Introducing Critical Theory E-Book

Stuart Sim

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Introducing...
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 124

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What might a 'theory of everything' look like? Is science an ideology? Who were Adorno, Horkheimer or the Frankfurt School? The decades since the 1960s have seen an explosion in the production of critical theories. Deconstructionists, poststructuralists, postmodernists, second-wave feminists, new historicists, cultural materialists, postcolonialists, black critics and queer theorists, among a host of others, all vie for our attention. Stuart Sim and Borin Van Loon's incisive graphic guide provides a route through the tangled jungle of competing ideas and provides an essential historical context, situating these theories within tradition of critical analysis going back to the rise of Marxism. They present the essential methods and objectives of each theoretical school in an incisive and accessible manner, and pay special attention to recurrent themes and concerns that have preoccupied a century of critical theoretical activity.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-780-2

Text and illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Theory of Everything

The Grand Narrative of Marxism

The Politics of Criticism

The Synthetic or Magpie Approach

Bringing Theory to the Surface

Hidden Agendas and Ideologies

Theoretical Reflexivity

Science Studies: the Paradigm Model

Postmodernism and Science

The Sokal Scandal

In Defence of Big Science

Origins of Marxism

Absolute Spirit: the Logic of History

The Communist Manifesto

Infra- and Super-structures

Economic Determinism

The Hidden Text

Mapping the Origins of Critical Theory

Reflection Theory

Zhdanovite Socialist Realism

The Battle for Class Consciousness

Lukácsian Theories of the Novel

A Critical Realist View of Alienation

The Theory of Hegemony

Cultural Criticism

The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory

The Progress of Irrationalism

One-dimensional or “Non-oppositional” Society

The Alternative or “New Left”

The Politics of Avant-garde Art

Against Totality – and Totalitarianism

Theory of the Aura

In Combat with Tradition

Brecht’s Epic Theatre

Russian Formalism

The Grammar of Narrative

Shklovsky’s Defamiliarization

Bakhtin’s Plural or Dialogic Meanings

Intertextuality or Heteroglossia

Jakobson’s Semiotic Linguistics

The Psychoanalytic Unconscious

Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory

Structuralism and Critical Theory

What is Structuralism?

The Structuralist Unconscious

Lacan and Structuralist Psychoanalysis

Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic Realms

Barthes and the Empire of Signs

The Common Structure of Narratives

The Death of the Author

Readerly versus Writerly Texts

The “Death of Man”

Intertextuality and the Symbolic Order

Eco’s Labyrinth

The Structuralist Marxism of Althusser

Structuralist Marxism and Literary Criticism

Genetic Structuralism

Reader-Response Theory

Poststructuralism: the Breakdown of Sign-Systems

Poststructuralist Deconstruction

Différance and Meaning

Deconstructing “Binary Oppositions”

The Order of Things

The Rise of Scientific Discipline

Uncovering the Hidden Discourse

The End of Humanism

Lyotard’s “Differends”

The Postmodern Condition

Postmodern Science

Scientific Narrative and Relativism

The Enlightenment, “Unfinished Project”

The Problem of Value Judgement

Paganism or Benthamism

Postmodernism in the Service of Capitalism

The “Case-by-Case” Event

Techno-science and the human

A Feminist Response to the Inhuman

The Sociology of Seduction

Against the Marxist Fetishism of Production

A World of Hyperreal Simulacra

Disneyworld America

When Did Postmodernism Begin?

The Double-Coding of Postmodernism

Postmodern Pastiche and Irony

Anti-Oedipus and Schizoanalysis

Anti-Oedipal Networks of Communication

Stay Sane – Keep Moving

Post-Marxism: The Breakdown of Marxism

A Post-Marxist Answer to Capitalism

The Failures of Marxian Theory

Beyond Doctrinaire Marxism

The Spectre of Marx

A Plural Marx

The “End of History”

Our Complicity in Ideology

The New Historicism

Cultural Materialism

A Politicized Shakespeare

The Theory of Postcolonialism

Fanon’s Anti-Colonialism

Poststructuralist Hybridity

Subaltern Studies

Theory as Sexual Politics

A Feminist Literary Canon

Feminism and Marxism

Post-Marxist Feminism

The Theory of Gynocriticism

Against Patriarchy

The Surplus Woman

Against the Male Canon

“Heroinism” in Women’s Literature

French Feminism: écriture féminine

The Undecidable of écriture féminine

Does Difference Lead to Separatism?

Two Champions of Modern Feminism

Postfeminism and Positive Womanhood

A Parallel with Post-Marxism

Queer Theory and Sexual Identity

Black Criticism

Black Feminist Criticism

Theory is Power

Critical Theory and a Pluralist World

Further Reading

Glossary

Index

The Theory of Everything

Theory has become one of the great growth areas in cultural analysis and academic life over the last few decades. It is now taken for granted that theoretical tools can be applied to the study of, for example, texts, societies, or gender relations.

The Phenomenon of “cultural studies” in general, one of the major success stories of interdisciplinary enquiry, is based on just that assumption. Any area of our culture is amenable to the application of the latest theories. The further assumption is being made that the application of such theories will lead to a significant increase in understanding of how our culture works.

The Grand Narrative of Marxism

The motivation for this development can be traced back to the rise of Marxism. Karl Marx (1818–83) and his followers bequeathed us an all-embracing theory, or “grand narrative” as it is more commonly referred to nowadays.

IT’S ABOUT TIME VAN LOON DID A NEW DRAWING OF ME … you can analyse and form value judgements on any cultural phenomenon: literature, art, music, political systems, sport, race relations, etc.

Entire cultures can be put under the microscope of Marxist theory. It forms a paradigm of the way in which any critical theory in general works. Cultural artefacts are tested against the given projection of the world as it is, or should be, constructed.

The Politics of Criticism

One criticism levelled against critical theory says that it is an “alternative metaphysics”, promoting a particular world view, and, at least implicitly, a particular politics. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with such a procedure, as long as it is made clear what that metaphysics entails. What is it trying to achieve? One can then accept or reject its programme.

From Marxism onwards, critical theory has been very closely linked to political positions. Nor that critical theory should be kept separate from the world of politics. We cannot assume that any criticism is a “value-free” activity.

A great deal of its value stems from its ability to remain politically engaged. Being critical is being political: it represents an intervention into a much wider debate than the aesthetic alone, and that is surely something to be encouraged. We live in politically interesting times, after all.

Such theories have been adapted by various movements to help further a political programme, as in the case of queer theory and black criticism.

Feminism can be crossed with Marxism or deconstruction; Marxism with postmodernism, poststructuralism, or postcolonialism – and so on in a variety of permutations.

The sheer profusion of theories with which we are confronted promotes this kind of experiment. In the theory world at present, it is very much a consumer’s market.

Bringing Theory to the Surface

To be a critic now, especially in academic life, is also to be a theorist – as any student in the humanities and social sciences will be only too painfully aware.

One no longer studies “literature”, but literature plus the full range of critical theories used to construct readings of narratives. The same thing goes for art history, media studies, sociology – and so on through the humanities and social sciences. Cultural studies ranges over many of these disciplines.

How we arrive at value judgements, and, indeed, whether we can arrive at value judgements, are now at least as important considerations as what the actual value judgements themselves are.

Hidden Agendas and Ideologies

Of course, theories have always operated “under the surface”, prior to the development of the term “critical theory” itself, but they were generally implicit rather than explicit.

It was a case of assumptions that were taken for granted rather than used in a self-conscious way. Liberal humanists tended to assume the “ennobling power” of great literature, for example; New Critics in the 1940s and 50s assumed that literary artefacts featured an “organic unify” – the higher the order of organic unity, the greater the work. “Assumptions that are taken for granted” is a pretty good and handy definition of ideology.

Theoretical Reflexivity

Self-consciousness, or “reflexivity” as we now call it, in the application of theory is what defines the current state of play in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. A student preparing a dissertation or thesis will normally be advised to outline the theoretical model being used, first of all, before going on to undertake the actual task of analysis itself.

The adoption of a theoretical position, a method of “reading” cultural “texts”, must be foregrounded. The final mark for one’s work will reflect the degree of success in articulating, and then applying, the theoretical “line” as much as anything else.

The last thing one wants to be accused of in such situations is being “undertheorized” – that way, low marks lie. The successful student in higher education reaches theoretically-informed conclusions in essays and exams, and can show precisely how the theory informed those conclusions.

Science Studies: the Paradigm Model

But it is not only in the humanities and social sciences that critical theory is deployed. Even the hard sciences have been infiltrated to some extent. Science as a social phenomenon is most certainly a target for critical theory. One well-known founder of “science studies” is the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (b. 1922).

Scientific history consists of a series of “scientific revolutions”, each instituting a new “paradigm” of thought and practice incommensurable with the old.

Like any other social activity, science is a legitimate topic for the critical theorist to explore.

Science has repaid the compliment by providing critical theory with a whole new range of critical concepts to add to its repertoire.

Quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity theory, in particular, constitute extremely fruitful sources of examples that seem to confirm postmodern “relativism”. These sciences suggest that the material world is far less stable, or predictable, than we have traditionally assumed it to be.

For instance, I suggest that pi (Π) isn’t constant and universal but relative to the position of an observer, and is therefore subject to “ineluctable historicity” … … that really should have alerted the suspicions of anyone responsibly competent!

The notion of a “postmodern science” is entirely illicit.

Science cannot be appropriated to the relativist views of critical theory. The issue remains – is science purely autonomous or “constructed” like everything else cultural?

Marxism analyses all phenomena in terms of its theory of dialectical materialism … And a particular historical vision accompanies this theory.

Origins of Marxism

The immediate source of Marxian dialectical materialism is found in the idealist philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel enriched theory with the crucial term, alienation, which explains the interrelation of logic to history. In logic, it specifies the contradiction latent in all thinking, meaning that one idea will inevitably provoke its opposite. Hegel’s aim was to resolve this in and by consciousness itself …

Consciousness proceeds in this way historically to a higher synthesis, in a continuous upward spiral of self-realization.

Alienation in this scheme is dialectical, that is, the inadequacy of one form of consciousness turns into another, again and again, until a “proper science” is achieved.

Absolute Spirit: the Logic of History

Alienation is a process by which mind – as the consciousness of a subject (thesis) – becomes an object of thought for itself (antithesis). And thereby the human mind constantly progresses to the next higher stage of synthesis and self-consciousness.

To the question – “What is the object of history?” – Hegel’s reply is … … the realization of absolute knowledge.

History is the journey of the “World Spirit” in its progress through a series of stages until it reaches the highest form of self-realization, Absolute Spirit. That form had been attained in Hegel’s view by the Prussian state in which he served as a public official (i.e. as professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin.)

The Communist Manifesto

Hegel’s dialectic is idealist. Marx gave it a materialist foundation, that is, he shifted alienation away from “mind contemplating itself” to the class struggle as the real history of consciousness in progress.

Our task is to contemplate the process of consciousness from the vantage point that it will attain only at the end of its journey – but not to interfere … No … philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

The realization of philosophy – literally its end – is for Marx the defeat of bourgeois capitalism by the industrial working class, and the establishment of a Communist society which finally abolishes the “latent contradiction” of exploiter and exploited.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Capitalism has simplified the class antagonisms into two great hostile ones – bourgeoisie versus proletariat.

The struggle is reduced to the private ownership of the means of production versus the workers who sell their labour to this capitalist system of production.

How does capitalism “work”? The real (dialectical) question for Marx is: how does it reproduce and maintain itself? The answer is: by two mechanisms normally camouflaged from view, which it is Marx’s aim to expose and bring to revolutionary consciousness. The first mechanism is consumerism … A worker’s production … depends on his (or her) reproduction. Work, work, work! Food, clothing and shelter for my family.

Infra- and Super-structures

There is a third hidden structure which is general and fundamental to all societies, including the capitalist. Society always consists of an economic base or infrastructure, and a superstructure. The superstructure comprises everything cultural – religion, politics, law, education, the arts, etc. – which is determined by a specific economy (slave-based, feudal, mercantile, capitalist etc.).

Understand the superstructure as ideology – ways of thinking characteristic of class behaviour (what we “take for granted” as natural).

What ideology is literally based on is the economic infrastructure – the means by which it produces itself, its wealth, and who owns those means of production.

Once again, we notice Marx’s critical insistence on the hidden: religion, politics, law, etc. – everything cultural that we “live by” – disguises and renders perfectly natural an economic means of production that is unnatural.

Economic Determinism

In the strict, or what is often called the “crude”, view of Marxism, the ideologies of culture (like art) are by-products determined by the economic base.

How much, to what degree, is culture economically determined?

This has been a considerable source of debate in Marxist circles. Some theorists conjecture that certain activities in the superstructure – most notably the arts – might have a “relative autonomy” from the base.

Did a slave-labour economy directly “produce” Greek art? Not quite so simply. It is only “in the last instance” that the economy dictates superstructural activity.

But what exactly does “relative autonomy” or “in the last instance” mean? Such debates in critical theory are important in deciding whether or not we can simply “read off” events in the superstructure from events in the economic infrastructure.

The Hidden Text

One thing is clear. If we grasp the basics of Marxian analysis – as featured in this “map” next – we will see how it shaped critical theory to “search below the surface” of texts. “Text” does not simply mean “paper with writing on it”, but an “encoded production”.

Note, first, that Marx gave a new meaning to alienation – not as the Hegelian process of self-consciousness but as an unconscious estrangement from oneself determined by one’s class condition (= false consciousness).

The inheritances of Marxism in critical theory are:

1. Tension of idealism versus materialism (the autonomy versus social construction of a text).

2. A hidden or camouflaged unconscious.

3. Interventionism: a sense that critical theory can make a difference.

Mapping the Origins of Critical Theory

* Single names given in the table are ‘representative figures’

For all its apparently monolithic character…