Leftist vs. (neo)liberal scripts for the (media) future: Enzensberger’s ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’

Hard words: Lukács, the reactionary, backward-looking nostalgic and McLuhan, the ventriloquist charlatan full of provocative idiocy ⁸

Section 15 of ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’, subtitled ‘The media: an empty category of Marxist theory’, critiques two living legends: Lukács and McLuhan. The pairing of the two might seem unusual, but within the framework of Enzensberger’s criticism it is quite logical and serves his purposes very well. He mentions the usual suspects from the first half-century of Marxist media criticism (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Horkheimer) but only in passing, in one single paragraph. Somewhat idiosyncratically, he singles out Lukács (who had never really engaged in questions of the media per se), ⁹ more specifically one of his earliest Marxist pieces from 1919: ‘The old culture and the new culture’. In this essay Lukács analyses the characteristics of the bourgeois, that is, the old culture, and contrasts them with the new, communist culture. In Enzensberger’s view, something crucial is misunderstood, overlooked and thus missing from Lukács’s interpretation of the new culture that has supposedly been born. While the old culture basically deconstructs itself (and with itself the whole of the capitalist system), ¹⁰ Lukács’s description of the new culture – unintentionally, but all the more tellingly – contains certain ‘voids’ and ‘vacuums’. According to Enzensberger, these are the vacuums that invite McLuhan into the picture.

Enzensberger concentrates on the following passage from the Lukács text:

Anything that culture produces [can] have real cultural value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker a single, finite process. It must, moreover, be a process conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exclusively the result of the artist’s labour and each detail of the work that emerges is determined by the individual qualities of the artist. In highly developed mechanical industry on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it. Production becomes completely independent of the human potentialities and capabilities of the worker. (Lukács, 1970: 28)

This is followed by a quote from Benjamin, which aptly summarizes the author’s own opinion as well:

This is where the philistine concept of art turns up with all its deadly obtuseness – an idea to which all technical considerations are foreign and which feels that with the provocative appearance of the new technology its end has come’ (quoted in Enzensberger, 1970: 28)

Before engaging with Enzensberger’s understanding of McLuhan and the ‘void’ created by Lukács’s faulty critique, we need to revisit Lukács’s seminal essay ‘The old culture and the new culture’.

The thesis is a well-known Marxist insight: capitalism will inevitably destroy itself. ¹¹ Lukács focuses on two interrelated aspects of this supposed self-destruction: the economic and the cultural. The latter is central to the investigation this time, that is, the cultural destruction of capitalism that is brought about by the very system itself. According to Lukács, the investigation of any aspect of capitalist society leads, by necessity, to an investigation of the whole system. ¹² From all of those potential aspects, he chooses to single out culture in this essay. ¹³

He elaborates on several components of the self-destructive process and claims that the culture of capitalism, that is, bourgeois culture, has already collapsed. This collapse will only be followed by a similarly self-induced, economic collapse. Culture, per definition, cannot exist in ‘finance capitalism’ for several, interconnected reasons. First, it lacks the social preconditions: the class that produced culture in the pre-capitalist era no longer exists, precisely because of the peculiar logic of the capitalist economy. In capitalism all social classes, including the bourgeois, are driven ‘into the service of production’, and hence are no longer in a position to be able to produce culture. Individuals, various groups of people, and social classes alike become ‘slaves of production’. Second, since society becomes one huge market, it logically follows that cultural products (which previously possessed other kinds of value as well) become commodities, without exception. Third, due to the capitalist division of labour, the previously existing organic, harmonious and continuous relation between (i) product and producer and (ii) products themselves ceases to exist. Fourth, and this is the deepest root of the crisis: the very ideology of individual freedom that helped the bourgeois come into power, and that could be seen as progressive at the time of its birth during the French Revolution, can no longer be granted to every member of the society. Individual freedom is subsumed under the logic of capital. The rest of the essay details the characteristics of a communist culture to come and Enzensberger only dwells on one point among them. He singles out Lukács’s undeniable insistence on the (once again) organic nature of the future (communist) culture, in terms of both of the aspects mentioned above – the relationship between producer and product (the end of commodification and reification), as well as that between cultural products themselves (the end of an inorganic, anarchic, individualist culture).

In a certain sense Enzensberger’s reading of Lukács may be justified: the latter clearly feels nostalgic about a mystic, pre-capitalist era that supposedly produced ‘organic culture’. ¹⁴ But this is not the major issue here. Enzensberger ridicules another aspect of Lukács’s train of thought that brings us closer to the heart of the matter. This also makes the logical link from the Hungarian philosopher’s observations (and the vacuums that his so-called oversight creates) to some of McLuhan’s ideas.

Enzensberger’s argument develops as follows: some time ago, but relatively recently, ¹⁵ there appeared a new kind of media, that is, the electronic media; as with any significant new development in the life of modern societies, it requires our critical understanding; since the new, electronic media has undeniably become an influential and important factor in the lives of modern societies, its understanding needs to be politically informed; ¹⁶ the most adequate tool for grasping the politically informed meaning of social phenomena is the Marxist approach; one needs to look for (i) existing Marxist scholarship on the given issue and (ii) real political action informed by a Marxist understanding of the given phenomenon. From this point one has basically two options: if the existing scholarship is incomplete, unsatisfactory or faulty, one then needs to come up with something better, more to the point; if, however, there is a non-Marxist approach to the same issues, one then needs to critique it mercilessly, because by definition, being non-Marxist, it misses the point. As to the first option, we have seen how and why he critiques the existing Marxist scholarship via Lukács. Simplifying the argument above, Enzensberger finds Lukács’s biggest mistake in how he misconceptualizes the potential of the new culture and how he overlooks certain very significant features of it. The reason that I think Enzensberger’s argument results in a non sequitur is that he implicitly equates ‘culture’ with ‘media’, yet the sense in which Lukács uses the term is different (and let us not forget that his essay dates from 1919, far earlier than the widespread use of electronic media): Lukács does not talk about (electronic) media. One can certainly apply various observations about culture to media but it needs to be done with caution. This is what I see as lacking in Enzensberger’s argument.

As a result of this logic, as well as the lack of any potentially politically active Marxist interpretation, Enzensberger claims that the oversight creates a ‘void’ that necessarily invites other interpretations. McLuhan’s is the most visible, misleading and self-deceiving of these. It is dangerous and to be avoided precisely because, in Enzensberger’s view, it lacks any political valence. ¹⁷ That missing political grounding, in Enzensberger’s frame of mind, can only be Marxist – and McLuhan is most certainly not Marxist. This is why he was so fiercely rejected and ridiculed by some on the left; it was not only his supposed ‘apolitical’ stance that provoked the left but also, more importantly, his anti-Marxist leaning. One cannot argue with this. The two systems of thought are hardly reconcilable (apart from their shared belief in a utopia, a better world to come). Yet Enzensberger criticizes another aspect of McLuhan in a similar fashion to his (mis)reading of Lukács: he accuses the Canadian scholar of seeing the human race as at the mercy of technology. And, as with Lukács, Enzensberger does not do full justice to the work of McLuhan.

Enzensberger claims that McLuhan ‘promises the salvation of man through […] technology’ (Enzensberger, 1970: 17), very much implying the lack of human intervention in the development of technology. ¹⁸ As we have seen, it is his major sin. On top of the fact that McLuhan does not advocate for a (Marxist) political intervention, his understanding of the function and mission of the new electronic media points in a radically different direction from that of Enzensberger. To be fair to McLuhan, one only needs to remember that, contrary to appearances, he is completely in favour of human intervention. ¹⁹ Nevertheless, this alleged lack of intervention is the basis on which Enzensberger proposes his own politically meaningful engagement with the new electronic media.

Enzensberger’s starting point, ironically enough, echoes the much criticized and ridiculed Lukács essay (most certainly in its methodology). ²⁰ He writes: ‘Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it’ (Enzensberger, 1970: 14). Just as in Lukács, this dialectic is supposed to result in the self-destruction of the (capitalist) system. Enzensberger proposes that we should not wait for that to happen, but rather intervene in the process, describing the forces that are capable of such a manoeuvre (evidence can be found scattered throughout the text of the essay). He refers quite explicitly to a socialist intervention, but he is careful to point out that the alternative is neither to be found in an ‘improved’ capitalism, nor is it to be sought in the existing practice of the socialist countries: ‘It could only be overcome by releasing the emancipatory potential which is inherent in the new productive forces – a potential which capitalism must sabotage just as surely as Soviet revisionism, because it would endanger the rule of both systems’ (Enzensberger, 1970: 14).

The new socialist forces should leave behind all the outdated, useless strategies and characteristics of the Old Left and instead put the huge potentialities of the new electronic media to good use. Most importantly, this means their potential to mobilize the masses (see Enzensberger, 1970: section 2), but equally significantly it also refers to the goal of turning new electronic media into real ‘communications media’. This is what is ‘fettered’ by both the capitalist and the socialist systems. Neither system allows people to communicate with each other without some kind of a central control, let alone permits those very people to be easily mobilized via communications media. ²¹

Two points bear further elaboration and more detailed explanation: one is the notion of a central locus of power that controls; the other is the reason why the Old Left is no longer in a position to initiate, let alone fully carry out such changes. In section 3, ‘The Orwellian fantasy’, Enzensberger claims that:

[w]ith the aid of systems theory […] it can be demonstrated that a linked series of communications or, to use the technical term, switchable network, to the degree that it exceeds a certain critical size, can no longer be centrally controlled but only dealt with statistically. (Enzensberger, 1970: 16)

After the publication of this essay it took another five years for Foucault to complete Discipline and Punish (1975), which would include exactly this point, that disciplinary power is decentralized, depersonalized, and functions automatically. ‘Central control’ is indeed no longer possible, but the bad news is that it is not even necessary for power to be exercised. Enzensberger is referring here to a substitute for central power, with the same functions and the same purposes. Two conclusions can be drawn from this: (i) he cannot yet see that the nature and ontology of power has changed in the Foucauldian modern episteme or (ii) he does see it (though obviously lacking the Foucauldian vocabulary to describe it in 1970), but his Marxist approach does not let him explain the nature of the changes in that fashion. Both are very plausible, I think. ²²

As for the basic differences between the Old and the New Left, Enzensberger introduces some radical observations. He accuses the contemporary left, that is the generation of 1968, of harbouring deep-seated bourgeois attitudes and values, and therefore of not being in a position to get hold of the new electronic media and use them for political purposes ²³ – the implementation of a real socialist transformation. The paragraph is worth quoting in full:

These resistances and fears are strengthened by a series of cultural factors which, for the most part, operate unconsciously, and which are to be explained by the social history of the participants in today’s Left movement – namely their bourgeois class background. It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture and thereby to the privileges of the bourgeois intelligentsia – a challenge far more radical than any self-doubt this social group can display. In the New Left’s opposition to the media, old bourgeois fears such as the fear of ‘the masses’ seem to be reappearing along with equally old bourgeois longings for pre-industrial times dressed up in progressive clothing. (Enzensberger, 1970: 18)

Just as in Lukács, what we find here is original and pointed criticism, supplemented with a wish for a New Left to come that will fulfil the objectively given potentialities of the ‘conjuncture’ (in the sense that Stuart Hall uses the term).

Dupes of liberalism

Enzensberger is one of 50 on a list of New Left thinkers in Michael Denning’s essay ‘The Socioanalysis of Culture’ (2004: 82). The biggest problem Enzensberger’s generation faced, Denning claims, was to cope with the question of: ‘how to invent a Marxism without class?’ (2004: 84). ²⁴ This question became even more pressing after 1968. If we place this and related issues in the Enzensbergian framework, we arrive at a cardinal question: who should, who could be the agent of change?

For the previous generation of western Marxists that included Lukács, Gramsci and Benjamin, it was not even a question. For them the agent of change was by necessity the working class, the proletariat. The year 1968 demonstrated that something crucial was changing in society in this respect as well. In many ways, the hopes of 1968 did not really materialize, and the widespread disappointment among leftist intellectuals eventually led to a serious rethinking of the issue. If the working class as it was depicted in classic Marxist thought no longer existed, who could then take its place and mission?

The first (and oldest) figure on Denning’s list, Roland Barthes, has something quite unorthodox to say in 1972:

one of the tasks of this century is to learn how the petite bourgeoisie can itself become a progressive class. I believe that if we do not find the answer to that question, history might hang fire for a long time. […] [t]here is no social class, no group that is safe from this general contagion of petit-bourgeois culture’ (in Barthes, 1985: 154–5)

Barthes was never a card-carrying Marxist and never actively took part in political movements, ²⁵ so it was much easier for him to have such an opinion – not so for Marxists such as Enzensberger. The relationship of progressive culture with bourgeois culture has had a contested history in the works of leftist intellectuals. Marx addressed the issue, Lukács addressed the issue (among others in the very essay Enzensberger quotes), Horkheimer and Adorno addressed the issue (in a way that was to be criticized by Enzensberger) and Enzensberger himself could not avoid addressing it either.

In this regard ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’ (1970) stands ideologically halfway and chronologically equidistant between his earlier work on the ‘consciousness industry’ (1974a [1962]) and his later musings about similar issues, for example in ‘Two notes on the end of the world’ (1978). The class struggle and the revolution, which he literally called for and hoped for in the ‘Constituents’ essay, never occurred. But what exactly did he hope for, on what basis, and why did it never happen?

Section 12 of ‘Constituents’ (1970: 26) schematizes the problem as shown in Table 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Repressive and emancipatory use of media.

Repressive use of media	Emancipatory use of media 26
Centrally controlled programme	Decentralized programme
One transmitter, many receivers	Each receiver a potential transmitter
Immobilization of isolated individuals	Mobilization of the masses
Passive consumer behaviour	Interaction of those involved, feedback
Depoliticization	A political learning process
Production by specialists	Collective production
Control by property owners or bureaucracy	Social control by self-organization

When we take a look at this list today, we see that most items in the right column did materialize – and yet the political, cultural and social changes that Enzensberger expected never took place. ²⁷ There are four major reasons for that. First of all, in classic Marxist fashion (and in complete agreement with Lukács, incidentally) he saw clearly enough that ‘the elimination of capitalistic property relationships is a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition’ (Enzensberger, 1970: 20). Even though such a transformation would not have been enough for Enzensberger, it did not even begin to take place. Second, the politicization vs. depoliticization of the masses did not develop in the way that he had hoped. Once again, Enzensberger did foresee the chance for that to happen. To put it briefly, in 1970 he saw two possibilities: the socialist one and the (neo)liberal one:

Any socialist strategy for the media must […] strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. This is impossible unless those concerned organize themselves. This is the political core of the question of the media. It is over this point that socialist concepts part company with the neo-liberal and technocratic ones. […] Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of […] liberalism […]. (1970: 23)

Looking back today it seems unambiguous which of the two scenarios has in fact taken place. ²⁸ A third reason for the lack of socialist transformation concerns the social consequences of the triumph of neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards, best summarized in the often quoted sentence of the recently deceased British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: ‘[there’s] no such thing as society, only individual men and women’ (quoted in Harvey, 2005: 23). ²⁹ In the era of ubiquitous electronic media people have become more individualized, and society has become more fragmented – and even if or when self-organization does happen, it is not with the purpose that Enzensberger invokes: it is subsumed by the spectacle (Isenberg, 1999: 122). The last reason also concerns the politicization vs. depoliticization of the people/masses, but as applied on the cultural level. These processes result in ‘a split between politically active groups and sub-cultural groups’ (Enzensberger, 1970: 19). The former are politicized, but unable and unwilling to use electronic media properly, while the latter are very much able and willing to use new media, but they are depoliticized. ³⁰ This seems to be a vicious circle for Enzensberger (1970: 19). The unlikely beneficiary is ‘capitalism’ on more than one level: the politically active groups are doomed to failure (because they act as if it were still 1900) and the sub- and counter-cultural groups, lacking a political viewpoint of their own, become ‘helpless victim[s] of commercialism’ (1970: 19).

Summary

In the US, the most thorough effort to date to critically engage with the ‘Constituents’ essay has been a conference devoted to Enzensberger which resulted in a special issue of Salmagundi published in 1998 (Boyers, 1998). ³¹ James Miller, one of the organizers of the conference, wrote in 2013 that:

when [they] organized that Salmagundi conference, [they] were aware that very little had been said in the US about the Enzensberger essay – or really about Enzensberger himself, who is shamefully neglected in the US, even though much of his work, including the poetry, is available in English. ³²

Participants of the Salmagundi symposium repeatedly call the ‘Constituents’ essay both ‘prescient’ and ‘dated’. It is undeniable that certain of Enzensberger’s claims, especially the more optimistic ones, may sound dated, whether looking back on them from the late 1990s or from the second decade of the 21st century. However, I think ‘prescient’ assesses the essay more adequately and does it more justice. Miller, for example, talks about the idea of ‘uncontrollability’ of the mass media as a prescient aspect of Enzensberger’s critique; at the same time he mentions its ‘dated’ quality, the implied ‘wild optimism for reversibility’ since ‘there’s a big difference between the media being uncontrollable […] and being new sites for genuine reciprocity’ (in Boyers, 1998: 116–17). Interactivity in itself is indeed not a new form of democracy. ³³ But let us not forget that, for better or worse, the socialist revolution which would have been the prerequisite of any of the changes that Enzensberger envisioned never occurred; it is the other scenario, the neoliberal model, that seems to have triumphed, and Enzensberger does talk about that possibility.

This nuance in his thought has been regularly overlooked, as evident both in contemporary and in later reviews of the essay. The most striking example is the total misreading of Enzensberger by contemporary leftist communications scholar Dallas W. Smythe, who in 1977 called his work ‘liberal, technocratic, and bourgeois elitist’, ‘anarchist’ ³⁴ and places him ‘in the same camp as the University of Chicago economists’ (1977: 202). ³⁵ This type of claim is very characteristic of that period: what it shows is that at the dawn of the neoliberal era, its arrival was sensed and registered, but a clear distinction between its welcome and its critique – however prescient – was lost on many. If ones reads him carefully enough, it becomes obvious that Enzensberger was not among those who would have welcomed change in that direction: what he did was to show this possible future. He was one of the very few for whom the ‘present’ was visible.