N: “Last day in Chengdu”, Nell said when Patricia got within talking distance. “When are you going home?”

P: “I’m not. Three days further in Chengdu and then off to see other parts of China. A few months ago a friend who lives here suggested that I moved here. She wanted me to sign up for some course back home and become an exchange student close to her. I’m just thinking about it.”

Nell’s face froze and she stood petrified.

N: “It’s … probably not a bad idea. You are young and bright.”

P: “Nell, you know I’m not bright! And soon not young either. But I don’t want to be a photographer all my life. And speaking with you made me see myself in a new light.”

Nell tried to walk around while standing still to avoid facing Patricia directly. She swallowed the lump in her throat, but it kept coming back.

N: “Oh how I would love to get a letter from you someday with a picture of you graduating.”

Patricia made a little mime play of her receiving a diploma.

P: “We have each others phone numbers and addresses, and I will absolutely keep you updated.”

They sat down at Ding’s and ordered enough to have a conversation that could last hours.

P: “I pulled myself together and read the rest of the Horkheimer and Adorno essay (Traditional and Critical Theory). If we can discuss the rest of that, I can pride myself in having digested two articles and an essay and covered critical theory, Neo-Kantianism and Marburg School.”

N: “I would like to do anything and everything that makes you happy!”

P: “Oh I’m so lucky having met you! Can’t you come with me forever?”, she exclaimed and baby-like leaned into her lap and grabbed Nell’s arms and wrapped herself with them like Nell was a giant teddy bear."

Her unexpected eruptions of child-like behaviour always stunned Nell, but she could muster no animosity against it. In fact, she just held the big girl tight without speaking.

Patricia flung back in her seat.

P: “Horkheimer and Adorno.”

N: “Right. I read the essay and re-read it, and I’m ready for your questions.”

P: “How does it end?”

N: “Sikes was killed. Holmes did it.”

Patricia chuckled and kept chuckling.

N: “I made a few notes, but before that, let’s see if we can defrost our minds here.”

Loose thoughts on Critical Theory.

P: “Love to. I also read the entire essay, starting over. I got through all of it, but the last twenty pages I force-fed myself to no avail.”

N: “Two things.

1. It is Marxism.
2. The method of honest description becomes the ruleset of the mechanics of the system.”

P: “Oh, I got it. The rules of the game are: You can only state what role each piece play in the whole and once said, those roles become the paths of development of the parts of the whole.”

N: “Pretty good. What struck me was how their own role and their own theory are treated as pieces of the picture. They are sociologists AND philosophers. So when they maintain that the very words and theories of the other members of society are defined by historical development, they make no exception for themselves. And they go through great pain to avoid speaking like you can stand outside of the world.”

P: “Aha, now I get it. When you read through the essay, it feels like walking in mud. But the reason is that the language is restrained. Like the words themselves are operators in a mathematical structure.”

N: “Excellent. Very astute. Once they get to Critical Theory in the essay, they spend most of the time contrasting it with bourgeois theory. But surprisingly they never even once explain in what the theory consists!”

P: “That’s philosophers for you. However, I can surmise from their essay: An interdisciplinary bringing together of psychology, statistical sociology and economics bridged together by philosophical analysis. An honesty that penetrates their own fabric and which goes before anything. And an understanding that they are the antithesis of the enlightenment mentality: They are very precisely NOT standing outside the world describing it objectively. Quite the contrary, they are in it, and their “objectivity” is nothing but a belief, a falsehood, consisting in words, facts, application of theories that are intrinsically derived from the society they spring from.”

Nell almost collapsed in awe and merriment.

N: “God you are smashing. All the cleverness is in there, ready to be hauled up. Water from a well. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) says this about Critical Method:”

It aspires to be

1. self-reflexive, accounting for its own embeddedness in specific social and historical conditions,
2. interdisciplinary, integrating philosophical analysis with social theory and empirical social research,
3. materialist, grounding critical theorizing in social reality, and
4. emancipatory, orienting itself toward the goal of social emancipation.

P: “Nono, don’t get me wrong… I can see that it is so, but I cannot unite it with my own classical thinking patterns.”

N: “Fair enough. And indeed the two approaches are impossible to unite. The essay spends a great deal of pages on contrasting Critical Theory (CT) with Traditional Theory (TT).”

P: “That’s what makes it slippery to deal with.”

N: “Yes, good word. Take their depiction of the role of identity in nationalism. Can you ask a nationalist »what place in society does an individual have?«. Well, if asked, it is doubtful the answer will be »speech is accepted as the organ of the community«.”

P: “But that description elucidates the function of speech. And the fragmented nature of the self. There is no self in their view. There are the thoughts stemming from forces of society.”

P: “Okay. Okay, they don’t like so-called objective science.”

N: “They don’t like the hidden assumptions in science, namely the notion that there is a neutral vantage point from where absolute truth can be found.”

P: “Sociologists at work. They see Descartes describing an idea in the 17th century and make a note »Monkey M invents idea X« and then notices the idea starts to grow into a cult. They simply do not consider that his idea is defensible.”

N: “Frankly, neither do we. In this case time is pretty much on their side. Descartes’ ideas on the thinking subject are rendered obsolete by neurology, anatomy etc. So viewing dualism from a sociological perspective as a peculiar cult is not altogether unobvious. But yes, I absolutely see what you mean. They are unrelenting Marxists first and foremost.”

P: “Still, I’d like to return often to the lonely position of the scientist in her laboratory. She is facing an unknown world of dark obscurity which she is trying to shine a light on with her single candle.”

N: “A vivid picture! I find it intriguing when H&A parallels the attitude and experience of individualism with an analysis of the self-inflicted alienation of individualism.

So we separate ourselves from being, but it comes back to haunt us many years later when the idea has woven the fabric of society and the semantic reality of society.”

P: “We dream about a world that is mechanical and the dream escapes into a universe of karma from where the idea manifests itself in the quality of the society we have around us.”

N: “We see the world as alien, and the world answers back by reminding us of our own alienation.”

P: “Wait stop! Can we go for a walk and ping-pong what is happening here for a second?”

N: “Love to.”

They left their empty plates and ventured into a broad and loud avenue where their voices struggled with the street noise. But it felt good talking loudly like that.

P: “Sedimentary strata of ideas! That’s what they refer to, isn’t it?”

N: “Precisely. Some of these we let in via decisions we control, they are the result of our own rationalisation process. But as human beings in a world that is really just the accumulation of completely unorganised forces, a very large part of our semantic universe of meaning is incompatible with the clarity of a penetrating analysis.”

P: “And the reason we end up in this situation is that capitalism is a free market where an overwhelming cacophony of voices drowns any hope of inventing a world which we can … I don’t know… recognise as human or fitting human existence.”

N: “It sounds like it, yes.”

Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built.

P: “And the reason we cannot break this deadlock, this trap we are in is because we suffer from the fancy that the world is both rational (intelligible for a rational mind) and laid out in front of us ready for objective inspection in such a way that we ourselves are not changed, and neither are the facts thus discovered.”

N: “Complete separation of thought and matter or being as they call it. Thought and being. We have learned to know that objectivity means separation of observed facts and observer. But the Marxist thinker refuses to ignore that observation is a job that goes on in an economic context.”

P: “Yes, they say that, but they talk as if this goes deeper than that.”

N: “I read that into it as well. As if the very qualities of the ideas we have mimic our perception of the governing laws of the world. But I’m not sure. This time it is just an impression.

One thing that really shines through is the revelation that if you can get rid of the separation between thought and being, between value system and fact, between observation and object, then it becomes clear that thinking becomes social action.”

The inability to grasp in thought the unity of theory and practice and the limitation of the concept of necessity to inevitable events are both due, from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge, to the Cartesian dualism of thought and being.

P: “That’s how I see it too. That explains why the rest of the essay is basically the result of utilising this insight in all sorts of places.”

N: “Yes, there is a long analysis of the societal transition from small factories to industrial magnates where the driving principle is used to ground the analysis in the economic shift, not in the value shift alone.”

Once, however, the development of technology in the last century had led to a rapidly increasing concentration and centralization of capital, the legal owners were largely excluded from the management of the huge combines which absorbed their small factories

P: “I remember. The small factories were also run by the owners. But the large industry separated owners and managers. The managers became the real top dog dictating the moral principles rather than the owners. That meant a shift from appraisal of productivity as such to a sharp discerning between productive versus parasitic capitalists.”

N: “The sociologists focus on the value system which changes. But the critical thinker which holds on to her Marxist roots never forgets that the essential change was the economic power base that transitioned from one group to another.

However, CT wouldn’t be CT if it just stood from another vantage point and observed. They maintain that the theoretician is but one cog in a machine that changes constantly.

Society changes the theoretician. The theoretician changes the theory. The theory changes society.”

Such changes do not leave the structure of the critical theory untouched.

The dependence of culture on social relationships must change as the latter change, even in details, if society indeed be a single whole.

P: “I remember reading that part and looking for how CT was changed as part of the society that changed. But it just got too obscure.”

N: “Yep, I got lost as well.”

The road ahead

P: “The latter half of the essay is not about CT as opposed to traditional theory, as far as I can tell.”

N: “No, it is mostly about how difficult critical theory is and how the theorist will only betray the social class whose reality he is trying to change if he does not stay aloof and upholds a dynamic, constant reevaluation of the concise situation in society.”

It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology

P: “That’s the danger of ideology. Especially the working class will suffer from self-oppression by subscribing to the ideas of the ruling class.”

The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theorists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification

P: “So verification and classification - core scientific activities - become associated with obedience.”

N: “That is how they see it, yes.”

If we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism.

N: “The intellectual must always be the one with ultimate insight. "

A last farewell

Patricia walked for some time perusing through the article on her phone. She looked up from time to time, added a comment here and there.

Nell sunk into her own thoughts. But mostly she just savoured the moments. It felt like sailing inescapably towards a waterfall. The roaring, dark sound approached mercilessly. Absolute silence was coming.

In her fantasy she posed the question: “You know, you could also just go home with me and we could talk like this anytime you wanted”. But she didn’t want to loose contact with the real world through a fantasy. Then rather the pain of losing someone you love.

Patricia looked at her and realised she was wasting Nell’s precious last seconds.

P: “Nell, I can’t predict the future. I don’t even know my own feelings.”

And this time she noticed the tear in Nell’s eye and she felt horrible.

After a farewell scene, they separated. Nell’s body could tell time so it packed her suitcase and checked for any missed items in the room. Then she switched off the light and left for home.

She sat in the airport, fomenting a thought of rebellion. Is life about playing the cards you receive or is it about refusing to accept the hand you’ve been dealt in the first place? Was her crime right now acceptance?

She walked around and around and noticed the clock.

Just one little step…

Just one more minute…

Ignore the loudspeaker…

Ignore the necessity…

And…

She missed her plane.

•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•