Topic
Critical theory
About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.
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TL;DR: The theoretical tension between structure and agency, a tension often mentioned but seldom explored in depth, was explored in this paper, where the authors examined how identity, structure, and agency might be defined by key thinkers in the social sciences.
Abstract: Against a backdrop of rapid global transformations, the ever-increasing migration of people across nation-state borders and a wide array of language practices, applied linguists, and language and intercultural communication researchers in particular, often include identity as a key construct in their work. Most adopt a broadly poststructuralist approach, drawing on the work of social theorists working in a wide range of areas such as cultural studies, gender studies and critical theory. However, the complexity of these sources poses challenges for these researchers and the aim of this paper is to discuss one such challenge: the theoretical tension between structure and agency, a tension often mentioned but seldom explored in depth. First, I examine how identity, structure and agency might be defined. Second, I then embark on a selective discussion of how structure and agency have been framed by key thinkers in the social sciences, ranging from Karl Marx to Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Pierre ...
70 citations
TL;DR: For many critics working during the last two decades from the Marxian or Marxian-derived premises of the "critique of aesthetic ideology," it has been axiomatic that Kantian aesthetics and the art contemporaneous with it establish an essentialist or transcendental ideology of literary-cultural value whose Other will be the material, the social, and the historical; whose Other, to formulate it more precisely, will be a critical attempt to engage the material and social and historical from a political, interventionist as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: slogan-the one absolute and we may even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought-will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well."' A great deal of critical theory, since Jameson issued his mandate, has assumed an identity between the aesthetic (particularly in its Kantian and modernist versions) and the process of ideological deformation of the material, the real, the sociopolitical; ultimately, of the historical. For many critics working during the last two decades from the Marxian or Marxian-derived premises of the "critique of aesthetic ideology," it has been axiomatic that Kantian aesthetics and the art contemporaneous with it establish an essentialist or transcendental ideology of literary-cultural value whose Other, from romanticism through modernism, will be the material, the social, and the historical; whose Other, to formulate it more precisely, will be the critical attempt to engage the material, social, and historical from a political, interventionist
70 citations
69 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a discussion of three conceptions of criticality, viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique, and deconstruction, is presented, and it is argued that deconstruction provides the most coherent and self-reflexive conception of critique.
Abstract: This article provides somephilosophical ``groundwork'' for contemporary debatesabout the status of the idea(l) of critical thinking.The major part of the article consists of a discussionof three conceptions of ``criticality,'' viz., criticaldogmatism, transcendental critique (Karl-Otto Apel),and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). It is shown thatthese conceptions not only differ in their answer tothe question what it is ``to be critical.'' They alsoprovide different justifications for critique andhence different answers to the question what giveseach of them the ``right'' to be critical. It is arguedthat while transcendental critique is able to solvesome of the problems of the dogmatic approach tocriticality, deconstruction provides the most coherentand self-reflexive conception of critique. A crucialcharacteristic of the deconstructive style of critiqueis that this style is not motivated by the truth ofthe criterion (as in critical dogmatism) or by acertain conception of rationality (as intranscendental critique), but rather by a concern forjustice. It is suggested that this concern should becentral to any redescription of the idea(l) ofcritical thinking.
69 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory.
69 citations