The Proletarian Public Sphere and Political Organization: An Analysis of Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience
Author(s): Eberhard Kndler-Bunte, Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox Source: New German Critique, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), pp. 51-75 Published by: New German Critique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487817 . Accessed: 29/04/2013 18:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . New German Critique and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German Critique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Proletarian Public Sphere and Political Organization: An Analysis of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience by Eberhard Kn6dler-Bunte 1. The Proletarian Public Sphere Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience attempts to provide a conceptual framework for the central political and theoretical problems confronting the contemporary situation. The trans- formation of the capitalist production process, with its far-reaching impli- cations that penetrate to the most basic levels of human experience, cannot be adequately understood and acted upon with a conceptual and political framework inherited from an earlier stage of historical development, or from circumstances fundamentally different from those of advanced capitalist society. The inability of the categories derived from previous political formulations and debates to grasp the contemporary situation is part of the continuing crisis of Marxism that has persisted since the 1920s and 1930s. With their book Negt and Kluge attempt to lay the groundwork for an analysis that will break this impasse. Negt and Kluge's contribution has been to develop a middle level theory which confronts the qualitative transformation of capitalist social relation- ships from both the standpoint of new forms of production as well as from the standpoint of changes in everyday experience in society. In this way they provide a framework that historicizes and defines previously indeterminate notions such as "consciousness" and "subjective factor," while at the same time analyzing the transformation of the capitalist productive process and its impact on concrete human experience and psychic structure. The central category of Negt and Kluge's work is the "public sphere" which organizes human experience, mediating between the changing forms of capitalist production on the one hand and the cultural organization of human experience on the other. Differentiating between the bourgeois public sphere, increasingly part of the capitalist production process, and the concept of a proletarian public sphere, Negt and Kluge argue that the latter could potentially oppose the organized interests of the bourgeois public sphere through its organization of human needs and interests. The increasing cultural socialization of human needs and qualities in an indus- trialized public sphere--for example the consciousness industry--sets in motion a potential opposition which under existing conditions can only resist This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 52 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE the conditions of alienated production by remaining in the realm of fantasy and imagination. As such, this opposition can still become the object of production. But the development of these new needs, which because of their specifically human quality oppose the discipline and abstract character of the capitalist production process, provides the basis for the potential emergence of a proletarian public sphere which organizes real needs into politically relevant forms of consciousness and activity. At the same time, Negt and Kluge investigate the new forms of the public sphere, above all television and other mass media. Their analysis of these new developments and possibilities for a potential challenge to the content of existing media is a significant aspect of their work. Negt and Kluge's examination of these issues and this complex of problems cuts across both scholarly and political approaches. The sociological formulation of specific questions about public opinion, mass communications and the traditional framework of political science is linked to questions about political practice. On the other hand these political questions--the Marxist concepts of class consciousness, class movements and social organization--are tied to theoretical developments in the academic world. Negt and Kluge's book thus attacks the fatal division of labor which separates narrowly specialized academic investigation from a revolutionary political theory directed towards praxis. Moreover, Negt and Kluge's book opposes the internal fragmentation of concepts in both academic and revolutionary theory. A critique of The Public Sphere and Experience must therefore begin with the ideas and intentions of the authors before it can move to individual points. This essay is primarily concerned with the former task. Instead of attempting an extensive critique of the individual categories employed, or of the interpretations of social developments and processes, this discussion focuses on the framework which they develop. It should, as a reader's guide help clarify the political and praxis-oriented aspects of the problems discussed. Thus this article is limited to clarifying points raised by Negt and Kluge.1 1. Parts of this essay were presented at a discussion of Negt and Kluge's book sponsored by the Institut ffir Kunst und Aesthetik, at which Oskar Negt spoke. This discussion, which primarily concerned questions about the "block of real life," questions of organization, and problems of political education, appeared in the journal Aesthetik und Kommunikation, 12. The author wishes to thank Silvia Bevenschen, Peter Gorsen and Heiner Boehncke for their important suggestions. Page numbers cited within the text refer to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Oeffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bfirgerlicher und proletarischer Oeffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1973). This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 53 2. The Public Sphere and Experience as Categories of Social Theory and Political Organization The very juxtaposition of the concepts "public sphere" and "experience" suggests that an important social relationship is considered here in a way that goes far beyond the limitations of studies dealing only with constitutional law, political science or social history. At the same time the authors' method cannot be reduced to the level of discussions of the public sphere and public opinion carried on in mass communication theory and public opinion sampling since the early 1930s These specialized areas of research are mostly concerned with the investigation of full-blown insti- tutionalized forms of the bourgeois public sphere and with theoretical questions about the function of public opinion in a democracy. Instead Negt and Kluge attempt to define the public sphere as a category relating to the totality of society. They emphasize that the public sphere can be understood as organizing human experience, and not merely as this or that historically institutionalized manifestation. They conceive of the public sphere as a historically developing form of the mediation between the cultural organization of human qualities and senses on the one hand and developing capitalist production on the other. Negt and Kluge write in explicit opposition to Jtirgen Habermas, whose Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was widely read at the beginning of the protest movement in Germany. Their specific differences with Habermas can be seen on three levels. From the outset Habermas restricts himself to the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere, opposed to which a proletarian public sphere appears merely as a "repressed variant of a plebeian public sphere." 2 Negt and Kluge's political interest is directed toward the interconnections of the bourgeois-capitalist and proletarian public spheres. New structural characteristics of the public sphere thus become visible permitting both a historical and a systematic investigation of non-bourgeois, pre-capitalist, proletarian, subcultural and even fascist public spheres. At the same time, Negt and Kluge's approach also serves to prevent a confusion between the ideal of the bourgeois public sphere-the basis for its historical claim to legitimacy--and the actual process by which the bourgeois public sphere became established as an instrument of class domination. Habermas, of course, also recognizes the contradictory ways in which this liberal model of the public sphere has in fact manifested itself in history. But the limitations of his approach prevent him from arriving at a 2. Jikrgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Oeffentlichkeit (Neuwied and Berlin, 1962), p. 8 This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 54 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE conceptual differentiation between the "ideal" and the "real" history of the bourgeois public sphere. Nor is Habermas able to trace this distinction back to the structural weaknesses of the society. Because Habermas overestimates the normative strength of the bourgeois public sphere, he is led, in his political conclusions, to apply the principles of the earlier bourgeois public sphere, if in altered form, to late capitalist conditions. On the one hand his work reconstructs the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere which had allowed it to become both an object of manipulation by privileged groups and an object of the profit-maximizing process. Since the public sphere can no longer maintain that it is linked to a politically significant process of opinion formation, Habermas, referring to this disintegration, speaks of a "refeudalization of the public sphere." Yet on the other hand, Habermas' concept of the "social welfare state mass democracy" allows him to discover a new basis for the bourgeois public sphere, albeit an altered one. The bourgeois public sphere is thus "a rational reorganization of social and political power under the mutual control of rival organizations committed to the public sphere in their internal structure as well as in their relations with the state and each other."3 This pluralistic model of the welfare state regulating itself through the public sphere can only be maintained at the cost of concealing the fundamental contradictions of capitalist production and transforming them into crises of legitimacy. These crises manifest themselves in state activity and in problems of securing the loyalty of the masses. In contrast to Habermas' conception, Negt and Kluge place the function of the public sphere, which is altered in the interests of the maximization of profit, into the context of a Marxist analysis of society. Negt and Kluge's starting point, therefore, is the relationship between the various forms of the public sphere and human experience and interests concretely tied to the social praxis of everyday life. These experiences are stylized by Habermas as "mere opinions (cultural assumptions, normative attitudes, collective prejudices and values)," 4 as a "kind of sediment of history," which he believes can be neatly separated from the bourgeois public sphere. By expanding their conception of the public sphere to include the class basis in which experience is molded and appropriated, Negt and Kluge refuse to permit the reduction of their investigation to mere institutional or intellectual history. They therefore argue for the restoration of an interrupted tradition of Marxist investigation, a tradition best exemplified by Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Reich and Karl 3. See JUirgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)," New German Critique, 1:3 (Fall, 1974), 55. 4. Ibid., p. 50. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 55 Korsch, as well as by the Marxist elements of critical theory.5 In this sense, the term public sphere refers not only to the public institutions which have prevailed in history but to the general horizon of social experience which enables individuals to formulate interpretations of social reality. Expanding the concept "public sphere" beyond the meaning ascribed to it by individual disciplines or by its bourgeois content, Negt and Kluge define the public sphere as the central element in the organization of human experience.6 Yet under conditions of bourgeois class domination the public sphere develops in restrictive and contradictory ways: as a result of the excluding mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere, or through new and illusory forms of organization of the public sphere. These forms of organi- zation arise from the expansion of the capitalist profit-maximizing interest into the area of human needs and consciousness. The proletarian public sphere stands in polar opposition both to the bourgeois public sphere and to its transformation into new forms ("the public spheres of production"). It represents the historical counter-concept to the bourgeois public sphere and a fundamentally new structure in the public organization of experience. Until now forms of the proletarian public sphere have emerged only in rudimentary form, and only in isolated instances have they prevailed as an alternative against bourgeois-capitalist domination. [Among the examples Negt and Kluge cite are the attempts made by the English working class in the early 19th century to form independent communication media (pp. 313-333); Lenin's concept of the "self-expression of the masses" as opposed to party propaganda; and the 5. For further discussion of this tradition in Marxist theory see the following works by Oskar Negt: Oskar Negt, "Theorie, Empirie und Klassenkampf: Zur Konstitutionsproblematik bei Karl Korsch," Ueber Karl Korsch, ed. Claudio Pozzoli (Frankfurt am Main, 1973); Oskar Negt, "Massenmedien: Herrschaftsmittel oder Instrumente der Befreiung? Aspekte der Kommunikationsanalyse der Frankfurter Schule," Kritische Kommunikationsforschung: Aufsatze aus der Zeitschrift fir Sozialforschung, ed. Dieter Prokop (Munich, 1973); Oskar Negt, "Rosa Luxemburg: Zur materialistischen Dialektik von Spontaneitat und Organisation," Rosa Luxemburg oder Die Bestimmung des Sozialismus, ed. Claudio Pozzoli (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). 6. Borrowing the notion of "the organization of human experience" from the early Soviet cultural theoreticians [See Peter Gorsen and Eberhard Knbdler-Bunte, Proletkult, 2 Vols. (Stuttgart, 1974) ], while opposing the reified concept of organization, Negt and Kluge attempt to determine the organizing function of cultural objectifications and forms of communications. This expansion of the concept of organization, which traditionally indicated only the "combination" of human beings (groups, associations, parties, unions) makes it possible to investigate the active and mediating function of cultural relationships on individual experience and perception. In strict opposition to a technocratic concept of organization, the concept of an organization tied to the proletarian public sphere indicates a concrete dialectic of spontaneity and organization, of immediate experience and insight into the social totality. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 56 VEW GERMAN CRITIQUE tentative steps taken in France in May 1968. Eds.] Nevertheless, the specific achievement of the proletarian public sphere is to provide the foundation for the potential formation of class consciousness as a partisan consciousness of totality enriched by substantive vital interests. In this context the proletarian public sphere can best be understood as a necessary form of mediation, as the center of a production process in the course of which the varied and fragmented experiences of social contradictions and social interests can be combined into a theoretically mediated consciousness and life style directed towards a transforming praxis Thus, the concept of the "proletarian public sphere" designates the contradictory and non-linear process of development towards class consciousness: a process which at present is either hidden behind a merely programmatic unity of the political and economic concept of class and its subjective correlate consciousness, combirred to form class consciousness, or is simply delivered to the proletarian party in its synthesizing capacity. The classical bourgeois public sphere was an unstable complex of institutions, organizations and activities within which the social process of opinion formation was to be constituted, but from which the most important aspects of life--material production and the realm of familial socialization--were excluded. In contrast, three very different factors must converge to create the proletarian public sphere: "the interest of the producing class must be the driving force; a form of interaction must be created which can relate specific interests in the realms of production to the entire society; and finally the inhibiting and destructive influences emanating from the declining bourgeois public sphere must not overpower the emerging proletarian public sphere. In all these points, the proletarian public sphere is nothing other than the form in which the proletarian interest itself develops" (p. 163). At this point the implications of this comprehensive concept for the theory of revolution and the theory of organization become clear. Insofar as the proletarian public sphere represents a form of interaction which expresses the vital interests of the working class in a specific form while relating them to the entire society, it assumes the active function of mediating between social being and consciousness. In short, it fulfills the task of mediating between society and that which the tradition of Marxist theory has designated--highly inadequately--as the "subjective factor.' This point will be returned to later. Provisionally formulated, the public sphere should be understood as a central category of social theory, which determines the connection between material production and cultural norms and institutions during the process This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 57 of the constitution of social experience. At the same time Negt and Kluge attempt to situate the concept of the "public sphere" historically in order to allow the reformulation of a central problem of the Marxist theory of revolution to emerge from the dialectic of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere. Thus, it is necessary for them to introduce new epistemological categories and relationships, constructing, for example, the levels of contradiction within the basic conditions of bourgeois and proletarian life ("the block of real life" which opposes the interests of profit maximization). Such categories permit the expansion of an analysis of late capitalist conditions to the point where certain political consequences for the organizational question can be drawn. The concept of the public sphere is essentially synthetic in its achievement: its application makes it possible to move beyond the theoretical and historical-empirical constraints in the discussion of class consciousness and political organization, and to reintroduce analytical content into that discussion. The authors maintain that the levels of mediation within which the organization of social consciousness and experience takes place can be empirically ascertained by examining both the total development of society and occasional eruptions such as strikes, factory occupations and mass protest, as well as political organization in factories, schools and local communities. This framework is as relevant for the development of Marxist theory as it is provocative for current political discussions. Negt and Kluge justify the claims of so broad a concept of the public sphere, not only by appealing to the necessity for a Marxist investigation of the unfolding relationships of cultural socialization (Vergesellschaftung). They also argue for the political urgency of such a conception. "With this book it is our political interest to establish a framework for a discussion which expands the analytical concepts of political economy downward, to the real experience of human beings" (p. 16). By directly confronting the critique of political economy with the concept of "real experience," Negt and Kluge address a complex of problems which the labor movement has been incapable of solving either theoretically or practically. For Marx and Engels it was not, for two reasons, a pressing task to develop a detailed discussion of class consciousness and political organization. On the one hand, their theoretical considerations were directed at a working class that was rapidly organizing, and whose organizational solidity and political efficacy was less a question of the subjective conditions of organization than of the more primary problem of a scientific analysis of the laws of capitalist development. Secondly, Marx and This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE Engels could assume that the working class emerged from a bourgeoisie which had carried through its interests against the feudal system and had maintained a revolutionary movement which still, it appeared, could be transformed into a proletarian movement. The experience of the Paris Commune made it clear, however, that the relevant elements of the bourgeois class had reorganized around the interests of profit maximization and had joined in an alliance with the feudal system. Simultaneously other broad strata of the bourgeoisie were already proletarianized or had sunk to the status of small commodity producers. What had remained concealed by the revisionist practice of the Second International, satisfied with its success as a mass movement, became a matter of immediate concern only with the revolutionary role of the bolshevist cadre party in the Russian Revolution: the problem of the conscious organization of proletarian class interests in a disciplined vanguard party. The wide adoption of the bolshevist experience in the European labor movement after the successful October revolution led less to the integration of these experiences into their own traditions- developed under the completely different conditions of a highly developed industrial society--than to the politically consequential "universalization" of the "Leninist Cadre Party" derived from the Russian revolutionary movement. The direct application of Russian experiences to the developed social conditions of Western Europe, which was intended as a break with the objectivist and economist conceptions of the Second International, led politically to the dissolution of the relationship between the organizational forms based on the workers' councils and the Communist Party, resulting in the one-sided primacy of the centralized organization. Theoretically it led to a division of the "subjective factor" and of class consciousness into political and economic elements: the class analysis of the proletariat was collapsed into theoretical issues of party and organization which centered around the struggle for political power. Only with the protest movement which appeared at the end of the 1960s did those issues, which Marxism had either denigrated or dismissed as heresy and relegated to the periphery, reemerge as central problems in the face of a system that seemed immune to internal and external opposition. The renewed discussion of the works of Reich, Luxemburg, Lukics, Korsch and others, as well as the numerous debates on Marxism and psychoanalysis, class consciousness, the latent fascist tendencies in late capitalism, media theory and aesthetics coincided with experimental forms of action and demonstration. At the same time these developments expressed a sharpened consciousness of new complexes of contradictions which the traditional This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 59 schema of base and superstructure, "subjective factor" and avant-garde organization no longer defined in a politically relevant way. Against the background of these developments Negt and Kluge's argument assumes a compelling theoretical and political importance. Precisely because the internal factionalization of the student movement has again abandoned these problems as peripheral to the basic questions of Marxist theory and organization their reconsideration takes on a political character. In his essay "Don't Go by Numbers, Organize According to Interestsl," Negt clarified the political context of his argument: "When I state that it is essential to link up to our own history of political socialization in the present organization debate, I am not suggesting that the old forms of organization be recovered; these were symptomatic of a mass movement restricted to intellectuals and youth which had only an indirect effect upon the working class. Rather, the issue is to take up those emancipatory forces and perspectives which the movement set into motion and to carry them forward under changed objective conditions and experiences."7 According to Negt and Kluge these emancipatory and theoretical perspectives can be best addressed by a methodology which neither totally conforms to scholarly "rules" nor, on the other hand, accepts the standards of the current factionalized political discussion. Instead, their book deliberately assumes a unique middle position permitting the combination of disparate theoretical approaches, global social interpretations and current political considerations in such a way as to produce practical evidence for the analytical connection between the public sphere and experience. Nonetheles, this methodology involves certain disadvantages as well, for instance an inconsistency in the categorical framework as well as a tentative quality in its empirical evidence and political judgments. Its strength, however, lies in its ability to release the disparate elements of social experience from the individual disciplines which hitherto claimed them and to demonstrate their extensive interrelationship. This interrelationship can be observed in four central steps in the argument: 1) Negt and Kluge begin with the process through which the classical bour- geois public sphere is transformed into new public spheres of production8 7. Oskar Negt, "Don't Go by Numbers, Organize According to Interestsl: Current Questions of Organization," New German Critique 1:1 (Winter, 1974), 46. 8. The concept of public spheres of production indicates a variety of heterogeneous individual public spheres which have emerged from the decline of the bourgeois public sphere. Although these public spheres of production seem to renew the external illusion of the bourgeois public sphere, their structure and content is determined by specific political and This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE (ProduktionsOffentlichkeiten) which to an increasing extent turn the basic conditions of human life itself into the object of production But at the same time a potential opposition is released which, in pnnciple could be channeled into new forms of the proletarian public sphere. 2) According to the authors these contradictory tendencies of cultural socialization can be understood by postulating a "block of real life," which indicates a crisis in human psychic organization. This crisis is intensified by 3) the expanded forms of secondary exploitation which are made possible by the development of commodity production and modern mass media. The accompanying industrial transformation of human senses and characteristics 4) alters the very forms within which the fragmented elements of social experience are capable of being organized for socialism. Hence a reformulation of the question of organization becomes necessary. In their political praxis socialist organizations can no longer sustain the fiction that the individual proletarian is organizable as a whole, over and above particular interests. Instead, the pre-revolutionary strategy must be to seize potential opposition in whatever area of human life it may appear: in factories, in and through the mass media, in educational institutions, in the family and in the so-called realm of leisure. 3. The Basic Conditions of Life as Objects of Production Negt and Kluge place the dialectic of the bourgeois and proletarian public spheres in the context of an all-encompassing process of human socialization which became universal with the capitalist mode of production. Only with the transition to capitalism does the production process become the dominant social relationship pervading all areas of human life. Pre-capitalist forms of production, which Marx could still subsume under the general concept of human appropriation of nature, were characterized by the continual "retreat of natural restrictions" on the one hand and by the anchoring of the labor process in regionally differentiated cultural, familial and political relationships on the other. But the labor process qua capitalist production process earns its new quality because of "the separation between economic profit-maximizing interests. The public spheres of production are distinguished from the bourgeois public sphere through their industrial mode of production and the expansion of their scope to the basic conditions of human life. The central moment of these public spheres of production is previously private sensuality. In the public sphere this sensuality has been combined with profit-maximizing interests. There are, according to Negt and Kluge broadl- speaking, three dimensions to the public spheres of production: 1) the sensual-demonstrative public spheres of factories, banks, urban centers and industrial zones; 2) the consciousness industry, including consumption and advertising and 3) public relations carried on by corporations, associations, states and parties This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 61 these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital."9 Capitalist social relations split asunder the "natural bonds of humanity," as Marx explains at one point, by their tendency to subsume all historically developed cultural forms of human life under their immanent logic in accordance with the process of profit maximization. On the part of the subject, this denial of the social characteristics of humanity corresponds to the reduction of the laborer to an existence primarily as a producer of exchange value. The separation of workers from the means of production, which Marx historically pursues as the process of primitive accumulation, also severs their abstract labor power from the concrete conditions of their existence: everything which does not contribute to the immediate reproduction of the commodity labor-power becomes something superfluous, something seemingly private, something negatively determined by the relationship which capital demands. For Negt and Kluge this transformation is the "capitalist cultural revolution," which is strictly distinguished from the proletarian cultural revolution-the production of communist forms of interaction. "The development of capitalism also revolutionized habits, cultural patterns, personality structure, the senses, human characteristics and consciousness. The entire process of economic production over the last two or three hundred years has produced increasingly socialized human beings. Socialization itself has become a fundamental human need, almost an anthropological category, because people become sick when they are forced to live in isolation. On the other hand, under alienated conditions this socialization is always combined with a simultaneous need to free oneself from it and retreat to private forms of existence" (p. 271). But now the relationship of the profit-maximizing interest to the basic conditions of human life itself becomes subject to historical modification. Rising production costs of the commodity labor-power and changes in the organic composition of capital turn human needs and forms of consciousness themselves into objects of capitalist production: the basic conditions of human life emerge from their purely negative relationship to capital. This key development is the starting point for Negt and Kluge's analysis. Their description of the transformation of the bourgeois public spheres of production on the one hand and the occasional emergence of a proletarian 9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Middlesex, 1973), p. 489. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 62 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE public sphere on the other can be understood as a depiction of the "subjective" cultural side of the reproduction of capital "on an ever increasing scale." The bourgeois public sphere, both in its ideal form and in its material content, refers to the early phase of capitalist development. In this phase the newly forming capitalist interests were primarily concerned with the appropriation of the material conditions of production, though they also waged a political and cultural struggle against the feudal system. The bourgeoisie used the public sphere both as a revolutionary slogan and as a medium within which the political struggle for the expanded appropriation of social wealth took place. This convergence of substantially divergent interests, which the bourgeois public sphere homogenizes, endows the bourgeois public sphere with its characteristic instability, marking it as an expression of the transition to a new world-historical level of production. The unstable bourgeois public sphere can only sustain itself in society to the extent that it succeeds in either diverting attention away from central interests tied to the realm of production and familial socialization or in giving political or cultural expression to those interests. But the political and cultural victory of the bourgeoisie and the anchoring of the principles of capitalist production in broad areas of the society made a continued detour through institutionalized forms of the public sphere unnecessary. The "dull compulsion of economic relations" 10 sustains bourgeois capitalist domination more effectively than a necessarily unstable public consensus or political force could ever do. But this process also produces changes in the structure and function of the public sphere. Once the capitalist profit-maximizing interest becomes the primary principle of social organization, it produces new forms of the public sphere, which formally appear to continue the bourgeois public sphere but whose characteristics are actually determined by a very different complex of interests. "The traditional public sphere, whose characteristic weakness lies in the mechanism of separating public from private, is today superseded by public spheres of industrial production which increasingly draw in the private realms, particularly the production process and the basic conditions of life" (p. 35). The authors consider a number of tendencies to be responsible for the emergence of these new public spheres of production, which, taken together, characterize a new level of socialization. Negt and Kluge do not, however, discuss these tendencies systematically; instead they limit themselves to a description of their effects. 10. Karl Marx, Capital 1 (New York, 1906), p. 809. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 63 Referring to Wolfgang Haug's work on commodity aesthetics, " Negt and Kluge begin with the premise that with the expansion of commodity production to all social realms the "appearance side" of use value assumes an increasing importance. The appearance of a commodity thus tends to separate itself from the concrete product and the use value which it was originally supposed to demonstrate. Rather, the appearance of the commodity enriches itself by incorporating general social experience. When the commodity becomes a "sensual-supersensual thing," it becomes a means to transform objects of use into fantasy products. With this development commodities themselves begin to participate in the public sphere. They become the object of an imaginary consumption which appropriates world views along with commodities. But this organized production of commodity appearance can be fully effective only when imperialist expansion abroad, aimed at the acquisition of raw materials, export markets and labor power, coincides with an intensification of imperialism at home which is now directed at the exploitation of the very social nature of human beings. To wage this struggle for domestic markets, capitalism employs the industrial production of fantasy values and cultural images which both divert and enrich the human capacity for imagination. This expanded level of commodity production is connected to a developed system of institutions which supersedes the formerly private, partially public and fully public areas of life and production. Increased productivity demands expanded education and training for mass labor power; state and semi-public institutions rapidly expand to take on the familial functions of subsistence welfare and the structuring of life and leisure. Thus a number of self-contained public spheres emerge, each organizing a specific aspect of human life for itself. Negt and Kluge attempt to describe the new quality of these public spheres by applying Marx's categories of real and formal subsumption under capital to institutions. Formal subsumption under 11. In his work on commodity aesthetics, Wolfgang Fritz Haug uses the concept of "commodity appearance" to characterize highly developed commodity production. Though in the simple phase of commodity production the use value of a commodity at first had to be visible to the buyer, in the highly developed stage of capitalist commodity production the appearance of use value is detached from the individual commodity and becomes the bearer of general social needs and desires. "Insofar as exchange value has established itself as the driving force of commodity production, a double process takes place. Not only is use value produced, but, along with it, the appearance of use value, the aestheticized promise of use value. Moreover this appearance is produced with its own techniques and considerations. The aim of this type of production is to endow the commodity with allure and the promise of utility so that not only will it be sold but also preferred and purchased in preference to other commodities." See Wolfgang Fritz Haug, "Die Rolle des Aesthetischen bei der Scheinl6sung von Grundwider- sprtichen der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft," Das Argument, 64 (June, 1971), 196. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 64 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE capital means that the institution stands only in an external, loose relationship t.9 the capitalist production process, which in turn only indirectly affects the institution's internal workings. The term real subsumption becomes applicable to the public sphere only when those "realms hitherto relatively autonomous are integrated directly into the profit-maximizing process and the use values, information and ideology produced by these realms are employed specifically as a means of stabilizing the ruling system" (p. 297). This general description of the nature of real subsumption requires some qualification. The emergence of mixed forms of state and private economic activity to deal with cases in which the individual capitalist incurs costs for tasks which transcend the immediate interests of profit maximization is a fundamental characteristic of late capitalist social systems. Such mixed forms can neither be entirely ascribed to the individual capitalist's interests, nor can they exist entirely outside of the profit-maximizing process. Paradigmatic for such mixed forms are the majority of educational institutions as well as government-regulated radio and television stations. Yet the empirically demonstrable importance of those mixed forms makes it questionable whether they can be adequately explained by means of a heuristic device describing the transition from formal to real subsumption. The analysis of the mixed forms should itself be the central object of a Marxist theory of the state which would explain the contradictory tendencies produced by structural characteristics of those institutions no longer directly responsive to capitalist interests. It is a weakness of Negt and Kluge's book that the authors consider the relevant works of Claus Offe, Joachim Hirsch and others only thematically and not systematically. The organized transformation of commodities into fantasy values and the institutionally mediated absorption of realms, not previously directly embraced by the profit-maximizing interests, are characteristic of the system of secondary exploitation. This system derives its new quality from the fact that it is no longer merely an extension of traditional realms like consumption and the so-called public sector: "precisely because secondary exploitation lays hold of human consciousness, of human wishes, hopes and conceptions, a close bond reestablishes itself between primary and secondary forms of exploitation. Secondary exploitation also existed with a specific function in the classical phase of capitalism. But in late capitalism secondary exploitation assumes a new quality based on the fact that a certain kind of social wealth must be produced within the framework of primary exploitation, a type of social wealth which itself threatens to oppose the immediate interests of capital as an independent force. This new level of This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 65 development is characterized by an attempt to reintegrate the centrifugal tendencies of this social wealth into the productive relationships of primary exploitation. Such a reintegration permits capitalists to make exactly as much or even more profit here than under earlier conditions of primary exploitation" (p. 300). This attempt at the reintegration of such disparate tendencies as work discipline and the expansion of human needs and potential can only succeed if the disparity between disciplined production and the illusory satisfaction of vital interests continues to develop at an ever increasing rate. Only the constant renewal of this contradiction can prevent the disassociation and isolation of human characteristics into opposing forces. "The traditional capitalist production process is sustained by the profits it receives from labor power, whose household affairs only occasionally aligned themselves with the interests of capital. The commodity labor-power thus regarded capital as something foreign, as something in opposition; the ties binding labor power and capital were external, allowing the worker a variety of possibilities for escape from its grasp. But now, in the new situation, a contradiction arises. On the one hand the relationship to capital, with all its accompanying demands and norms, is transported directly, and from without, into the worker's intellectual organization, embracing it totally. At the same time the oppressive character of the labor process and earlier forms of the relationship of labor to capital continue to persist" (p. 306). Through the postulation of a "block of real life" the contradictory effects of secondary exploitation on human psychic organization can be investigated in terms of their central political implications. 4. The Block of Real Life The central theoretical nucleus of Negt and Kluge's argument is the construction of a "block of real life which opposes the profit-maximizing interest" (p. 107). This block consists of a complex of contradictory tendencies in the internal organization of human psychic experience which reconstitutes itself on every level of the system of primary and secondary exploitation. The block does not respresent an anthropologically invariable structure of human nature. Instead it is determined materialistically as the residual potential for experience and action which cannot be integrated into the system of profit maximization, but which nevertheless develops necessarily in conjunction with the expansion of capitalist profit maximization and the changing composition of capital. This construction assumes that those human needs anchored in the psychic structure and characterized by qualitative relationships within the socialization process This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 66 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE cannot be diverted from their goal. Rather, these human needs preserve within themselves a realistic and unified tendency towards their satisfaction. "It is unlikely that in the long run they will be content with substitute satisfactions and allow themselves to be distracted from their own realism by any kind of reality principle in their search for satisfying relationships" (p. 304). Of course, this realism characteristic of human needs is itself historically produced. The historical development of this realistic basis coincides with the objective possibility of their realization. At the same time it is the result of both an expansion and intensification of exploitation and the relaxation and undermining of disciplinary work norms. The twelve hour day, child labor and the immediate demands of material existence prevent the very formation of needs which transcend the simple reproduction of the commodity labor-power. The development of individual needs presupposes a high degree of social wealth which relieves individuals from the immediate pressures of existence and allows the emergence of a form of leisure which is more than a mere reflex of the working day. A certain level of social development must be presupposed for needs to emerge which point beyond the existing framework of material production; these needs can, obviously, themselves become objects of the maximization of capitalist profit. Expanded commodity production and the public spheres of production represent new historic forms of production which absorb and restructure these needs according to the interests of capital. These apparatus of production are effective vis-d-vis the masses precisely because they do not abstract from real experiences and wishes. They intervene on the level of concrete interests. On the other hand, they cannot grasp these needs in their specific determinate qualities, in their uniqueness, without adjusting them to their own interests in the production process. This assimilation of vital human interests into the content of the public sphere of production causes it, because of its content, to assume a position contradictory to the general tendency of capital. This general tendency, in the interest of an expansion of profit realization, moves in the direction of increasing abstraction from concrete conditions. At the same time capital must, "in order to progress along this path, concern itself with living conditions, living labor and human raw materials to an ever increasing degree. Capitalism must 'dirty its hands' by dealing with human beings. This is the reason for its extreme instability" (p. 309). Thus capitalism itself sets in motion a countermovement of concrete interests. By developing particular human qualities in isolation, by isolating them from each other or even by suppressing them altogether, the interests of capital constitute negatively a complex of qualities and interests which This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 67 find themselves in continual retreat from profit-maximizing tendencies which threaten to absorb them. These qualities exist beneath the threshold of bourgeois rule, in the form of escapism and fantasy activity, which capitalism cannot completely integrate into the process of profit maximization. "The character of this fantasy activity is multi-dimensional. It emerges as a necessary compensation for the experience of the alienated labor process," as an "equilibrium of drives in opposition to intolerable conditions of alienation" (p. 67). "If [the workers' needs and interests] are directly suppressed, that is, if they are not utilized in society's profit-maximizing process, they maintain themselves as living labor power, as raw material. In this quality as extra-economic interests, they exist in the forbidden zones of fantasy, beneath taboos, as stereotypes of the rudimentary organization of the basic conditions of proletarian life. As such they cannot be further suppressed. They also cannot be assimilated. In this respect they possess two characteristics: in their defensive stance over and against society, in their conservatism and in their subcultural character, they are mere objects. But at the same time they comprise the block of real life which opposes the profit-maximizing interest" (p. 107). This negative, dialectical relationship of the block of real life to the profit-maximizing process will continue as long as capital cannot do without living labor as a source of value. "Where attempts are made to integrate this block into capitalist interests, for example, by subordinating the basic conditions of life to the capitalist programming and consciousness industry or the new public spheres of production, the process of suppression and exclusion produces a new, more differentiated block accordingly" (p. 107). Television and "media concentration" nevertheless represent a new stage of social production which threatens to draw in the very raw material comprising the block of real life. The degree that this is successful must be determined by a consideration of the structure of production of the developed media. 5. Television and Media Concentration The investigation of the functional connections of developed mass media assumes an important position in Negt and Kluge's discussion. An analysis of these media must determine whether one can accurately speak of a new quality of cultural socialization. Such an analysis must develop criteria by means of which new media can be differentiated from those of the traditional bourgeois public sphere. And at the same time it would have to formulate a plausible explanation of changes in the media's structure of production which have allowed the media to take on these new functions. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE a) Government-regulated television Negt and Kluge describe government-regulated television as an "institution characteristic of a transitional phase..., in which the essential needs of communication are no longer entrusted to an exclusively capitalist mechanism, but in which effective new forms of public control do not yet exist" (p. 217). Television is situated in a contradictory intermediate position between the bourgeois public sphere and the new public spheres of production. Furthermore, television is separated from the bourgeois public sphere and its media by the total industrialization of its production structure and by its complete integration of the basic conditions of life, as evidenced by the totality of its program offerings. Television is distinguished from the new public spheres of production, for example media concentration, by the institutionalization of its governmental regulation. Government regulation prevents television's complete domination by individual capitalist interests 12 and applies norms in the form of programmatic obligations, requiring that programming be "in the public interest" --thus preventing the direct satisfaction of the concrete needs of various social groups. Formally, television stands in the tradition of the bourgeois public sphere.Its public regulation is designed to prevent the domination of the medium by special social interests. Yet the control of television by "relevant" social groups, which guarantee that programs are balanced and that they serve the"public well-being," really only creates an unstable equilibrium of social interests incapable of achieving consensus, permitting only an abstract trade-off of the values of the bourgeois public sphere. The increasing pressure for legitimation which this situation produces leads to half-solutions, repeated on every level of the production hierarchy. In the bourgeois public sphere the opinio communis was a bond whose content in principle could still be determined. But the establishment of television programming on the basis of a fictitious public well-being, which even specific individual programs should address, is the result of a harmonization of interests made possible only by obfuscating their concrete contents. This relationship between increased pressure for legitimation and abstract trade-off of interests 12. The fact that television is more than merely a medium for individual capitalist interests has long since ceased to mean that these interests have no effect on actual calculations and production. The increasing dispersion of production in enterprises which are either private or contain a privately financed television sector makes any real public regulation and control of these productions impossible. Moreover, rising costs in an increasingly diminishing market make television increasingly dependent on advertising and the resale and distribution of programs in a national and international television market (which has begun to expand with the cassette industry). This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 69 restricts television to the "broadcasting of generalized programs" (p. 176) which corresponds on the part of viewers to an "abstract receptivity." The programming obligations and guidelines in which--in analogy to com- modity production--the long-term interests of capital are expressed emerge on the level of program planning as contradictory to the short-term interests of individual programs which utilize various ad hoc legitimations: rating scores, topicality, economy of production, technical quality, aesthetic inno- vation, entertainment value, originality, etc. These contradictory relation- ships between forms of legitimation arise from a structure of production in which various levels of production converge: at the level of the individual television programs and films concrete labor encounters a highly complex, relatively content-free technology, and both in turn are included in abstract planning activities involving a high degree of division of labor. On the part of the product, this contradiction expresses itself in the divergence of a program's individual elements: the entertainment value of the program assumes an independence vis-d-vis its educational value and the educational value in turn contradicts the program's value as news. "This contradiction between long-term and short-term interests reveals itself in every program, regardless of whether it deals with news, critical documentary or entertainment. The contradiction is intensified by the ambivalence which exists between most stations' critical stance towards the culture and their actual function as producers of entertainment" (p. 187). On the subjective side, this contradiction expresses itself in the clash of various orientations towards work. Conflicts occur most readily in those areas where the concrete activity of the program producers runs up against abstract guidelines and rigid time-cost quotas which decide the "program's struggle for its very survival." The often-interrupted struggle of the past years for a codified editorial policy came from precisely those groups who could connect their demands for codetermination, for democratization of the decision making structure, to the content of their work. In part still organized professionally, but already assuming the form of a trade union, this movement of editors and contributors soon took up demands transcending their own economic interests, aiming instead at a self-criticism of radio and television stations. Negt and Kluge incorrectly assess the direction of this movement, which goes far beyond the institutional framework of the television stations. Since they understand the struggle for a codified editorial policy only as an organization of economic interests which seeks to extend its role in planning, they underestimate the extent of the conflicts which arise from the demand for the right to determine the content of one's work. The authors correctly This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 70 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE perceive that qualitative issues cannot be taken up productively from the position of the individual planner. Yet by maintaining that the "totality of viewer needs" (p. 218), the "fundamental interest in communication as such" (p. 180), must be absorbed in the institution of television, that "reciprocal communicative relationships" must be created on a horizontal level, the authors fatally approach the neoromantic building-block theory of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who formulated technical utopias above the actual organization of the working class and ignored the necessity to change institutions within capitalist relations of production. When Negt and Kluge conclude: "Thus the task of subjecting government-regulated television to comprehensive public criticism remains a matter for critics from without" (p. 219), they are abandoning the political terrain without constructing a plausible alternative. Because of its increased need for legitimation, television must develop a strong self-interest in making use of collective social experience of the sort which is created in political struggles. Thus it is important to organize those who produce television programs in order to change at least partially the institutional conditions of its reception and integration by viewers. For if it is correct to maintain that the cultural critique, which either criticizes the consciousness industry as a whole or simply analyzes ideological tendencies of individual programs, comes up short against television as an apparatus of industrial production, serving only the "rearrangement of legitimation within the apparatus" (p. 219), then it is necessary to discuss concretely the kind of organizational, technological and material conditions which would make possible the development of counter-productions. Media critique obviously cannot start from the situation of the viewer sitting in front of the set. But neither can it ignore the medium's internally contradictory institutional ties, or its structure of reception without at the same time investigating practicable counter-models. As long as the politically and materially secure institution of television is not fundamentally changed by a political praxis which creates new institutions, a practical critique is limited to the precise investigation and evaluation of the potential for opposition that can be crystallized in the medium. The "interchange between the television station and its viewers, which would make possible a variety of television channels, written and telephone communications and assemblies of viewers" (p. 223), could be developed more fruitfully--but only under socialist conditions. In the present situation it is still necessary to seize contradictory tendencies in the mass media and to support the struggle for codetermination as an element of revolutionary strategy. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 71 In contrast, the struggle for the creation and acceptance of counter-productions pursuing autonomous goals continues on another level. Those who are engaged in the struggle for codetermination are aiming primarily at securing legal, wage-related and content demands within their private or public institutions. But the organizers of counter-productions have a different goal in mind--expressed in the growing cooperation between socialist publishing houses, newspapers and magazines, between socialist film makers and film distribution cooperatives. While the struggles for codetermination aim at an improvement in the conditions of production, these wider struggles attempt to acknowledge and deal adequately with needs arising in response to the conditions of socialist praxis. Clearly, the organization of counter-productions by cooperating leftist groups in the media can only result from the unification of socialist praxis. Under present conditions it would be illusory for left groups in the media to imagine that a mass left press would have a chance in the struggle against the capitalist cultural industry as Willi Mtinzenberg's productions had in the Weimar Republic. Although autonomous to a degree, Mtinzenberg's enterprises were both in organization and content dependent on a relatively strong Communist Party and on a broad revolutionary movement within the working class. The development of such a broad movement, consisting both of producers and of an audience, mediated through organization and experience in political struggles, is the necessary precondition for the development of socialist counter-productions in the media. Even if one believes that present socialist praxis has reached a point where it can pose the question of the construction of counter-productions in the media, the problem still remains whether, as Negt and Kluge suggest, a media trade union within IG Druck und Papier (Printing and Paper Union) really would be in a position to create a politically effective alliance of journalists, writers and artists concerned with codetermination within the left media. The authors' radical critique of media workers' attempts at organization which do not include demands for the control of the means of production in fact becomes political indifference in cases where it is necessary to politically analyze the present organizational possibilities for counter-productions. The mere "inclusion of small and middle sized enterprises engaging in emancipatory publishing, newspaper or media praxis" (p. 433) in a media trade union is a long way from changing the form of production. Rather, the form of production is directly dependent on the possibility for political action within the trade unions. The demand that IG Druck und Papier include the leftist media would make political sense This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 72 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE only if tendencies within the trade unions--particularly those insisting on a fundamentally new orientation of union policy towards the media - could be evaluated. b) The total commodity: media concentration (Medienverbund) In contrast to government-regulated television, as well as to traditional media such as the press, publishing, film, etc., media concentration represents a stage corresponding to conditions of advanced capitalist production on an international level. Its combination of individual commodities such as education, entertainment and information make it a total commodity which confronts the individual purchaser as a closed system. This characteristic places media concentration on a level with expanded commodity production. Preconditions for the emergence of media concentration include both the concentration of various enterprises plus a series of new developments in technology and organization involving new ways to transmit information and to set up distribution and planning systems on a large industrial scale. Only when both of these preconditions are met do systems of media concentration emerge which embrace the basic conditions of human life in their entirety, thus in real terms subsuming human beings under capital. This new quality of media concentration arises less from the development of individual media which media concentration then combines than from the cohesion of the media themselves into a "total system." Although at this point completely developed systems of media concen- tration do not yet exist, Negt and Kluge believe that they can predict the new qualities of media concentration from a variety of tendencies. The most important characteristic of media concentration is its ability to adjust its offerings so that it satisfies general interests as well as the specific needs of individual groups. "Its programs do not present merely an abstract general offering ('to whom it may concern') but rather are able to meet indivi- dualized needs, the needs of various target groups, and therefore the basic conditions of human life become the object of a packaged system of exploitation" (p. 240). With its greater specificity of programming, media concentration is responding to the viewer's changed structure of perception, which changes in the sphere of production have brought about. Following Walter Benjamin, Negt and Kluge recognize that the development of the media is accompanied by far-reaching changes in the structure of human perception. While the traditional media develop individual human senses in relative isolation from each other--in a manner analogous to the specialization and This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 73 division of labor necessitated by Taylorism-media concentration rests on a form of perception that is shaped by the interaction between speciali- zation and synthesis. This new form of perception corresponds to similar changes on the side of production. Here, technical changes demand a new type of cooperation from individuals (p. 241 f.). Such changes have their material basis in a situation in which workers must perform precise individual technical tasks at the same time that they supervise and monitor an entire apparatus. These alterations in the structure of perception in turn encounter changes in the psychic structure: the legitimations of the performance principle and work discipline begin to lose their traditional psychic anchoring and are replaced by the principle of a new immediacy. A permanent evocation of sensual needs breaks down the barriers of denial or postponement of drives, setting in motion a dynamic of developing needs which is directed towards their harmonic satisfaction. "When basic human needs (hunger, thirst, shelter) are met, the empirical needs attempt to restore their basic unity and are directed at the objective world. They strive towards the harmony of the senses and respond to those commodities which represent not merely isolated satisfaction or individual use values but rather entire cycles of fulfillment which embody the basic conditions of life. In these circumstances the objective side of media concentration becomes apparent. It welds these tendencies together and organizes them from without. In a proletarian public sphere the interconnection of the needs and senses must be organized through the praxis of human beings themselves" (p. 244). 6. Questions of Organization If Mao Tse-Tung is correct that consistent materialists have nothing to fear, then an investigation of new socialization tendencies characterized by the development of the programming and consciousness industries will be able to reveal the direction in which the contradictions inherent in these tendencies are moving. Through a variety of complex arguments Negt and Kluge have demonstrated the existence of these contradictions, first of all in the declining bourgeois public sphere and in the new public spheres of production such as media concentration. The formulation of a "block of real life" allows them to determine those limits which even the most highly developed profit-maximizing interests confront when they attempt to absorb proletarian qualities and interests. This approach is superior to Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of culture insofar as it confirms the systemic character of the culture industry developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment--differ- entiating, however, between short and long term interests in the context of This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE commodity production--while at the same time refuting that aspect of the culture industry thesis that ignores those new levels of contradiction which permeate the social production of human experience. The fundamental contradictions of wage labor and capital, of social production and private appropriation, have not yet been unilaterally resolved to the advantage of a capitalist super-system immunized against all contradictions. Capitalism has only, although perhaps qualitatively, changed the forms of its concrete social appearance. It is necessary therefore to ask whether the changes which Negt and Kluge perceive in the social experiences and interests of the masses compel a reformulation of the organizational question. They respond to this question in two ways. On the one hand, their analysis of these new contradictory tendencies lays the groundwork for a fundamental critique of traditional working class organizational forms. On the other hand, they start from the premise that the altered structure of experience of the masses makes it necessary to formulate a framework of organizational theory which points towards a socialist strategy in a pre-revo- lutionary situation. Their critique of the traditional organizational forms of the working class is based on the thesis that the oft-repeated historical attempts of the working class movement to constitute its interests in autonomous political parties or proletarian culture within bourgeois society have failed because they began with a false conception of the "total proletarian." "The history of the workers' movement in all the industrialized countries proves that it has been catastrophic for the proletarian parties, the Social Democrats as well as the Communists, constantly to categorize individual members (not to mention those voters who frequently switch parties) as totalities, as Social Democrats, Communists or class-conscious proletarians. Whereas their specific needs, such as living conditions, child care, sexuality, work, leisure time have either remained undeveloped and stagnant or have been organized from above in such a way that the interests and needs, as by-products of capitalism, could not gain any free expression."'3 It is characteristic of these organizational forms that they have produced a "fortress mentality" (p. 384 ff.), leading to the adoption of the ideals and organizational structure of bourgeois associations. The effects of this adherence to bourgeois forms are particularly evident in the great defeats of the working class movement; for example Maximalism in Italy on the one hand, and Austromarxism on the other. The contradictory nature of these 13. Negt, "Don't Go by the Numbers," 48. This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 75 traditional organizational structures, for Negt and Kluge, is founded in the ambivalence of the "block of real life": "Capitalism cannot destroy this block, and the proletariat cannot attack society from within it" (p. 108). The industrial development of human senses and qualities leads Negt and Kluge to the position that only the purposeful politicization of fundamental vital interests can create a stable context for praxis, within which a long-term socialist strategy could develop. As Negt indicated, "If, as I have already noted, the established organizations presuppose a 'whole' human being who is allied with them by commitment and membership, then the first political act of a revolutionary organization must lay bare this illusory totality. The 'whole' person, whose characteristics, capabilities, interests and needs are fragmented by capitalist production and consumption stands at the end of the revolutionary process, not at the beginning."'14 The proletarian public sphere is the constitutive element of a highly complex process of organization that has as its goal "the release and redirection (Aufhebung) of the experience that remains locked within the basic conditions of proletarian life" (p. 60). By analyzing the new historical forms of the socialization process sphere, Negt and Kluge have developed a political position which can serve an important function for future organizational debates insofar as it subjects the traditional short-sightedness of Marxist theory of organization and class consciousness to a radical critique. Their conception is valuable as an alternative only if this line of epistemological argumentation is carried over into a political analysis of present day class struggles. As long as the question of organization cannot be discussed in the context of a theory of late capitalism -because such a theory does not yet exist--attempts such as Negt and Kluge's remain of vital importance, precisely because of their tentative character. In this way problems hitherto ignored can again be raised and discussed. Translated by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox 14. Ibid., p. 49 This content downloaded from 128.135.100.113 on Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:20:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions