Interview with Martin Jay

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

PART ONE: SOURCES - THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Introduction - Peter Beilharz Urban Flights - Martin Jay The Institute of Social Research between Frankfurt and New York Adorno in America - Martin Jay The Frankfurt School in Exile - Martin Jay Critical Theory and Political Economy - Moishe Postone and Barbara Brick Walter Benjamin Today - Richard Wolin Introduction to Habermas on Society and Politics - Steven Seidman Habermas and Critical Theory - Jeffrey Alexander Beyond the Marxian Dilemma? Complexity and Democracy, or The Seducements of Systems Theory - Thomas McCarthy PART TWO: SOURCES - FROM THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL TO FOUCAULT From the Problem of Judgement to the Public Sphere - Seyla Benhabib Rethinking Hannah Arendt's Political Theory Ontology and the Political Project - Dick Howard Cornelius Castoriadis Institutionalization as a Creative Process - Hans Joas The Sociological Importance of Cornelius Castoriadis's Political Philosophy Habitus, Field and Capital - Craig Calhoun The Question of Historical Specificity The Reality of Reduction - The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu - Jeffrey Alexander Why We Might All Be Able to Live Together - Jeffrey Alexander An Immanent Critique of Alain Touraine's Pourrons-Nous Vivre Ensemble? Women in Dark Times - Martin Jay Agnes Arendt and Hannah Heller Foucault, Post-Structuralism and the Mode of Information - Mark Poster Conflicting Conceptions of Critique - David Couzens Hoy Foucault versus Habermas PART THREE: AMERICAN INFLEXIONS AND RESPONSES Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - Daniel Bell The Actor Deprived of His Art - Richard Sennett The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time - Christopher Lasch Nostalgia - Christopher Lasch The Abdication of Memory Afterword - Richard Rorty Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism An Underestimated Alternative - Hans Joas America and the Limits of 'Critical Theory' Between Science and Politics - Steven Seidman For Gouldner - Martin Jay Reflections on an Outlaw Marxist City Life and Difference - Iris Murdoch Young Culture, Political Economy and Difference - Nancy Fraser On Iris Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference Calhoun's Critical Theory - Peter Beilharz Bourdieu in America - Lo[um]ic Wacquant Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory Prophetic Pragmatism - Cornel West Cultural Criticism and Political Engagement The McDonaldization of Sociological Research - George Ritzer PART FOUR: SOCIOLOGY - CRITIQUE AND INNOVATION Modern, Anti, Post and Neo - Jeffrey Alexander How Intellectuals Have Coded, Narrated and Explained the 'New World of Our Time' Rethinking Critical Theory - Craig Calhoun Civic Bodies Multi-Cultural New York - Richard Sennett The Search for Tradition - Andreas Huyssen Avant Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Fredric Jameson The End of the Utopias of Labor - Anson Rabinbach Metaphors of the Machine in the Post-Fordist Era Critical Theory, the Informational Revolution and an Ecological Path to Modernity - Timothy W Luke and Stephen K White Where Are We at Home? - Agnes Heller On Irony - Gil Eyal, Iv[ac]an Sz[ac]el[ac]enyi and Eleanor Townsley An Invitation to Neo-Classical Sociology PART FIVE: POLITICS Introduction - Craig Calhoun Habermas and the Public Sphere Why More Political Theory? - Jean Cohen Civil Society and Social Theory - Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics - Nancy Fraser Redistribution, Recognition and Participation Recognition and Social Justice - Axel Honneth Honneth's New Critical Theory of Recognition - Jeffrey Alexander and Mari Pia Lara The Politics of Recognition - Charles Taylor PART SIX: ENGAGING AMERICA The Resistance That Modernity Constantly Provokes - Peter Wagner Europe, America and Social Theory The Evergreen Tocqueville (On the Occasion of the Hungarian Publication of Democracy in America) - Ferenc Feher Why Return to the American Revolution? - Dick Howard False Premises - Jean Cohen Jean Baudrillard - Robert Hughes America The Signs in the Street - Marshall Berman It All Comes Together in Los Angeles - Edward W Soja PART SEVEN: ENDGAMES/EXITS The Significance of the Frankfurt School Today - Albrecht Wellmer Five Theses (1986) Exit - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Purpose“Fake news” or misinformation sharing using social media sites into public discourse or politics has increased dramatically, over the last few years, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic causing concern. However, this phenomenon is inadequately researched. This study examines fake news sharing with the lens of stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, uses and gratification theory (UGT) and big five personality traits (BFPT) theory to understand the motivations for sharing fake news and the personality traits that do so. The stimuli in the model comprise gratifications (pass time, entertainment, socialization, information sharing and information seeking) and personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness and neuroticism). The feeling of authenticating or instantly sharing news is the organism leading to sharing fake news, which forms the response in the study.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual model was tested by the data collected from a sample of 221 social media users in India. The data were analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling to determine the effects of UGT and personality traits on fake news sharing. The moderating role of the platform WhatsApp or Facebook was studied.Findings The results suggest that pass time, information sharing and socialization gratifications lead to instant sharing news on social media platforms. Individuals who exhibit extraversion, neuroticism and openness share news on social media platforms instantly. In contrast, agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits lead to authentication news before sharing on the social media platform.Originality/value This study contributes to social media literature by identifying the user gratifications and personality traits that lead to sharing fake news on social media platforms. Furthermore, the study also sheds light on the moderating influence of the choice of the social media platform for fake news sharing.

Letter from the Editors

From Café Culture to Tweets

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

Traditional theories are concerned with understanding and explaining what is happening so their agenda goes no further than discussion. Critical Theory, however, is different because it not only critiques but it seeks to make changes. It is political. Critical Theory seeks to emancipate and transform those who are oppressed and marginalized through functional steps:Critical theory is politically committed in the sense that it aims to achieve emancipation and transformation of individuals and society through human action. Theory and practice form a single process and philosophy is 'put to work' to provide analysis and critique of society and leading to social change (Jessop 2010: 3).It was Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School who initially coined the term Critical Theory. The Frankfurt School which was also known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally located in Germany but then moved to New York when the Nazis forced its closure and exiled its Jewish members (McLaughlin 1999: 110). Key developers of Critical Theory include Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and later Habermas who formed the second generation. Critical Theory emerged from a group of men who saw the atrocities inflicted by humans on humans. The scholars from the Frankfurt School wanted to understand how people could act the way they did but also how such behaviour could be stopped. Although the scholars were Jewish, Kellner (n.d.) states:The Frankfurt School had a highly ambivalent relation to Judais . . . They were also, for the most part, secular Jews who did not support any organized religion, or practice religious or cultural Judaism. In this sense, they were in the tradition of Heine, Marx, and Freud for whom Judaism was neither a constitutive feature of their life or work, nor a significant aspect of their self-image and identity.Despite the Frankfurt scholars being religiously detached, their focus in developing Critical Theory was 'nothing less than the discovery of why mankind, instead of entering a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism' (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997: xi). The function of Critical Theory is empowerment, it seeks to encourage transformation for those 'whose voices are silenced or marginalised' (Bercaw & Stooksberry 2004). After critiquing society and understanding 'what is', it then asks 'what should be' to create a 'better life' (How 2003: 9). Developers of Critical Theory saw how mass media or the culture industry 'played a highly manipulative role in modern society and served to control or subvert oppositional consciousness, thus removing any threat to the dominant capitalist class' (Strauss: 2012). The demonization of the Muslim masses is a good example of subverting 'oppositional consciousness'.According to Habermas, 'critical knowledge was conceptualized as knowledge that enabled human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection and took psychoanalysis as the paradigm of critical knowledge' (Huttunen 2011). Habermas developed the theory of communicative action. This was a way that people could work together and produce positive social transformation. The theory of communicative action refers to interpersonal communication geared towards mutual understanding. Mutual understanding leads to mutual civility and this works to exclude barbarity. I will discuss the Islamic equivalent of this theoretical perspective later in my introduction to Islamic critical theory:Actors do not primarily aim at their own success but want to harmonize their action plans with the other participants. Opposite to communicative action is the concept of strategic action, which means calculative exploitation, or manipulation, of others. An actor who acts strategically seeks primarily his or her own ends and manipulates other people either openly or tacitly (Habermas 1984: 285).Critical PedagogyCritical pedagogy was initially based on Marxist theory (Lyles 2008: 38). …

Uncorking an Old Bottle Found in the Atlantic Sea—What Does Critical Theory Want from Film? Gertrud Koch (bio) On several occasions, Theodor W. Adorno compared the work of art to the monad. Like Leibniz's monad, the work of art lacks windows that open onto the world, while at the same time confining the whole world inside of itself. The work of art contains a blueprint of the world and was not made to bring it outside. On another occasion, Adorno found a nautical metaphor for the negative dialectic of art: the work of art is a message in a bottle, which floats in the ocean with no guarantee if or when the bottle may be uncorked and the message may find an addressee. During the last decades, one sometimes gets the impression that Critical Theory, especially the writings on mass culture, was doomed to share the fate of art: caught in between two continents. And it was Miriam Hansen's courageous task to start to decipher the message in the bottle as a tale of two continents. Starting in Frankfurt with American Studies and closing her final book on the Frankfurt School in Chicago, she shipped the transatlantic messages in both directions. Miriam Hansen's posthumously published book on the positions in and the implications of the thinkers and thoughts of the so-called "Frankfurter Schule" on film and mass culture was the sum of a lifelong dialogue with a paradigm that never was placed in the center of academic philosophy or cultural theory, nor did it enter into the [End Page 654] mainstream of film or media studies.1 Why, then, does the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School still haunt our concepts and understanding of mass culture? As we know, the so-called Frankfurt School only became a brand long after its foundations were built in the city of Frankfurt. Even during its best times, the members of the club lived in different cities and parts of the world—the center was a group of persons and a growing number of texts and commentaries. Its history was linked to the practices that were inspired by those texts and performed on the part of students from around the globe and members of civil rights movements from Berlin to Berkeley and Tokyo. Do these practices extend to the present field of media studies? I would venture to say yes: we encounter a continuing preoccupation with Walter Benjamin and a growing serious interest in the rediscovery of Siegfried Kracauer, and last year has seen celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Marcuse's book, One Dimensional Man, which took place at least at Columbia University and Brandeis University. If I am reading the signs correctly, there is also a return to one of the most strictly banned text in media studies, the chapter on the "Culture Industry" in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. This text assembles the most radical aspects and positions of the Frankfurt School: a nearby pre-Foucauldian perspective on Freud's psychoanalysis, reflecting the tension between a social technology of the self and a redemptive reading as Nietzschean culture critique; a Marxist analysis of the economy of distribution or, to quote more frequently used Marxist terminology, an analysis of the circulation and fetishization that comes with the commodity form. It addresses a fate that is at stake for all culture in capitalism—not only popular culture, but all mediated art that is sold and distributed on the market. The questioning of abandoned Marxist approaches touches upon the scars that were left after the expulsion of Marx from the Western philosophical and sociological canon, an expulsion that started early and has never fully ceased. The nostalgia that whispers its sorrows in the question, "Where Is the Frankfurt School Now?" also conjures the specter of Marx. Let me take us back to the terms themselves. When did theory become critical? When the term "Critical Theory" was first introduced as proper name for the project of the Frankfurt School, it was a replacement for the Marxist notion of "materialism" that had to be banned under [End Page 655] the conditions of the American exile. "Critical Theory" still refers to Marx's...

Dissemination of medical publications on social media - is it the new standard?

Critical media theory can be traced back to the development of critical theory by thinkers associated with the so-called Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was generally neo-Marxist and Hegelian, and established powerful critiques of positivist, mainstream forms of social science and philosophy. The Frankfurt School’s approach to theorizing the emergent 20th century “mass media” therefore founded a powerful critique of mainstream, positivist, “administrative” mass communication research that became dominant in the early decades of the discipline. Arguably the most direct theoretical descendants of Frankfurt School critical theory (via the latter’s critique of industrialized culture) are the forms of political economy of the media that emerged in their wake. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, competing Marxist analyses began to challenge what they took to be the economism, reductionism, and determinism of Frankfurt School and political economy approaches. The most important movement in these respects came out of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The so-called Birmingham School developed forms of structural and cultural Marxism that drew heavily on the work of Althusser and Gramsci in particular. Additionally, the CCCS developed semiotic and ethnographic approaches to critical media studies that drew upon thinkers such as Barthes and Geertz, and thus gave rise to theories of media audiences that differed sharply from those of the Frankfurt School and political economists. During the late-1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the critical media theory of the Birmingham School engaged closely with feminist theory and politics, and with critical race theory; it also engaged in dialogues and debates with poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism and postcolonialism, and spread internationally under the stripped-down heading of “Cultural Studies.” Though not unrelated, critical media theory can be differentiated from film theory: many film theorists reject the characterization of cinema as a “communication medium,” and equally rejected (for many years, at least) the engagement with television that spurred the development of a great deal of critical media theory and that helped give rise to the field of television studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical media theory in general, and television studies in particular, have incorporated some forms of psychoanalysis to one degree or another, but neither has been anywhere near as absorbed by psychoanalytic approaches as film theory was for many years (arguably as primarily a consequence of the specificity of the cinematic apparatus). In more recent years, new media theory in particular has been central to the continuing development and concerns of critical media theory more generally.

This research investigates the psychological motivations underlying the sharing of fake news on social media concerning political issues in Malaysia. Despite the growing concern about fake news on social media platforms, gaps in psychological research and the relationship between social media use and fake news sharing remain unattended within the Malaysian context. The study aims to identify the primary motivations driving social media users to share fake news on social media platforms concerning Malaysian political issues and explores potential gender differences. Using a quantitative research design, this study collected data through a questionnaire comprising 32 items distributed among social media users. Results indicate a significant relationship between psychological motivations and the sharing of fake news on social media. However, the study found no significant gender-based differences in this relationship. Findings suggest that respondents are moderately motivated by psychological factors to share fake news regarding Malaysian political issues on social media. In conclusion, this study emphasises the influence of psychological motivations on sharing fake news. It contributes to the broader understanding of the relationship between social media and fake news. Future research in this area can further explore the nuances of psychological motivations and their implications for combating the dissemination of fake news in the digital landscape.

With recent advancements in social media and technology as a whole, online news sources have increased. Therefore there has been a higher demand of people wanting a convenient way to find recent, relevant and updated online news articles and posts from social media platforms. In the current status quo, many people feel comfortable with their main source of news being social media articles. Unfortunately, receiving news via social media platforms and unverified online sites has aroused many problems, one of which being fake news (news which contain incorrect or biased facts and statements). Many individuals all around the world are vulnerable and subject to fake news and becoming victims of propaganda and/or being misinformed. To solve this world-wide complication, we used word preprocessing skills to digest the content of articles, and used several mathematical vectors to pinpoint the legitimacy of a news article. To establish an accurate system, words used in examples of fake news and real news were collected using Python. Verifying fake and real news is an important process that all news should go through as it can result in immense consequences. Data on real news and fake news were collected from Kaggle. We had the conclusion that the trained machine learning algorithms showed high accuracy of distinguishing which indicates our research was successful.