Page 3 - Critical Theory of Communication as Critical Sociology of Critique

FUCHS: CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION AS CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF CRITIQUE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CAPITALISM

Introduction

Review essays are attempts to make sense of the thought presented by an author. It is certainly diff cult to classify
my work. I would not accept any classif cation of it except that it is inf uenced by Marx’s works. Often I do not
read reviews of my books and works because a signif cant share of the reviewers read my works selectively,
have not read what I have written about specif c topics, claim that I am either not a Marxist (if they are orthodox
Marxists) or that I am an orthodox Marxists (if they are heterodox Marxists) or that Marx is outdated (if they
oppose Marxism), that I disregard X although I am writing about Y and about X in other works, etc. And many
are not interested in a genuine discussion, but just want to draw attention to their own works. Dealing with such
one-dimensional criticism is cumbersome and leads nowhere, which is why in most cases it is best to just move
on and focus on more interesting and important work.
Jan Løhmann Stephensen’s discussion of my book Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media in
Conjunctions (Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 155-171) is of a different nature. It is an intelligent and informed reading of my
work, and he is interested in arguments, asks interesting questions, and has made me think about some specif c
aspects of the key question of how we today should best conceptualise a critical theory of society and communi-
cations. So I want to respond to these ref ections, because I think he made an important intervention into debates
about the critical theory of culture and communication. At the same time, writing this response allows me to ref ect
on my own conception of critical theory on a meta-level.

In this essay, I ref ect on Marx’s understanding of social production (section 2), creativity (section 3), Boltanski
and Chiapello (section 4) and humanist Marxism (section 5). These thoughts contribute to methodological and
theoretical foundations of a critical theory of communication and digital media. I draw some conclusions in the
f nal section.

Marx’ stress on social production

Jan Løhmann Stephensen argues that in my book, “Marx’ theory of alienation is brought into play, and the con-
trasting ideal, creativity is introduced” (Stephensen, 2015, p. 156). Such a “def nition of Man as a creatively
productive being” would be “a position which actually is mostly in line with young, romantic and/or philosoph-
ical Marx” (Stephensen, 2015, p. 159).

One can certainly not argue that Marx overstressed the term creativity. And it is also not my intention to fore-
ground the concept of creativity in Marx or in critical theory in general. Instead, Marx stressed that humans are
active, conscious, sensual, societal beings, who have to engage in social production in order for society to exist.
So, for example, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx (1844b) never uses the term “creativity”
and employs the word “creative” only once, namely when he writes that “money is the truly creative power”
(Marx, 1844b, p. 139). For instance, Marx writes:

Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in
which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of
myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. […] The
individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal
life carried out together with others – is therefore an expression and conf rmation of social life.
Man’s individual and species life are not different, however much-and this is inevitable-the mode of
existence of the individual is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species, or
the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life (Marx, 1844b, p. 105).

This passage shows quite well that Marx foregrounds human production and the social character of humans
when speaking of society. When he uses the term “to create”, he means social production. One key point I
make in Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Fuchs, 2015), a book that is grounded in Raymond

CONJUNCTIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, 2016, ISSN 2246-3755 | PAGE 3