298. What Do You Think "Critical" Means?

I suppose everybody knows by now which of its seven meanings "critical" has in the expressions "critical theory," "critical pedagogy," "critical ethnography," "critical psychology," "critical consciousness," and "critical race theory."  Nearly all have big entries in Wikipedia.

Well, maybe not everybody knows.  So I'll print the seven meanings and let you guess:

critical, adjective

1. inclined to find fault or to judge with severity, often too readily.

2. occupied with or skilled in criticism.

3. involving skillful judgment as to truth, merit, etc.; judicial: a critical analysis.

4. of or relating to critics or criticism: critical essays.

5. providing textual variants, proposed emendations, etc.:

a critical edition of Chaucer.

6. pertaining to or of the nature of a crisis: a critical shortage of food.

7. of decisive importance with respect to the outcome; crucial: a critical moment.

Since so many of you are of my generation maybe I ought to give you a hint.  Each one of the items with a Wikipedia entry is big in some universities and growing in most. 

So it's Number 3, right?  Wrong!  None of them fit.  Number 1 comes closest but I know you don't want to choose it.  Not with that judgment ("often too readily") appended to it.  Your kind start itching when you see a little tendentiousness.  This would be a kidney stone.

"Well now, after we go over your 'criticals' maybe we will choose Number 1.  What's critical ethnography and how is it different from ordinary ethnography?"

We get the answer right away in the Wiki entry: "In contrast to conventional ethnography which describes what is, critical ethnography also asks what could be in order to disrupt tacit power relationships and perceived social inequalities."

"And the rest of the 'criticals' are like that?  Implying that those of us who accept tacit power and inequality are 'uncritical'?"

Yes.   All are derivations from the parent critical," critical theory" of the Frankfurt school, known to us starkly, though not inaccurately, through Max Horkheimer, who "described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks 'to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.'"  They all have the purpose of liberation from oppressive circumstances.

"Surely not all.  There must be some that hold to 'critical' in the old sense."

Well, let's look.  Critical psychology, drawing "extensively" on "critical theory," "challenges mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in more progressive ways, often looking towards social change as a means of preventing and treating psychopathology." 

"Doesn't that propose social change that liberates?"

No, it looks towards it.  You're loading words.   Here just a little, but still you're giving them more weight than the author gives them.  An author, I might add, who freely appropriates the favorable load sense 3 has given our word.  But let that pass.  How about "critical race theory"?  It, "an academic discipline focused upon the application of critical theory," and proposing that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, "pursues a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination."

"On the mark.  Aims at liberation from oppressive circumstances, finds fault, and judges with severity.  Bingo for sense Number 1."

So it's no surprise that "critical theology" is synonymous with "liberation theology," and "critical consciousness" means "political consciousness."

"No surprise.  They all more or less do what Horkheimer says critical theorists do.  And we, by our Socrates-loving leader, are being led to pass judgment, severe judgment.  Let me skip over a lot of what I see coming and put that judgment bluntly: critical theory stinks." 

Stinks?  You're having me use the word I used for clitorectomy cultures ("My Culture's Better Than Yours," Post 77).  I can't use it for academics but it does let me narrow my charge: critical theorists, the Frankfurt school, are not stinking up the world, they're only stinking up the house, the academic house.  That's all I want to say.  I leave open the possibility that they are right, that present power relationships are unbearable, and that they have the best program to relieve the pressure.  But even if they are right, even if the city, the nation, and the world will be better off going their way, we cannot live in the same house with them.

"But maybe you're exaggerating their importance.  Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports) says that postmodernism, which takes in what you're worried about, 'plays little or no role in most major academic disciplines.'  Even in his field, philosophy, where serious claims are most reliably honored, it has influence only 'at the margins.'"

Maybe so, but as long as those fields with the  greatest influence on undergraduates, to him English and history (I would add communications, sociology, anthropology, and minority studies), we have to worry about it.  We in the academic tradition, the tradition within which critical Socratic thinking has so long and so successfully been introduced to and nurtured among the young, cannot maintain that tradition if in our language the young accept "critical" as meaning "critical of everything except our starting assumptions."  The starting assumption of the Frankfurt school, and by extension of every school subscribing to "theory," is that the present power structure (to them that of late-stage capitalism) is oppressive and must be replaced.  For Socrates and anybody who pretends to follow him everything is open to critical examination, with replacement contingent on the examination.

"You wouldn't have taken so long if you had stuck with my verb 'stinks.'  In Socrates' house, the traditional university, the windows are open.  In Horkheimer's house the windows are closed and he and his friends are stinking it up."

Clever, but so unfair.  Stick with the metaphor and see the whole picture.  Outside the house the odor of critical theory, filling feminism and cultural studies and minority studies, can thrill us, esthetically and politically, with its fragrance.  Release it in the house, close the windows, and you've got an unbearable stink.

"How can you be so sure of that stink?  Have you done the research?  Do you have the statistics?"

No, but I have the writing, and that's enough.  People who say they are "enslaved" by "circumstances," and want to "disrupt tacit power relationship" aren't bothered by vagueness and don't make necessary distinctions. 

"You don't think there are oppressive, tacit power relationships?"

Of course there are, but if we make no distinction, and make a fuss about every one of them, we'll never get through a day.  "Let's face up to your power and fight it out right here, " he said to his doctor, shortly before finding himself at home treating his appendix himself.  Our welfare, our orderly life, our civilization itself, depends on "tacit power relationships."

"And writers who just slop the expression into Wikipedia (obviously a theorist wrote the entry) without recognizing its faulty reference, can't be taken seriously.  Not in the academic circle."

No.  They will show a lack of elementary training.  They will arouse suspicions of what Saul Bellow called "a certain fecal carelessness."

"Now you're being cleverly unfair.  Such writers are taken seriously.  Look at the universities.   Look at the conferences they host.  Who invites these people whose writing is so unlike that of gentlemen?"

Their fellow arrivistes, obviously.

"And what do you propose to do about them? "

Nothing.  And it's not that I'm too old or that the theory battle is over (it's not).  It's what I've indicated, that the lines I know how to communicate on are down.  What kept them up were the rules of serious discourse shown to us first by Socrates.  Deny them, deny the power of logic, deny common meaning, deny responsibility for objective reference, and you were closed out of the circle of discussion, which was open to everything else.  I can communicate seriously only with people in my circle.

"And, since in the critical theory circle your tacitly accepted rules are 'tacit power relationships,' you're closed out.  No wonder you two can't live in the same house."

And that's a shame because there's only one university house and that's the one our young go to.  I can't bear to think of theorists owning it.  I'd be evicted as a corrupter of youth.

"Oh nightmare!  Oh doom!  You're blinding yourself.  Look closely at the list of  'See also' entries following the critical pedagogy entry.  There, just below 'critical consciousness' and 'critical psychology,' is critical thinking, as blue as any of the others.  How it slipped in I don't know.  But a student clicking on it will find entries making every point you are trying to make.  'Socrates set the agenda for the tradition of critical thinking,' and on from there."

Will this do the job for her — a buried click, a string of inferences, recognition of a contradiction, destruction of a position?  That's asking a lot.

"You have to trust the young, as Socrates trusted them.  And as the theorists, with their denial of 'critical' to their own position, do not trust them.  Once the young start clicking from this 'critical thinking'' site there'll no stopping them.  From then on it will be all clicking and thinking and clicking and thinking.  All you will have to do is give them some help when they start writing."