Understanding Critical Theory

• Terry Eagleton declared that the golden age of cultural theory is over
• The unique set of circumstances that enabled certain figures' work to go beyond academic culture is now definitively in the past.
• Critical theory includes various ideas from numerous disciplines.
• The shifting intellectual trends make choosing definitive authors and ideas challenging.
• Considering critical theory as a series of junctures with distinct social, political, and aesthetic issues is helpful.
• Key figures like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault bridge multiple conjunctural moments and theoretical movements.
• The modern form of critical theory started with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.
• Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse critiqued Soviet communism and the rise of consumer capitalism in the West.
• The Frankfurt School incorporated ideas from Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche, moving away from traditional Marxism.
• They criticized capitalism from a position free from the commodity form and instrumental rationality.
• The Frankfurt School critiqued capitalism and its associated degraded intellectual culture and art.
• Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947) critiques the decay of Enlightenment ideals.
• Their essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" is a key text in the debate on popular culture's value.
• They criticized the standardization and commercialization of the film and music industries in the U.S.
• The Frankfurt School's work on popular culture was later superseded by others.

1950s: Structuralism and Cultural Studies

• Raymond Williams' work significantly influenced critical theory, particularly cultural studies.
• Williams' work resonates with themes from the Frankfurt School and Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
• Culture and Society (1958) uses and expands upon the Marxist idea of Base and Superstructure, embracing literature and cultural practices.
• Williams emphasizes the material determination of culture, drawing on Marx's assertion that the mode of production conditions social, political, and intellectual life.
• Williams displaces individual consciousness from its determining role in cultural analysis.
• He analyzes British culture as a site of class struggle, not a unified tradition.
• His 1958 essay "Culture is Ordinary" shows a more sympathetic view of mass culture than the Frankfurt School, especially regarding British working-class culture.
• Structuralism emerged as a theoretical method for analyzing art, culture, politics, and ideology.
• Structuralism is based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory, especially the signifier/signified division and the langue/parole distinction.
• Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss were key figures in structuralism's development.
• Roland Barthes' Mythologies (1957) combines structuralism with a leftist commitment to exposing ideology.
• Barthes analyzed cultural phenomena like Marlon Brando's hairstyle, wrestling, and soap powders.
• Barthes' concept of "Myth" is similar to the semiotic concept of ideology.

Theory Takes Over: The 1960s

• Decolonization and changing cultural values influenced critical theory in the 1960s.
• The French Communist Party (PCF) shifted away from Stalinism, leading to a new cultural movement.
• Louis Althusser formalized approaches to culture, politics, and subjectivity that remain important in critical theory.
• Althusser rejected Hegelian influences and economic determinism in Marxist critical theory.
• By breaking with dialectical materialism, he allowed for the consideration of art and culture as relatively autonomous from economic structures.
• Althusser's work led to viewing art, literature, and politics as operating within their own trajectories, with contradictory relationships to economic exploitation.
• Althusser's concept of ideology and subjectivity is proposed in his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’ (1970).
• He stated that ‘Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence’
• The critique of ideology moved away from “false consciousness”.
• Post-Althusserian theory acknowledges ideology as a medium for creating social meaning.
• The term ‘imaginary’ refers to the way in which an individual can become captivated by an image with which they identify.
• 'ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’ in which the individual is addressed through the operations of ideology.
• Althusser's idea of interpellation is partially the result of the in uence of Jacques Lacan's theory of identi cation outlined in the ‘Mirror Stage’ seminar paper.
• Ideology becomes fundamentally concerned with the ways in which subjectivity is intimately bound up with the consolidation of a social, political and epistemological consensus.
• The Althusser/Lacan axis displaced the traditional notion of the human subject as a self-generating core of initiatives and emphasized the ways in which subjective identity is conferred upon the individual via external signifying practices.
• The Althusserian critique of ideology was premised upon only one aspect of Lacan’s model of the human psyche, the imaginary (stasis and fixity).
• Lacan's work covers epistemology and ethics, along with an awareness of post-Saussurean linguistics.
• In the work of Lacan the division of the sign into signi er and signi ed characteristic of structural linguistics became a focus on the primacy of the signi er, on the way in which the process of signi cation itself is what characterizes human culture and identity.
• The increasing in uence of the work of Lacan signalled a pivotal change of direction that would de ne critical theory as the radical 1960s unfolded around the eclipse of Marxism.
• Theory moved away from the class-based focus of Marxism in tune with the more diverse and politically libertarian ambience of the times.
• Michel Foucault took materialist criticism in a new direction in his work The Order of Things (1963).
• His notion of power was intimately bound up with the social construction of meaning and identity at every level.
• Foucault developed a notion of ‘discourse’ that examines the ways in which discourses of truth, veracity and power develop through different historical periods, and the social and institutional consequences of this.
• Foucault's work from the 1960s onwards is central to the development of theory in its own right.
• Jacques Derrida addressed the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in the Western philosophical tradition and demonstrated that philosophical discourse was structured as if the relation between signi er and signi ed was not arbitrary and that meaning must always be the product of difference.
• Derrida's work struck a chord with the political and intellectual climate of the time in that it could demonstrate that discourses of hierarchy, authority and truth were dependent upon rhetorical devices that sought to consolidate certain views about the order of the world.
• The critical methodology most associated with Derrida’s name is ‘deconstruction’, a process that can be thought of as a de-centring of certain key assumptions.

New Times, New Social Movements: The 1970s and 1980s

• Factors which have in uenced the direction of theory since the 1960s Expansion of demographics in higher eduction, revival of feminism, the protracted ending of European colonial power and successive waves of immigration into Western Europe and North America
• Feminism was at the forefront of this process in terms of both a renewed sense of social and political urgency, and as a theoretical tool in the understanding and trans- formation of existing notions of gender.
• The work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and later Judith Butler would help to make the study of gender an extremely important element of critical and cultural theory.
• It was their encounter with Derrida which gave French feminism of the time its distinctive theoretical tone.
• Derrida had criticized the Western tradition for its ‘logocentrism’ or its insistence upon presence and being rather than difference and absence, and among the postu- lated names for presence has always been God, or ‘God the Father.
• This paternal metaphor was identi ed as phallocentric as well as logocentric, resulting in the compound neologism ‘phallogocentrism’ that indicates the political af liations of much Western thought and culture.
• The identi cation of the paternal metaphor at the heart of Western thinking allowed Cixous and Irigaray to track the origins and impact of patriarchal hierarchy through innumerable and varied discourses.
• Another radical and far-reaching consequence of this line of thinking was to criticize or ‘deconstruct’ the foundational opposition between masculine and feminine, and to question the validity and stability of the concepts themselves.
• While feminism and gender studies represented one crucial development in the trajectory of theory, the study of race and the aftermath of colonial empires also became signi cant in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Frantz Fanon drew upon Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic to analyse the ways in which imperial and colonial discourses constructed whiteness in relation to a racialized notion of otherness.
• As the process of decolonization continued its course and renewed neo-imperial and Cold War tensions emerged, postcolonial thinking began to assess the legacy of empire.
• Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was to prove hugely in uential in the development and popularization of postcolonial studies.
• Terry Eagleton began as a pupil of Williams but was at the forefront of popular- izing the work of Althusser and other theorists in a country that had traditionally been resistant to such ideas.
• Fredric Jameson worked primarily in the lineage of the Frankfurt School, but like Eagleton managed to instigate and maintain a dialogue between Marxism and other currents of theory.
• The three decades between 1960 and 1990 probably witnessed the meridian of critical theory.

The 1990s to the Present: Theory Goes to Market

• Any attempt to produce a resumé of theory in the last two decades will need to address an idea which has itself become rather threadbare during this time: the thorny issue of ‘the postmodern’
• Postmodernism designated not only a time in which the great modern dream of a classless society had become unthinkable, but also a time in which civilization was undergoing a profound change, the boundaries between high and low art, even the distinctive forms of artistic practice themselves, were becoming blurred, digital culture was becoming all-pervasive, and globalization and neoliberalism set the agenda.
• Gender theory subjected masculinity to new forms of critique, and queer theory (see Chapter 10) emerged as an academic discipline.
• Migration, the consequences of established communities of different racial, ethnic and religious identities within the borders of its nation states, a phenomenon usually designated by the shorthand term ‘multiculturalism.
• The increasing prevalence of digital culture and advances in genetic research have engaged critical theory in questions surrounding what actually constitutes ‘being human’ from both an ethical and an ontological perspective.
• Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), a text that considers issues around the blurring of species boundaries and human hybridity in the light of both technology and genetics.
• Marxism and psychoanalysis have persisted mainly through the work of Slavoj Žižek.
• The world has changed immeasurably over the last 60 years, and to a large extent the conditions which prompted some of the foundational texts of critical theory have disappeared from the industrialized world.
• The way in which theory has foregrounded literary and cultural texts as signifying practices which can be viewed as both reinforcing and undermining ideological attitudes continues to be a central tenet of contemporary literary and cultural studies.

Explore critical theory's key thinkers, origins, and evolution. From the Frankfurt School to postcolonial and post-human perspectives, this quiz questions the role of ideology and power structures in society. Test your understanding of theory across various disciplines.