Critical Theory

Theory associated with the Frankfurt School, particularly Max Horkheimer's 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Traditional theory, Horkheimer argues, discounts the possibility that its truth value might itself be historically conditioned. Its apparent disinterestedness reflects the apparent freedom of the bourgeois economic subject. When society itself is irrationally organized and alienated from itself, so also is reason. The very division between theory and praxis arises as the effect of alienated thought. Traditional theory is powerless to transform its object of knowledge, for its job is strictly to understand by means of an unwavering eye on the “facts.” It is, ultimately, under the rule of the empirical because, in the face of any discrepancy between fact and theory, theory is modified in light of fact.

In contrast, critical theory seeks to transcend alienated thinking by linking itself to praxis and by acknowledging the historically contingent nature of knowledge. To critique empirical reality, critical theory must both accept that reality as its object and run counter to common sense. It must find some way of articulating the discrepancy between theory and fact without capitulation to the latter, and it can only do this by speaking a language alien to the empirically self-evident. Committed to working for the reasonable organization of society, yet continuously taking for its object a society unreasonably organized, critical theory is necessarily at odds with everything about which it speaks.

Central to the Frankfurt School's “critical” project was a focus on the role of mass culture and the media. Early studies regarded the media as ideological, as disseminators of the false consciousness of capitalism. The culture “industry” cannot critique society for it serves society as a divertissement from the reality of labor and unemployment. However, the work of Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere and communicative action offers a more productive way to understand the mediatory role of culture. The public sphere refers to discursive spaces, such as coffee houses or newspapers, where social issues are identified and debated. These spaces can only operate in democratic societies where public policy arises through fair debate (the word parliament derives from the Old French parlement, meaning discussion). It is in the act of rationally ordered communication that freedom is formed and performed. By the exercise of communicative reason, social beings cohere, giving to the media a transformative role in public debate. In witness to these transformative possibilities and to the indissoluble connection between literature and social reality, critical theory—broadly incorporating philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytical, and political methods—occupies a central place in literary studies. For more information, see Habermas (1962/1989) and Horkheimer (1937/1972).