Introduction


Critical theory precisely denotes the theoretical work of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (or Frankfurt School), becoming the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, New York, in 1933 when the Frankfurt Institute was closed by the Nazi regime and its members - mainly Jewish and Marxist - were forced to leave Germany. Although using the tern social research in its title, and carrying out some projects involving the collection of data from surveys, the Institute is mainly known for, and was primarily concerned in, the formulation of theories by which to understand the predicament of human society and its development. This is conditioned by the failure of revolution in Germany in 1918-19 - contrary to the idea that revolution should succeed in industrialised societies - and, above all, the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s onwards. In the darkest of times, when political hope was remote, emphasis moved to culture and the structures of social organisation.

 

Among key contributors to critical theory are Theodor W Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer (the Institute's Director), and its associates - not employed at the Institute but who published material in its journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for social research) and in other ways engaged with the Institute and its aims - Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. After 1945, Hannah Arendt extends the concern for liberation developed in the Institute's work.

 

In Germany after 1945, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honeth are seen as continuing the project of critical theory. But, in a looser sense, the term is sometimes (if inaccurately) used for French post-structuralism. There are, still, interesting possibilities to compare the work of French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze with that of the Frankfurt school. The issues of power and agency might be central to such work, but, too, the interest in everyday life (from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau) is another, less examined but important area.

 

The common thread in German critical theory and French post-structuralism is the revision of Karl Marx's theory of social change: as stated in his Theses on Feuerbach (in a notebook of 1845); For example: Thesis XI (last)

           

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.

 

Critical theory, then, rests on the idea of intervention, but intervention from a position of understanding. This is praxis: the effort to gain appropriate understandings of past and present conditions, for insight into possibilities for change.

 

 

Dialectical Materialism

 

Marx integrated German Idealism with Materialism. In Idealism, the world's history is a movement towards freedom, as the ultimate rational state of a society. Materialism, in a different approach, regards human behaviour as moulded by the conditions in which humans live. Education shapes how people act, as do economic conditions.

 

As Ernst Fischer explains:

 

The chief defect of all materialism - is, that the object, reality, which we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object of contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism - which of course does not know real sensuous activity as such.

 

[Fischer cites Theses on Feuerbach]

 

The 'philosophy of practice' is intimately connected with the vision of the 'whole' - From the very start the species man [sic] has not appropriated the world passively but actively, through practice, labour, the setting of goals, the giving of form. -.

 

But the process of the division of labour led to a profound split between intellectual and physical work. In the commodity-producing society, philosophy ceased to be the business of the active man and became that of the contemplative man, - who does not change the world but observes it, reflects upon it, interprets it.

 

A curious inversion had taken place - In idealist philosophy the intellectual became the active, creative principle - For the materialist philosophers, on the other hand, man was only a product of the outside world and that world itself only an object for contemplation, reflected in sensory impressions, of which thoughts were regarded as the abstraction.

 

The 'philosophy of practice' transfers the active, creative principle from the systems of idealist philosophy into materialism: reality as process, movement, change, and social reality as the interaction of objective and subjective factors -circumstances and - activity.^[1]

 

 

Hence, reflective, critical observation informs (and can be said to be informed by) action. Very broadly, this might also be examined in the context of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, and Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis. One of the key questions is what might be an alternative to the instrumental rationality of power's operations in western society, without abandoning rationality - either for the domination of a supposedly mysterious Fate or the irrationality of fascism's appeal to (and distortion of) emotion.

Critical Theory

Horkheimer sets out the aim of critical theory (and the Institute) in a lecture of 1931:

 

[after discussion of the limitations of Idealism, and proposing a shift in the Institute's priorities towards social philosophy (rather than sociological research)] -

- discussions concerning society have slowly but ever more clearly crystallized around one question - the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the real of culture in the narrower sense to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements, such as science, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle. Etc.). The project of investigating the relations between these three processes is noting but a reformulation - of the old question concerning the connection of particular existence and universal Reason, of reality and Idea, of life and Spirit. ^[2]

 

In a 1933 paper, 'Materialism and Morality', Horkheimer states:

 

In materialist theory, the main point is not to maintain concepts unchanged but to improve the lot of humanity. In the struggle for this, ideas have altered their content. Today, the freedom of individuals means the sublation of their economic independence in a plan. The presupposition of the ideas of Equality and Justice hitherto was the prevailing inequality of economic and human subjects; it must disappear in a unified society, whereupon these ideas will lose their meaning. - Hitherto, all concepts took their determinate content from the relations of the free market, which with time were supposed to function to the benefit of all. Today they have transformed themselves into the concrete image of a better society, which will be born out of the present one, if humanity does not first sink into barbarism. [-]

 

In previous history, every task of culture was possible only on the basis of a division between ruling and ruled groups. The suffering that is connected with the continual reproduction of the life of the masses at a particular level - has never been distributed equitably among its members. The reason for this is not to be found - in the avarice and depravity of the rulers, but in the disproportion between the powers and needs of human beings. - the general level of the development of the whole of society (including the upper class) conditioned - the subordination of the masses at work and thus in life generally. - The emergence and dissemination of cultural values cannot be separated from this division. Leaving aside the material goods which result from a production process based on the division of labor, the products of art and science, the refined forms of social intercourse, their sense of an intellectual life, all point to their origin in a society which distributes the burdens and pleasures unequally.^[3]

 

 

What does Critical Theory Do?

 

Raymond Geuss offers the following description of (or rationale for) critical theory:

 

1. Critical theories have special standing as guides for human action in that:

a) they are aimed at producing enlightenment in the agents who hold them -

b) they are inherently emancipatory, i.e. they free agents from a kind of coercion which is at least partly self-imposed, from self-frustration of conscious human action.

2. Critical theories have cognitive content, i.e. they are forms of knowledge.

3. Critical theories differ epistemologically in essential ways from theories in the natural sciences. Theories in natural science are 'objectifying'; critical theories are 'reflective.' ^[4]

 

Hence, critical theory is plural - theories - and departs from traditional scientific theory in reflecting critically on its own production, rather than assuming an objective viewpoint.

 

Its field includes all human activity and social form, though much of the way in which it is cited now tends towards culture. Following from the assertion of reflectivity, it may follow that a critical theory needs more or less continual updating and revision - in contrast to the permanence of scientific laws or the certainties of, say, geometry.

 

In any period, then, subjects become active, or assume the role of agents, when they are aware enough of the conditions by which their attitudes are shaped to intervene in those conditions. Geuss writes:

 

By showing the agents in the society that they would not accept their world-picture freely if they were to discuss it under ideal conditions, the critical theory 'dissolves' 'objective illusion,' i.e. it refutes the claim of the world-picture to be objectively valid. If the statements purporting to describe them are shown to have no standing - the pseudo-objects which form part of the content of the ideological form of consciousness are dissolved, too. If all discourse about natural rights is mere expression of the preferences of some particular social class, natural rights are 'objects' only of wishful thinking. ^[5]

 

Today, as well as class, categories of race, gender and sexuality would be added. The point remains that the prevailing ordering of a society is only its form in specific historical conditions, not natural or immutable. The problem, of course, is how the illusion falls away and how a new consciousness and society come into being. This is the difficulty, in effect, to which Herbert Marcuse accepted he had no answer in discussion following his lecture 'The End of Utopia' in Berlin in 1967.^[6]

 

The Culture Industry

 

Among the key texts of critical theory dealing with culture are Adorno's essays on the culture industry,^[7] and his analysis of the horoscope column in the Los Angeles Times.^[8]

For Adorno, mass culture is a means of systematic coercion of its consumers. It both reduces cultural experience to the banal - for Adorno genuine cultural experience is found only in high culture (the arts) - and uses its debased allure to ensure the compliance of the mass public in capitalism. He writes:

 

The dream industry [by which he means the movies, or Hollywood] does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people. This is the thousand-year empire of an industrial caste system governed by a stream of never-ending dynasties. In the dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world, mass culture represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to those who have been subjugated not in order that they might be enjoyed but only that they be read. The authentic images of the film screen as well as the inauthentic ones encountered in hit melodies - appear so rigidly and so frequently that they are no longer perceived in their own right but only as repetitions whose perpetual sameness always expresses an identical meaning. ^[9]

 

This contrasts with Bloch's view that utopian glimpses were found in popular culture, and Benjamin's that toys and curiosities, as found in the arcades of Paris, similarly sparked a latent utopian memory.

 

Earlier in the same essay, Adorno states:

 

Under monopoly conditions, the more life forces anyone who wishes to survive into deceit, trickery and insinuation and the less the individual can depend any longer upon a stable profession for his living, upon the continuity of labour, then all the greater becomes the might of sport in mass culture - Mass culture is a kind of training for life when things have gone wrong. ^[10] [-]

 

 

The more industry exhausts what has already been perverted into commodities in the very name of culture, the more the omnipresence of culture proclaims itself. The shots of leading figures in economic life - can only be distinguished from those of gangsters by the fact that they take their hats off when they enter the room while they exploit the robust speech of the gangster for the sake of popularity. - The totality of mass culture culminates in the demand that no one can be any different from itself. ^[11]

 

Benjamin and Cultural Production

 

Benjamin is best known for his essay on the work of art in a period of technical reproducibility, used ubiquitously in cultural studies. There, he argues that the audience for reproducible visual images, as in film, are aware of both the process of production itself - for film in repeated takes - and the constructed (rather than given) quality of the narrative (or plot). Hence they can identify with the actors' alienating toil; and imagine alternative endings to those given. It is only one step from that argument to say that members of a society can imagine an alternative to its present system of ordering (its narratives of power, and so forth).

 

In a lecture to a group of anti-fascist writers, in Paris in 1934, he advances a more direct argument: that the process of production itself should be reorganised, on the model of taking over the means of production for the benefit of the whole society.

 

For the dialectical treatment of this problem - the rigid, isolated object (work, novel, book) is of no use whatsoever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations. - when materialist criticism approached a work, it used to ask what was the position of that work vis-a-vis the social production relations of its time. This is an important question. But also a very difficult one. - And I should now like to propose a more immediate question - I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary technique^[12]

 

Benjamin gives the example of the Soviet press of the 1930s, but this can be updated to include blogs and other forms of internet-based communication outside the control of the news or entertainment media today.

 

Yet the extensiveness of such means adds a further difficulty: they are disconnected from the specifics of power. As Adorno argues (above), as a cultural form becomes more reproduced and total, it becomes a means to control rather than liberation.

 

 

 

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