Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
6.5. Towards a Dialectic of Labour and Communication:
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work as all forms of “societal production”8 (Holzer 1987, 23). Habermas ‘is not able to see societal production’s essential determination, namely that not only the productive forces are developed in the process of production, but also the societal relations, including communication and interaction, that humans enter in this production process’9 (Holzer 1987, 27).
Communication is neither automatically good nor bad. It is not the moral essence of society. Just like a voluntary fire brigade has to communicate in order to save a child from a burning house as an act of altruistic social action, so too does a group of suicide bombers have to communicate in order to co-ordinate mass killings as a sinister form of social action. Communication is a necessary symbolic mediation of all social relations. It is a form of symbolic production that creates and sustains social relations. It is basic to all social systems and societies and serves the rational goal of organising social relations. If one wants to draw a moral distinction between different forms of rationality, as Haber-mas does, then the dualism of teleological action and communicative action fails. A more appropriate distinction is the one between instrumental action that aims at instrumentalising humans and society for fostering the domina-tion of some over others and co-operative acdomina-tion that is based on the logic that actions benefit all (Fuchs 2008). Habermas (1984b, 477–490) discusses Marxist humanists’ criticisms of his theory. They advance the argument that he over-looks the fundamental importance of work as creative production in society and its potentials for a non-alienated society of well-rounded individuals. He describes these approaches as romantic and doubts that work is as essential for society as communication.
Habermas’ theory strictly separates communication and labour, the lifeworld and the economy. It is, as he says himself, based on a media dualism.
internal activity aimed at mastering oneself’ (55). In sign use, external events are internalised.
Vygotsky’s approach is a step to conceiving labour and communication not in a reductionist or determinist, but a dialectical manner. The dialectic is for Vygostky that work and communication have common and different aspects at the same time. Vygotsky however ascertains an overall dualist approach that keeps the realms of work and communication separate: labour is oriented on nature, on ‘mastering, and triumphing over, nature’ (55), and not also on culture.
And sign production is for him not a specific form of work. Cultural work that produces information can on such foundations not be adequately understood.
6.5.2. Valentin Vološinov: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Valentin Vološinov11 (1895–1936) was a Russian linguist. He was interested in establishing foundations of the Marxist philosophy of language. The founda-tions of this approach have been formulated in his book Marxism and the Phi-losophy of Language.
Vološinov (1986, 9) argues that a sign is not part of the natural or social real-ity, but ‘reflects and refracts another reality outside itself’. The Leninist theory of reflection’s basic assumption is that there is a reflection of the outside reality in consciousness and knowledge. Vološinov argues in contrast that a sign ‘is also itself a material segment of that very reality’ (11), from which it is different and that it reflects and retracts. Vološinov (1986, chapter 2) explicitly asks the question about the relationship of base and superstructure in the context of his theory of signs and language. The basic argument is that the sign’s materiality are the social relations, in which humans communicate with the help of signs.
The ‘forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction.
When these forms change, so does sign’ (21).
Horst Holzer makes an argument similar to Vološinov by saying work is a form of social production in society and that by creating use-values, work also produces a social environment of meanings and for meaning-making: ‘Societal work (that takes place physically and mentally) creates a “meaningful” environ-ment in so far as through the purposes that are objectified in societal labour with the goal of securing and developing life, meaning is realised’12 (Holzer 1987, 62).
In class-based societies, signs would also form an ‘arena of the class struggle’
(Vološinov 1986, 23) so that signs are contradictory. Vološinov distinguishes between inner and outer signs and argues that both are social in nature. Com-munication can, based on this distinction, be understood as the dialectic of the externalisation of inner signs (utterance) and the internalisation of outer signs (introspection) (36). For Vološinov, communication and language are therefore activity and ‘meaningful creativity’ (48). It also means a ‘we-experience’ that is based on an ‘I-experience’ (88).
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Vološinov’s theory of language is not a mechanic theory of reflection, in which thought is part of the superstructure and a linear reflection and copy of mate-rial reality that is communicated from A to B. Lenin, for example, wrote: ‘Mat-ter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them’ (Lenin 1908, 130). In such an understanding, language and communication are separate from material reality and matter in a linear way determines the content of thought and speech.
Vološinov in a at a first glance rather counterintuitive manner says that a sign is part and not-part of reality. He thereby wants to express that the world of signs is its own world that is part of material reality and is mediated dialectically with other realities through cognition and communication. Symbolic interaction of humans with the outside social and physical reality is non-linear (‘refracted’), which means that it is not calculable, but shaped in a complex way by social and societal contexts. With the notion of linguistic creativity (98), Vološinov points out the fact that communication is a form of production, the production of signs in human interaction. But he leaves open the question how communication and signs relate to work and labour. The term ‘labour’ is in fact only used twice in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. So although Vološinov pro-vided some foundations for a dialectical-materialist theory of communication, he never clarified the relationship of communication and signs to labour.
6.5.3. Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s Marxist Semiotics
Ferruccio Rossi-Landi13 (1921–1985) was an Italian Marxist semiotician. His main theoretical insight is that language and communication are not just semi-otic production processes, but specific forms of work.
Rossi-Landi’s semiotic theory is partly problematic (see Fuchs 2016, 61–63), but at the same time helps to clarify the dialectic of work and com-munication: language-use and communication are work that produce words, sentences, interconnected sentences, arguments, speeches, essays, lectures, books, codes, artworks, literature, science, groups, civilisation and the lin-guistic world as totality (Rossi-Landi 1983, 133–136). As ‘words and mes-sages do not exist in nature’ (Rossi-Landi 1983, 36), they must be the prod-ucts of human work that generates use-values. They are use-values because they satisfy the human needs of expression, communication and social rela-tions (Rossi-Landi 1983, 37). ‘Like the other products of human work, words, expressions and messages have a use-value or utility insofar as they satisfy needs, in this case, the basic needs for expression and communication with all the changing stratifications that have historically grown up around them’
(Rossi-Landi 1983, 50).
Wulf D. Hund14 is a professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg. He specialises in the critical theory of racism and in the 1970s was among those
German authors who worked on the foundations of the Marxist political econ-omy of communication. Wulf Hund (1976, 273) argues that traditional com-munication theories separate work and interaction and assume that ‘society is essentially constituted through communication’.15 ‘Just like any work, com-munication occurs always just as production’16 (163). Based on Rossi-Landi, Hund argues for a materialist theory of communication that analyses ‘the work character of communication’17 (271).
6.5.4. Raymond Williams’ Cultural Materialism
Raymond Williams18 (1921–1988) was a Welsh literary critic, cultural and communication theorist, and novelist. He developed the approach of Cultural Materialism and not just worked on British literature, but also on topics such as communications, television, everyday culture, the sociology of culture, politi-cal theory, ecology, language, etc.
In his later works, Raymond Williams advanced the insight that most critical theories are not ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92) because they separate culture and the economy (for a detailed discussion, see: Fuchs 2015, chapter 2).
Culture understood as ‘language, ideas, values, beliefs, stories, discourses and so on’ is ‘itself material’ (McGuigan and Moran 2014, 176). Williams (1977, 78) argues that Marx opposed the ‘separation of “areas” of thought and activ-ity’. He formulates as an important postulate of Cultural Materialism that ‘[c]
ultural work and activity are not […] a superstructure’ (111). The importance of cultural labour in the information society would be one of the reasons why the separation of the economy and culture cannot be upheld:
Thus a major part of the whole modern labour process must be defined in terms which are not easily theoretically separable from the traditional
‘cultural’ activities. […] so many more workers are involved in the direct operations and activations of these systems that there are quite new social and social-class complexities (Williams 1981, 232).
Williams (1977) in Marxism and Literature’s chapter on language to a certain extent brings together insights from Vygotsky, Vološinov and Rossi-Landi. He argues that Vygotsky and Vološinov enabled a break with mechanic reflection theory in Marxist theory, ‘a new starting point’ (34) for ‘the way to a new kind of theory’ (35) by stressing language as social activity and creation. For both authors, signification would be ‘a practical material activity; it is indeed, literally, a means of production’ (38). Vygotsky and Vološinov have provided foundations for understanding language as dialectic of structural conditioning and produc-tive agency. This becomes for example evident when Vološinov says that commu-nication is a dialectic of introspection and utterance and a dialectic of refracted reflection and creativity. The exact relation between work and communication
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remains however unexplained in both approaches. Williams indicates that Rossi-Landi takes steps towards overcoming such limits (43).
The works of Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Ray-mond Williams are important foundations for a dialectical critical theory of communication. They give some insights into the dialectical relations between structures/agency, technology/practices, reflection/production, sociality/indi-viduality, externalisation/internationalisation, economy/culture that are cru-cial for such a theory. In the final section, I will try to bring together some of these insights.
6.6. Towards a Dialectical Critical Theory of Communication