哈贝马斯交往理论视域下的《白噪音》解读

Habermas (1929-), it is necessary to start with an understanding of Western Marxism. This trend of thought first emerged in the 1920s, when Maurice Ponty first defined the concept of Western Marxism in his Les aventures de la dialectique published in 1955. Western Marxism is an ideological theory derived from the development of Marxism, aiming at reinterpreting Marxism in combination with the current historical conditions. György Lukács, who is widely credited as the pioneer of West Malaysia, regards the cultural critique of developed industrial society as the eternal theme of West Marxism in his Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. While it is integrated into other theories of social science such as sociology and psychology, he always adheres to his criticism of bourgeois ideology. Because West Marxism covers many regions, includes many schools and have lots of representative figures, its researchers have to divide its theories into different categories, based on the different positions and insights of the theorists, thus forming a spectacular academic research status. 

The Frankfurt School is a school based on how the theorists of West Marxism views ideology. On the attitude towards ideology, Western Marxists are divided into two camps: one camp inherits the critical position of Marx and Engels and criticize the ideological problems arising in capitalist society; the other camp occupies a neutral position, regarding ideology as a neutral concept and preoccupy themselves in theoretical researches (Liu, 2018: 33). Frankfurt School is a prominent school belonging to the former camp. Liu Zhuohong pointed out in her “The Critique Theory of Frankfurt School and Its Inspection on Modern Chinese Sexual Culture” that the basic features of Frankfurt School are the “critique of instrumental rationality, critique of social alienation and the critique of the whole subject group, the theorists do not forget to take humanism as the base while doing research, and finally it forms a school of its own with its cultural critical meaning”.

2.2 Theories of Communicative Action

The first generation of Frankfurt School, no matter Horkheimer or Marcuse, did not put forward concrete and practical measures to resolve the manipulation of rationality by technology, but only criticized this ideology at the theoretical level. However, Habermas, the successor of Frankfurt School, began to find a way out for human beings, that is, tried to restore human rationality in the real world. The theoretical system of Communicative action he constructed is inextricably linked to the shaping of his critical conception, which is the evolution of related thoughts. As is mentioned above, science and technology under the state intervention have possessed the characteristics of monopoly and centralization, which accounts for the fact that the freedom of the mass media as information transmitters and the social groups as information recipients has been greatly restricted in the process of information transmission. At this point, people’s self-consciousness is increasingly weakened under the background of developed industrial society. In Habermas’s “philosophy of subjectivity”, his attention shifted from the outside world to the consciousness of individuals. In fact, before Habermas, Marx had explored the classification of theories about communication as early as the 1840s. Although no clear definition of social communication was found in his classic treatise, Marx implied that individual subjective” need for communication” is important in both realistic and historical dimensions. He argued that “when Communist craftsmen unite... they also have a new need, that is, the need for communication, and what appears as a means becomes a purpose” (Marx, 1979: 93). Marx subsequently distinguished two types of human mode of communication: material communication in the process of material production practices and spiritual communication built on the medium of communication