Contemporary Critical Theory Research Paper

1. Contemporary Critical Theory

Much contemporary critical theory though has been shaped by Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929) who, despite often being described as the ‘heir’ to earlier critical theory, has criticized many of its claims. He regards the apocalyptic despair of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work as having ignored the ‘unfulfilled potential’ of Western modernity to expand rationality and democracy (Habermas 1987, p. 113). They too readily accepted a Weberian nightmare of an iron cage of total domination, in which philosophy could only keep alive the possibility of a better society while lamenting the lost opportunity for emancipation (Benhabib 1981). For Habermas though, the very possibility of critique must presuppose the existence of a rational criteria of a better society against which the present is being judged (Habermas 1987, p. 113). Habermas aims to recover and explicate this potential, to which end he has undertaken an elaborate reconstruction of the grounds of everyday communication.

1.1 Communicative Turn

Habermas’ early work focused on the constriction of the public sphere through technocratic politics and commercial mass media. Though less central to later work, this theme is manifest in Habermas’ distinction between two social orders, of lifeworld and system. The former is the sphere of communication and culture, mediated by norms and language. The latter refers to forms of social ‘steering’ by money and power, which are not available to normative discourse. While Habermas insists that the market and state are essential in modern societies, there is a continual tension along the boundaries of life-world and system along which new social movements arise. An example would be environmental protests over nuclear reprocessing that open debates about the rationality and morality of projects previously driven by technological and financial criteria.

In recent work though Habermas has identified emancipatory practice not by appeal to agents of change (such as the proletariat) but through ‘universal pragmatics’—the reconstruction of rationality implicit in speech acts. Habermas argues that the potential for rational agreement is present whether we acknowledge it or not, in sociolinguistic rules of communication. He uses Chomsky’s linguistics and Austin and Searle’s theory of speech acts to reconstruct communicative rules, arguing that the elementary units of communication (speech acts) involve validity claims that are ‘naively accepted’ in conversations. For conversations to occur we assume agreement about grammar and illocution (we recognize something as a promise, an assertion, an order, etc.). Similarly, judgments about the comprehensibility of actions involve evaluations as to whether good reasons have been provided. Although moral choices are often regarded as matters of personal conviction, Habermas agues that the requirement to provide good reasons, subject to public scrutiny, renders these choices ‘capable of truth.’ The evaluation of moral choices is comparable to the evaluation of empirical claims, in that in both our proffered reasons are subject to critical testing (Habermas 1992, p. 76). Thus Habermas seeks a practical and cognitive basis for critical theorizing.

These are not timeless linguistic structures, but unfold historically through the formation of post-traditional (modern) worldviews. Unlike Marxist theories, which view social development as the succession of modes of production, Habermas’ theory refers to stages of cognitive and moral learning, which parallel childhood development. Premodern forms of moral authority involve conventional attachments to externally given value systems, underwritten by sacred beliefs. Echoing Kant, ‘maturity’ involves post-conventional distance from rules and the capacity to evaluate and argue whether adherence to a moral injunction is appropriate. Successful post-traditional sociality institutionalizes new levels of cognitive and moral learning, thus normative structures are the ‘pacemaker of social evolution’ (Habermas 1979, p. 120). Modern worldviews dissolve sacred authority into rational justifications of morality.

This process of the ‘linguistification of the sacred’ is potentially liberating because it releases the ‘argumentative force of language’ grounded in the capacity of assent or dissent from any proposition, whether empirical, moral, or aesthetic. In each of these spheres any attempt to reach an understanding of the truth of a proposition, the sincerity of the speaker, or the appropriateness of the utterance can be disputed. Habermas claims that entering into dialog about the validity of utterances involves a specific type of discussion (Diskurs) oriented towards examining these conditions (Habermas 1984, p. 28). But here is the nub of the argument. Such practices will be successful only if we assume equality of access to speech acts and freedom to move from level to level in Diskurs, since it is only under such conditions that consensus could be motivated by the force of better argument. This enables Habermas to introduce the ‘general symmetry requirement’ (also called the ‘ideal speech situation’) which states that if a consensus is to be reached guided only by the force of better argument, then whether we recognize it or not we routinely assume certain conditions. That is:

everyone has an equal chance to deploy,

initiate, and perpetuate speech acts;

utterances are comprehensible;

their propositional content is true;

what is said is legitimate and appropriate;

it is sincerely spoken.

Habermas realized, of course, that these conditions of communicative competence are counterfactual and rarely present in actual speech, but it is precisely this that justifies two further claims. The first is that the goal of normal communication is disturbed by power relations, which intrude to prevent questions being raised or validity claims being tested. Second, these constraints on communication are self-defeating since they contradict the underlying assumptions that make dialog possible at all. From this it follows that rationality can be measured by the degree of openness or closure in communication. The goals of truth, freedom, and justice are not mere utopian dreams, but are anticipated in ordinary communication; and there- fore the goal of emancipation is presupposed in the constitution of the species as linguistic beings (Habermas 1991, p. 244). If the unspoken authority of all communications can potentially be challenged, then perhaps democratic social relations are already implicit in everyday communications. For this insight to have practical significance though, it would need to be linked to the formation of emancipatory social movements: feminism, ecology, civil rights, and democratization movements (Ray 1993, pp. 57–78).

1.2 How Critical Is Critical Theory?

Contemporary critical theory has developed a wide range of debates and projects in the course of which Habermas’ has been extensively criticized. For some (Hullot-Kentor 1989) he has abandoned the earlier critical thrust of Horkheimer and Adorno. For others, he privileges communicative functions of language over others, such as irony or aesthetic expression (Thompson 1982) and has misunderstood or misused speech act theory (Rasmussen 1990, p. 37). One of the most frequent criticisms is that if Habermas envisages domination-free dialog as an attainable state, this is an implausible utopian dream (Jay 1988, p. 31). If it is not an attainable state then the force of his critique is lost. Similarly, Habermas’ emphasis on communication and language is idealist and perhaps ignores the importance of material structures (Dux 1991). Brian Fay suggests that emancipation through rational reflection encounters limitations imposed by ‘embodiment,’ since authority is inscribed into conditioned patterns of activity, which cannot readily be subject to rational refection (Fay 1987, p. 148). Two areas of controversy in particular serve to highlight the relevance of critical theory to contemporary debates.

2. Critical Theory And Feminism

Some of the most interesting critiques of Habermas have come from feminist critical theorists, who share his commitment to the explication of power, knowledge, and morality, but differ with him on other issues. A central issue is that Habermasian theory stands in the Enlightenment tradition which many feminists have rejected (Meehan 1995). Universal pragmatics deals with highly abstract and depersonalized speech rules. By contrast, feminist critics have identified discursive forms that represent experience of embodied female subjects. For example, Nancy Fraser (1985) argues that Habermas fails to examine the gendering of his core concepts such as citizenship, universalism, public sphere, and civil society. The role of citizen is premised on male occupation of the public sphere in which a civil contract amongst brothers is contrasted with the feminization of the private sphere.

Seyla Benhabib criticizes what she sees as the disembodied transcendental rational ego that is the subject of ideal speech. Drawing on communitarian critics of the ‘unencumbered self’ (Taylor, MacIntyre), she sees in Habermas’s attempt to reconstruct universal morality an autonomous male ego, which universalism privileges as a point of reference. Since subjects are finite and social, contexts of gender and community are central and people are not only generalized others (moral persons with reason) but also concrete others. The negotiation between the ‘generalized other’ and collective concrete others takes place in a male public sphere from which women disappear (Benhabib 1992, p. 13). Nonetheless, Benhabib applauds Habermas’ shift to communication, which departs from reason as a psychological attribute of consciousness to an intersubjective view of ethics and dialog.

A similar point is made by Kate Soper, who notes the ‘all male monastical atmospherics of the Frankfurt School,’ but sees nonadversarial dialog as similar to consciousness-raising, and his distinction between normatively secured and communicatively achieved dialog as a means of opening up unquestioned conventions (e.g., family) to explicit discussion. Indeed, there is some anxiety among these critics that the theory risks losing sight of universalism in favor of Romantic particularism. Benhabib asks, ‘would a moral theory restricted to the standpoint of the concrete other be sexist, racist, culturally relative, and discriminatory?’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘rights must be an essential component of any such theory.’ The problem here (cf. Soper 1992) is that ‘rights’ must involve abstraction from particularity otherwise the grounding for the demand for equal treatment is removed.

3. The Debate Over Modernity

Critical theory seeks to salvage Enlightenment rationality. Habermasappears to be the only con-temporary theorist willing to defend the tradition of modernity, and is frequently called to do so in debates with theorists like Lyotard, Gadamer, and Foucault. Yet critical theory shares with postmodernism an attention to knowledge and communication media, the fragmentation of culture and identity, and the end of historical narratives. Nonetheless, for critical theory, postmodernism denies the grounds of its own critique and permits celebration of spontaneous power of imagination. That, on the contrary, modernity is not exhausted but unfulfilled, was demonstrated by the anticommunist ‘rectifying revolutions’ (die Nachholende Revolution) of 1989. They posed anew the core issues of modernity—rights, civil society, market governance, cultural autonomy, and democratic association (Habermas 1990, 1994, p. 62).

The robust defense of modernity and enlightenment is, paradoxically, as much a challenge to earlier critical theory as to postmodernism. An evaluation of con-temporary critical theory should assess its success in identifying emancipatory impulses neglected by earlier theorists. Habermas gestures towards social movements as representing new communicative structures, although he says very little about these in detail. The key issue is whether the theory of communicative action is a plausible reconstruction of the emancipatory potentials inherent in everyday speech. Even if we find these arguments persuasive, the question remains whether these are cultural conventions or deeper structures constitutive of discourse.

Bibliography:

1. Benhabib S 1981 Modernity and the aporias of critical theory. Telos. 49: 38–61
2. Benhabib S 1992 Autonomy, Feminism and Postmodernism. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
3. Dux G 1991 Communicative reason and interest. In: Honneth A, Joas H (eds.) Communicative Action. Polity, Oxford, pp. 74–96
4. Fay B 1987 Critical Social Science—Liberation and its Limits. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
5. Fraser N 1985 What’s critical about critical theory? Habermas and gender. New German Critique. 35: 97–131
6. Habermas J 1979 Communication and Evolution of Society. Heinemann, London
7. Habermas J 1984 The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Heinemann, London, Vol. 1
8. Habermas J 1987 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
9. Habermas J 1990 What does socialism mean today? The rectifying revolution and the need for new thinking on the left. New Left Review. 183: 3–21
10. Habermas J 1991 A reply. In: Honneth A, Joas H (eds.) Communicative Action. Polity, Oxford, pp. 214–64
11. Habermas J 1992 Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Polity, Cambridge, UK
12. Habermas J 1994 The Past As Future. Polity, Cambridge, UK
13. Horkheimer M 1972 Traditional and critical theory. In: Horkheimer M (ed.) Critical Theory. Herder and Herder, New York
14. Horkheimer M, Adorno T W 1973 Dialectic of Enlightenment. Allen Love, London
15. Hullot-Kentor R 1989 Back to Adorno. Telos. 81: 5–29
16. Jay M 1988 Fin de Siecle Socialism. Routledge, London
17. Lovibond S 1994 Feminism and the ‘crisis of rationality’. New Left Review. 207: 72–86
18. Meehan J 1995 Introduction. In: Meehan J (ed.) Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. Routledge, New York
19. Rasmussen D M 1990 Rereading Habermas. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
20. Ray L J 1993 Rethinking Critical Theory. Sage, London
21. Soper K 1989 Feminism as critique. New Left Review. 176: 91–112
22. Thompson J 1982 Universal pragmatics. In: Thompson J B, Held D (eds.) Habermas—Critical Debates. Macmillan, London, pp. 116–33