Critical Theory: Diverse Objects, Diverse Subjects: Volume 22

Both Marxist and postmodern discourse have tended to place Foucault's work in an antagonistic juxtaposition to Marx's, seeing him as directly confronting both Marx's politics, epistemology, and subject matter. Ample evidence — in his words and intellectual practice — supports this view. However, such positions suffer from two main weaknesses. First, they often conflate the different levels of abstraction in Marx's work, leading to problematic analytical comparisons between elements in his work vs. Foucault's. Second, interpretations of Foucault as Marx's foil must ignore and/or downplay equally compelling evidence — also in his words and intellectual practice — that place him squarely within Marx's epistemological, if not political, camp. To the extent Foucault positively engaged Marx's work itself is the extent to which postmodern claims of the declining relevance of Marxism fail.

The paper examines linkages between individual cognition and emergent social processes. We consider theoretical and empirical work in cognitive psychology, and the ways individuals process information in a social context, and then progress to more macro-level cultural phenomena. Legitimacy of an argument is likely to be judged against the backdrop of semantic networks, but these networks arise in, and are modified in, a social context. Organization of information in semantic networks is partially a function of position in the stratification system. We examine ways in which political priorities on the material level do and do not parallel information prioritization rules on the individual level. Cultural similarities can be seen as similarities in ways of prioritizing information. Because of linkages between the organization of information and social organization, objective social and cultural changes occur concomitantly with subjective changes in cognitive networks, especially as they are mediated by prioritizing summary symbols.

Are film reviewers “critical” intellectuals? To answer this question, I compare the estimations of the “best” films of 1997 provided by three groups of film audiences (film critics; the public; and the Hollywood film industry) with particular attention paid to the preferences of the critics themselves in order to identify the basis, or theory, underlying their aesthetic judgments. The analysis demonstrates that critical film reviews in the tradition of the Frankfurt theorists continue to be written and continue to provide helpful and important insights into the intersection of art, commerce, and the ideological and utopian understandings embedded in these films.

The notion of duality — which Anthony Giddens uses to describe the operation of virtual, generative structural rules and resources as both the media and the outcomes of human agency — can be extended to the analysis of spatio-temporally located sytems of reproduced relations. Rather than simply being the outcomes or byproducts of action organized by the duality of structure (as they are for Giddens), relational systems are also the media of action. I defend this claim through an analysis of the literatures on the recursive relationship between social networks and social movements. The arguments that some types of network ties facilitate the mobilization of social movements and that one outcome of social movement activity can be the expansion of network ties have been developed largely independently of one another and can be integrated through this new structurationist concept — the duality of systems.

African American writers and theorists have represented and analyzed whiteness for over a century; such analysis has been necessary for social and physical survival. Only within the past decade have white scholars heeded the call to interrogate whiteness as an ethnicity and to come to terms with its accompanying benefits of power, privilege and cultural dominance. Whiteness studies examines race as performance, perception, ideological category and social reality, acknowledging that while race is a biological fiction, the lived experience of race is shaped by very real existing structural and institutional inequalities. From the inception of what is now the United States, race has been an organizer of power, although white colonizers did not think of themselves as raced. Colonists conceived of race as a quality of the other. Consequently, “whiteness” was defined by absence or negation, particularly of slavery, synonymous in the minds of 18th century U.S. whites with blackness. Following “Enlightenment” philosophies of humanity, the prevailing notion of whiteness came to mean universality and normality while refusing to acknowledge any racial character. By the twentieth century, whiteness was redefined and policed by court battles over segregation and immigration law. Changing census categories currently appear to offer more freedom to redefine one's race, but nostalgia for an imagined white core of U.S. identity lingers. Whiteness theorists therefore argue for the abolition of the white race and its accompanying racial privilege and domination. They call for treason to whiteness through solidarity and anti-racist forms of white identity. Whiteness studies is crucial to contemporary understandings of “race”, as well as the inevitable intersections of race, ethnicity, social class, gender and sexuality.

Slavery was originally practised in West Africa as a means of integrating into society individuals who had been cut off from their families after an inter-tribal war or some form of natural calamity. The entire dynamics changed drastically when the Portuguese and Arabian traders went to West Africa. Because of the need for cheap labor supply in their home lands, these foreign traders switched to trading in slaves by exchanging their Mediterranean or Asian goods for West African slaves. Between 1441 and the middle of the 19th century, the expanding slave trade became the Black African's only link with Europe and America especially, the Americas where cheap supply of human labor was needed on the cotton and sugar cane plantations. Before the Missionaries arrived on the West African Coast, the natives practised traditional African or Islamic religions. With the slave traders came the Christian Missionaries who, prior to the exportation of slaves, preached to them, converted them, baptized them and gave them biblical names. The slaves left their home land of West Africa with clouds of spiritual confusion on their minds and coupled with these was their inability to worship freely in the New World.While most or all the original slaves lived and died uneducated, enslaved, and emotionally traumatized, their children, grand children and great grand children after them enjoyed freedom to worship the way they wanted, attended schools and became literate. They moved as freely as they wanted, and raised their own families with as much unrestrained freedom as they dreamed of, However, the psychological and spiritual bruises on their psyche left them perpetually traumatized to the extent that most of them forgot their West African origin, custom, culture, and their traditional African religious belief systems.Today, however, descendants of former West African slaves who live in the Diaspora appear to be more privileged than their West African brethren. This paper traces the brief history of slavery from its unsavory beginning in the 14th century, to the period of its final abolition in the United States in 1865. The majestic roles of representative samples of the liberated Africans of the Diaspora are presented, the ongoing problems plaguing West African countries are highlighted, and specific intervention programs to correct for the ills of the past brought about by the slave traders and the Western Christian Missionaries are discussed. It is concluded that while the Missionaries might have had good intention, the end result did not justify the means; converted West African slaves were bruised emotionally and spiritually than they were blessed. This paper highlights series of the appropriate reparations that should be paid to measurably alleviate the centuries old posttraumatic stress syndrome and spiritual confusion suffered by the original slaves and their descendants.

This paper argues that Critical Theory can, and should, take an intercultural turn, through which the contemporary challenges posed by cultural pluralism be faced. To begin, I attempt to demonstrate the paucity of Critical Theorists' engagement with issues of cultural alterity, reviewing three stages in the history of this encounter: Horkheimer and Adorno's interest in the relationship between myth and reason; Habermas's evolutionary theory of rationality; and, more recently, Honneth's framework of social recognition. Thus, in a first instance, the flawed or underdeveloped character of Critical Theory's cross-cultural sensibility will be stressed. The second part of the paper indicates some of the paths leading to a more cross-culturally sensitive Critical Theory. I thus call for the incorporation of some of the insights of a French stream of ‘ethnological’ social theory. Drawing on the work of Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, the paper strives to demonstrate how the ‘ethnologization’ of Critical Theory enables the defamiliarization and radical interrogation of Cartesian rationalism.

The aim of this paper is to open a debate about the relevance of American pragmatism for the philosophy of the social sciences. The agenda for a pragmatist philosophy of social science is introduced by contrasting it with ‘sociological hermeneutics’. Sociological hermeneutics refers to a common research agenda that attempts to implement insights from the philosophical project of hermeneutics into the social sciences. According to this view, the interpretative method is a sine qua non for any faithful representation of the external world. In contrast, a pragmatist philosophy of social sciences shows affinities with Nietzsche's genealogical method and the reflexive turn in cultural anthropology. Its aim is not to represent something out-there, but to use the encounter with different forms of life to reassess our selves and our own culture.

This article critically assesses the late writings of the European social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis in the light of controversies concerning relations between human subjectivity, contemporary culture and political autonomy. My argument is that Castoriadis can now be regarded as a classic figure in social theory. There are three central areas, I shall suggest, that make Castoriadis's theoretical innovations important for the history of social thought: (1) his analysis of the mediation of psyche and society; (2) his views upon culture; and (3) his interpretation of autonomy. Notwithstanding the importance of his work, however, I argue that the thesis of radical imagination needs to be grounded in a broader sociology of affective processes and intersubjective relations, which will in turn permit a theorization anew of the links between subjectivity, social reproduction and political domination.