What's Wrong with Critical Theory?

For one, it doesn't seem to mix well with politics.

“Critical theory” has come under a lot of fire in the last several years as its influence on popular culture has grown. Those on the right routinely think of it as a corrupting force, sapping “the West” of its moral fiber. Most of those who condemn it barely understand it, haven’t engaged with it, and outsource their opinions on it to political partisans who tell them it is bad. Yet, there is also real frustration with “critique” among its most savvy practitioners.

The frustration stems from the dual recognition that “critique” often points to real problems but, in response to those problems, too often turns inward on itself to the neglect of the world. As though the critical theorist became hostage to a paranoid impulse. It is too risky to venture positive claims about the world or to advance judgments. That only exposes one to further critique.¹

I think 2008 was a turning point. In the years afterwards, ideas downstream from prominent, often long-dead, theorists were suddenly in vogue again.² People like David Harvey and Richard Wolff were leading a revival of Marx in response to the financial crisis. The Occupy movement was exploring anarchist alternatives, under the guidance of thinkers like David Graeber. Slavoj Žižek peaked in popularity. Subcultures grown in the petri dishes of Tumblr seemed to escape into the wild. Critical race theory exploded into public consciousness between the killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Trump’s election, and the 2017 Women’s March, mixed with intersectionalism in the #MeToo movement to fuel a broad popular interest in gender theory.

Contrary to popular belief, it is difficult to harmonize these different strands of thought. Their political attitudes are broadly “left,” but they do not coexist peacefully. Marxist-Leninism, anarchism, and liberal feminism are at odds with each other. But as the ideas spread far downstream from their textual source waters, carried less by intellectual currents than moral ones, they all seemed to converge into something most people call “woke.” This great river of sentiment looked and acted very different from the unfrequented mountains and heady high plains that fed it.

The responses from the right varied. Some latched onto calling the the whole watershed “postmodern neo-marxism.” Others lamented “identity politics” and “cancel culture” as the abandonment of universalist politics bequeathed to us by Christian Enlightenment thinkers.

Astute commentators, however, noted that many on the right have been drinking from the same waters. Ross Douthat, for example, noted the increasing influence of Michel Foucault among conservatives. Steve Bannon called Martin Heidegger “my guy.” A Nazi party member, Heidegger has also been incredibly influential in post-structuralist and postmodern thought. More generally, it has been a common critique of the right that their response to “woke” identity politics has been more identity politics. The truth is, as I have written before, that we have never/always been postmodern.

Misinformation, Rhetoric, and (Post)Modernism

Rather than respond to some of the more unhinged critics of critical theory, I want to respond to the more measured criticisms of someone like

Dan Williams

. In his post “Contra critical theory,” he argues that engaging in critical theory became the preeminent status game in the humanities, for historically contingent reasons. To put it somewhat reductively, “critique” came to have more cachet than its competitors because to be “uncritical” is to be naive. Abstruse prose that claimed to identify hidden structures of oppression therefore became a marker of deep thought in a mid-20th century university system rocked by civil unrest.³ Scholars who devoted most of their intellectual energies to criticizing and condemning the Western societies in which they lived became the most influential.

Critique is characterized by its "againstness." This can start to make its practitioners sound more like Victorian scolds or Puritan preachers than they are comfortable with. So there is pressure on the critic to say that they aren’t condemning like a modern day Jonathan Edwards, they are merely problematizing widely cherished narratives. They are trying to show the rubes that they are driven by forces beyond their control, enthralled by illusions that provide cover for the powerful. As Dan points out, this can lead to motivated reasoning, conspiracy theorizing, and one-sidedness. There is a real thrill in the feeling that you have discovered a truer reality hidden beneath everyday surfaces. This deeply human impulse is documented for us in the records of ancient mystery religions, as its subversive potential. See, for example, the Christianized Roman empire’s efforts to stamp out gnosticism.

As I said above, critique often points to real problems. The question then becomes how critique itself attempts to approach the problems it identifies. It could attempt to contextualize these problems. It could compare different alternatives, make judgments about the better and worse, and suggest necessary or desirable compromises. But that would make the critic themself vulnerable to accusations of bad judgment. The hypothetical critic’s critic would only be too ready to pounce, pointing out how such judgments are naive, or, worse yet, evidence of sympathies for an oppressive regime.

As Rita Felski points out, the critic wants to have the last word. They come with the benefit of hindsight to correct the distortions and falsehoods of the past. And the best way to ensure that no further correction will be needed in the future is to take the logic of critique to its extreme endpoint. If this looks absurd, then reiterate that you—the critic—are not in the solutions business, you are in the problems business. You are just calling out the problem as you see it, and really, it unfolds of its own accord. What the reader does with this is really out of your hands.

Freddie deBoer

’s recent essay commenting on an interview with Judith Butler is illustrative. I think that anyone who actually read enough of Judith Butler’s writing to get a solid handle on what she thinks about things would find Butler’s recent “indictment of identity politics” to be largely consistent with her body of work.⁴ But Butler is a good example of how “critical theory” can be mobilized in pursuit of dramatically simplified, “uncritical” ends—the transformation into the “uncritical” basically erases the complexity and subtlety of its source material.

One might ask: what’s so great about complexity in the first place? Isn’t “subtlety” more an excuse for something’s failure to win our attention than a virtue? The answer, as with most things, is that it depends. When it comes to persuasion, sometimes subtlety just isn’t effective. But the truth is that the world is complex, and operating successfully within it requires navigating those complexities. Understanding the world requires cleaving it at joints of our choosing, carving it up into little pockets of predictability that compress an impossibly vast and chaotic impression of the world into something manageable. Experience has shown us, I think, that the seductions of simplicity’s easy charm often mask a Procrustean butcher who brings pain instead of peaceful clarity.

Hold on, one might say. Simplicity has its virtues. Think of Ockham’s Razor. Complexity can overwhelm us, and drown us in noise. It can stupefy us. It can also give us false confidence, leading us into error. Haven’t you simplified things too much, and rhetorically painted simplicity itself as the devil?

It looks like the original question—“what’s so great about complexity in the first place?"— unfolds on its own. Simplicity and complexity are themselves recursively braided in a complex pattern. Both God and the devil are in the details.

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There are at least two reasons that critical theory turns into “uncritical” theory. The first is that political discourse itself demands simplification. As a matter of description, political rhetoric is about seeking adherents and allies, not mutual understanding with one’s opponents. This is not a normative statement. It’s just an empirical truth about most political rhetoric, that pertains whether you think political debate is an existential contest between friends and foes, or more optimistically, a contest between agonists who agree on the rules in an iterated game.

Critique is not alone in being ill-suited to the pressures of political communication. It requires a willingness to engage with the material.⁵ Critique is, fundamentally, in the questions game. Politics is in the judgments game. At its best, critique doesn’t just offer a different point of view, but a totally different landscape. The going is often hard and uncomfortable, however, and it is often made worse by critical theorists’ stylistic tics. It’s also true regardless of the specific political content. Socrates knew well how difficult it could be to get people who disagreed to arrive at some shared truth. Leo Strauss, a “conservative” critic, is famous for his theory of esoteric and exoteric communication.

The second reason that critical theory tends to become uncritical stems from the way that writers tend to empty out their theory of specific content even as they persuasively argue for a revaluation of the status quo under new terms or hierarchies of value.

Critique claims to operate above the fray of politics, revealing hidden forces beneath its surface. However, in practice, it rarely critiques the demands and presuppositions of the opposition to which it has prior heartfelt attachments. As a tradition, it is rooted in left-wing politics, and views itself as an outsider to mainstream discourse. But like law, which can be wielded by both the prosecution and the defense, criticism is double-edged. Neither the powerful nor the powerless hold monopolies on self-contradiction and hypocrisy, and that goes for those in the academy as well.

There are two main ways that theorists can channel their critical energies in the intended direction without immediately stooping into an uncritical stance. The first is a tendency to identify with “otherness” or “alterity” tout court, rather than actually existing oppositional movements with slogans that are, by political necessity, simplistic and therefore open to critique.⁶ This amorphous emptying out into “the Other” is supposed to do things like liberate “utopian” energies and disrupt the status quo. But utopia is a no-place that inevitably comes to be filled with all sorts of political content that has only a tenuous link to the original texts beyond the affective attachments of its readers (and often its authors).

The alternative, to be a bit reductive, is to focus on the dystopic. Take Foucault as an example. Grad school curricula often include an excerpt from his book Discipline and Punish on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.

The Cuban Presidio Modelo, modeled as a panopticon.

Foucault is describing what sees as the emergence of a different form of invisible power in a surveillance state, as embodied in Bentham’s design for a prison, where one prison guard can watch dozens if not hundreds of prisoners. In the panopticon, all prisoners feel under surveillance, even though the guard cannot be looking at all of them at once, because the guard might be looking in their direction at any time.

In the panopticon, prisoners begin to police themselves, almost automatically, without need for actual surveillance. As in the prison, so in society at large, where the rituals and practices of power on the microlevel shape individuals to be good, self-monitoring self citizens.

Foucault is often criticized for elaborating a “totalizing” theory of power, where even resistance against power is neutralized, co-opted, or turned back on itself. One should notice that in simplifying Foucault’s text, as I’ve done here, “surveillance” and “power” begin to seem very powerful indeed. The persons, things, events, relations, and microcircuits that Foucault discusses in his book are not elaborated here. It is hard to get a sense of where the boundaries of power might, or even whether Foucault thinks this is better or worse than what came before, whether he thinks there is “more power” or “less power” being exercised by the state, and plenty of other questions you might have. This means that “Foucault,” the author-function is especially ill-defined, even if we take for granted that the simplest texts are subject to multiple interpretations.

The problem, I’m afraid, is even worse than that. Foucault’s method is self-avowedly a descriptive one. He looks backward to untangle the historical events, accidents, and reversals that have led to certain insitutions and practices in the present. But his writing inescapably tends toward value judgments, and it is often hard to tell to what extent they are deliberate provocations, and to what extent they are simply the consequence of putting into question the deeply held, basically unconscious normative judgments of the present. For that reason, Foucault fits well within what Paul Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

All texts inevitably end up constructing a hierarchy of terms with implied values. A very blunt example is reference to “in/justice.” The just is good and the unjust bad. Because critical theory is typically defined by its “againstness” it focuses on elaborating injustice, and rarely lays out a vision of justice. It either gestures towards utopic horizons, or, ends up never getting around to it at all, leaving a distinctly dystopic impression.

In the next post I will be taking a look at Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in depth. The essay is an account of Nietzsche’s influence on Foucault and his evolving method. I think it has several deep insights that have, by now, become so thoroughly internalized by most people that they could be said to be part of the ideological water in which we swim. But it is also an example of how critical theory encourages its own degeneration into uncritical sloganeering.

In Critical Theory Context is Everything

1. See, for example, Derrida’s response to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, and Foucault’s response to the response. I find both interesting in their own rights. But in the high stakes game of academia, the episode illustrates the danger in appearing too naive. Nowadays, the whole episode reads like a letter from another world. It is rare in contemporary academia for scholars in the humanities to make such pointed critiques of their colleagues’ work. There is a bunker mentality, and not without reason.

2. Including in (Teen) Vogue magazine.

3. “Searle claims Foucault told him: ‘In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.’ When Searle later asked Pierre Bourdieu if he thought this was true, Bourdieu insisted it was much worse than ten percent.”
http://www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

4. Insofar as one can be consistent: “I contain multitudes.”

5. Alternatively, obsequious identification works with almost any discourse.

But if you are unwilling to hold in suspense the conviction that every person comes into being with a given gender essence, there is no point in reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.

6. There is also a strong critical tradition that seeks to justify just such political slogans, particularly in “X studies” disciplines. Though these are often explicitly political, marshalling theorists for activist interventions.