Critical Theory

The work of the Russian aesthetician Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) is a good example of crude reflectionism. For Plekhanov, art was a recorder of social developments. By examining the art of a given period, we could pin down that period’s ideological character also. This meant that we could indeed “read off” the ideology from the art. If the art was decadent, then it must have been the product of socio-political decadence: a direct reflection of it, in fact

Once again, we notice Marx’s critical insistence on the hidden: religion, politics, law, etc. – everything cultural that we “live by” – disguises and renders perfectly natural an economic means of production that is unnatural

Quantum mechanics asserts that we cannot plot the position of any sub-atomic particle with certainty.
Chaos theory permits randomness and determinism to exist simultaneously in systems.

Lyotard also argued that what he called “postmodern science” (quantum mechanics, catastrophe theory and chaos theory) provides a model for us in our intellectual inquiries. Such science was “producing not the known, but the unknown” – that is, more problems than solutions, as scientists delved deeper into the bizarre world of “anti-particles”, “strange attractors” and “deterministic chaos”.

Part of Derrida’s objection to structuralism is its dependence on binary oppositions. He considers discourse in the West in general to be founded on a series of such oppositions. One term of the binary always takes dominant priority over the other. Man/woman would be one such example of a “loaded” binary.

Words always contain within themselves traces of other meanings than their assumed primary one. It would probably be better to talk of a field of meaning rather than a precise one-to-one correspondence between word and meaning.

Structuralism went too far as an all-embracing form of analysis, apparently able to explain anything and everything about human affairs and the world around us. Everything became a sign-system – in fact, nothing could escape being part of a sign-system.

The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

In its earliest pre-Western Marxist form, however, Marxist critical theory tended to assume that everything that happened in the superstructure, including the arts, was a mere reflection of what happened in the base.

The inheritances of Marxism in critical theory are:

1. Tension of idealism versus materialism (the autonomy versus social construction of a text).

2. A hidden or camouflaged unconscious.

3. Interventionism: a sense that critical theory can make a difference.