Critical theory as a discipline for the 21st century

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

In the hectic run-up to an important election, we need to keep minds focused on the larger picture, and on the potential for epochal change in light of environmental and economic crises.  

Critical theory was begun in the 20th century as an alternative to capitalist “social science” and also as an alternative to Leninist forms of “dialectical materialism.”  It sought to look at the world in terms of history, philosophy, and science, criticizing “mainstream” social science as infected by ideological attitudes while recognizing the persistent longevity of the capitalist system and wondering what to do about its injustices.

This diary will explore the possibility of critical theory, a 20th century “bigger picture” way of thinking about the world, as an intellectual and social discipline for the mind and for understanding the 21st century world.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

Some time ago, I tried to write a diary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 “culture industry” thesis.  It wasn’t all that good, and I guess I should be grateful for the thirty comments it got.  The “culture industry” essay, however, is a classic of critical theory, a movement in social thought which can serve us, today, as a model of intellectual discipline as we enter the Era of Post-Bush.

*****

What is “critical theory?

There are two common definitions of critical theory.  One of them is used in English departments in colleges across the US: it has to do with the criticism of literature.  This is not the definition being used here.

The other definition of critical theory is derived from this “Frankfurt School” group, of which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were primary representatives.  Max Horkheimer, in particular, was briefly the head of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, in Germany, just before Hitler’s takeover.  Soon thereafter, Horkheimer’s associates moved into exile in the US, after which many of them moved back to (West) Germany after World War II.  At that point, what was once somewhat “Marxist” about the “Frankfurt School” was no longer so.  The later “Frankfurt school” tradition, with Jurgen Habermas, adopted a somewhat modified and rather compromised Marxism, married for the most part with communication theory and with structural-functionalism in sociology.  (You don’t need to know what those things are to read this essay, if you don’t want to.)

Initially, the “Frankfurt school” thinkers were looking for an alternative form of governance, outside of the capitalist system and, also, outside of Soviet “Communism” as it existed in the 20th century.  Unfortunately, World War II dispirited Horkheimer and Adorno to the point where they simply (and thereafter) saw little point in believing in the powers of progress in “Western civilization” at all.  Modern society, they argued, was trapped in consumerism; and consumerism was a form of behavioral manipulation which cemented society’s members to an unjust social order.  Thereafter, critical theory became a search for a positive, proactive force for social change within modern consumer society.  We can’t find it, the “Frankfurt school” complained.  It also became an attempt to explain, using all of the tools of philosophy and science, why no great movement for liberation was likely in the society of the mid 20th-century, Horkheimer and Adorno’s time.  

In that context, the social movements of the 1960s, experienced by the aging members of the “Frankfurt School,” were viewed as only a limited attempt at social improvement, with the culture industry (i.e. the entertainment business and its domination of culture) placing limits upon how far any liberatory capabilities could be realized in consumer society.  A summary of this argument in its most articulate form is given in Deborah Cook’s The Culture Industry Revisited; Rolf Wiggershaus’ multiple biography titled The Frankfurt School portrays Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s response to the events of the ’60s as excessively conservative and stodgy.

(Adorno (right) and Horkheimer (left) with Habermas (in background, with hands on head))

*****

What is critical theory good for today?

Many observers of the “Frankfurt School” and its critical theory tend to observe critical theory as having hit a philosophical roadblock.  The Soviet Union was a farce; capitalism was no good, either, so what form of governance was worth a try according to these people?  Here the “Frankfurt School” had no answer.  Even Herbert Marcuse, a “Frankfurt School” associate who stayed in the US in the 1960s and endorsed the New Left, even venturing a brief fling with Angela Davis, was left without a movement when the New Left collapsed at the beginning of the 1970s.

So what good is critical theory today?  Critical theory has, of course, made it into the academy; there are plenty of professors out and about, publishing books on whatever they think the world is coming to, in this newer era of capitalism.  But that’s not why critical theory is important — academics will talk about anything, as long as it gets them tenure.  Specifically, we want to know this: since critical theory was not like Marxism, prophesying a better world through a different economics, and since it was not a social theory that supported the existing system either politically or economically, why would it be useful to us today?

The original critical theorists, the exile Germans who associated with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, confronted the capitalist system as it moved into a “consumer” stage, in its 300 years (at least) of change.  These writers also confronted the horrors of Nazi Germany, which took over their native land and tragically slaughtered many of its residents.  They experienced, then, a particular era of crisis, and applied to it the analytic tools which they had.

One of the best of those analytic tools was historical materialism, which comes from what Karl Marx called “the materialist concept of history.”  The reigning notion of historical materialism, as noted in the Wikipedia entry, is that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”  People are a product of social and material worlds, and so history should try to excavate the social and material worlds of the past in order to figure out what’s in store for the present one.  On the other hand, history which discusses Great Ideas, Great Books, great leaders and thinkers, or triumphant empires misses the origins of the real world in front of our noses.  Historical materialism tries to transcend all that.

Critical theory, then, tries to look at the world as it is, using historical materialism as a philosophy.  Marx’s version of this philosophy, that society proceeded by economic stages, is not the only version of historical materialism.  Marx thought, you see, that human society proceeded from the prehistoric “hunter and gatherer” stage, to the era of empires, to the feudal era, and at last to capitalism.  He then prophesied that after capitalism would follow socialism — but this is by no means certain at all.  Critical theory looked at this way of looking at society and said, yes, there is progress, but it’s progress “from the slingshot to the atomic bomb” (as Adorno once said).  Our weapons have gotten fancier, to be sure, but at heart we’re still a bunch of primitives.  

Another “stages” theory of how history developed is given by Kees van der Pijl in his book Transnational Classes and International Relations.  This is about capitalist history in particular.  I went over this theory in my second diary on DailyKos.com; it’s posted here.

So critical theory need not be Marxist; but it does look at the world using Marx’s tools.

The other great aspect of critical theory was its interdisciplinarity.  If you want to read about how the disciplines of critical theory are just pretending to be separate, and about how social science it at its core an interdisciplinary endeavor, I would sincerely invite you to take a look at Kees van der Pijl’s beautiful Survey of Global Political Economy.  The great thinkers of earlier days, as van der Pijl points out, were not afraid to venture outside of their academic departments and look at all of the relevant information in order to piece together what has become of the world, and the “Frankfurt School” were definitely part of this interdisciplinary festival.  Much of their view of the political and economic worlds, for instance, is colored by psychology (see for instance Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization) and philosophy (see for instance Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics).

All of which is to give the reader, here, an elaborate preface of why critical theory has potential these days.  Critical theory has the potential to tell us of the potential for social change, the potential for future danger, and to clue us in to the realities of the world.  Since this diary is already too long, the following will offer a series of notes on what can be done with critical theory in the present day.  This diary is really to serve as an introduction to a discipline: critical theory is an especially “real” way of looking at the world, and I invite all readers here to investigate its texts further.



Two important applications of critical theory for the present era

1) One advance of the idea of “historical materialism” has been in the area of green history.  Since the Earth is a physical thing, attempts have been made to understand how it has fared ecologically since the beginnings of civilization.  One might take a look, for instance, at Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World, or Sing C. Chew’s The Recurring Dark Ages, which suggest that world society is in for another Dark Age for its maxing-out of environmental resources.  Remember, clearing away civilization for another Dark Age will mean the immediate deaths of billions of people in one great mass extermination, whether it be climate-change-caused, or otherwise.  Would you prefer immediate death, or slow and agonizing?  Time to pay attention to critical theory as such: this is the downfall of civilization Horkheimer and Adorno predicted in the “culture industry” essay.

2)  The recent vogue of the past four decades (really, since the rise of Marshall McLuhan) has been in the celebration of “new media.”  McLuhan even had it color-coded, specifying “hot” and “cold” media.  In McLuhan’s books, radio is imagined as permitting the rise of Hitler; television, of the ’60s.  Recent scholarship is hot to investigate the rise of the Internet.

Critical theory points to a distrust of media.  For Horkheimer and Adorno, the media were bad in every way you could imagine.  Never mind the Republican representation of the “liberal media”; never mind the Democratic representation of the “conservative media” (although this one is far closer to the truth); for Horkheimer and Adorno the media were the “culture industry,” that great apologist for bad reality.  The media were there to give you a fake feeling of happiness.  The “Frankfurt School” really didn’t care for the mass media.  Let’s take a look at what Adorno says about television, for instance, in his essay “Prologue to Television”:

Television is a means for approaching the goal of possessing the entire sensible world once again in a copy satisfying every sensory organ, the dreamless dream; at the same time it holds the possibility of inconspicuously smuggling into this duplicate world whatever is thought to be advantageous for the real one.  (49)

This is even more true today than it was at the time of writing of this essay, in the 1950s.  Think of what computer generated images have done, for instance, to make George Lucas’ “Star Wars” universe seem real on the “big screen.”  Adorno concludes:

The gap between private existence and the culture industry, which had remained as long as the latter did not omnipresently dominate all dimensions of the visible, is now being plugged.  (49-50)

For Adorno, then, behavior control was assuming totalitarian dimensions, and he was writing this in the 1950s, when the television screen was much smaller than it is today.  Television makes us more like that character “Mike Teavee” in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the kid who was so obsessed with television that he had himself shrunk to an extremely small size so as to be transported via TV.  TV makes us smaller.

Now, if we are are not merely view Adorno as a Panicky Pete, here, we need to understand what sort of things he himself wished to do with media.  To clarify the difference between the new, “sensurround” media and the media which are directly dependent upon language, let’s take a look at the reflection given at the beginning of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.  Wittgenstein here is examining language, and in our reading of him we need to think of it as a medium:

“I know that I am a human being.”  In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation.  At most it might be taken to mean “I know I have the organs of a human.”  (E.g a brain which, after all, no one has ever yet seen.)  But what about such a proposition as “I know I have a brain”?  Can I doubt it?  Grounds for doubt are lacking!  Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it.  Nevertheless it is imaginable that my skull should turn out empty when it was operated on.

When you express something in language, you imagine its possible doubt.  Sure, most doubts are merely unreal, and so have no use to us.  If I were to say “I know I have no brain,” then this would just be fantastic, and so “I know I have a brain” is unimportant as a statement.

The point: language makes it possible for us to doubt anything.  The only doubts which are relevant to us are those which stand a chance of being real.  Can film do the same?  Adorno’s point about television, certainly applicable to film in general, is that the near-total environment of the mass media seems programmed to erase the possibility of doubt.  In film, using CGI, we could make Wittgenstein’s imagination come to life.  Open his skull, look! no brain.  We could even use CGI to make Wittgenstein come back to life — he’s been dead for more than fifty years, but why not?

We might even argue that all film contains with it an ideological presupposition — that what is onscreen is important.  The written word contains the same presupposition, but with the written word we can just gloss the unimportant acts of writing and move on to the words which help us.  We have more power over words than we have with film.

The lesson of these examples should not be lost on educators.  What we need, then, is for an education in language use to put the question to students of what is to be doubted and how we are to find grounds for doubt.  This is to say, critical thinking.  What are the language-based media?  Well, almost all of them, but especially 1) discussion, either face-to-face or in public speaking, 2) books, 3) radio, and 4) Internet.  But those are the media of critical education.  Their apprehension cuts to the meaning of the word “critical,” related to the word “criticism,” to be able to discern.  Those media need to be used in education to excite the mind, to allow it to doubt the power of the culture industry.

It is also to say that critical thinking can teach us, via language, to imagine things which are simply not imaginable via film, because the power of doubt that it inspires is beyond that of the power of film to make us to believe in the truth of the unreal.  We can even control the power of doubt, to help us understand which doubts will help the mind control its apprehension of the real, whereas (as Adorno pointed out) film seeks to replace the real with a wished-for reality.

Conclusion

Both of my examples of 1) the environment and 2) the mass media relate to the opposition between the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle” given in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  In Freud’s forumlation, in the human psyche the “reality principle” tames the “pleasure principle” (which just wants pleasure) for the purposes of self-preservation.  But we can only know when to follow the “reality principle” if we know reality.  This is the promise of critical theory: the possibility of knowing reality.