Everything about Critical Theory totally explained
In the
humanities and
social sciences,
critical theory is the examination and critique of
society and
literature, drawing from knowledge across social science and humanities disciplines. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in
social theory and the other in
literary criticism. Though until recently these two meanings had little to do with each other, since the 1970s there has been some overlap between these disciplines. This has led to "critical theory" becoming an umbrella term for an array of theories in English-speaking
academia. This article focuses primarily on the differences and similarities between the two senses of the term
critical theory.
Critical theory (social theory)
The first meaning of the term
critical theory was that defined by
Max Horkheimer of the
Frankfurt School of social science in his 1937 essay
Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of
Marxian theory, critiquing 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. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (for example how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That Critical Theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology. Although this conception of critical theory originated with the Frankfurt School, it also prevails among other recent social scientists, such as
Pierre Bourdieu,
Louis Althusser and arguably
Michel Foucault and
Bryan Reynolds, as well as certain
feminist theorists and social scientists.
This version of "critical" theory derives from
Kant's (18th-Century) and
Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "
critique", as in Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work
Das Kapital (
Capital) 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. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's 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. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "
Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".
(External Link
)
In the 1960's,
Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his
Knowledge and Human Interests, 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.
The term
critical theory, in the sociological or philosophical and non-literary sense, now loosely groups all sorts of work, for example that of the Frankfurt School,
Michel Foucault,
Pierre Bourdieu, and
feminist theory, that has in common the critique of domination, an emancipatory interest, and the fusion of social/cultural analysis, explanation, and interpretation with social/cultural critique.
Critical theory (literary criticism)
The second meaning of
critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under
literary theory. This form of critical theory isn't necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts and text-like phenomena. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies became increasingly influenced by European philosophy and social theory and thereby became more "theoretical".
This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the proper
aesthetic understanding and evaluation of literature, as articulated, for example, in
Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."
(External Link) This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's
Poetics as a theory of literature.
This meaning of "critical theory" originated entirely within the humanities. There are works of literary critical theory that show no awareness of the sociological version of critical theory.
Relationship between the two versions
These two meanings of critical theory derive from two different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique, both of which derive ultimately from the Greek word
kritikos meaning judgment or discernment and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.
To use an
epistemological distinction introduced by
Jürgen Habermas in 1968 in his
Erkenntnis und Interesse (
Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of
hermeneutics, for example knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions, while critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of
domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination. From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it's focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or
Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general doesn't necessarily involve a
normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of
values, norms, or oughts, or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.
Overlap between the two versions of critical theory
Nevertheless, a certain amount of overlap has come about, initiated both from the critical social theory and the literary-critical theory sides. It was distinctive of the Frankfurt School's version of critical theory from the beginning, especially in the work of
Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin,
Herbert Marcuse, and
Leo Lowenthal, because of their focus on the role of
false consciousness and
ideology in the perpetuation of
capitalism, to analyze works of culture, including literature, music, art, both "
high culture" and "
popular culture" or "mass culture." Thus it was to some extent a theory of literature and a method of literary criticism (as in Walter Benjamin's interpretation of
Baudelaire and
Kafka, Leo Lowenthal's interpretations of
Shakespeare,
Ibsen, etc., Adorno's interpretations of
Kafka,
Valery,
Balzac,
Beckett, etc.) and (see below) in the 1960s started to influence the literary sort of critical theory.
Within social theory
In the late 1960s
Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School, redefined critical theory in a way that freed it from a direct tie to Marxism or the prior work of the Frankfurt School. In Habermas's epistemology, 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. This expanded considerably the scope of what counted as critical theory within the social sciences, which would include such approaches as
world systems theory,
feminist theory,
postcolonial theory,
critical race theory,
performance studies,
transversal poetics,
queer theory,
social ecology, the theory of communicative action (
Jürgen Habermas),
structuration theory,
psychoanalysis and
neo-Marxian theory.
Within literary theory
From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the
New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially
semiotic,
linguistic, and interpretive theory, then
structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
post-structuralism, and
deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially
phenomenology and
hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory. Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", for example philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of
cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from
Marxian theory, post-structuralism,
semiology,
psychoanalysis and
feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of
postmodern theory.
Language and construction
The two points at which there's the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.
Language and communication
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Ferdinand de Saussure,
George Herbert Mead,
Noam Chomsky,
Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Roland Barthes,
Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (
Jacques Lacan,
Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s,
Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, for example communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.
Construction
Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and
political consciousness come about. Whether it's through the transformational rules by which the
deep structure of language becomes its
surface structure (Chomsky), the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the
episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there's a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there's significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by
Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the
Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Critical Theory'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://critical_theory.totallyexplained.com">Critical theory Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
