Ontology. He concludes that Habermas ‘isolates the lifeworld as a thing-in-itself, conferring upon it a non-existent separation from the systemic sphere’, whereas for Lukács there is an ‘unshakable interrelationship between the sphere of the subject and the activity of work’ (Antunes 2014, 138). Antunes goes one step too far in his reading of the Ontology and completely leaves out the analysis of ideology and ideological labour, i.e. labour that produces ideology (see Fuchs 2015, chapter 3). Lukács however discusses, as I will show, this form of production as well as others in the Ontology, and thereby integrates History and Class Consciousness’ stress on ideology.

50

Critical Theory of Communication

One should not misinterpret my stress on Lukács’ Ontology. I do not want to say that History and Class Consciousness is unimportant, problematic and outdated and should not be read. To the contrary: in chapter 5 of this book, I show the contemporary relevance of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness by engaging with how his concept of reification inspired Axel Honneth’s critical theory of recognition. We can use both approaches for a critical theory of reified/alienated media in the digital age. So my point is that one should not only read History and Class Consciousness, but also Lukács’ other works. His philosophy is immensely rich and a thorough engagement with it is very rewarding.

2.1.4. The Ontology of Social Being’s Context

The Ontology was written in the years 1964–1970 and was Lukács’ final work (Fehér, Heller, Markus and Vajda, 1976). In his study of the Ontology, Nicolas Tertulian argues that Lukács’ aim in this work was ‘to reconstruct ontology as the fundamental discipline of philosophical reflexion’ (Tertulian, 1988, 247) and to work out ‘a really universal theory of the categories of existence’ (249). It is an extensive book comprising of 1,460 pages in total, separated into two volumes in the German edition. Some chapters of the Ontology have been translated into English and published in three parts on a total of 436 pages, which shows that large parts have remained thus far untranslated. The first part of the English edition focuses on Hegel (Lukács, 1978a), the second on Marx (Lukács, 1978b), and the third on labour (Lukács, 1978c). The second German volume (Lukács, 1986b) contains a part called Das Ideelle und die Ideologie (The Realm of Ideas and Ideology) that consists of three parts: Das Ideelle in der Ökonomie (The Role of the Ideal in the Economy), Zur Ontologie des ideellen Moments (Toward an Ontology of the Ideal Moment), and Das Problem der Ideologie (The Problem of Ideology). It also contains a section on work that has been translated (Lukács, 1978c). Given that there is both a focus on work and ideas and on labour and ideology in one volume, it is clear that the Ontology promises insights into the relationship of the economy and culture.

Lukács’ doctoral students Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, György Markus, and Mihály Vajda (1986) published their notes on the Ontology, in which they formulated dissatisfaction with the work concerning concepts such as nature, objectification, reflection, value, freedom, and progress. They also note that it remained an unfinished work because Lukács, who only partly agreed with his students’ criticisms, died before he could carry out any planned revisions. But overall, he was not convinced by his students’ criticisms. Rather ‘at the end of his life, Lukács was persuaded that it was in his Ontology that he had furnished the essential and definitive form of his thought’ (Tertulian, 1988, 248).

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar

51

The analysis shows that the Ontology is largely ignored and has not been read and discussed a lot, both in the German-speaking world and internationally. The reasons for this cannot be ascertained and can only be left to speculation. Lukács left the book unfinished, but it is nonetheless extremely voluminous. It is certainly a book that is dificult to read. The popularity of History and Class Consciousness may also play a role in the lack of its reception. And the fact that only parts of the book have been translated into English certainly strongly limits its international presence. It is dificult to be recognised when one stands in the shadow of giants. My point is that the Ontology should be seen as having equal importance as History and Class Consciousness.

For a cultural-materialist perspective on society, Lukács’ final book promises insights into the relationship of work on the one hand and communication and language on the other hand, as becomes evident when for example Titus Stahl (2013) in an encyclopaedia entry about Lukács writes about the Ontology:

From these ontological commitments, it follows that the existence of the social totality depends on the intentionality which guides individual acts of labor and vice versa […] Lukács therefore describes social phenomena – as language and institutions – as modifications and ‘mediations’ of the relations of the labor process. That is, they are media of “indirect” teleological positing because they enable forms of action which do not directly modify nature, but which indirectly aspire to bring other persons to do so.

Language and communication in the Ontology are explained as part of the dialectics of society, in which work undergoes dialectical mediations.

The principal aim of the ontological-genetical method developed by Lukács in his last work is to show how, in beginning from the elementary act of work, social life constitutes itself as a tissue of objectifications of greater and greater complexity, as interhuman relations better and better articulated, thanks precisely to the relation of dialectical tension between the teleological activity of individual subjects and the network of objective causal determinations (Tertulian 1988, 258).

2.2. Work and Communication

2.2.1. Work’s Ontology

Lukács starts the second German volume of the Ontology with a discussion of work’s ontology. He uses the German term Arbeit that has been translated into English as ‘labour’. The term labour goes back to the Latin word laborem that means hard work, pain, and trouble (Fuchs, 2015, 23–24). The German word Arbeit derives from the Germanic term arba, which means slave (ibid.). The English word ‘work’ and the German term werken go back to the Indo-European term uerg (doing, acting) (ibid.). They have the connotative meaning of creating something that has artistic value. In contemporary language, the terms work and labour are often used interchangeably in English, and the German word Arbeit often stands for both work and labour. It is certainly not Lukács’ intention to assume that slavery and toil are features of all societies. In the discussion that follows, I therefore replace his usage of the term labour by ‘work’ where he speaks of anthropological features of the economy in society.

52

Critical Theory of Communication

Lukács defines work as ‘a relationship of interchange between man (society) and nature, and moreover with inorganic nature (tools, raw materials, object of labour) as well as organic’ (1978c, iv) and ‘the positing of a goal and its means’ (22), ‘the metabolism between man (society) and nature’ that is an ‘“eternal” form that persists through the change in social formations’ (39). Work ‘involves a process between human activity and nature: its acts are directed towards the transformation of natural objects into use-values’ (47). It is the ‘intervention into concrete causal relations in order to bring about the realization of the goal’ (67).

2.2.2. Work as Teleological Positing

Work is a ‘teleological positing’ that results in ‘the rise of a new objectivity’ (3). Work is teleological because in it, a ‘conscious creator’ (human beings) produces with a purpose, orientation and goal (5). So the human teleology that Lukács considers as being characteristic for work, and therefore for society, is not opposed to causality and is not an external, esoteric force that drives society to a higher goal (such as Hegel’s Weltgeist or in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Anaxagoras’ nous), but is immanent in society itself, namely in human practice and consciousness.

Lukács’ (1978c) examples are predominantly taken from agriculture and hunting. When describing concrete work processes, he speaks for instance of the selection of ‘one stone out of a heap of stones’ as tool (31), of hunting (47), or the human use of fire (Lukács 1986b, 34). In a materialist philosophy, there is nothing outside of matter and therefore nothing outside of nature. Humans and society are however diferent from non-human beings in that they can make conscious choices between alternatives and anticipate the potential efects of their behaviour, which enables morality. Work not only takes physical objects found in nature as its input, but also physical and non-physical objects created by humans. The tools of work are not just physical tools, but can also be information-processing technologies such as the computer. The products of work processes are not just physical goods, but also information, non-physical services and social relations. With the development of scientific and technological progress, human work therefore has the tendency to distance itself from its close grounding in natural objects. One may therefore say that work is not just a process between humans and nature, but one between humans, nature and culture, in which humans create, with the help of technologies, physical, social, and informational use-values out of natural, industrial, and cultural objects.

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar

53

Lukács (1978c) was aware of this circumstance and therefore argued: ‘In the later and more developed forms of social practice, the efect on other people comes more the fore, and ultimately – if only ultimately – this efect aims at the production of use-values’ (47). Work’s teleological positing has historically become more distanced from nature and has become ‘also designed to cause other men to carry out positings of this kind in their turn’ (128). This results in ‘man’s own behaviour, his own subjectivity, becoming the object of a teleological positing’ (128).

The decisive variations arise by the object and medium of realization in the teleological positings becoming ever more social. This does not mean, as we know, that the natural basis disappears, simply that the exclusive orientation to nature that characterizes work as we originally presupposed it is replaced by intentions that are objectively mixed in character, and become ever more strongly social (129).

Lukács here argues that the social itself, such as relations, intentions, experiences and knowledge, in the course of society’s development has become more part of the objects, tools and products of work so that work has partly been distanced from its original natural basis, which however does not mean that information work substitutes, but rather complements agricultural, extractive and industrial work. Lukács distinguishes between two types of teleological positings: those that change nature and those that change the social (Lukács, 1986b, 136). The latter of the two would become the more important, the more work and co-operation develop (ibid.). They are expressions of ‘mental work’1 (ibid.).

2.2.3. Society as Complex of Complexes

Society is for Lukács a totality consisting of over-grasping moments, i.e. systems that reach over into each other. It is a ‘complex of complexes’ (Lukács, 1986b, 155; see also 181) that help in reproducing society (182). Language is one of these complexes. It is a subjective organ and objective medium that enables social reproduction so that the human species can continuously preserve itself by continuous change of subjective and objective moments (169). Language use and communication are for Lukács constitutive moments in the social reproduction of society. He does however, unlike Niklas Luhmann (1995), not assume that communication is a subject in itself that continuously produces further communications in an autopoietic manner, so that social systems and society in a self-referential manner reproduce themselves (see Fuchs, 2008, chapter 3). The problem with Luhmann’s approach is that he considers, in a functionalist manner, humans as outside observers of social systems, as sensors in the environment of social systems (Luhmann, 1995, 410). For Lukács, communication as a form of social reproduction in contrast depends on active human, social, languaging beings inside the systems that they reproduce through interaction with nature and interaction between themselves.

54

Critical Theory of Communication

2.2.4. Consciousness

Consciousness plays a crucial role in the ‘active and productive being of the positing of causal relationships’ (Lukács, 1978c, 31). That work is a conscious activity means that workers constantly make choices between behaviour alternatives, which results in a ‘chain of causality’ that in contrast to nature is not automatic, but consciously decided (33). The work process is ‘a chain of alternatives’ (33). If a programmer, for example, codes a piece of software, s/he must consciously decide which algorithm is used next, how it is implemented, which syntax elements are used, etc. in order to achieve the goal that the programme should fulfil. Consciousness enables ‘human self-control’ (45), ‘self-realization’, ‘self-founded being’, and ‘social being’ (46).

Lukács (1986b, 478) argues that dualist concepts of consciousness and theories that draw a sharp distinction between the physical and the ideational, reflect in an ideological manner society’s division of labour that has, since the emergence of slavery, instituted this division in the economy itself. One should, however, not forget that a similar separation is also immanent in patriarchy that institutes a gendered division between physical and social labour and in gerontocracy, which is based on a generational division between labour and collective decision-making. Lukács opposes dualist ontologies of society with his dialectical ontology.

2.2.5. The Economy and Culture

For Lukács (1978c), work is the essential and foundational activity of humans and society. It is the ground of other phenomena such as language (v). Work is the ‘model for all social practice, all active social behaviour’ (46). Work ‘is the underlying and hence the simplest and most elementary form of those complexes whose dynamic interaction is what constitutes the specificity of social practice’ (59). There is an ‘identity of identity and non-identity’ of work and other forms of human practice (59).

Lukács considers teleological positing (the conscious and active production of changes by realising subjective intentions in the objective world) as a common feature of work and communication, i.e. the economy and culture. There is an ‘ontological similarity of base and superstructure as they are both based on teleological positings and their causal efects’2 (Lukács, 1986b, 424). In the economy, where work creates goods, the intentional goals tend to be much more clearly defined, whereas in culture, where communication influences social behaviour, there is much more scope for what is considered desirable and undesirable, for ‘reactions to societal matters of fact, situations, tasks, etc.’3 (Lukács 1986b, 417). Lukács says that in the economy, the value of a product depends on whether it is ‘immediately useful or non-useful, whereas in artistic creation the field and possibilities of value and non-value are extraordinarily widely stretched and hardly determinable in advance’ (535).4

Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar

55