Seyla Benhabib's Critical Theory

If you have been kidnapped and forced into slavery, you may well trust a guy who promises to liberate you though what he actually does is sell you down the river. This sort of 'Liberation' may be very profitable but such 'Liberators' might be killed by their victims or hanged by the slave-owners.

A safer course is to ask for small sums of money in return for pretending to liberate people from Death, Rebirth, enslavement to Desire, the occult hegemony of the Lizard People from Planet X or dem Jewish Nigger-lovin' Freemasons wot talk fancy,  or Neoliberalism, or the Demon of Lust, or- had Hilary been elected- being sodomized by the neo Gramscian Lesbian nomenklatura.

Of course, if you can actually do or teach something useful then you'd look a fool if you claimed to be in the liberation business as opposed to plumbing or heart surgery. On the other hand, if, like Germany, your country had tried to enslave its neighbors and had been severely thrashed for it, then it made sense to have a few obviously stupid and worthless Professors writing tedious shite about 'liberation'.  Why? Well, instead of German peeps being regarded as evil bastards, they'd come across as stupid cunts. Since their country was divided and occupied, they couldn't hurt anyone no matter how stupid they were.  In this context, Germany could export philosophy-as-stupidity because of that psilosophy's proven track record of being utterly shite at opposing anything or liberating  any one. Still, at least it appeared to be 'critical' and being a critic sounds a pretty cushy type of job.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating … influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.

All action aims at Liberation. When you take a shit you are seeking to liberate yourself from having a lot of shit inside you. Society can only overcome its condition of being full of shit if people of all races and creeds can achieve liberation from having a heavily freighted colon. Yet, ironically, Society punishes me for shitting on your doorstep. Must not all things be toilets to all things? Only if we create a Polity and an Economy which is truly caring and sharing and free of prejudice and injustice can we achieve Liberation from being full of shit.

Western Philosophy- as represented by the Academy- considers Kant to be a seminal figure in critical philosophy. He wrote-

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.

If human beings did not evolve on an uncertain fitness landscape this would be a reasonable view. Alternatively, if human beings' heads would blow up if they didn't have an 'a priori cognition' of objects, then we could say- 'our heads have not blown up, thus a priori cognitions have survival value in this particular 'Anthropic' Universe.

However, there is no evidence that either of these two views is tenable. Kant's mistake is revealed immediately

This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.

The stars weren't at rest. Copernicus had taken a step in the right direction but not because of an a priori cognition. Rather, he had formulated a hypothesis which better fitted with empirical observations.

Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori;

That is the correct position

but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself.

A possibility which you can 'very well' represent to yourself is one which you have a very good method of changing. If Kant had discovered a way to change his 'faculty of intuition' such that, looking at a thing, he could predict its future trajectory, or else change it into a flying pig, then there would be some point to his 'metaphysics'. He couldn't actually do this. So his 'metaphysics' was empty and foolish.

Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.

In other words, if Kant feels obliged to believe something stupid then he must necessarily write stupid shite. Experience is not a kind of cognition. Cognition is not a kind of experience. One can take apart a cognition and put it together in a different way to a superior utilitarian end. One can't do the same thing to an experience.

Kant could see that he wasn't able to produce superior scientific or mathematical work. Still, he may have thought his ideas would have a good social result. Maybe, if everybody accepted his ideas, then- like him- they'd quit jerking off and doing other naughty stuff- like waging war and believing things he thought were silly.

Kant was wrong. He went quietly mad and started babbling about 'Zarathustra'. Those who read him developed wholly dissimilar theories which valorised race or class warfare as essential for 'Liberation'.

German political philosophy came to be recognized as stupid or evil or a just massive waste of time.

But not by Seyla Benhabib who was born in 1950. She writes-

May 1968 marked the political awakening of my generation. I was a junior at the American College for Girls in Istanbul at the time, feeling the revolutionary winds as a young Jewish woman in a predominantly Muslim society and because of the anti-Americanism precipitated by the Vietnam War. Pictures of napalm attacks on Vietnamese children and adults circulated among us during lunch hours. And when the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet scheduled a visit to Istanbul, and many boyfriends, relatives, and others were clubbed by the police, our sense of political disappointment with and opposition to U.S. policies increased.

I suppose this is how a deracinated, Anglophile, eighteen year old would have seen the events of the period. The US was being naughty and so the older students protested and then the police were very cruel to those dreamboats and so Turkish people felt very disappointed with the US coz it's naughtiness lay at the bottom of all the wickedness in the world.

Living in Istanbul, we knew that the wider political world was on fire. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague reform movement under Alexander Dubček and the “socialism with a human face” experiment. Students built barricades in Paris and confronted the police. And the countercultural movement in the United States challenged the pieties of bourgeois decorum. The continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict was personally devastating: I feared for the continuing existence of Israel after the 1967 war, while feeling moral outrage and pain at the oppression and occupation of Palestinian Arabs.

The Palestinians trained pretty much any and  every type of terrorist nutjob in Turkey. Bulgaria supplied the arms and heroin paid for everything. Europe and America, because of their wealthy and vocal Armenian origin populations, cheered as Terrorism took a huge toll on Turkish lives.

Israel, of course, could take care of itself. Why? It had learned the only truly important lesson afforded by Fascism- viz. having a credible offensive military doctrine is all that matters. Telling stupid lies helps nobody.

May 1968 saw our revolt against the oppressive conformism of the postwar Pax Americana.

There was a revolt spearheaded by leftist Turkish University students. It had an anti-American aspect because of the widespread belief that the US was behind the 'Colonel's coup' in Athens and that Ankara was the next domino. This perception was the reason the Turks temporized during the Seventies. Their independence was dearer to them than any particular Economic system. Obviously, while the Soviet threat remained, Turkey would keep American bases. In any case, Turks enjoyed having some push-back against its NATO allies. If they fostered anti-Turk terrorism then Ankara was well-pleased when they were at the receiving end  of some blow-back. The classic example is the nutter who tried to shoot the Pope.

Benhabib emigrated from Turkey long ago. She can't be blamed for understanding nothing about its Politics. This is because the Western Academy filled her mind with shit.

Stuff like this-

We hoped for liberation from the spirit of consumerism, the shackles of the patriarchy, bourgeois family, nationalism, militarism, and much else.

In Baghdad, in the same year, I hoped for a World liberated from the spirit of naughtiness. Spirit of niceness should animate all beings. Mind it kindly.

No theoretical tradition captured the aspirations I shared with many contemporaries as well as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

What about the Gandhian tradition? Or that of Noddy the good elf from the Enid Blyton books? I suppose Benhabib would have felt these were not 'theoretical' enough.

My intellectual journey from Istanbul to Frankfurt began with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), which I read that fateful spring.

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was a blend of philosophical reflection and social scientific inquiry born in reaction to the European catastrophe of the last century: the failure of the European working classes to resist the rise of fascism (with the exception of the republican forces in Spain who resisted but were defeated); the blindness of the bourgeoisie and big capital who deluded themselves into thinking that they could manipulate Nazism for their own ends; the silence and cooperation of the mandarin classes; and the Holocaust of European Jewry.

Fascism was better than Bolshevism, at least for working people, which is why anyone who had a choice preferred it. This did not mean Fascism was better at winning unwinnable wars

No theoretical tradition captured the aspirations I shared with many contemporaries as well as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Yes. It was the equivalent of My Little Pony for deeply provincial schoolgirls

At the center of this political and theoretical project was the transformation of the concept of critique.

Critique was not a political project because it was completely useless. Killing people was a political project. A theoretical project is only useful if it makes better empirical predictions. Critique does no such thing. It is isn't theoretical, it is stupid.

The Frankfurt School completed an epistemic and ontological revolution that had started with Immanuel Kant.

Right! Coz Kant brought down the Prussian Monarchy! What's that? He didn't? But surely he brought about a Scientific Revolution- like Newton or Einstein? No? Then fuck did he do? Why should we bother with him?

'Epistemic' revolutions involve scientific or mathematical discoveries. Critique is just a cul de sac for pedagogues where they can gas on about how masturbation is bad and slavery is good.

Ontological revolutions don't matter because those who make them still go mad, shit themselves and die. The thing is pathetic.

The task of the Kantian “critique of pure reason” was to limit reason’s theoretical pretentions in order to create room for a faith that would support freedom and morality.

Coz Pietists didn't already exist. Christianity did not already flourish. Freedom needs a crutch coz  Morality kneecapped it. Morality too needs support coz...urm...Spirituality took a dump on its doorstep and Morality was rushing to the office and slipped on Spirituality's turd and broke its legs.

Kant argued that we can never establish with theoretical certainty that we have free will; nor could this claim be proven wrong.

So what? He didn't know modern proof theory. His arguments are jejune. An Eichmann can appeal to them just as much as a Gopichand. Kantian ethics justified the Gulag and the Gas chamber just as much as it justified Atul Gopichand's practice of farting in the lift and exiting anytime Prof. Amartya Sen entered it.

So it remains open to us to act with a practical faith that we are free: that we can be moved by reasons, assert our autonomy, and fulfill the demands of morality.

When has this not been the case?

Critique for Kant is in the service of autonomy: only a critical exercise of reason can save us from our self-inflicted tutelage to false beliefs in authority, religion, and tradition.

Benhabib is demonstrating nothing here but her own slavish tutelage to silly dead white pedagogues.

In his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Max Horkheimer provided a particularly compelling statement of the Frankfurt School’s post-Kantian conception of critique. Following G. W. F. Hegel and the brilliant Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, Horkheimer defended a program for critical thought that presses beyond Kant’s conception of freedom. Lukács had argued that Kant’s views of freedom were limited because he lacked a concept of praxis—of a historically and socially situated human agency. We are not only subjects with moral freedom, but historical subjects who express our freedom by transforming the external world through various forms of human individual and collective activity—including labor, culture, religion, art, and political institutions.

So, Benhabib reckons Kant did not know that human beings work and go to Church and paint pictures and so forth.

Horkheimer defended a program for critical thought that presses beyond Kant’s conception of freedom.

Was that defense successful? Did Hitler go, 'Damn Horkheimer! That schweinehund has foiled my evil plans!' ?

Horkheimer’s remarkable achievement in “Traditional and Critical Theory” is to develop this philosophy of praxis into a critique of the epistemology of his contemporaries—both positivist social sciences as well as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

Husserl was shite- coz phenomenology can only be non-shite if consciousness did not evolve on an uncertain fitness landscape- but had already been kicked in the goolies by Heidegger's mystagogic shite. The Frankfurt School achieved nothing in that respect.  'Positivist social science' means stuff that has a mathematical representation and which is empirically testable. In so far as it can pay for itself, it burgeons with or without the Academy. Henryk Grossman was part of the Frankfurt School. His work could be assimilated to Growth theory. But, Growth theory turned out to be useless. I believe Jairus Banaji- or Bananaji as he is known to billions of imaginary Indian Trotskyites- translated some of Grossman's shite. Nobody else even bothered. 

Horkheimer puts critical inquiry once more in the service of autonomy and emancipation.

Nobody achieved autonomy or emancipation through Horkheimer's 'critical inquiry'. They did shoot or run away from evil bastards who were trying to put them into Gulags or Gas Chambers.

Emancipatory knowledge, he argued, helps to demystify the supposed objectivity of the social world, and above all, of the so-called “laws” of capitalism.

Only Marxists thought Capitalism had 'laws'. But there was no need to 'demystify' the supposed objectivity of the social world created by Marxists. People could see for themselves that the thing was a shitshow. That's why the Berlin Wall was built to prevent people voting with their feet and running away.

By disclosing that the world of social facts is not governed by natural laws but is instead the historical residue of the work of human beings themselves, it will be possible to end the alienation from and enslavement to a social reality that dominates humans.

Social facts are governed by human laws. These laws, more especially in a Democracy, can change in line with what the people consider to be desirable. Thus lawyers and politicians can play a useful role. However, if they believe in imaginary evils and tilt at windmills, they will lose salience or else crash the system.

Horkheimer’s breathtaking ambition was to transform the tradition of German idealism into a critical theory of society.

That's not a breathtaking ambition. Turning the thing into a bunny rabbit- maybe. But transforming stupid shite into stupid shite is not an ambition, it is the condition of a coprophage. It causes you to hold your breath, it does not take it away.

But this program had ceased to convince even during the lifetime of the early members of the Frankfurt School. Unlike the young Marx and Lukács, the Frankfurt School could see no revolutionary historical subject who would end world alienation and put an end to social domination.

'Revolutionary historical subject' means murderous thugs who slaughter people you disapprove of. Germany had plenty of such people. Sadly the Frankfurt School- probably coz it was pretending to be a School, not a Beer Hall- failed to recruit enough thugs.

What happened next? Californication.

By the time Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer composed the Dialectic of Enlightenment in exile in California in the 1940s, the program of the emancipatory philosophy of praxis had inverted into its opposite. Human mastery over nature came at the expense of internal repression; civilization was not a process of humanization but instead a dark development of repressing and disciplining the psyche that would then manifest itself in bursts of violent aggression toward those “others” that are threatening the already fragile integrity of the civilized self.

So the Frankfurt School ended up univocal with Heidegger's Nazi shite.

In one of the “Notes” appended to the text called “The Importance of the Body,” Adorno and Horkheimer memorably write: “Europe has two histories: a well-known written history and an underground history. The latter consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization.”

Yup! That 'planetary technology' sure is the pits.

Emancipatory knowledge helps to demystify the supposed objectivity of the social world—and above all, of the so-called “laws” of capitalism.

But LSD was quicker. Thus these silly pedagogues, whose uselessness had been demonstrated in Germany, became the child-minders of crazy Californian hippies. Capitalism may not have laws, but the Market does. If you are selling shite, only shitheads are your customers.

France was a different kettle of fish. Some philosophers had been part of the Resistance. They, or their successors, could dream of allying with the Left to displace fellow normalien technocrats within the power elite. However, in '68, these fools shat the bed. De Gaulle, who had initially run away, returned and won the largest majority in French parliamentary history. Thus Foucault & Deleuze and so forth were Frankfurterized, or McDonaldised,  as fast food to satiate the munchies of the stoned-out-of-their-gourds Liberal Arts section of the Anglo Saxon Academy.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a bridge text to a broader conception of critical theory—of oppositional and emancipatory knowledge—that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. Although Michel Foucault quipped that he had never read the Dialectic of Enlightenment(published in 1944), his work replaced the creative subject that Horkheimer took from Hegel, Marx, and Lukács with a theory about how subjectivity is created. History is a not a record of the deeds of a collective or singular subject, he argued; rather, it is formed by a series of epistemes—configurations of power-knowledge—each giving shape to different conceptions of knowledge and action.

Foucault hadn't mastered even a single useful episteme. If he had, he would have been making History, instead of writing stupid shite about it.

In the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault explains that whereas archaeology digs into the layers of what is manifest in the present, genealogy searches for the breaks and displacements between the source and the phenomena. Genealogy searches for emergence (Herkunft),but emergence does not mean a smooth evolution from a known original (Ursprung). Just as there is no continuous narrative that can be told of a unified collective subject unfolding in history, so too genealogy does not trace an uninterrupted line of development from the past to the present, providing a narrative of improved knowledge and moral progress.

So- the thing is useless.

Instead, society is constituted by a discontinuous and fragmentary series of power-knowledge configurations, full of displacements and erasures.

Nonsense! These 'discontinuous and fragmentary series of power-knowledge' don't exist any more than 'discontinuous and fragmentary series of power-farts or knowledge-burps or epistemic queefs. Stuff which doesn't exist and is useless shite doesn't constitute anything at all.

Society is constituted by legal and economic and political processes. However these processes don't 'enslave' or brainwash or otherwise 'alienate' ordinary people. People who think a Collidge degree in a worthless subject will make them smart might end up in some cult or fringe political faction. But the same thing might happen if they just took lots of drugs while living in their parent's basement.

Knowledge is not just emancipatory but also disciplinary; power can only be confronted by power. “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines,” he writes in Discipline and Punish (1975).

Eurocentric nonsense! Why not just say Whitey invented Humanity? Black peeps were just swinging by their tails from tree to tree eating bananas.

There is a natural affinity between Foucault’s counter-narrative of the Enlightenment and contemporary postcolonialism and critical race theory.

Yup! That affinity is based on earning a little money by pretending Whitey is almighty. This does not 'subvert' anything. It's just a shameless type of mendicancy.

Both urge us to consider the process of European modernization from the periphery as well as the center.

Both are ignorant and stupid. They can't consider anything at all. They represent the urge to shit higher than one's arsehole, nothing more.

At its best, postcolonial theory scrambles the center-periphery distinction altogether.

But it is the product of scrambled brains. The thing is contemptible.

The Enlightenment’s contradictions became evident when, in the process of building their republics, the European powers—the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and somewhat later, the Germans and Italians—also acquired their empires and confronted radical differences of race, color, and culture. Imperialism reveals the limits of Enlightenment universalism. Europe, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, “needed to be provincialized” in order to envisage a true universalism that encompassed all of humanity and not just white male Christians.

What 'true universalism' has Dipshit envisaged? None at all. The fellow is a laughing stock in his own country.

Postcolonial theory also bears affinities with one of the most influential critical theories of the post–Frankfurt School period, Jacques Derrida’s method of “deconstruction.” Derrida transforms Hegelian “immanent critique” into the interplay between the text and its constitutive exterior. For Hegel, there is more to a form of life than what the participants can grasp in thought. Immanent critique unfolds through the contradictions they face as they aim to understand a world they can only imperfectly grasp; this dialectic of thought can only be stilled when, as Hegel supposed would happen in a fully rational form of life, thought and actuality are reconciled. The idea that there is always something more than we grasp in thought is transformed by Derrida into a teaching about texts. Derrida shows that the silences and gaps of a text are indices of the repressed subjectivity of others who haunt the footnotes, the appendices, and the marginalia. Deconstruction thus has an ethical core: the uncovering of the margins of the text becomes a project of critiquing “phallogocentric western rationality.”

What has that project achieved? Nothing. A few charlatans got tenure but their students are unemployable save as baristas.
Hegel was important because Marx had been a Young Hegelian and, at one time, a large portion of the globe was ruled by Marxist nutjobs. Thus, pretending to be a particularly stupid fellow-traveler seemed a good way to hedge one's bets. Those days are long gone. So are the days when one might secure tenure by vomiting up this shite. Now the thing is simply a cultic form of stupidity which, if it didn't exist, the alt-right would have to invent.