Critical Theory

The development of structuralism and poststructuralism in France in the 1950s and 1960s and rapid global transmission of books and ideas contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary mode of theory that became prevalent in the humanities. Structuralism is often associated with the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose studies of myth, culture, and language discerned a binary structure in myth, for example, between nature and culture or the raw and the cooked. For Lévi-Strauss, culture was articulated into systems that could be described with the precision and force of a science.

Structuralism spread through the human sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, moving from Lévi-Strauss's anthropology and study of myth, to structuralist theories of language (often combined with semiotics), to structuralist Marxism that produced structuralist accounts of the capitalist economy (Louis Althusser) and state (Nicos Poulantzas).

The human sciences were conceptualized by structuralists as self-contained systems with their own grammar, rules, and structuring binary oppositions. Texts were seen as structured networks of signs determined not by what they referred to so much as through their differential relation to other signs. Structuralist critical theory thus focused on detecting the system of binary oppositions through which textual systems were structured, and it delineated oppositions between synchronic and diachronic arrangements, or langue/parole, with the former referring to the synchronic social system of language and the latter referring to specific speech at a particular time.

Whereas structuralism had ambitions of attaining the status of a super science, which could arbitrate among competing truth claims and provide a foundational discipline, poststructuralism challenged any single discipline's claim to primary status and promoted more interdisciplinary modes of theory. Poststructuralism turned to history, politics, and an active and creative human subject, away from the more ahistorical, scientific, and objectivist modes of thought in structuralism.

The poststructuralist moment was a particularly fertile one as important theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault wrote new poststructuralist works and younger theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and others entered into productive periods. The poststructuralist turn was evident in the famous 1966 conference on "Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man" at Johns Hopkins University, which featured an important intervention by Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Rejecting structuralist theories of language, Derrida stressed the instability and excess of meaning in language, as well as the ways in which heterogeneity and difference were generated. Derrida also questioned the binary opposition between nature and culture upon which Lévi-Strauss had erected his system, thus undermining a certain glorification of the human sciences in the humanities and opening the discipline for a greater appreciation of philosophy, literature, and less-scientific modes of discourse.

Derrida became one of the most prolific writers of his generation and generated great interest in philosophy throughout the humanities, but he also crossed boundaries between disciplines and contributed to both a proliferation of critical theories and more interdisciplinary humanities. Derrida's de-construction took apart philosophical and closed scientific systems, showing that their foundational beliefs affirmed one side or another of the binary oppositions, for example, nature, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau; or culture, with cultural anthropologists who described the constructed nature of society and culture (a theme that would move into poststructuralism and many of the humanities).

Poststructuralism stressed the openness and heterogeneity of the text, how it is embedded in history and desire, its political and ideological dimensions, and its excess of meaning. This led critical theory to more multilevel interpretive methods and more radical political readings and critiques. Foucault described how texts and discourses are embedded in power; Edward W. Said articulated the "Orientalism" of Western-centric ideology and the construction of non-Western cultures in both colonial and postcolonial discourses; and feminists described how patriarchy and the concepts of totalitarianism and subordination are inscribed in texts.

Following the poststructuralist moment of the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a proliferation of new theoretical moments of critical theory that connected with new social movements, producing a proliferation of "posts" and theory wars from the 1970s into the early twenty-first century. Baudrillard, a French theorist, took up poststructuralism and deconstruction in idiosyncratic ways. His early work analyzed the "system of objects" and "political economy of the sign" in the media and consumer society, showing how the system of commodities and consumer values were organized in a hierarchal system. Yet by the mid-1970s, Baudrillard entered a deconstructive and poststructuralist phase, taking apart in sequence the claims of Marxism and political economy, Freud and psychoanalysis, Foucault, and other forms of theory. For Baudrillard, the consumer and media society was generating novel forms of sign and signification, technology, and cultural spaces, which produced a break with modernity itself. While modern societies, he argued, were organized around production and political economy, postmodern societies were organized around technology and generated new forms of culture, experience, and subjectivities.

In Le différend, Lyotard valorized those voices that had been suppressed or muted in social and academic spheres. He advocated "the end of grand narratives" in the humanities and politics, and the production of small, "minor narratives" and microanalysis. This theme was also taken up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who proliferated a dazzling range of critical theories to engage salient cultural, social, economic, and political phenomena of the day.

French poststructuralist critical theory is extremely hard to categorize as it combines social theory, cultural and political commentary, philosophy, literary stylistics, and many social and human sciences in its work, crossing boundaries between academic disciplines and fields. This interdisciplinary focus links French critical theory to Frankfurt School critical theory and to certain types of feminism and other cultural theories that practice "border crossing" (that is, they cross the borders between disciplines and the traditional division of topics and academic labor).

The proliferation of theories also produced a tendency to use the term Theory (with a capital T) to describe the wealth of conflicting critical theories. In this sense, Theory replaces philosophy as the most abstract and general mode of theoretical discourse. Theory has emerged as an autonomous enterprise in many academic disciplines, giving rise to a tendency to do work in Theory, which engages various critical theories, problems, and concepts, or explores the nature and function of theory itself in the academic disciplines.

Critical theory turned to a "politics of representation" during the 1960s and 1970s. This enterprise involved analysis of the ways in which images, discourses, and narratives of a wide range of cultural forms—from philosophy and the sciences to the advertising and entertainment of the media culture—were embedded in texts and reproduced social domination and subordination. British cultural studies, for instance, showed how problematic representations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other identity markers were found throughout cultural forms. Cultural studies developed different critical theories and methods to analyze the production of texts, their multiple meanings, and their complex uses and effects.

Critical theories were also developed within feminism, critical race theory, gay and lesbian theory, and other groupings associated with new political movements, making critical theory part of political struggle inside and outside the university. Feminists, for instance, demonstrated how gender bias infected disciplines from philosophy to literary study and was embedded in texts ranging from the classics of the canon to the mundane artifacts of popular culture. In similar ways, critical race theorists demonstrated how racist images and discourses permeated cultural artifacts, while gay and lesbian theorists demonstrated how their sexual orientation was negatively represented and marginalized.

These critical theories also stressed giving voice to groups and individuals marginalized in the dominant forms of Western and then global culture. Critical theory began going global in the post-1960s disseminations of critical discourses. Post-colonial theory in various parts of the world developed particular critical theories as a response to colonial oppression and to the hopes of national liberation. Frantz Fanon in Algeria, Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Gabriel García Márquez in Latin America, Arundhati Roy in India, and others all gave voice to specific experiences and articulated critical theories that expanded the global and multicultural reach of critical theory.

The past decades have thus witnessed a proliferation of critical theory to the extent that the very concept is a contested area. In the early twenty-first century, conflicting models of critical theory are used by different individuals and groups in various fields of inquiry in different parts of the world. There is also a tendency to combine critical theories in one's work, following a recommendation by Foucault in the 1970s that many have taken up. Others who took up the anti-theory discourse of Richard Rorty and various critics of Theory have called for rigorous empirical and contextual engagement with topics and subject matter. Critical theory is thus a multidimensional term that continues to take on differing connotations and uses and is embedded in many different disciplines and debates.