Critical approaches
Definitions
Social structure – 'entities or groups in definite relation to each
other ... relatively enduring patterns of behaviour and relationship within
social systems that shape the behaviour of actors within social systems ...
institutionalised norms or cognitive frameworks that structure the actions of
actors in the social system' (Wikipedia, 2007).
Absolutism – the doctrine of an absolute or non relative reality that is independent of or unconditioned by anything
outside itself.
Relativism – the rejection of the view that there are universal truths about the
world based on its essential characteristics. There are only interpretations of
the world.
Idealism – the metaphysical view that all reality consists of mind
and its ideas.
Scientific realism – the view that the subject matter of scientific
research and scientific theory exists independently of our knowledge of it, and
that the goal of scientific research is to describe and explain both observable
and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism holds that there are
knowable, mind-independent facts, objects, or properties.
Critical realism – like scientific realism, except it raises its
claims within the social sciences.
Anti-realism – rejects the view that there are knowable
mind-independent facts, objects, or properties.
Empiricism – understood in contrast to scientific or critical realism. Empiricism
is the view that knowledge of the world is limited to what
can be observed. For instance, concepts apply to or derive from an experience – the concept of dizziness applies to the experience of dizziness. The
experience must have evoked the concept, or the person must recognise that the
concept applies to the experience. Also, beliefs about the world have truth merit only
when they are related to someone’s experience.
Capitalism – an economic system in which the means of production
are privately owned and operated for profit, and in which the distribution,
production and pricing of goods and services is determined within a free market.
Text – any interpreted experience including written
words, conversation, pictures, film, architecture, a piece of art, or a social
event.
Introduction
This topic explores critical approaches that have been influenced by the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar
and the Western European Marxist tradition. Critical Theory, when capitalised,
is associated with thinkers
from the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas), a group of German scholars interpreting Marxist thought in the 1920s.
This topic will also consider the influence of hermeneutics upon the development of the Frankfurt School and contemporary Critical Theory.
It is important to remember that the term critical theory, particularly when it appears
with a small 'c',
is sometimes used to refer to critiques that are influenced by a broader range of
theoretical influences than Critical Theory and critical realism including
phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic
theory, feminism, Marxism, and hermeneutics. In this topic, we are concerned
with Critical theory with a big 'C'.
Critical realism and Critical Theory share many aspects in common with the
interpretive approaches summarised in the last topic, perhaps most notably a
critique of positivism, but they also disagree in important ways. Like
positivism, critical realism and Critical Theory claim to offer a 'scientific' approach to the study of society,
and like the interpretive approaches we looked at in the last topic they accept that social, historical and cultural conditions
shape knowledge and experience. However, they aim to avoid both the
absolutism of positivism and the relativism of interpretivism by offering
knowledge about socially constituted structures or mechanisms,
upon which to build social action and political change.
Perhaps the simplest way to understand what is distinctive about Critical
Theory is to begin with the concept of social structure. Within Critical Theory,
social structures are understood as the relationships that exist between
stratified social groups, for example groups based on gender, race, class, ethnicity,
or religion. Social structures determine individual, organisational and social
behaviour and outcomes, but they are also shaped by the actions of individuals,
groups and organisations. Critical Theory aims to offer a scientific analysis of
'real' social structures, but the methodological or philosophical basis for its
knowledge claims are distinctive from both positivism and interpretivism.
For Critical Theory, social
structures are objectively real, but they cannot be theorised in the same way that positivism theorises objective reality because,
for Critical Theory,
social structures are understood to change from one society to another, and from one time period
to another. Critical Theory rejects the positivist view that the social
world is composed of fundamental natural laws just like the natural world, and insists on understanding social processes within their cultural
and historical circumstances.
On the other hand, Critical Theory rejects the empiricist view, within both
positivism and interpretivism, that knowledge of the world can only be gained
through direct observation or experience. For Critical Theorists, social
structures exist independently of our knowledge of them, and they can be
theorised independently of direct experience. In other words, we do not need to
see or hear social structures in order to be confident they exist.
Critical realism and Critical Theory
reject the relativism and idealism
within interpretivism. Critical Theory argues that interpretivism produces
localised, isolated and temporally specific knowledge in which all points of
view are seen to be equally valid (Neuman,
2000:76). It also claims that interpretivism places too much emphasis upon people's
ideas, and too little upon the deeper, more enduring social structures that precede, shape and delimit events and experience. In this sense, interpretivism is
seen to be just as
at risk as positivism of uncritically reproducing the social order, including
its oppressive aspects.
The process via which researchers can distinguish between 'real' and
'subjective', 'distorted' or 'ideological' orders of existence is distinctive
within Critical Theory. Positivism attempts to validate its claims with
reference to empirical data taken to reflect 'objective reality'. Interpretivism
sees consciousness or human beings as the ultimate origin of 'meaningful' social exchange. In this topic we will see that for Critical
Theory it is rational dialogue or communication that validates the knowledge
produced by a critical social science.
Critical realism
From Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity
Press, Cambridge, pages 58-62.
- The foremost proponent of critical realism is the Brittish philopospher
Roy Bhaskar (b1944).
- Realists agree with interpretivism that the social world is
mediated by social relations, is qualitatively different from the
observable natural world, and must therefore be studied in a different way.
- Realism also agrees with interpretivism that the social world is
pre-interpreted. It is socially produced and reproduced. It is both a condition and
an outcome of social processes.
- However, Bhaskar sees an important distinction between the meaning of
actions and the personal beliefs, intentions or motives of subjects such
that an interpretive inquiry into the subject's own perceptions will not necessarily yield a correct reading of events.
- Bhaskar also believes that it is possible to describe and explain
unobservable aspects of the world, thereby rejecting the empiricist view
that knowledge can only be obtained via sense experience.
- This conception flows from Bhaskar's layered conceptualisation of
reality.
- Reality, for critical realists, comprises three
elements: the empirical, the actual and the real. The
empirical pertains to what is observed. The actual pertains to events,
whether or not they are observed. The real consists of the underlying
structures or mechanisms that constitute and produce events.
- Real structures or mechanisms, for Bhaskar, exist independently
of our observations of them. That is, they exist whether we observe them or
not.
- Although not always observable in terms of their effects, these
structures can generate observable events, or cause manifest phenomenon.
- Critical realism aims to explain phenomenon by revealing the
underlying structures and mechanisms that cause them.
- Interpretivism is seen to entail an unnecessary relativism in
which nothing can be said to exist beyond interpretation. Interpretivism is
also criticised because it fails to shed
light on the underlying structures or mechanisms that shape the social
context and subjective experience.
- Positivism is seen to entail an unnecessary
absolutism in which observable data are assumed to reveal universal laws.
- For critical realism, causality operates as a tendency or pattern,
rather than as an absolute law that determines the relationship between
events as for positivism. The causal power of structural laws depends upon
context or conditions. Structures are not always predictable, but arise from
the specific social forces within a given time period and cultural context.
- Realism must therefore theorise about possible relations or tendencies between
social events or phenomenon, and then seek empirical evidence to establish
whether the relationship exists. It cannot simply collect empirical data, as
positivism does, based on the assumption that a universal law is being
observed because ahistorical laws simply do not exist for realists. The mechanisms that
cause social events and phenomena are understood to be relative and
changeable.
Critical Theory has been influenced by critical realism and shares many of
its conclusions, although it is more directly associated with influences from
Marxism and hermeneutics. These will be discussed in turn below.
Karl Marx
From Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, chapter 6.
In epistemological and theoretical terms Critical Theory is very different
from the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883). However, Marx’s work has been extremely influential
on the direction of social thought in general, including that of the Frankfurt School and
Critical Theory.
Some of the central tenets of Marx’s thought:
- Dialectical materialism (historical materialism) – societies are
composed of inner contradictions that drive historical transformation
(influenced by Hegel’s dialectic).
- Economic determinism – the means and forces of production (developments
in the technological mode of subsistence) determine social relations of
production.
- ‘Superstructure’ – legal, political and cultural forms are
built upon the ‘real foundation’ of the economic base.
- Ideology – the production and distribution of ideas by those who are
economically dominant.
- ‘False consciousness’ – accepting values and norms generated by the
ruling elite that do not represent things as they really are.
- Marxist ontology – an understanding of human beings as productive in their very nature.
Work is seen to express who we are and to fulfil us.
- Alienation (becoming a stranger to oneself) – within capitalism labour
and its products become alien to us because they are owned by someone else.
We no longer know ourselves, or find fulfilment in our labour.
- Proletarian revolution – in which workers must revolutionise society in order to
restore humanity.
The Frankfurt School of thought first emerges in the debates of the 1920s
after Marx’s death. It has been strongly influenced by phenomenology and
hermeneutics and emphasises culture as distinct from economics while retaining
Marx’s emphasis upon social change and activism.
Hermeneutics
From Crotty, M 1998, The foundations of social research, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, chapter 5.
- Hermeneutics originates in biblical studies, and refers to the practice
of interpreting obscure or symbolic biblical texts in order to unearth their
hidden meaning. The term now includes scholarly ‘readings’ of non scriptural
texts, practices, events, and situations, and is driven by a concern to
understand cultures or historical periods that are different from our own (Blaikie,
1993:29).
- Hermeneutics introduces a critical emphasis on language as central to human life and
experience – language shapes us and our world (rather than humans or the
world shaping language).
- It inherits from its past life as scriptural interpretation a tendency to
mine texts for deeper significance, and to explain how texts can or should
be applied (so not just a matter of abstract theorising, but also of common
sense).
- There is an attempt to explain or make intelligible something that is in some way
hidden, indirect, strange, separated in time or place, or outside
experience.
- Hermeneutics holds that we can only understand and articulate ourselves as culturally
and historically located beings – speech, writing, art, behaviour, law,
institutions, and therefore experience itself, are all products of time and
place.
- Hermeneutics attempts to gain an understanding of the text that goes beyond the
author’s understanding or ability to articulate; authors bring implicit
meanings and intentions that they do not themselves recognise.
- There is a consistent theme of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ in which ideas and terms
that explain a phenomenon must be incorporated in understanding it. Each
part relates to the overall meaning of the text and must be read in relation
to the whole, and the whole must in turn be read in relation to the parts.
It is a cyclical or gradual process in which one piece of information comes
at a time and influences how you understand the object until it gradually
comes into focus. The
interpreter moves from the text to the social world of the author bringing
to life that world and the meaning of the text within it.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic existentialism:
- Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) paved the way for
hermeneutics in his early work.
- Heidegger was critical of philosophies of subjectivity from Descartes
onward which envisaged a separate, self-aware entity that experiences and
knows the world. He argued that received versions of the subject do not
describe a naturally occurring thing, but are a product of historical
thought and fail to consider fundamental questions about the nature of
existence itself (Mansfield, 2000:22-23).
- Heidegger offers a conceptualisation of subjectivity as fundamentally
based upon a state of ‘being’, ‘presence’ or ‘pre-understanding’ that is
more fundamental than our interpretation of experience. This state of being,
or Dasein, is
overlaid by the social, cultural, and historical understandings that we
immediately reach for.
- Heidegger also rejected the received view that subjective experience or
consciousness is enclosed within an interior space that is separate from the
exterior objective world. For Heidegger, Dasein is in the world and
belongs to it. The world conditions our experience and the context within
which we live (Mansfield, 2000:22-23).
- For Heidegger, the interpreter must return to, or move from this
‘primordial’ state of consciousness in order to make explicit what is
implicit or unthematised in our experience. From this position, he argued,
we can begin to observe and understand our experience and the world in a way
that is truly reflective and meaningful, avoiding the trap of simply
reproducing received versions of events.
Gadamer’s historical hermeneutics:
- For Hans-Georg Gadamer (b1900) the interpreter can hope to understand the past because we
are ourselves embedded in the past – human beings stand in traditions, and
traditions exist within language. ‘Tradition is not an object of historical
knowledge, but part of one’s very being’ (Audi, 1999:338).
- The trick for the interpreter is to filter out ‘local and limited
prejudice’ and individual viewpoint in order to form a genuine understanding
of developments or changes in historical tradition. (It is almost as though
the interpreter historian is looking for what is truly historical within
themselves and in the present in order to understand significant
developments in the past).
- So historical hermeneutics doesn’t offer an objective essence of what
‘really happened’ so much as a history of changes or developments in human
traditions that are understood to be uniform, coherent and at the core of
human consciousness and experience.
Critical Theory
From Crotty, M 1998, The foundations of social research, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, chapter 5.
Horkheimer
- Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was the first director of the Frankfurt
School.
- He was concerned with a split within German research between the vitalism of direct experience and the rigour of empirical research. He
sought a melding of philosophy and science that could capture and
theorise the lived reality of social life, rather than simply reproduce
fragmented ideological accounts – a critical theory of the social order.
This led to an interdisciplinary program of research in which philosophical
theory was tested against empirical evidence.
- The early Critical Theorists Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and Max
Horkheimer called for a 'critical tribunal' based on the capacity of human
beings to reason. They believed that human beings are capable of acting
autonomously to create and control their lives in the pursuit of meaningful
pleasures so long as they are free of relations of social
domination. The capacity to reason was seen as fundamental to our ability
to critique the irrationalism of capitalist society which produces false
needs and wants while failing to meet our real needs and wants (Blaikie, 1993:52).
- Critical Theory challenges positivism's denial of the scientific
validity of critical reason (for positivists reason falls outside
experiential knowledge and is not therefore accepted as a basis of knoweldge)
(Blaikie, 1993:52).
Adorno
- Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) became a member of the Frankfurt School in 1938.
- Adorno was a musical composer and musicologist and combined his interest
in philosophy with aesthetics.
- He worked closely with Horkheimer and led the latter away from the
empirical side of his social theory towards a more social philosophical
bent.
- We see the critical phenomenological and hermeneutic flavour of Adorno’s ideas in his insistence upon the domination and
oppressiveness of concepts, and their inability to capture the fullness and
richness of the things they represent.
- For Adorno, knowledge acquisition involves a process in which we utilise
pre-existing concepts in order to identify and classify realities into
manageable totalities, but in doing so we lose many precious differences.
- Instead, Adorno advocates a 'dialectical', 'nonidentical', 'mimetic' or
'aesthetic' cognition in which analogy and similitude are exchanged for
conceptual definition. This allows us to see the resemblances between
concepts and things, but also to multiply the differences between them.
Concepts are used 'non-conceptually' to tentatively suggests a reading that
does not fix our perception.
- Mimetic cognition then becomes a model for human conduct and for social
organisation. Adorno challenges the assumption that we are each of us
unique, pre-social individuals who must conceptualise the objects of our
experience in order to express our genuineness, as some expressions of
social constructionism and phenomenology would have it. Rather, for Adorno,
the individual self is given to us by society so that, in a sense, the
greater our engagement with social forms the more genuine we become.
- In this move, Adorno turns the fear of imitation within broader
aesthetic discourse into a virtue by arguing we should enter into mimetic
consciousness in which we utilise or mimic existing concepts to understand
our experience without accepting that concepts ever fully capture that
experience for us.
- This kind of mimetic conduct renders our experiences a 'constellation'
or 'trial arrangement' that is always shifting and incomplete, a creative
unfolding in which concepts are never allowed to fix our identity or
experience. It is an aesthetics of existence.
- For Adorno, this aestethics of existence or 'immanent criticism' rejects
the power of concepts to define consciousness and reality and opens the path
to social and historical change. It offers us the means by which we can
resist the forms of social domination that depend upon an acceptance of the
pre-existing concepts that fix our sense of what is real, disallowing the
objects of our perception to continually unfold within specific contexts,
and to suggest to us new lines of action.
- Despite the emphasis on philosophy, Adorno did not then retreat from the
Marxist insistence on social change. His concern with consciousness and with
art arises from his sense of the need for a more revolutionary consciousness
among the proletariat, and a more subversive role for art.
Habermas
From Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity
Press, Cambridge, pages 52-58.
- Jurgen Habermas (b 1929) is a leading contemporary exponent of Critical
Theory.
- He joined the Frankfurt School in the mid 1950s as Adorno's research
assistant.
- Habermas agrees with interpretivism that 'reality' is already
pre-interpreted, or only meaningful within specific existing cultural and
historical contexts. Knowledge produced by the natural
sciences is therefore imbued with taken-for-granted cultural assumptions, and is not
objective as it claims.
- Habermas introduces the concept of 'interest', 'cognitive interests' or
'knowledge-constitutive interests'. 'Interests' guide people in how they
constitute reality and organise their experience. These interests determine
what can count as an object of knowledge, as well as the methods that can be used to produce and justify
what counts as knowledge.
- Habermas offers a threefold typology for the interests that shape human
knowledge. The empirical-analytic sciences, including both the
natural sciences and the social sciences, aim to exploit knowledge for the
purposes of prediction, control and domination over nature and social
relations. The historical-hermeneutic, or cultural or human sciences,
aim to understand communication within and between social groups. The third,
critical theory, aims for emancipation from the relations of
domination within social relations. In each approach, the researcher's
interests are different and shape how reality is viewed – as something that
can be explained in causal terms, in the first, or understood as a
communication system, in the second.
- For Habermas, Critical Theory involves all three kinds of knowledge and
uses the methods of both the empirical-analytic sciences, and the
historical-hermeneutic sciences, as well as its own form of knowledge
production.
- The truth of a critique within Critical Theory is established not by observation,
as for the empirical-analytic sciences,
but via critical reason and open dialogue. This depends upon 'ideal speech
situations' in which participants are free to question or refute the claims
of other speakers. Within these contexts 'rational consensus' emerges
because, so the approach reasons, rational people who are free of the pressures of
social distortion and constraint, will inevitably find agreement.
- The truth that emerges within Critical Theory is understood in normative
rather than absolute terms – it is grounded in the structure of social
action and language.
- In this way Critical Theorists attempt to avoid the
problems associated with skepticism and relativism. The knowledge produced
by Critical Theory is seen to utilise, but transcend the status of the
empirical-analytic and historical-hermeneutic sciences in that it offers
knowledge subjected to rigorous processes of free and rational discourse,
and therefore free of social distortion.
Common threads within
contemporary Critical
Theory:
- Critical Theory accepts that knowledge is subjective (historically and culturally
embedded) and constructed on the basis of issues of power (Lather, 2006:38).
- Critical Theory sees discourse as controlled and produced within and by rhetorical and
political interests (Lather, 2006:38).
- There is the view that the relationship between concept and object, and
between signifier and signified, is never stable and is often mediated by
the social relations of capitalist production and consumption.
- Language is understood to be central to the formation of subjectivity,
that is, both conscious and unconscious awareness.
- Certain groups in society are privileged over others, constituting
an oppression that is most forceful when subordinates accept their social
status as natural, necessary or inevitable.
- Oppression has many faces, and concern for only one form of oppression
at the expense of others can be counterproductive because of the connections
between them (gender, class, race).
- Mainstream research practices are generally implicated, albeit
often unwittingly, in the reproduction of systems of class, race and gender
oppression’ (Crotty, 1993:157-158).
- Emancipatory knowledge reveals the contradictions that are hidden or
distorted by our everyday understandings, and thereby suggests the way to
social transformation (Lather, 1986:259).
Some well known contemporary critical theorists
From Morrow, R A 1994, Critical theory and
methodology: Contemporary social theory, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, p.17.
Zygmunt Bauman, David Held, John Keane, William Outhwaite, John B. Thompson,
Ben Agger, Robert Antonio, Andrew Arato, Stanley Aronowitz, Seyla Benhabib,
Richard Bernstein, Norman Birnbaum, Craig Calhoun, Jean Cohen, Fred Dallmayr,
Nancy Fraser, Henry Giroux, Alvin Gouldner, Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Tim
Luke, Tom McCarthy, Paul Piccone, Mark Poster, Philip Wexler, Barry Adam,
Gregory Baum, Ioan Davies, Rick Gruneau, Barb Marshall, William Leiss, Greg
Niielson, John O’Neill, Marcel Rioux, Charles Taylor, Beilharz, Johann Arnason,
Bob Connell, Michael Pusey, Robert E. Young, Barry Smart, Raymond Williams, E P
Thompson, Stuart Hall.
Critical theory journals
Thesis Eleven, Theory, Culture and Society, and
Theory and Society.
Research design
Analytic approach:
- adopts a mixture of empirical and theoretical approaches to knowledge
production;
- emphasises the scientific nature of the knowledge produced;
- values and departs from theory about underlying structures;
- draws distinction between false consciousness and liberatory
consciousness and tries to reveal the latter via processes of probing and
deeper analysis;
- seeks to expose or reveal the social and historical contingency of
knowledge and practices previously accepted as natural, inevitable or
inviolable;
- seeks to reveal injustice;
- focuses upon relations of domination and resistance;
- avoids ‘rape model’ of research in which researchers advance their
careers on the basis of alienating and exploitative methods;
- concerned that theory should both resonate with and challenge lived
experience;
- involves participants in knowledge construction and validation;
- aims for a research process in which both researcher and researched
become ‘the changer and the changed’.
References used in the development of this resource
Audi, R (editor) 1999, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Blaikie, N 1993,
Approaches to social enquiry,
Polity Press, Cambridge (pages 58-62).
Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
E-book at:
http://etitle.title.com.au/Openlib/libview.asp?SID=62&CID=296&FID=1&PID=1&sp=1
Lather, P 2006, ‘Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with:
teaching research in education as a wild profusion, International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 35-57.
Lather, P 1986, ‘Research as praxis’, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 56,
no. 3, pp. 257-277.
Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self
from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
Morrow, RA and Brown, DD 1994, Critical theory and methodology: contemporary
social theory, Sage, London.
Neuman, W 2000, Social research methods: Qualitative
and quantitative approaches, Fourth edition, Allyn and Bacon, Boston.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2007, 'Social
structure', viewed April 24 2007,
http://en.wikipedia.org/Social_structure.
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Discussion
4 - Critical approaches
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