CRITICAL TERMS
ENLIGHTENMENT
Although its origins can
be traced back as far as the late middle ages, Enlightenment thinking derives
its name from the philosophical revolution of 1720–80 whose participants aimed
to ‘enlighten’ their less forward-thinking peers. Influenced by pioneering
thinkers such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
philosophers including Voltaire and Immanuel Kant mounted a direct challenge to
the dominant religious doctrines that determined and organized ‘knowledge’.
Disputing the church’s pre-eminence in governing common societal wisdom, and
the myth of the ‘natural’ rights of the hereditary aristocracy, the
Enlightenment encouraged individualism, reason and freedom. It was a
combination of these doctrines that resulted in the French Revolution of 1789, where
the partnership between church, state and gentry was so manifestly challenged and
defeated.
One of the leading
pioneers of ‘enlightened’ thinking was Galileo Galilei, who in 1632 advanced
his Copernican assertion that the earth orbits the sun. Because his account
directly contradicted the biblical notion that God’s earth is the dynamic
celestial body, Galileo’s teaching was denounced, and he was forced to publish
his later works clandestinely. In spite of the papal edict against Galileo’s theory,
the revolution of thought that his work initiated could not be disparaged. And
so, in the mid eighteenth century, scholars such as Diderot and Voltaire published
17 volumes of the seminal Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences,
des Arts et des Métiers, commonly known as The Encyclopedia.
Intrinsic to the work of the ‘Encyclopedists’ was a promotion of the attributes
of science and measurability over the Christian revelations of nature and moral
truth. Whilst ‘enlightened’ thinking continues to influence contemporary
critical theory, it does have its critics. In Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer present an acute Marxist critique of its
limitations. For Adorno and Horkheimer, all ‘enlightened’ societies are unreservedly
repressed, and within Dialectic of Enlightenment they examine how the apparatus
of the culture industry manifests an ‘enlightenment of mass deception’. In
addition to the Marxist critique, postcolonial theorists argue that the
Enlightenment idealized its European notions as universal truths and
subsequently allows little or no ‘speech gap’ for the subaltern. Critics aside,
the Enlightenment revolutionized the way we think in terms of critical
interpretation and general cognition; it also continues to uphold the belief that
knowledge should be impartial, neutral and objective.
GENEALOGY
(Greek genea meaning
race) The study of an entity’s lineage, which within critical theory is
primarily associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Developing Friedrich
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, it is Foucault’s The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1970) that serves as the key text for understanding genealogy
in relation to analytical thinking. For Foucault, genealogical investigation should
not be a passive programme of simply looking at the archaeology or architecture
of discourse, but one that actively interrogates it in order to uncover its hidden
values. Adopting a Nietzschean refusal of the notion of truths outside their contextual
setting, Foucault argues that discourses and ‘what we know’ can only be fully
understood when their genealogical development is addressed. Such analysis will
reveal the hidden structures that support not just the knowledge base of
society but also its ideology and power relations. Genealogical investigation
reveals that discourse, ideas, and ‘universal truths’ are riddled with human
intervention and implicated within the maintenance of society’s conformity.
GRAND NARRATIVE
An all-encompassing theory
which claims to provide an explanation for all of the narratives in circulation
in a culture. For Jean-François Lyotard, grand narratives (grands récits)
have characterized modernity, and he refers to examples such as Christianity,
socialism, capitalism and hermeneutics in the introduction to The Postmodern
Condition. Any theory which claims to account for the true meaning of all
social and cultural forms can be considered to be a grand narrative. Thus it
could be seen that even an oppositional philosophy such as feminism becomes a
grand narrative when it claims to offer a totalizing account of woman, thereby
subsuming the differences between women. Grand narratives typically offer the
subject a specific role in relation to the future revelation of a singular
social or aesthetic truth. Thus, in the case of Marxist thought, all social formations,
including art, literature, etc., are considered as outcomes of the capitalist system,
whose inconsistencies bear the seeds of the future revolution, which will
ultimately emancipate the working subject – the hero of the socialist grand narrative.
Crucially, Lyotard finds that the postmodern condition is characterized by a new
scepticism towards the grand narratives of modernity.
HEGEMONY
A political concept
that explains the oppression-based relationships between the dominant and
compliant classes of Western capitalist democracies. Whilst Karl Marx and Georg
Lukács have also written extensively about hegemonic states, it is the Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose name is synonymous with the term. Unlike many
theories of power, hegemony does not advocate a ‘top-down’ dictatorial model of
rule. Within hegemonic relations, the dominant class or classes favour encouragement
over coercion. Rather than autocratic rule, hegemony functions through
consensus, in spite of the inherent oppression and/or intergroup exploitation. Hegemonic
societies are characterized by an absence of revolution and social uprisings, their
sense of equilibrium brought about by the subaltern group’s acceptance of
the dominant ideals. This does not, however, rule out the potential for
conflict and protestation by the subordinate classes. Agreeing to ‘empty compromises’,
the ruling class(es) accommodate the demands of the ruled and suppress
potential unrest. Crucially, those sectors of society that are challenged and
changed by such interactions are never key strategic ones such as those that
maintain the status quo. The concept of hegemony also features extensively
within Louis Althusser’s writing on the Ideological State Apparatus, those
social bodies that can only function through society’s acceptance. These are in
stark contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus such as the army and the penal
system that often encounter, and are based upon, aggression and resistance. More
recently Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics provides a comprehensive critique of
the term. Investigating its genealogy, they argue that in its current and
accepted guise, hegemony is – to borrow from Michel Foucault – ‘the archaeology
of silence’. For Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is not so much a localized space
of ‘unthought’ but of a reductive closed paradigm.
HERMENEUTICS
The study of
understanding, which takes its name from the Greek god Hermes, the deliverer
and interpreter of messages. Although traditionally reserved for the
interpretation of biblical texts, ‘modern’ hermeneutics embodies two distinct
branches, the interpretation of textual artefacts, and cultural events.
Evolving in the early
nineteenth century, it is widely held that modern hermeneutics began with the
work of Friedrich Schleiermacher who, in his 1838 Hermeneutik und Kritik,
sought through textual analyses to establish ‘what the author meant’. As the study
of hermeneutics has developed, however, the presence and intention of the author
has become less significant. Modern hermeneutics is now applicable to a myriad
of texts, and irrespective of whether written, performed or photographic, all
texts undergoing hermeneutic analysis are processed in the same manner, with
the analyst alternating between general and specific evaluations. Having initially
studied the text, the analyst forms a general hypothesis of its meaning. This initial
evaluation is then tempered with a closer rereading of the text based on what
is now ‘known’. Subsequent rereadings and alternations between the general and
the specific, the ‘familiar’ and the ‘unfamiliar’, are repeated until the
disparate factions merge and a tentative interpretation can be formed.
In addition to the
pioneering work of Schleiermacher, theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and
Hans-Georg Gadamer have provided valuable insight into the field of hermeneutics.
In 1960 Gadamer published Truth and Method, regarded by many as philosophical
hermeneutics’ most significant advance since Martin Heidegger’s Being and
Time. A central tenet of Truth and Method is Gadamer’s contention
that ‘truth’ can be revealed through scientific investigation. Acknowledging a
major limitation of hermeneutic analysis, Gadamer announces that ‘every
translation is clearer and flatter than its original’; any understanding has to
be appreciated as an act of interpretation that excludes certain textual
components whilst ‘spotlighting’ others.
In The Conflict of
Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Ricoeur provides a more holistic
interpretation than that offered by traditional approaches to hermeneutics. Addressing
the impact of hermeneutics’ cultural heritage Ricoeur discusses how differences
in analysts’ backgrounds will influence their ‘readings’: analysts from diverse
cultures will inevitably interpret the same text or component differently. As
Ricoeur explains, ‘every reading takes place in a culture which imposes its own
framework of interpretation’.
ID
A term that
designates one of the three conflicting internal agencies of the mind outlined
by Freud, the others being ego and superego. This tripartite division is consolidated
quite late in Freud’s work (The Ego and the Id, 1923), and can be seen
as reworking his first ‘topography’ of the mind, the binary divide
conscious/unconscious. Freud originally used the term unconscious to
distinguish a part of the mind distinct from any conscious control. Seen by
many as the most significant aspect of psychoanalysis, over many years Freud went
on to develop a whole theory around the unconscious: how it was created out of primary
repression, how its contents represented the drives and how it was enslaved to
the pleasure principle. The term id (via Nietzsche from the German das Es,
meaning ‘the it’) was introduced by Freud in order to temper the distinction
between the conscious and the unconscious. Rather, the id and ego interact through
the process of sublimation, the ego harnessing the drives for non-sexual aims.
IDEOLOGY
A central concept in
critical theory, which is most commonly used in one of three ways. The first
takes ‘ideology’ to be a set of conscious or unconscious beliefs held by a
particular group of people. The second holds that these beliefs are incorrect,
and that this fact can objectively be proven. This theory, which Friedrich Engels
called ‘false consciousness’, is the basis of the Marxist/Freudian take on religion.
The third uses the term to denote the process whereby people come to hold their
beliefs: the most influential theories of this are articulated by Antonio
Gramsci and Louis Althusser. The term ‘ideology’ was coined in the late
eighteenth century by the French philosopher Destut de Tracy, to denote a ‘philosophy
of mind’ or ‘science of ideas’. Soon afterwards, the French Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte was the first to use the word in a pejorative sense, employing the
now familiar conservative debating tactic of contrasting an opponent’s
allegedly dogmatic thought with his own common sense pragmatism.
The groups most
concerned with ideology have been those interested in why societies are
organized as they are, and in how they may be changed. One of the most important
conceptions of ideology is that advanced by the nineteenth-century German political
philosopher Karl Marx. Marx’s central contention regarding ideology is that
‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class
which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual
force’ (Marx and Engels 1977: 176). For Marx, society’s economic ‘base’,
the means of
production and distribution, is the primary determinant of its social and ideological
‘superstructure’, its art, religion, etc., and hence its ideological beliefs.
Soviet thinking about
ideology was rooted in the attempt to translate Marxist theory into
revolutionary practice. A crude application of the base/superstructure model,
known variously as mechanical materialism, determinism or economism, considers
the base to be not the primary but the sole determinant of the superstructure. This
reading of Marx reduces the complex changing, and sometimes contradictory, ideas
of a 40-year career to a sterile, static orthodoxy, but this did not prevent it
from becoming dominant in official Communist Party interpretations of his work
in the
early twentieth
century. Subsequent theorists, including Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Louis
Althusser and Raymond Williams, have refined the base/superstructure formulation,
suggesting that the superstructure possesses a ‘relative autonomy’ and can
bring about changes in the base.
The Italian Communist
politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci formulated a ‘culturalist’ Marxism, in
which the consent of citizens is secured by the cultural exercise of
‘hegemony’, which works by subliminal persuasion rather than coercion. Gramsci’s
theory influenced the French structuralist Louis Althusser’s formulation of the
Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus. For Althusser, who
also draws upon the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, ideology ‘interpellates’
(hails) individual citizens ‘as subjects’. Althusser goes further, arguing that
ideology is ‘eternal’ and ‘individuals are always-already subjects’. This has
led to the accusation that Althusser has simply replaced the orthodox economic
determinism with a heretical, and no less sinister, cultural determinism.
The theory of
ideology advanced by Althusser, and adopted and adapted by subsequent
theoreticians, including his student Michel Foucault, has been criticized by
humanists because it furthers the psychoanalytic challenge to the idea of the
unitary self, and by Marxists who consider it unduly pessimistic in its view of
the potentiality of workers and other oppressed groups to recognize and change their
situation. Though it has proved controversial, Althusserianism has been embraced
as potentially emancipatory by ‘post-Marxist’ theorists of gender and race such
as Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, who are keen to demonstrate that
characteristics ascribed to certain groups are not essential but ideological
‘social constructs’ and thus either have no basis in reality, or are at least
changeable. As such, the theory of ideology remains a focus of debates about
existing social structures, and the prospects for social transformation.
INTERPELLATION
A key element of the French
Marxist Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. The word derives from the French
verb appeller, which means, ‘to name’. It is the process by which
individuals internalize the cultural values, or ideologies, which are essential
to the maintenance of the capitalist system. Althusser explains that ideology
calls on us to accept unquestioningly certain elements of our culture as fixed,
natural and disinterested, when they are actually contingent, learned and
crucial to preserving existing power structures. It does this by interpellating
us as free, autonomous, choosing subjects. So, for example, thousands of
advertisements address us every day as consumers with unlimited free choice;
when there is an election the various political parties invite us to see
ourselves as powerful actors in the democratic process. If we accept these positions
we have consented to our interpellation as subjects of the ideologies of
freedom, consumerism and democracy. These are not necessarily false positions, but
the choice between consumer products or between political parties is limited.
Our acceptance of ideological subject positions implicates us in the
preservation of society and politics as it stands, instead of inviting us to
imagine a non-consumerist world with a more genuinely representative and participatory
democratic system.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Coined by Julia
Kristeva, ‘intertextuality’ is a term employed by poststructuralist critics. To
say that a text’s meaning is ‘intertextual’ is to claim that it derives its
meanings from its relationships with other texts, for example through overt or
covert allusions and references. Meaning is not, therefore, something which inheres
in that text and only that text; it is relational. Similarly, no text is seen
as autonomous; instead, every text is made up of many other texts. Derived in
part from Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences, the notion
of intertextuality implies that a text does not contain stable and definitive meanings,
but instead produces meanings through its relations with other texts and through
the contexts into which it is put. As the text is constantly entering into new
relations and contexts, it is always producing new meanings beyond those that
might have been intended by its author. More recently, internet narratives,
with their use of hypertext, have been cited to demonstrate the interweaving
and interconnectedness of texts, i.e. their fundamental intertextuality.
Contd…
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