Abstract
Reviewed by: Madeleine S. Esch, Associate Professor, Department of English and Communications, Salve Regina University, Newport, RI
As I write, much of the country is engrossed in the ongoing investigation into Russia’s use of Facebook to manipulate American political discourse and still reeling from the massive data breach at the credit reporting agency Equifax; we are also eagerly debating the greatest features of the just-announced iPhone X and the merits of 280-character tweets. The time is ripe for a serious consideration of power, labor, and exploitation of the Age of the Internet, which appears to be what Christian Fuchs will provide in Critical theory of communication: New readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the age of the internet. Fuchs laments that “Internet research is predominantly a positivist science that lacks grounding in social theory and tends not to reflect on the Internet’s larger presuppositions in society” (153). To remedy this, he argues that we must “profoundly engage with and re-interpret contemporary critical theory approaches in order to reformulate them [for] the realm of digital media that shape and are shaped by contemporary society” (153).
Fuchs is an erudite guide through complex theoretical constructs foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory. A great strength of the book is Fuchs’ interest in getting beyond the “greatest hits” of Critical Theory. Instead of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, he focuses on Ontology of Social Being, including portions not yet published in an English translation; instead of Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry, he highlights On Subject and Object. The various chapters, highly structured and numerically subdivided into short sections, can serve as entry points for readers looking to dig deeper into a particular theorist’s body of work to get beyond that one essay or book we might have been assigned in a graduate theory course. However, the detailed outlining of the book should not lead readers to expect rigidly separate analyses of thinkers in isolation. Rather, Fuchs weaves together lines of thought, circling back to trace scholarly disagreements and convergences.
Readers expecting a close empirical analysis of “the Age of the Internet” will likely be disappointed. Fuchs does explore what Adorno might make of YouTube, how Herbert Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality makes sense of social media marketing slogans, and how Axel Honneth’s understanding of recognition and alienation might account for Facebook users who accept the trade-off between social connection and corporate data mining. For me, these are some of the most tantalizing moments of the book, but they are brief and not fully developed. However, given Fuchs’ stated interest in profoundly engaging with theoretical approaches, this is not a shortcoming but a provocation.
Ultimately, what Fuchs seeks is “an open conversation between various Marxist approaches” (3)—specifically, but not only, those of the authors named in the subtitle. After an introductory chapter, Fuchs dedicates one chapter to each scholar beginning with Lukács and progressing chronologically to Adorno and Marcuse in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Then, however, in Chapter 5, Fuchs skips forward to Axel Honneth, considered a “third-generation” Frankfurt School scholar and the current director of the famed Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, before circling back to the “second-generation” Frankfurt School scholar Jürgen Habermas in Chapter 6. A seventh concluding chapter largely reiterates the main themes of the body chapters and ends with Fuchs’ call to move “Towards a Dialectical Critical Theory of Communication.”
Chapter 2, “Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar: Cultural and Digital Labour in the Context of Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being,” extols the virtues of this lesser known work, focusing especially on the concept of “teleological positing” as it might apply to understanding the production of social media as both work and culture. Chapter 3, “Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge,” in part, takes aim at cultural studies scholars who dismiss Adorno as overly pessimistic. Fuchs illustrates this trend with an amusing litany of quotes, but his primary counter-argument—that Adorno believed in the possibility of ennobling mediated culture—is a fact that many cultural studies scholars would not dispute.
Perhaps the strongest chapter is Chapter 4, “Herbert Marcuse and Social Media,” which is not surprising since Fuchs has previously published three books (not yet translated into English) on Marcuse. This chapter begins with an evaluation of Marcuse’s relative status in English- and German-speaking academic circles, the sort of personal insight that enriches the book, and moves into explication of Marcuse’s conceptions of “technological rationality” and “repressive tolerance” among others. He convincingly shows how Marcuse’s early 20th century understanding of the inherent connection between play and labor presages the sort of “playbour” that characterizes social media production today. Fuchs’ applies Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics to dialectical tensions in the Internet Age such as between the Individual and Society, noting for example how social media services have names such as “YouTube, MySpace and Facebook and not OurTube, CollectiveSpace and Groupbook” (122). Yet, we’ve also seen progressive social movements mobilize via those same privatized commercial networks and with this potential come “new risks such as corporate and state surveillance and control of movements” (148), Fuchs concludes.
In Chapter 5, “The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory of Reification and Alienation,” Fuchs explores Honneth’s theorizing of “recognition.” Fuchs argues that Honneth critiques Marx for being too narrowly focused on labor struggles and thus misses other struggles for recognition, but that Honneth himself misses the importance of production in “social co-production processes” (159). Having thus argued for the mutually constitutive relationship between culture and economy, Fuchs sets up the final body chapter, ostensibly centered around the work of Jürgen Habermas.
In Chapter 6, “Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication,” Fuchs spends little more than four pages directly engaging with Habermas’ own work and proposes instead to “build on Habermas and go with Habermas beyond Habermas” (178). Doing so, he brings in a half dozen additional voices but devotes the most time to Raymond Williams, who emerges as a surprise guest star of sorts. Williams, a founding father of British Cultural Studies, although strongly identified with Marxism, is not usually classed among the critical theorists. Yet his presence is welcome here. Williams’ version of Cultural Materialism, which implodes the Marxist base–superstructure metaphor, answers many of the critiques leveled against Frankfurt School critical theory.
With Williams, Fuchs is interested in lifting up democratic forms of communications, geared toward the local, the communal, and the public interest. Throughout the book, while not rejecting Facebook, Twitter, and other corporate social media giants, Fuchs calls for alternatives such as peer-to-peer networks and commons-based media, and for political praxis in which digital media “are also part of struggles for a society in which humans overcome alienation and collectively control their conditions of life” (218). Lest we forget, Fuchs reminds us that the struggle can’t only happen with 140 (or even 280) characters at a time.