Criticality appears to be everywhere. The urge to be critical is also omnipresent in education and in, for example discussions of (social) media around the world. But calls to be critical tend to result in a cacophony of rhetoric and ideologies.
In this volume, the authors discuss different ways of problematizing critical thinking in education, arguing for multipolar versions that acknowledge different contexts, beyond dominant hegemonies and impositions of (symbolic) power relations. This introduction provides some preliminary answers to the following questions: what is meant by the notion âcriticalâ, especially in education? What are the uses, abuses, and misuses of this polysemic notion? The final section of the introduction problematizes theoretical and practical means to break with the anaesthesia and impotence surrounding criticality.
What Is Meant by âCriticalâ?
The term âcritical theoryâ has a long history: Traditionallyâoften in the singular and upper caseâit refers to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, the generations of philosophers and sociologists who have succeeded one another at the Institut fur Sozialforschung (including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Enrich Fromm, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredrich Pollock) (Keucheyan, 2013). However, today the term critical theory is used in a much broader sense and always in the plural to encompass different theoretical, methodological, and practical strands of research. Today critical theory can relate theoretical strands of research such as Queer and Gender studies, Existentialism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Postcolonialism (ibid.). In his (1972) book Traditional and Critical Theory Max Horkheimer opened with a discussion about âwhat is theory?â Horkheimer went onto map the methodological and analytical basis of what should be constituted as Critical Theory. This included rejecting positivism, rejecting objectivity, and rejecting the separation of theory from social praxis (Horkheimer, 1972). Keucheyan (2013) asserts that
Critical theories reject the epistemological axiom of âvalue neutralityâ posited by Max Weber in the early twentieth century in his essays on the methodology of the social sciences. (Keucheyan, 2013, p. 2)
In this sense, researchers and research which fell within the realm of Critical Theory were understood as a form of social criticism, thus âthe âcriticalâ dimension of the new critical theories consists in the general character of their challenge to the contemporary âsocial worldâ. This generality is itself variableâ (Keucheyan, 2013, pp. 2â3). Critical theories more or less challenge the existing social order (Keucheyan, 2013).
It is not the purpose of this book to propose one form of criticality; in fact I would be against suggesting there is one universal form of criticality, instead, one must always ask: Criticality for whom? Criticality by whom? Criticality for what purpose? Despite the fact that some have heralded previous decades as âThe defeat of Critical Thinking 1977â1993â (Keucheyan, 2013), perhaps ironically, critical thinking and criticality in its various guises are now somewhat omnipresent in education (and many aspects of society). At the end of his book Keucheyan asserts that since the 1970s onwards forms of critical thought have been disseminated throughout the world (ibid.). Keucheyan strongly argues that critical thinking is inseparable from the Americanization of the notion (including knowledge production and the financialization of higher education), meaning it is difficult for scholars from India, South America, China, and Africa to resist dominant hegemonies about how critical thinking is thought about (ibid.). Thus, âthe Americanization of critical thinking contains the seeds of its political neutralizationâ (Keucheyan, 2013, p. 255). In order to deconstruct (my word) the knowledge production of Anglo-centric and Americanized forms of critical thinking, echoing Chantal Mouffe (2013), Keucheyan argues that critical thinking should reflect a multipolar world order (Keucheyan, 2013). Multipolarity is grounded in rejecting liberal universalism and cosmopolitanism as ideologies in terms of how supranational institutions impose rational and legitimate arguments upon countries and/or contexts (Mouffe, 2013). By imposing states of being, whether it is about how society should be organized, what forms of democracy and human rights countries should adopt, or concerning the social values that citizens should abide by and adhere to, such impositions deny the very power relations which constitute the political (Mouffe, 2008). Such imposed forms of homogenization mean that some societies around the world are deemed illegitimate in terms of how they are incompatible with certain ways of thought or behaving. One example of this from my own teaching and research would be that I often hear discourses such as Chinese students lack critical thinking skills (and criticality in general sense) in higher education, which is often used as a biased and prejudiced argument relating to the countryâs political system. Instead, Mouffe (2013) calls for a multipolar world order (different units which coexist and inhibit different values and identities) to reject universalist thinking about how notions (e.g. liberal democracy, human rights, justice, and so on) should be practiced and understood (ibid.).
A multipolar vision for criticality is important in terms of breaking away from universalist logics and practices that exacerbate the notion that one countryâs form of criticality can be âbetterâ than the other. Such power relations can be used to stigmatize, marginalize, and potentially discriminate against the other as they become susceptible to the process of othering (Simpson, 2018, 2019). Othering means âturning self and other into an âotherâ by using stereotypes, representations, and prejudices. Othering often leads to hierarchizing the worldâ (Dervin, 2016, p. 115). In this sense, when criticality is assumed as being present it can be manipulated for different political and/or ideological means (Keucheyan, 2013).
One way of problematizing criticality can be through the work of Nathan Ross (2017):
(1) To think critically means to resist making the object of critique into a means to an external end, and to resist making thought itself into a means to an end. (2) To think critically means to discern the pernicious role of mythology in modern life in such a way as to immunize oneself against it. (Ross, 2017, p. 351)
Criticality, understood as an adjective rather than a nounâthrough the suffix ality means that the condition of being critical (i.e. Criticality) should be understood as a process in the making, a continuous process of becoming. Criticality cannot be a normative fixed or static state nor can the notion be an âendâ in itself. Thus, being critical involves contesting normative (mythological and ideological) values, concepts, principles, and the ways knowledge is produced and reproduced. Myths are not defined by the object of the message âbut in the way in which it utters its messageâ (Barthes, 1972, p. 107). A myth therefore cannot be classed as neither misinformation nor disinformation, neither a truth nor an untruth, a myth is a form of communication (ibid.). In The Rustle of Language (1989) Roland Barthes argues the science of the signifier (i.e. the physical form of a sign versus its meaning) is not merely to âde-mythâ mythologies in the guise of de-mystification or de-mythification through âunmaskingâ and or ârevealingâ myths; rather, the science of the signifier must âcontest the symbolicâ (Barthes, 1989, p. 66). Barthes (1989) argues that one must enter into a dialogue in terms of questioning the very essence of things and our being in relation to mythsâin this sense, with regard to criticality, this involves me questioning how my criticality is constituted and whether I...