1. I want to begin today by defining what I understand the concept of critical theory to be and to thereby demarcate the area that the present course will cover as well as the rationale for looking intensively at the theorists I will mainly be concerned with. Today the concept of critical theory is employed rather widely to connote a whole range of studies that take place under the banner of literary and cultural studies. If you go into a local bookstore like Gleebooks you will find a whole section devoted to “critical theory”. This tendency to expand the concept of critical theory was the product of certain dissatisfactions with the methods that used to dominate literary criticism until a few decades ago. The reasons for this dissatisfaction were many and I don’t want to go into them in any detail as they are not especially relevant to this course, nor do I feel specifically qualified to talk about literary theory. However, from the outside it seems that the old literary criticism was judged to as being either too narrow or too reductive. Its narrowness consisted in an alleged too exclusive focus on the self contained text and its authorial meaning, while literary criticism could also be said to be reductive when it judged the text in crude Marxist terms as mere ideology, as simply the reflection of material interests and therefore denied its autonomous meaning. The antidote to both these failings was found in a turn to “theory” by which was understood a certain reception of French postmodernist and deconstructive readings associated with thinkers like Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and others. The virtue of these approaches lay in their close and rhetorical reading of texts, as well as its broadening out of the notions of “text” and “textuality” to cover almost any cultural product: this meant that it was possible and legitimate to both read beyond the constraints of authorial intentions and to also breach the “canon,” to look at a whole range of other cultural material and products formerly not considered worthy of serious study. However legitimate were the reasons for this development in literary and cultural studies, there are good reasons to question its designation as “theory”. These French theoretical developments were originally conceived as a way of raising the claims to scientificity of literary studies to those achieved by linguistics and anthropology where the emphasis had shifted to language and other symbolic systems. However, even Derrida, the alleged inspiration of many of these efforts, noted that the appropriation of these methods under the designation of “theory” in the United States was characterised by eclecticism and a lack of interest in the cognitive and epistemological grounding that is typically characteristic of the theoretical standpoint of science and philosophy. Now the question of the mainly American appropriation of French theory and the justice of charges of its eclecticism and disregard for the epistemological standards in the domain of literary studies is beyond the scope of this course. Furthermore, I want to also make it clear from the outset that this course is not interested in critical theory understood in this sense. What is the meaning of the term “critical theory” that will exercise our attention in this course?
2. From the beginning of the philosophical tradition the term theoria was understood as a spiritual contemplation characteristic of philosophy that was an end in itself (praxis as opposed to poeisis). Such an activity was free in the double sense of being removed from the necessities of life and also involving only self-relation. This contemplation is modelled on the self-contemplation of a divine being: God. In the Greek understanding God turns to the whole world and what is divine in it freely and without exterior end: contemplation is in this sense nothing less than divine self cognition and enjoyment. The etymology of the concept of theoria refers to looking or watching in general but is also the gaze of the mind in the sense of observation or speculation. It derives from the Greek root theoros that has an indeterminant derivation from thea, sight or looking or theos God. Of course, the Greeks realised that philosophers were not Gods. However, the capacity for contemplation was godlike, it implied at least contact with the Gods and the capacity to imitate them, even if the theoretical vision of philosophers has intrinsic limits owing to their status as finite beings.
3. It might surprise you to find that this
understanding of theory survived into the early modern period. Only then did a
more activitist concept of theory (associated with experimentation) start to
challenge and then displace the more receptive and quietest notion of
contemplation as understood in the classical world and ultimately rendered the
knowledge claims of the latter almost meaningless. However, in philosophy at
least, the classical understanding of theoria
persists right up to Spinoza and Hegel. It underpins the traditional view that
theory concerns itself with the eternal verities (of cosmos and nature) and not
with the transient affairs of human beings. However, the fact that until the
late 18th century society itself was relatively stable and viewed
normatively as one region within a stable natural cosmos or “great chain of
being” reinforced the conviction that the highest knowledge was eternal and
beyond the reaches of pragmatic human action. Yet, all of this changed
dramatically as the historical lift off into modernity gathered pace through
the gradual acceleration of combined economic, political and cultural changes that
culminated in the multiple revolutions of that time. The traditional
understanding of philosophy as sub specia
aeternitatas succumbs to these historical dynamics and they also destroyed
forever the idea of a preordained social order.
4. Critical theory presupposed the
historical and cultural horizon of modernity and the normative assumptions that
issue from the intellectual world and self-understanding of the new bourgeois,
secular constellation of society. These assumptions include the idea that
history is progressive and not cyclical, that political authority is not
divinely allocated or naturally given but a co-operative, contractual,
revisable arrangement amongst human beings for their mutual benefit, that
individuals are not part of a naturally stratified social order but essentially
equal in virtue of their capacity to reason, for freedom and moral judgement,
that there are no authoritative standards independent of history and
socio-cultural context for adjudicating completing claims to validity in the
normative domains of science, morality and art; that human knowledge is
therefore contestable and open to revision on the basis of “good reasons”.
5. Under the banner of Enlightenment, these normative assumptions begin to form and permeate the evaluative horizon of the modern social and cultural world and began to shape identities, institutions, proposals and the practices of individuals in bourgeois society. They generate a future orientated consciousness that finds much to be dissatisfied with in the still tradition bound life-world of the Ancien Regime. Modern society has been characterised as the “dissatisfied society”, as a society that integrates philosophical questioning into everyday life, that assesses what exists against an “ought”. This questioning of traditional and religious authority, of existing social and political relations is also expressed at this time in, and against, the philosophical tradition. Of course, the criticism of what exists had always been a feature of philosophy. When Plato shapes an image of justice writ large in his Republic or when Rousseau says in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality “man is born free but is everywhere found it chains” both are engaged in a criticism of existing social arrangements. However, Plato does not think his ideal of a just society can be realised. Nor does Rousseau think that his ideal of a social contract that actually expresses the “general will” can be realised in the older European states like France or England. In both these cases, social criticism is expressed in terms of a model of the “good society” that stands in a normative or interpretative relation to existing society.
6. Critical theory expressed the contemporary dissatisfaction with a merely contemplative or interpretative understanding of philosophy that is still hegemonic in Rousseau and his immediate successors. It evoked the need for philosophy to have a practical dimension and by “practical” what I mean is an ethico-political or life forming dimension. Of course, such a dimension had always been a significant element of philosophy insofar as philosophy was not just a cognitive exercise but also concerned with living the good life. However, never before had it posited a future historical horizon and this life-forming dimension tended to go into demise when philosophy became institutionalised in the academy and philosophers became state employees no different to other public servants. Whether or not this criticism of traditional philosophy was justified either then or now, and whether the alternatives offered by critical theory were better or worse, are obviously important questions, but they need not really worry us at this point. What changes for what will become the critical theory tradition is that the background normative assumptions of modernity that history is dynamic and progressive, that social arrangements are man made and changeable, that knowledge is fallible, contestable and open to the better argument, that individuals can be historical actors who exercise both freedom and their moral autonomy to modify the world they have inherited; that the human capacity for self- reflexivity allows thought to be part of that process of historical change, that philosophy doesn’t have to and in fact cannot stand apart from or above these struggles but is always a part of them and has to become conscious of its role within them, gradually all coalesce into the key proposition that the “good society” need not be a regulative idea or an unrealisable utopia but can be immanent to the movement of history itself. Hannah Arendt suggests in the Preface of her The Human Condition (1958) the need to “think what we are doing”. Arendt was not a critical theorist, but her emphasis on the modern need for self-reflexivity is precisely what critical theory was demanding from philosophical theory, its own self-recognition of its practical engagement with its world. Afterall, this is really only a more methodologically sophisticated form of the self-reflectivity that should be exercised by every citizen. The critical theory tradition makes a major contribution to the task of philosophical self-reflectivity, by insisting that philosophy has a practical dimension, that it is a product of, and must not unconsciously but consciously engage with, the great problems of its age. I certainly don’t want these general remarks to be taken to mean that I think that the critical theory tradition had all the answers. In fact, to the extent that it develops durable insights, we find some of these shared in some respects and ways with other traditions like pragmatism or phenomenology. However, it also does have some unique insights and still plays a significant role in many contemporary debates, even if in mutated forms. For that reason alone, it is worthwhile to know something about it.
7. Now let me turn to the concept of critical theory itself and briefly explore its prehistory in the concept of critique. Let me start with the curious historical fact that Marx himself only became associated with the idea of critical theory in the 1930’s 50 years after his death. This new view understanding of Marx work was born out of the groundbreaking interpretation by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness (1923) and the somewhat later publication of his early writings, specifically, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Before this time Marx was generally interpreted in accordance with the Second International orthodoxy as the founder of a new science of history. This view was based on the scientistic paradigm of the mid 19th century, the birth of evolutionary theory and the relative scarcity of Marx’s early works. However, in the wake of Lukacs and especially in acknowledgment of Marx’s philosophical debt to, and critique of, Hegel, he then became viewed as the founder of an entirely new framework in social theory that Max Horkheimer, the Director the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt would call "critical theory".
