Nancy Weiss Hanrahan and Sarah S. Amsler
Critique and judgment were once regarded as the distinguishing features of an emancipatory social science, yet their role in the study of culture has become particularly contested in recent years. The growth of identity-based politics and the proliferation of new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, and the accompanying cultural turn within social theory, highlighted the analytical and ethical limitations of the authoritative knowledge claims that are often associated with critique. Recognition of cultural difference, now widely regarded as crucial for advancing claims for social equality and analyzing many aspects of social life, challenged universal conceptions of human freedom, including those that had been the basis of an earlier generation of critical theory. The crisis and collapse of Soviet socialism during this period seemed only to mirror the exhaustion with Marxist conceptions of domination and liberation that had been central underpinnings of both normative social critique and struggles for social justice. Within cultural sociology, these developments opened up the field to a rich exploration of cultural practices across a wide range of social and cultural groups, many of which were not previously recognized as “legitimate” culture or legitimate subjects of cultural study. This “democratization” of both the culture concept and its analysis seemed to favor interpretive over critical methodologies. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, there was a strong “discourse of suspicion” in the field towards any normative claims that linked culture specifically to the expansion or denial of human freedom, beyond the basic theoretical observation that in practice it may do both (Reed 2007: 12).
However, although cultural sociologists may have become disenchanted with critical theory, culture itself is not yet “post-critical.” During this same period, culture has become an “arena of intense political controversy” (Benhabib 2002: 1). From identity-focused struggles for political recognition and human rights to debates about localized cultural practices such as female genital cutting; from the symbolic mediation of terrorism to the political force of narratives about a geopolitical “clash of civilizations,” both critiques of culture and cultures of critique proliferate in everyday social practice (Buck-Morss 2003; Calhoun et al. 2002; Eisenstein 2004; Fraser and Honneth 2003), and the future and possibility of critical judgment in global political life have become matters of theoretical concern (Couzens-Hoy 2004; Duncombe 2002; Pensky 2005). Within the global North, social critics have also expressed concern that the autonomy of culture is being increasingly weakened through the criminalization of political dissent, the closing down of democratic public spaces and activities, and the commercialization of artistic production in a “new cultural environment” shaped as much by the economic and political centralization of cultural production as by the postmodern disarticulation of social meaning (Bourdieu 2003; Kellner 2002; Wolf 2007).
The tension between a widespread disavowal of critique in cultural sociology and the persistence of critical judgment in cultural life raises several questions for sociologists. Can, and should, normative judgment be an integral part of a fully articulated approach to culture, one which values in equal measure the interpretation of meaning, its normative evaluation, and its relation to action in the social world? Does sociology best fulfill its “democratic imperative” (Reed 2007: 12) by renouncing critical theories of culture, or can the normative practices of critique and judgment be reconceptualized and renewed to pursue democratic goals of dialogue, interpretation, and an empathetic “ethic of engagement” with others (Kompridis 2005, 2006)? Cultural sociologists have answered these questions in part by highlighting the analytical and ethical dangers of deterministic approaches, which preclude dialogue and close down interpretive processes. However, they have also concluded that critical theories of culture inherently do the same things, thus leaving little scope for exploring how and why normative analysis is important for making sense of the complex relationship between culture and politics, on the one hand, and for orienting our action with others in the world, on the other.
Here, we offer an alternative perspective: that critical theory—including, and indeed particularly that within the Frankfurt School tradition—offers important insights for combining deep interpretations of meaning-making practices (which are essential for cultural understanding) with their normative evaluation, which is a necessary element of critical participation in political life. First, rather than essentializing critique as elitist and interpretation as democratic, critical theory demands that we continually problematize how particular forms of knowledge—including critique, judgment, and imagination— are legitimized or marginalized in practice. It therefore opens up new lines of reflective inquiry into the role of critique as a cultural practice. Second, although critical theorists regard autonomous culture as a potential space of freedom and possibility, they also argue that cultural autonomy must be understood as a political problematic rather than a social fact. In other words, while we may “uncoupl[e] culture from social structure” for analytical purposes and recognize its centrality in shaping actions and institutions (Alexander and Smith 2004: 13), we cannot overlook its relationship to the political and economic logics that have consequences for meaning-making and expressive action. Finally, in contrast with deterministic approaches to critique, critical theory challenges positivistic epistemologies in which knowledge is created in order to arrive at a single, absolute, empirical truth. It points to the limitations of claims to “total” knowledge, suggesting that it is difficult to develop rich understandings of cultural action without attention to other modes of understanding such as aesthetics, affect, and imagination.
Although these insights are developed in various ways throughout various feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist forms of critical theory, their clear articulation within the Frankfurt School tradition—some of which prefigures the later developments— makes this body of work an important point of reference for contemporary cultural sociologists. Before examining what critical theory has to offer, however, we want to discuss its current status within cultural sociology, and to explain how critique has come to be interpreted as antithetical to culture, rather than as a cultural practice in its own right.
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (2004) recently argued that the study of culture has reached a new stage of professional maturity, overcoming the inadequacies of its critical predecessors. The emergence of the “Strong Program” in American cultural sociology and of post-critical theories appears to mark the beginning of a new intellectual era— one in which we can divest ourselves of the romanticism and reductionism of “weaker” traditions of cultural study and embrace the complexity, ambiguity, and autonomous power of culture itself.
Within this perspective, normative approaches to culture are often interpreted as both intellectually and politically regressive. Frankfurt School critical theory has also come to play a “traditional role in cultural studies … as a kind of negative or naive moment” which “has to be overcome for cultural studies to properly exist at all” (Nealon and Irr 2002: 3; see also Kellner 2002; Szeman 2002). However, the narrative of progress from reductionist approaches in the sociology of culture to the more intellectually and ethically advanced “structural hermeneutics” of cultural sociology is itself rooted in judgments about the nature of social scientific truth and the imagination of alternative possibilities: in other words, it is rooted in critical practices. The rhetorical devices deployed to structure this story, particularly the boundary drawn between normative judgments that impose objective meaning onto subjective experience, on the one hand, and descriptions of authentic cultural practice, on the other, indicate that critical judgment remains central to the analysis of culture itself.
Although the turn away from critical theory in the sociology of culture defies any simple explanation, it was rooted in a number of intersecting social and intellectual developments. By the 1970s, it became clear that neither critical theory nor the traditional sociology of culture, as they had been institutionalized, offered adequate conceptual tools for understanding how individuals experience, communicate, and negotiate the cultural resources that orient their being in the world. Although both critical theorists and cultural sociologists offered competent explanations of how culture is implicated in or used as an instrument of social domination, their work was rarely employed to develop analyses of culture as a separate space or practice of autonomy and possibility (Goldfarb 2005). Critical theorists were called upon by members of social movements to reflect on the viability of critique as a mode of action-oriented reflection and to develop theoretical approaches that could explain the emergence of new forms of cultural struggle. At the same time, sociologists of culture began to distance themselves from conceptions of culture grounded either in aesthetic discourse and hence considered abstract and elitist, or in theories of “the culture industry,” which were deemed economically reductionist and deterministic.
Both projects in critical theory and the sociology of culture sought to clarify the possibility of autonomous cultural action and create alternative conceptions of culture that were sympathetic to subjective experience, contingent definitions of truth, and individual autonomy. However, neither seemed capable of reconciling the perceived antimony between subjective experience and objective truth without subordinating one to the other in epistemologically or even politically violent ways. Critique, which is always grounded in a normative claim to some sort of truth beyond individual self-understanding or culturally sanctioned knowledge, hence came to be regarded as inherently constraining, reifying, and anti-democratic. For in contexts where truth-claims are equated with determinate judgments or total representations of objective reality, both truth and judgment are “anti-critical” in the sense that they foreclose rather than open up possibilities for alternative thought and action.
Regarding criticality as a hopelessly flawed epistemological project, cultural sociologists therefore turned towards the “thick description” of ethnographic research and the descriptive reconstructions of social performance and meaning-making practices. But can critique justifiably be abandoned as a practice of dismissal and exclusion that is both intellectually and morally suspect? On the one hand, the critique of critique may be regarded as a positive shift, as authoritative claims to universal or hegemonic truth are antithetical to both critique and democratic deliberation. On the other hand, however, making judgments is vital not only for critical sociology, but also for cultural action and critical thought. The exercise of judgment, in which individuals participate in producing and deliberating claims to truth (or, as Horkheimer and Adorno once argued, “act as subjects in the truth”) is a cultural practice—perhaps one of the very conditions of culture (1997: 244). It is practiced in various ways, from simple taste preferences to appeals to transcendent standards of ethics, justice, human rights, or aesthetics, to the systematic and rigorous analysis of social systems with respect to their potential for human freedom. Given the centrality of critique and judgment in everyday life, perhaps the question is not how they can be transcended or replaced but how they might be alternatively conceptualized and practiced in ways that advance cultural freedom.
One way of answering this question is to examine how and why critique traditionally has been linked to concepts of freedom and cultural autonomy in critical theory. Given the importance of the autonomy of culture within cultural sociology, it is interesting that the Frankfurt School, for whose participants autonomy was a pressing social and epistemological problem, has been virtually written out of the “Strong Program’s” history of the field (see, for example, Alexander 1990; Alexander and Smith 1993, 2004). References to the Frankfurt School’s work tend to be oblique rather than specific, and lumped together with “Marxist” or “Leftist” analyses that reduce culture to its hidden material interests. Critical theory is presented as proceeding through “demystification” and “denunciation,” through methods of ideology critique that are conducted from “on high” and deny the autonomy of culture (Eliasoph 2007; Lichterman 2005, 2007; Reed and Alexander 2007).
However, this characterization of critical theory is itself reductive, in that the Frankfurt School theorists wrote prolifically about the dangers of reductionism and absolutism in cultural critique. They also drew on other strands within Marxist theory, such as the conception of critique as a confrontation between norm and reality, as well as Kant’s notion of critique as reasoned reflection on the conditions of rational knowledge, judgment, and action. Theodor Adorno specifically argued against the “barbarism” of reducing culture to its material interests, and for the need to proceed dialectically between transcendent and immanent positions when conducting cultural critique (1967: 32). This position was asserted because autonomy, defined as human freedom, is not a given but rather enables “the single existential judgment” on which the whole project of critique depends (Horkheimer 1972: 227; see also Brunkhorst 1995: 82). The autonomy of culture is neither theoretically affirmed nor denied, but conceptualized as a possibility— one to be investigated, disclosed, or determined through critical analysis.
The links between the autonomy of culture and critique are visible throughout the diverse body of work in classical critical theory. Originally seeking to produce interdisciplinary social research on the “great transformation” from liberal to monopoly capitalism, from democratic to authoritarian states, and from bourgeois to mass culture— in short, on the “transition to the world of the administered life,” critical theorists aimed to analyze forms of social domination that threatened individual autonomy and reflective forms of thought (Horkheimer and Adorno 1997: ix). Culture entered these analyses both as an instrument of domination (through the distortion of language and cultural symbols as well as the manipulation of communication media that made mass mobilizations of fascism possible), and as a relatively autonomous domain of thought and action. Art in particular held promise in that its specifically aesthetic forms and conventions embodied a non-instrumental form of rationality that could open space for reflection and allow both the articulation of utopian projects and the transcendent critique of social conditions.
The autonomy of culture in critical theory was therefore not a matter of disciplinary disposition that preceded analysis, but precisely a matter to be determined through the analysis of specific cultural configurations as against their historical possibilities and future potentials. Most importantly, because art and culture were implicated in both the reality of social domination and the possibility of eventual human freedom, distinguishing between these possibilities and making judgments about culture were crucial. For the Frankfurt School, judgment was therefore both a political imperative and a moment of autonomous culture itself. Yet what was clearly conceived as an act of subjective freedom, however contradictory and difficult to achieve, has come to be read as elitism or even domination.
An alternative perspective can be obtained by problematizing critique as a complex and situated cultural practice. This approach enables us to raise more nuanced questions about how critique may be exercised to open or close down dialogue; why it may be interpreted as “demystification” or “disclosure,” evaluation or judgment, common sense or a specialized skill, and as oppressive or emancipatory; and under what conditions it engages or excludes and alienates others. To address these questions, we can explore how critical theorists have distinguished between critique and truth-claiming, determinate and reflective judgment, and the different ethics of engagement that these practices require. These issues are explicitly addressed in what has become the Frankfurt School’s emblematic and ironically most criticized text, Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] Horkheimer and Adorno 1997).
Much critical theory of culture has been criticized for taking a “god’s-eye view” of culture and proceeding at an abstract “level of theorizing that does not address or attempt to document the actual mechanisms” of cultural mediation in social life (DeNora 2003: 40; 2005: 149). Interestingly, however, it is in Dialectic of Enlightenment that Horkheimer and Adorno inveigh most strongly against the very types of truth-claims and social scientific knowledge that they are accused of producing. Their analysis marks a turn away from authoritative social science and its positivistic methods of inquiry, which the authors believed had become implicated in the total administration of human beings. It is also a sustained reflection on the contradictions of Enlightenment thought itself: its potential for critical self-reflection remains a necessary condition for human freedom at the same time that its instrumentality undermines that very possibility.
As an alternative, in the opening essays of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors proceed mimetically, employing forms of presentation that challenge dominant expectations of scientific reason and mastery. Rather than undertaking a “positivistic search for information” about the nature of culture in their society, the authors use more hermeneutic and metaphorical methods to evoke, and persuade readers to consider, alternative representations of the social world (Horkheimer and Adorno 1997: x; Honneth 2007: 59). As Bernstein has argued, their aim was less to tell a truth than to raise questions about culture “from the perspective of its relation to the possibilities for social transformation” (1991: 2). In these terms, the question “remains open as to the kind of truth claims it can actually uphold” (Honneth 2007: 61). Far from being a factual description of social reality, therefore, the text may be interpreted as a “world-disclosing critique” of dominant interpretations of it (Honneth 2007).
This point is significant, for the argument within cultural sociology that critique is anti-democratic is based largely on the assumption that it stakes a claim, not only to the truth, but to a superior truth, and in particular one not recognized by, or accessible to, ordinary social actors. But this is not the assumption underlying the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, while engaging in unmasking and demystification, does not simply presume that a final and absolute truth exists to be “uncovered.” Indeed, the authors argued that “the proposition that truth is the whole turns out to be identical with its contrary, namely, that in each case it exists only as a part” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1997: 244). At a time when the authoritarian manipulation of “truth” was being used to justify highly “rationalized” forms of anti-Semitism, political conformity, and mass mobilization, critical theorists had purposes beyond unmasking the ideological underpinnings of fascist propaganda. They also aimed to open up spaces for autonomous, critical thought, and they did so by producing alternative interpretations of society that encouraged others to actively judge the merit and value of competing claims to truth (Horkheimer and Adorno 1997: 244). The philosophy of knowledge at work here is similar to that of Hannah Arendt (1954), who believed that establishing any claim to absolute truth is distinctly un-political because such finality is coercive and forecloses the very essence of politics—persuasion, performance, and the agonistics of speaking and acting in the presence of others.
Certainly there is a tension here between, on the one hand, opening space for autonomous thought and action by inviting others to participate in critical reflection about culture and, on the other, critical theory’s self-understanding as a specialized practice able to produce unique insights and to reveal instances of domination otherwise obscured. Horkheimer and Adorno clearly struggled with this problem and the tension between the different strands of critique is not fully resolved in the text. Similarly, the precise relationship between critique and description is sometimes undeveloped, and in a later edition of the book the authors make explicit references to the “reality of the times” and social changes that require the reconsideration of their central arguments. Yet their intention as dialecticians was to reveal, however imperfectly, a world or possible worlds that were not-yet-recognized in the facts—a world understood not through the observation of its particular temporal appearance, but through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of thought, emotion, relationships, imagination, values, and judgments.
Here, it is necessary to understand the influence of Kant’s distinction between determinate and reflective judgment on the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. For Kant (2000), reflection was a form of reason positioned between the sensual and the cognitive. Frankfurt School theorists thus regarded it as an alternative to scientism, positivism, and instrumentality, on the one hand, and to raw sensation and impulse, on the other—both of which were implicated in the rise and consolidation of authoritarianism (Marcuse 1969). The reflective judgments that Kant associates with aesthetics differ from the determinate judgments of science because they can never be established as true or false in empirical or philosophical terms. Where the latter are coercive, reflective judgments are persuasive. Their validity can only be determined through a speaker’s engagement with others, and through their agreement. Because reflective judgment is oriented toward this potential agreement, it is premised on an assumption that we judge for others, and on an expectation or even a hope that our own sense of beauty or right or good is shared by those from whom we seek agreement. Our judgment is therefore an appeal to universal norms, not in order to indict or oppress but to persuade.
Recently, new critical theorists have picked up this line of reasoning, reconceptualizing critique as the reflective disclosure of social possibility, rather than the establishment of superior scientific truths. Nikolas Kompridis, for example, combines Kant’s insights with a Heideggerian conception of “disclosure,” arguing that empirical truth can never be the goal of any form of critique that is regarded as ongoing or unfinished, and oriented towards disclosing future possibilities. He also suggests that critique—when it is deliberately oriented towards learning with other people with whom we speak—may be practiced as an “intimate” form of engagement rather than an alienating one. The conception of critique as the reflective disclosure of possibility therefore operates on two levels—as the disclosure of possible solutions to social problems, and as the disclosure of possible selves. In an ideal relationship of intimate critique, Kompridis suggests, the aim “is not just the critical transformation of the object of critique, but also of the subjectivity of the critic” (2006: 175). In other words, rather than speaking authoritatively in ways that exclude others, “it is in the voice of the second person, not in the voice of the first, that critique must speak” (Kompridis 2005: 339). In order to disclose possibilities for the future, and to engage in cooperative problem solving, we have to listen, be receptive to others, and be willing to change our own self-understandings. For, as Kompridis argues,
once we acknowledge that culture plays an irreducible and constitutive role in social and political life, once we acknowledge the irreducibility of reasonable disagreement, we may find that the critique of others with whom we must nonetheless find a way to live requires an intimate mode of criticism; a mode of criticism based on reciprocal recognition, on re-knowing one another in terms different from those on which we previously relied.
(Kompridis 2006: 260)
It is of course tempting to suggest that critique is a practice of freedom when it is disclosing, intimate, reflective, and inclusive of others, and an exercise of domination when it is determinate and exclusionary toward others. Yet this view would be too simplistic. Indeed, although the theory of “intimate critique” is conceptually compelling, it reproduces some of the problems of Habermas’s ideal speech situation: it is premised on face-to-face interactions in which imbalances of power must be bracketed, and it requires a degree of receptivity that may be difficult to achieve. Indeed, conceptualizations of intimate critique may be inappropriate in circumstances where relations of domination and subordination obtain, and it would be a mistake to discount other forms of critique that aim to speak truth to power as being inherently dominative. One form of critique cannot simply be substituted for another as being more “democratic” in principle, and there is no single model or criterion of “democratic” critique. Nevertheless, the reflective, inter-subjective, and indeterminate character of Kompridis’s notion of intimate critique points to the alternative contributions that critical theory can make to a sociology which, in addition to understanding how cultural meaning is constituted in everyday practice, is also capable of explaining how it is implicated in the defense and expansion of human freedom. It also has particular importance for explaining how and why respect for cultural difference and the practice of normative understanding can, and perhaps should, be articulated together in new forms of critique. For whereas critique is often abandoned or rejected because it is thought impossible to carry out across cultural boundaries, Kompridis (2006: 145, 246) argues that disclosing critical practices in fact require radical differences that disrupt the horizons of our own taken-for-granted “cultural sensibilities” and that can, within facilitating conditions and in the spirit of learning, contribute to their transformation.
Throughout this chapter, we have argued that a normative interpretation of the “democratic imperative” is a valuable element of any democratically oriented and critical sociology of culture. Indeed, it is particularly important for any project that engages the complex cultural meanings, practices, and controversies that mark the current “global” era. The autonomy of culture was a central problematic for the Frankfurt School critical theorists, who believed that it was always possible and everywhere threatened. They developed their methods of critique as analytical strategies for assessing its possibility, and understood reflective judgment as one form of resistance to its closing down. Though the terms of their analysis were generated in response to particular social and historical conditions, the problem of cultural freedom remains urgent today. As long as it is possible for people to be arrested for posting dissenting material on a website, for public spaces to be closed or monitored in order to prevent peaceful political demonstrations, or for commercialization to infiltrate every aspect of artistic production—in other words, to the extent that the autonomy of culture remains a political problematic, critique must remain a central theoretical method for cultural sociology.
Hence, in political and intellectual contexts which are often “inhospitable to the practice of critique” (Kompridis 2005: 326), sociologists have a vital role to play in developing normative approaches to analysis that open up spaces for the reflective, intimate, and critical interpretation of culture. One of our main tasks is to work out how culture mediates judgment and how judgment mediates meaning; another is to critically evaluate our own practices of knowledge production in light of those more open, imaginative, and reflective possibilities. However, a critical theory of culture need not aim to establish the truth of such meanings and practices—not to understand them in an illusory “pure” form or to explain their causal roles as mechanisms for social change. Instead, as the Dialectic of Enlightenment so compellingly illustrates, and as new critical theorists such as Kompridis suggest, by disclosing how social life, and cultural sociology itself, could be otherwise, we might open up moments of autonomy in which the possibilities of culture can be critically evaluated and enlarged.
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