Where has Critical Theory gone? Paris argues that in turning away from Horkheimer’s call for a theorizing and researching for liberation and a future free of suffering, theorists such as Habermas have ignored the past and future. For these new Critical Theorists, the future is “the ongoing mediation of cultural conflict; the engaged life of the public sphere; the pursuit of private goods; and the continuous adaption of new markets to meet the needs of finance capital and its allocation mechanisms. This is precisely the future that was dreaded by critical theorists as no future at all: the continued repetition or reproduction of the same” (29).
For Paris, “a genuine future is an alternative to sameness…. A Critical Theory cleansed of both past and future becomes, like that of Fukuyama, obsolete, evanescent, capitulatory. Yet…something lives on….I believe that Critical Theory is already obsolete. yet philosophy as critical theory, the philosophy of refusal and resistance, thereby lives on” (30).
Paris concludes by citing examples of this negation:
These negations are not merely theoretical; they are performative acts of rebellion. Whether it be the unfurling of a banner in Columbus, Ohio, to point out the damned illogic of imperial reason; the occupation of a U.S. embassy in Indonesia by East Timorese students; organizing caravans to bring medicine and computers, or even a piano, to Cuba; facing down the state military apparatus in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Prague, and Los Angeles; or chaining oneself to a redwood tree in northern California — such acts as these enact the negation of current systems of exploitation and greed. Theorizing from this standpoint, from concrete acts of hope and refusal, is the central task of a New Critical Thoeyr imbued with the spirit of liberation. (30-31)
That’s the kind of concluding paragraph that makes reading theory worth it.
Paris, Jeffrey. “Obstinate Critique and the Possibility of the Future.” New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation. Ed. William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey Paris. Lanham: Rowman & LIttlefield Publishers, Inc. 15-36.
