Power, Emancipation, and Complexity: Employing Critical Theory

Abstract

Critical theory, if nothing else, is a moral construct designed to reduce human suffering in the world. In the critical theoretical context, every individual is granted dignity regardless of his or her location in the web of reality. Thus, the continuation of human suffering by conscious human decision is a morally unacceptable behavior that must be analyzed, interpreted and changed. In this context the genesis of this type of decision-making process is uncovered and new ways of thinking that would negate such activity are sought. As critical theorists have engaged in this process, they have come to describe a set of practices that contribute to forms of decision making that perpetuate human suffering. This article focuses on a few of these dynamics in order to situate the moral dimensions of a twenty-first-century reconceptualized critical theory. The authors' notion of critical theory is described as 'reconceptualized' in that it is more sensitive to modes of domination that involve race and gender and to the complexity of lived experience than in the Frankfurt School's original articulation of the notion in the 1920s in Germany. It is also informed by what they describe as the theoretical bricolage, which infuses numerous theoretical advances formulated in the eight decades since the inception of critical theory. The Theoretical Bricolage: the contemporary reconceptualization of critical theoryIn this reconceptualized context, contemporary critical theory argues that so-called democratic societies are not as democratic as generally believed. Democratic citizens are regulated by the forces of power operating in a general climate of deceit. In this contemporary condition individuals are acculturated and schooled to feel comfortable in relations of either domination or subordination rather that equality and interdependence. Given the social and technological changes that have led to a hyperreality of electronic information saturation, critical theoretical concerns with self-direction and moral social relationships have been reassessed. As critical theorists consider the politics of thinking in the electronic maze of contemporary communications, many have recognized the need for a serious conversation between critical assertions and counter-Cartesian or postmodern modes of social and educational critique (Young, 1990;Morrow, 1991;Giroux, 1997;Kincheloe, 2001aKincheloe, , 2008.Such critiques include feminist theory, ecological theory, Foucauldian genealogy, poststructualist psychoanalysis, Santiago enactivist cognitive theory, complexity theories, postcolonialist theory, discourse analysis, semiotics, hermeneutics, and other concerns. In our own work we have referred to this melange of theories and their interaction in terms of a theoretical and methodological bricolage (Kincheloe, 2001b;Steinberg, 2006). The synergy of the conversation between the postmodern critique and critical theory involves the interplay of the informed moral practice of criticality and the lenses of complexity of the counter-Cartes...

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