The Domestication of Critical Theory

Michael J. Thompson

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783484324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Critical theory was one of the most vigorous and insightful intellectual traditions of the twentieth-century. At its core was a critique of culture and consciousness that stemmed from an insight into the nature of modern rationality, economic life, and social organization. Yet, Michael Thompson argues in this highly original book that the tradition has been domesticated - it no longer offers a philosophically convincing nor politically viable form of social critique. Thompson demonstrates that the field has surrendered its concerns with domination, alienation, and the pathologies of capitalist modernity and shifted its focus toward neo-Idealist themes. This new critical theory has turned its back on the insights of the classical critical theorists. Thompson traces how this shift occurred and how we can reclaim a genuinely critical critical theory. He goes on to defend the different aspects of critical theory that can be used to reformulate a social critique, one that must be brought into dialogue with contemporary political, social and moral philosophy and theory in a way that protects the lasting and crucial legacy of critical theory as a political project.

Part I

The Present State of Critical Theory

Chapter 1

The Rise of Neo-Idealist Critical Theory

I. Introduction

In what follows, I would like to identify and critique a paradigm shift in contemporary critical theory defined by a move away from the Marxian and Weberian themes that animated classical critical theory and toward Idealist themes of cognition and intersubjectivity that I will here call “neo-Idealist.” By neo-Idealist I mean that these thinkers proceed from the premise that there is a self-sufficiency to the powers of intersubjective reason, discourse, structures of justification, and recognition. Their theories stem from an account of reason, of social practices and noumenal capacities that are divorced from the distorting potency of social power, rooted in the material organization of social life, to shape norms, values, and cognition. This paradigm shift in critical theory asks us to consider the ways that communication, justification, and recognition all possess an autonomous power to provide a critical theory of society. What they actively evade, I suggest, are the various ways that capitalist social relations and the kinds of power that stem from them shape subjectivity and the kind of capacities that they see as the nucleus for emancipatory critique. I submit that this transformation of critical theory has essentially domesticated it by rendering it unable to critique the actual mechanisms of social domination and power in modern societies, placing philosophical discourse external to the essential forms of domination and unfreedom that persist under modern capitalist society. Unwittingly, they have created intricate theories that have the potential to reproduce the power relations that govern the existent reality. Indeed, although the new critical theory has been made palatable to mainstream academic debates about language, ethics, and democratic theory, it has abandoned its critical stance toward the kinds of domination characteristic of late capitalism.

The neo-Idealist view holds that noneconomic types of action and power should be privileged over the “technicist” forms of power expressed by capitalist social relations of production and exchange as well as the bureaucratic forms of rationalization that pervade the formal institutions of modernity. But my argument here will not be one that looks backward. Rather, my thesis concerns the ways that the sphere of values and norms is in fact deeply entwined with the institutions of economic and social power. That the attempt to approach a critical theory of society from the point of view of intersubjective forms of praxis derived from the insights of pragmatism is deeply flawed. Neo-Idealism is the result of a reaction against Marxism and the Marxian roots of critical theory, and it is characterized by an inflated assessment of the powers of human communication and recognitive relations that, wrongly, invests such practices with critical and emancipatory potential. It has adopted an approach inspired by pragmatism that places emphasis on forms of thought and social practices that supposedly constitute a critical theory of society.

The object of neo-Idealism is therefore radically different from that of classical critical theory: in place of a critique of consciousness that was tethered to the mechanisms of social structures and functions, neo-Idealism sees consciousness as the result of intersubjectivity and discourse. Its object is not the critique of capitalism and the kind of social order it engenders, but rather the means by which subjects will come to mutual understanding through rational discourse, or “struggle for recognition.” But the problem with this new paradigm of critical theory is not its intentions but its inability to perform what I deem a basic task of critical theory—namely, exposing the social processes responsible for promoting a homogeneity of values and norms that are capable of coordinating and legitimating capitalist social institutions and social relations. The Marxian twist on the Idealist notion of critique was to show that ideas were shaped—indeed, determined—by social structure, that objective social processes shape subjective processes (psychological, cognitive, affective, evaluative, etc.). Power was inherent in the social relations that crystallize around resource extraction, and the realm of ideas, of consciousness, was a function of this form of power. It is not that material forms of power simply map themselves onto consciousness, but that new forms of legitimacy, new norms, and new values come to pervade the social world, making everyday life an adjunct to securing domination-relations, not a fertile ground for evoking an “intramundane” critical praxis.

But neo-Idealist critical theory adopts just this point of view. Its emphasis on forms of human action and thought at the expense of the objective and material domain of social structure renders it essentially uncritical of the forms of power that continue to shape and dominate modern societies. Neo-Idealist thinkers have effectively made critical theory an academic discipline sealed off from the realities of real politics and concrete relations of social power within society. By moving away from the structural-functional mechanisms of capitalist social formations, neo-Idealism promises a liberated form of theory; what it provides, however, is one that no longer has in view the true source of social power and dominance. Capitalist modernity was a central concern for critical theorists because they were able to grasp that it was the central organizing principle of modern societies and that the concepts of alienation, reification, and domination were endemic to it. Domesticated critical theory does not so much drop these categories of analysis as much as recast them in a meta-social light. Despite their claims that they have overcome the metaphysical elements of classical critical theory by resolving the tension between subject and object through the synthesis of consciousness and intersubjective praxis, they have eliminated the essence of the Marxian element of critical theory: that a relation between base and superstructure is a fundamental aspect of social pathologies restraining critical consciousness and sustaining modern forms of rational domination.

II. Two Paradigms of Critical Theory

The move away form the Hegelian and Marxian roots of critical theory can be seen as a shift from the concerns of how social relations and structures constitute consciousness to one in which the intersubjective relations between agents constitutes consciousness. This is by no means a subtle shift in emphasis, but a paradigm shift where concerns about the relationship of the subjective world, of consciousness itself, and the objective world—nature, social structure, and so on—are transposed. I want to suggest here that the paradigm shift in critical theory has moved from one based on a Marx-Weber paradigm to one based on an Idealist-pragmatist paradigm. At the core of the Marx-Weber paradigm of critical theory is the premise that forms of socialization and social integration are shaped and affected by concrete forms of extractive dominance that pervade not only economic relationships but also rationalized social relations of noneconomic spheres of life and consciousness that provide a nonrational (but nevertheless rationalized) basis for the willing acceptance of authority and the generation of social and personal pathologies. In essence, to the extent that economic forms of production are the basis for forms of social power, value systems will emerge to legitimate those processes of production and consumption. The values of elites will become the values of the community as a whole.1 This includes the kinds of cultural and psychological structures that pervade modern societies. The Idealist-pragmatist paradigm, by contrast, places emphasis on the epistemic and symbolic forms of action and dimensions of social integration and sees these as constitutive of consciousness. It seeks to reveal within social action the capacities for critique and to identify social pathologies without reference to the fundamental role played by economic relations. For critical theorists of this strain, the core element of critique is to be found in the ways that ego development is shaped by noneconomic social relations. Social relations are not seen as embedded in economic power, in the exchange relations that dominate modern capitalism, but are conceived as a nexus of symbolic and moral relations that are oriented toward social solidarity.

The basic distinction between these two paradigms concerns the nature of constitution: Do forms of power and relations with social structures and institutions constitute subjectivity and consciousness, or do epistemic and symbolically mediated forms of social action constitute consciousness and subjectivity? For those attracted to the Marx-Weber paradigm, the constitution of the self (as well as of community, culture, institutions, and so on) occurs through the nexus of power relations rooted in capital and in the kinds of rationalized social institutions that are shaped by it for the realization of its ends. But this process is not simple or mechanistic. Rather, it occurs through a process of what I will call below constitutive domination, where the very forms of social action that neo-Idealists privilege are colonized by authority structures, thereby rendering their capacity for critique minimal at best. For those attracted to the Idealist-pragmatic paradigm, individuals construct their lifeworlds through symbolic and linguistically mediated forms of social integration as well as through forms of mutual recognition, justification, and understanding. Cognitive capacities are split from the pressures and forces of material social organization, not unlike the classical Kantian dualism of “noumena” and “phenomena.” Indeed, the critique of such a dualism was premised, at least in Marx, by the thesis that forms of social power have a formative effect on the mental states of subjects. But for neo-Idealists, the noumenal realm is elevated above the social phenomena in which power, hierarchy, and dominance are essential features. They view economic power as a marginal concern, either relegating it to a different level of social action (Habermas) or seeking to absorb it into a theory of markets without the realities of capital (Honneth). My thesis here is that the shift from the former to the latter describes the state of contemporary critical theory. My second thesis is that this shift is responsible for a domestication of critical theory, which means that it is rendered unable to critique the fundamental forms of social power that distort consciousness and therefore is unable to serve as a means of elucidating an emancipatory consciousness for social critique.

It should be said that the Marx-Weber paradigm in critical theory was at least partly responsible for its own self-destruction. Marxism’s theoretical growth led in a direction that was overly mechanistic and simplistic, and Weber’s thesis of the “iron cage” of modernity was in fact too pessimistic. Indeed, the reason for the neo-Idealist turn in critical theory is not without warrant. The Frankfurt School’s early interdisciplinary project was to investigate the structures of consciousness that accompanied advanced industrial society. It sought to understand the ways that consciousness under the forces of modernity—itself rooted in mass industrial capitalism—was shaped and the ways that it was able to constrain critical consciousness. Reification was the key concept, variously interpreted, that became the touchstone for their research. It brought together the various ideas of Marx, Weber, and Freud in an attempt to construct a research program for a modern, advanced, industrial capitalist society. But the rise of fascism and the postwar years saw a different direction take shape. Adorno and Horkheimer came to see the Enlightenment as leading to its dialectical opposite: into mass deception, the dominance of instrumental rationality, and the bureaucratic state. Marcuse emphasized the importance of negation as a central philosophical concern, and Adorno’s later philosophy saw as fundamental the need for not only negation but also a return to the defense of a radical subjectivity in a world so infected by reification that a negative dialectic was the only means of preserving subjective critical consciousness. In effect, Adorno advanced an interpretation of subjectivity as a last refuge—in particular in his aesthetic theory—that led him into a kind of cul de sac: the social world was so riven by reification that the subject stood alone and his central task was to negate the totality that was the administered world. It was clear, to anyone entering critical theory at the time, that there was no way to move forward.

Habermas’s reconstruction of critical theory during the 1970s needs to be seen in this context. The most important shift here was a project in which he would purge critical theory of its Marxian and Hegelian elements and replace them with a new, pragmatist-inspired conception of social action. Habermas’s critique of Marx centered on the thesis that communicative action follows a logic that is independent of the force of social systems. He pulls from Durkheim to show that there is an autonomous form of social action and social cognition—specifically in the realm of values and norms—that can ultimately be expressed in language, in communication.2 Habermas separates what he sees to be the Marxian thesis that social action is organized by technically useful knowledge that is oriented by the mode of production and counterposes to it the cognitive dimension of moral-practical knowledge inherent in structures of communicative interaction.3 Now the concept of social action is cleaved in two: the Marxian understanding is relegated to the dimension of technical reason, and communicative action dwells in the dimension of...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction: How Critical Theory Was Domesticated
• Part I: The Present State of Critical Theory
• Part II: Reconstructing the Logic of Critical Social Theory
• Part III: Renewing Critical Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author