Critical theory

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Template:Frankfurt School sidebar Critical theory is a social philosophy pertaining to the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With origins in sociology, as well as in literary criticism,^{[citation needed]} it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation, critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. The latter sociologist described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.^{[citation needed]} Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, the capitalization of Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun particularly stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School.^{[citation needed]}

Modern critical theory has additionally been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, as well as second-generation Frankfurt School scholars, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas' work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social "base and superstructure" is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much of contemporary critical theory.^:5-8

Postmodern critical theory analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings."

Overview

Critical theory (German: Kritische Theorie) was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", in which it is described as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms (or oughts), or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique).

The core concepts of critical theory are that it should:

1. be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time); and
2. improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

Kant and Marx

This version of "critical" theory derives from the use of the term critique by Immanuel Kant (18th century), in his Critique of Pure Reason; and Marx (19th century), through the concept that his Das Kapital forms a "critique of political economy."

For Kant's transcendental idealism, critique means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system.

Kant's notion of critique has been associated with the overturning of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs. His critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas, and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Ignored by many in "critical realist" circles, however, is that Kant's immediate impetus for writing his Critique of Pure Reason was to address problems raised by David Hume's skeptical empiricism which, in attacking metaphysics, employed reason and logic to argue against the knowability of the world and common notions of causation. Kant, by contrast, pushed the employment of a priori metaphysical claims as requisite, for if anything is to be said to be knowable, it would have to be established upon abstractions distinct from perceivable phenomena.

Marx explicitly developed the notion of critique into the critique of ideology, linking it with the practice of social revolution, as stated in the eleventh section of his famous Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

Adorno and Horkheimer

One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, particularly the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and culture industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in economy had effectively abolished the tension between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory,{{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= {{#invoke:Category handler|main}}{{#invoke:Category handler|main}} }} constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning.

Yet, contrary to Marx's famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas' words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal, and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope." For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.

Habermas

In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas, a proponent of critical social theory, raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Although unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkheimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.^:6 In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism, and progressed closer to American pragmatism.

Habermas is now influencing the philosophy of law in many countries—for example the creation of the social philosophy of law in Brazil—and his theory also has the potential to make the discourse of law one important institution of the modern world as a heritage of the Enlightenment.

His ideas regarding the relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber. Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, although his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called "postmodern" challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.

In academia

Marxism in France

The impact of the failure of Marxism to accurately explain events in the Western industrialized societies impacted the Francophone world differently than the Germanic. Unlike the communist parties in the German and Italian world the French Communist Party (PCF) remained closely connected to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) even during the Stalinist period. The PCF, which dominated French intellectual life, was very slow to de-Stalinize. That changed with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which first appeared in English translation in 1963, but was not published in France until 1973. It hit like was a bombshell in French intellectual life, particularly within the PCF and French intellectuals of the left. While some remained in the Soviet camp, others tried to "save socialism" from the actually existing reality in the Soviet Union.

Still others began to ask serious questions about some of the flaws of Marxism and to think differently about the use of power in the Gulag. One of the leaders of that reassessment was Michel Foucault.

Actually the only socialism which deserves these scornful scare-quotes is the one which leads the dreamy life of ideality in our heads. We must open our eyes on the contrary to what enables people there, on the spot, to resist the Gulag, what makes it intolerable for them, and what can give the people of the anti-Gulag the courage to stand up and die in order to be able to utter a word or a poem.

The issue for thinkers like Foucault was not merely that the Soviet model had failed to produce the desired outcome. It lay within problems of Marxist theory itself. Even in "turning Western metaphysics on its head," it remained a theory based on Modernist assumptions, which were coming under greater scrutiny.

Modernism

Modernism was based on the Enlightenment notion of reason and science as stable foundations for knowledge. For Modernism, reason is universal, transcending historical context. Science is an objective tool for discerning the truth. Reason and science are a secure foundation for discerning objective reality and objective truth. Marxism provided a critique of Western political society and the ideology stemming from the Western metaphysical tradition of Idealism on which it was based. The truths that they espoused masked a deeper, underlying truth. Marxism countered this tradition with a materialist theory. The social and political ideology of Western culture masked a darker truth, that it was all based on a naked expression of power that undergird it. This was the enduring power of Marx's critique for Western intellectuals.

But while Marx's critique of the social relations of capitalism was foundational for critical theory, it would eventually come under scrutiny by some for the fact that it replaced the belief in the rational truth of Western Idealism with a metaphysical materialism. It purported to be the truth of human history in the tradition of Hegel and in the Hegelian fashion it asserted for materialism the same conclusion - the resolution of the dialectic in a utopian conclusion. In the wake of the failures of Marxism to produce that outcome, some philosophers began to question these assumptions. Marx's theory of history came to be seen by some as suffering from some of the failures of Modernism that it had sought to expose. Marxism turns philosophy on its head, but it still maintained some of the Modernist assumptions. Marx replaced Idealism with Materialism, but his appeal is still to reason and science. He called his philosophy "scientific socialism" as a way of buttressing its claims and its sense of inevitability.

Nietzsche and Postmodernism

In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism emerged as a critique of the ideology of Modernism. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, often criticizing Enlightenment rationality and focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining political or economic power. Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, framing them as products of political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies.

Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-consciousness, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.

French Post-modernists "are particularly concerned with the foundations and limits of theory. They are animated by a rereading of Nietzsche, especially his far-reaching and virulent critique of truth. The lesson they learn from Nietzsche is that truth is not a transcendent unity. The persistent in European philosophy to unify truth, be it by means of a scientific method or through a dialectical totalization, has unfortunate epistemological and political implications. The tendency of poststructuralism is to therefore regard truth as a multiplicity, to exult in the play of diverse meanings, in the continual process of reinterpretation, in the contention of opposing claims.

Postmodern critical approaches especially gained in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature, contemporary art, and music.

Post-structuralism

Much of the theoretical work of postmodernism emerged in the Francophone world of the 1960s and 70s as theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze among others developed an approach that was postmodern and poststructural. Post-structuralism, like postmodernism, critiques the notions of rationality, progress and fixed and stable meanings of the Structuralism that came before.

Post-structuralism like postmodernism owes a debt to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his critique of truth. Nietzsche, like Marx, saw Western culture as effect, not cause. It masked the real driving force of history. Marx saw capitalist ideology as masking the underlying truth that political society was already determined by the control of the forces of production. For Nietzsche, the notion of truth itself had become problematized. In his famous declaration that "God is dead," Nietzsche was claiming that the traditional understanding of Western Christian culture and ethics was illusory. Scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had effectively 'killed' the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. Western culture and specifically Christianity was antithetical to human nature and its "will to power." God had served as the foundation for the Western conception of truth and the underpinnings of Western culture. The "death of God" for Nietzsche meant that the concept of Truth had lost its referent. The very notion of Truth had been destabilized. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the supra sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead if the supra sensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." In the wake of this destabilization of truth, Nietzsche called for a "transvaluation of all values."

Foucault

Foucault was one of the key figures in a re-evaluation of the role of power. Marx's view of power was grounded in Hegelianism, that is, history was teleological or pointed toward a final goal. For Marx, that goal involved a struggle between oppressor and oppressed classes that would ultimately end with the proletarian revolution. The oppressive use of power would disappear when the proletariat overthrew their oppressors. Since they had no power, power would end after the revolution.

For Foucault, this utopian notion did not square with his observations about how power actually worked. His studies on power took a different starting point. The French philosophers of the 1960s and 70s were deeply impacted by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The "death of God" heralded by Nietzsche was ultimately an attack on the concept of absolute truth. God was the ground of that truth. Without God, Nietzsche radicalized the notion of truth. Truth became relativized, contextualized, historicized. This was the starting point for Foucault and the entire group of scholars that have been called post-structuralist (although Foucault rejected this term.) Following Nietzsche he rejected absolutes like truths and focused his work on examining the historical contexts in which institutions of power were constructed.

His work on power is instead rooted in a deep historicism. Thus, he rejects the Marxist notion that power is simply an oppressing system where one societal class or group oppresses another (a typical feminist or Orthodox Marxist definition of power).

Power is much more subtle, and includes not only the naked use of force but those systems that are designed to create consent. Foucault's work centered on institutions of bourgeois society like medicine, psychiatry and the prison system.

Derrida

Philosophers of language like Jacques Derrida began to question not only truth but the stability of meaning.

Via Heidegger Derrida applies the Nietzschean "death of God" to the Western philosophical tradition. He characterizes it as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning." This is the attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" which, following Heidegger, he called logocentrism. Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.

Following Ferdinand de Saussure Derrida focused on the dichotomy of signifier/signified. Traditional semiotics had viewed this as a stable relationship between referent and the thing. Saussure bracketed the "diachronic" relationship of the signifier to the signified to focus on the "synchronic" relationship of signifier to other signifiers. It is a structuralist approach to language. Saussure set aside the diachronic relationship to examine how language works. Derrida took this a step further. He introduced the concept of différance. The neologism was difference with an "a" inplace of the "e." For Derrida it incorporated both the sense of differing and deferring of meaning. Meaning both differs from itself and meaning is always deferred, unstable. Derrida's approach is designed to dismantle traditional Western metaphysics.

Logocentrism, for Derrida, is phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings."

Derrida seeks to undo the "subtle repression" of Logocentrism by undermining traditional meaning. He refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction.

Postmodern critical social theory

Focusing on language, symbolism, communication, and social construction, critical theory has been applied within the social sciences as a critique of social construction and postmodern society.

While modernist critical theory concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the development of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system," postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings." Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures. As a result, the focus of research is centered on local manifestations, rather than broad generalizations.

Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other." Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified."

The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works within sociological terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author. Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School. In contrast, Jürgen Habermas of The Frankfurt School is one of the key critics of postmodernism.

Communication studies

From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning came to be seen as the theoretical foundation for the humanities, through the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically-oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction.^{[citation needed]}

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication, with communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, and distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap to a much greater degree than before.^{[citation needed]}

Pedagogy

Critical theorists have widely credited Paulo Freire for the first applications of critical theory towards education/pedagogy, considering his best-known work to be Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a seminal text in what is now known as the philosophy and social movement of critical pedagogy. Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education," because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not dispenser of all knowledge, the sage on a stage, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them; even as they are learning from the teacher. The goal is to liberate the learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to both reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo.

Criticism

While critical theorists have been frequently defined as Marxist intellectuals, their tendency to denounce some Marxist concepts and to combine Marxian analysis with other sociological and philosophical traditions has resulted in accusations of revisionism by classical, orthodox, and analytical Marxists, and by Marxist–Leninist philosophers. Martin Jay has stated that the first generation of critical theory is best understood as not promoting a specific philosophical agenda or a specific ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems."

Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis) following critique, often explicitly repudiating any solutions (such as with Herbert Marcuse's "the Great Refusal", which promoted abstaining from engaging in active political change).

A primary criticism of the theory is that it is anti-scientific, both for its lack of the use of the scientific method, and for its overt criticism of science as a tool used for oppression of marginalized groups of people.

See also

• Outline of critical theory
• Critical philosophy

Lists

• Information criticism
• List of critical theorists
• List of works in critical theory

Journals

• Constellations
• Representations
• Critical Inquiry
• Telos
• Law and Critique

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Bibliography

• "Problematizing Global Knowledge." Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3). 2006. ISSN 0263-2764.
• Bittar, Eduardo C. B. 2016. Democracy, Justice and Human Rights: Studies of Critical Theory and Social Philosophy of Law. Saarbruken: Lambert.
• Calhoun, Craig. 1995. Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. Blackwell. Template:ISBN. — A survey of and introduction to the current state of critical social theory.
• Charmaz, K. 1995. "Between positivism and postmodernism: Implications for methods." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 17:43–72.
• Conquergood, D. 1991. "Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics." Communication Monographs 58(2):179–94. Digital object identifier (DOI): 10.1080/03637759109376222 .
• Corchia, Luca. 2010. La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia. Genova: Edizioni ECIG. Template:ISBN.
• Dahms, Harry, ed. 2008. No Social Science Without Critical Theory, (Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25). Emerald/JAI.
• Gandler, Stefan. 2009. Fragmentos de Frankfurt. Ensayos sobre la Teoría crítica. México: 21st Century Publishers/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Template:ISBN.
• Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Honneth, Axel. 2006. La société du mépris. Vers une nouvelle Théorie critique, La Découverte. Template:ISBN.
• Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York: Continuum Publishing.
• Lindlof, T. R., and B. C. Taylor. 2002. Qualitative Communication Research Methods (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Morgan, Marcia. 2012. Kierkegaard and Critical Theory. New York: Lexington Books.
• Rolling, James H. 2008. "Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era." Qualitative Inquiry 14(6):926–48. — An example of critical postmodern work.
• Sim, Stuart, and Borin Van Loon. 2001. Introducing Critical Theory. Template:ISBN. — A short introductory volume with illustrations.
• Thomas, Jim. 1993. Doing Critical Ethnography. London: SAGE. pp. 1–5 & 17–25.
• Tracy, S. J. 2000. "Becoming a character for commerce: Emotion labor, self subordination and discursive construction of identity in a total institution." Management Communication Quarterly 14(1):90–128. — An example of critical qualitative research.
• Willard, Charles Arthur. 1982. Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. University of Alabama Press.
• — 1989. A Theory of Argumentation. University of Alabama Press.
• — 1996. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

External links

• Critical Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Template:Cite IEP
• Gerhardt, Christina. "Frankfurt School." The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Ness, Immanuel (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Blackwell Reference Online.
• "Theory: Death Is Not the End" N+1 magazine's short history of academic Critical Theory.
• Critical Legal Thinking A Critical Legal Studies website which uses Critical Theory in an analysis of law and politics.
• L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas. A Bibliography: works and studies (1952-2013), Pisa, Edizioni Il Campano – Arnus University Books, 2013, 606 pages.
• Sim, S., & Van Loon, B. (2009). Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide. Icon Books Ltd.

Archival collections

• Guide to the Critical Theory Offprint Collection. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, Cali Guide to the Critical Theory Institute Audio and Video Recordings, University of California, Irvine. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
• University of California, Irvine, Critical Theory Institute Manuscript Materials. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

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