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Definition "Critical Theory", (1 S.) (engl.)
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Beitrag von: Vinzi
Critical Theory
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Although the term critical theory is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase referring to any theoretical enterprise of the human or social sciences, it is more specifically and properly used to designate the ideas of the members of the Frankfurt School. This "school" of Marxist thinkers was officially titled the Institute for Social Research and was established at the University of Frankfurt in 1923. With the rise of Nazism, the institute fled Germany for the U.S. in 1933 and eventually reestablished itself in Frankfurt in the 1950s. Its members included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm. Literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Adorno's, was also associated with the institute, but never officially a member. The most prominent of the "second generation" of critical theorists is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
Although critical theory meant different things to the different members of the institute, some generally held principles can be identified. Perhaps most important, the institute was interested in developing a critical perspective for the analysis and discussion of all social phenomena. At root in such a perspective is a continual critique of ideology, which the Frankfurt School characterized as distortions of reality whose purpose is to camouflage and legitimate unequal power relations. The political agenda underlying this projectwhich was never systematically articulated by any member of the institutewas grounded in its direct opposition to domination of any kind. For example, the Frankfurt School acknowledged that Marxism itself became a repressive, rather than liberating, ideology when it was expressed as Stalinism. The institute was also critical of the limitations of orthodox Marxism, arguing that society was much more complex than could be fathomed by analysis based only on political economy. As a result, they incorporated analytical tenets from a number of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, and sociology into their work. Their objective was to demonstrate that positivist or deterministic Marxist models of historical development were unsuitable for cultural analysis (see determinism; positivism). For the Frankfurt School the movements of history did not happen behind the backs or "above the heads" of individuals and thus dispassionately create the material conditions of existence. Rather, individuals were seen as "partially knowing subjects" whose "situated conduct" makes history.
Characteristic of the thinking and writing of the Frankfurt School is their use of the dialectic. Horkheimer and Adorno especially were intent on avoiding linear, syllogistic reasoning, opting instead for examining the contradictions inherent in a phenomenon or concept as the site of meanings and significance. Adorno was also specifically interested in the function of fragmentation and dissonance in aesthetics. For him a work of art, though derived from a conventional "bourgeois" order, is only successful as art when it is able to reconfigure that order, representing it in ways that allow its critical contemplation, as does the music of Schoenberg.
Despite their admiration of much bourgeois art before their time, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that most objects of aesthetic admiration in their own time had become commodities (see commodity) and that culture itself had thus been transformed into an industry. The products of culture, rather than offering a site for subversion, instead reinforce the very structures of life they are ostensibly meant to provide an escape from. For these theorists, contemporary culture is how oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated.
Though their work has been criticized as elitist because of their desire to maintain distinctions between high and low culture or as parochial because of their insistence that capitalism was ultimately capable of coopting opposition, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and the other members of the Frankfurt School are often heralded as the forebears of contemporary cultural studies. Certainly their influence on such theorists as the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies has been well documented. Their continual critique of ideology in all its manifestations is often cited as an important precursor to post-structuralist thought.
Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. London: Spearman, 1967.
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1973.
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
Dews, Peter. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso, 1987.
Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory. Trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.
Reproduced with permission from The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Copyright © 1995 Columbia University Press. All Rights Reserved.
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