Review: Critical Theory of Communication

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

By Christian Fuchs University of Westminster Press, 2016 (Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies series)

Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet. London: University of Westminster Press. ISBN 978-1-911534-04-4. Open access, DOI: 10.16997/book1.

Christian Fuchs has spent a career arguing that digital and social media theory needs to take Marx seriously again, and this open-access book is his attempt to route that argument through the Frankfurt School specifically. The structure is five stand-alone essays, each pairing one critical theorist with the analysis of digital communication: Lukács's late Ontology of Social Being read against cultural and digital labor, Adorno's theory of knowledge read against claims that he was a "media pessimist," Marcuse's dialectics read against social media, Honneth's recognition-based theory of alienation read against Facebook, and a closing chapter that surveys several rivals to Habermas's communication theory. Fuchs is explicit that the book does not attempt to deliver a finished "dialectical critical theory of communication," only to lay foundations for one. That modesty, stated plainly in both the introduction and conclusion, turns out to be the most reliable guide to what the book actually accomplishes.

The strongest material is where theory meets platform #

Chapter 4, on Marcuse and social media, is the book's high point, and it earns that status by doing real interpretive synthesis rather than paraphrase. Fuchs takes Marcuse's account of play, labor, and the reality principle from Eros and Civilization and combines it with Boltanski and Chiapello's account of the "new spirit of capitalism," Mario Tronti's concept of the "social factory," and Deleuze's "society of control" to build a concept Fuchs calls "playbour": Facebook use as an activity that has the phenomenological texture of play (irregular, self-directed, pleasurable) while functioning economically as unpaid, surplus-value-generating labor. The chapter includes a table mapping Marcuse's stages, from societies of scarcity through classical capitalism to "capitalism in the age of Facebook," showing how leisure time and work time collapse into each other under platform capitalism. Whatever one makes of the underlying political economy, this is a genuinely original piece of theoretical bricolage, and it is the concept for which this book is most often cited elsewhere.

Chapter 5's treatment of Honneth is nearly as strong. Fuchs stages a real disagreement in the secondary literature, between Mark Andrejevic, who argues Facebook produces "algorithmic alienation," and Eran Fisher, who argues Facebook use can feel de-alienating because it lets users express themselves, and uses Honneth's three-way distinction between subjective, intersubjective, and objective alienation to show the two aren't actually incompatible: Andrejevic is describing the objective dimension (data as an object beyond the user's control) while Fisher is describing the subjective dimension (how alienation feels from the inside). The resulting nine-cell table crossing three spheres (economic, political, cultural) against three dimensions (subjective, intersubjective, objective) is a genuinely useful piece of conceptual infrastructure, the kind of table a reader could productively borrow for other platforms Fuchs never discusses.

An uneven allocation of critical attention #

The chapter titled "Beyond Habermas," which closes the book, is where the project's ambitions outrun its execution. Habermas is one of the five thinkers named in the book's own subtitle, and arguably the Frankfurt School figure most identified with communication as a topic in its own right, yet he receives roughly five pages of direct engagement inside a chapter that also has to cover Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Jean Baudrillard, and then, as the positive alternative, Vygotsky, Vološinov, Rossi-Landi, and Raymond Williams. Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, and Honneth each get an entire dedicated chapter built around one or two of their books. Habermas gets treated mainly as an obstacle: the chapter's job is to state his labor/communication dualism, note that it separates instrumental action from communicative action too cleanly, and move past him toward a dialectical alternative built out of other people's work. For a book whose title puts Habermas on equal footing with the other four names, the actual space and analytical care devoted to him is the least of the five, and the chapter reads less like a considered response to Habermas's theory of communicative action than a rapid survey of everyone Fuchs would rather build on instead.

The introduction is a literature review wearing an argument's clothes #

Before reaching any of the five thinkers, the book spends nearly forty pages cataloguing definitions: Lash's distinction between dialectical and aporetic critique, Tyson's list of critical-theory schools, Tallack's list, Agger's list, two competing Marxist encyclopedia entries on the German term Kritische Theorie. This is not wrong, exactly, and some readers will find the genealogical care useful as reference material. But it reads as throat-clearing rather than argument, and it delays the book's actual payoff, the applied readings in chapters 2 through 5, for a stretch that would be more at home in a companion or handbook than in the introduction to a five-essay monograph. The repetition compounds across chapters too: because each essay began life able to stand alone (Fuchs says so explicitly), several chapters re-introduce their thinker's basic biography and canonical texts from scratch, producing a mild but noticeable amount of redundancy for anyone reading the book cover to cover rather than dipping into a single chapter.

How it holds up #

This is the sharpest limitation, and it is not really Fuchs's fault so much as a function of when the book was written. Published in 2016, every applied example runs through Facebook: Facebook exploitation, Facebook alienation, Facebook playbour. A decade later, after the platform consolidation, algorithmic feed redesigns, TikTok's rise, X's transformation under different ownership, and the arrival of generative AI as a communication medium in its own right, a book subtitled "in the Age of the Internet" reads as a book about one specific and no-longer-dominant moment in that age. The theoretical machinery Fuchs builds, particularly playbour and the nine-dimension alienation grid, is portable to newer platforms, and an alert reader can make that translation. But the book itself doesn't, and its examples now require a small act of historical translation before they land.

Verdict #

Read chapters 4 and 5 for what they actually are: two of the more inventive attempts in the critical theory literature to make Marcuse's and Honneth's categories do real work on a specific communication platform, rather than staying at the level of gestural citation. The Lukács and Adorno chapters are competent scholarly reconstructions that will be useful to readers who want an accessible route into Ontology of Social Being and Adorno's less-cited epistemological writing. But the book's own subtitle promises equal treatment of five thinkers and delivers four chapters plus an appendix-like treatment of the fifth, and its introduction spends real estate on definitional cataloguing that the applied chapters don't need. Ten years on, its Facebook-bound empirical horizon is the thing most likely to send a reader looking for Fuchs's more recent work instead of this one, even though the concepts built here, playbour above all, are still doing work in that later scholarship.