Critical Theory

How is Critical Theory useful in any way? It's just a bunch of pretentious ramblings with no real-world application. Plus the Frankfurt School were all elitists.

Prove me wrong.

Other urls found in this thread:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/
youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2ozMbvldw
youtu.be/ppT8JK1loSg?t=26m28s
youtube.com/watch?v=gEG0yPvUt4g
libcom.org/library/rojava-reality-rhetoric-gilles-dauvé-tl
twitter.com/AnonBabble

No.

Critical theory: 1
OP: 0

Explain. Why should I waste my time with Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno, Foucault, Derrida and Zizek when they literally say nothing? Also dialectics has been proven fraudulent.

You're literally not typing anything. No letters, no words, nothing.

Polysyllabic nonsense.

Another ghost reply, wow. Hey there, mister ghost!

lol
the irony

It's the sort of meaningless esoterica produced by academics to distinguish themselves from the dumb commoners that don't have the time or education to devote themselves to that sort of Ivory Tower wankery - which ultimately leads to shit like pic related and academics bewailing the failure of the "genuine Left"

Adorno is literally the stereotypical "oy vey remember the 60 gorillion" jewish intellectual. Guy is way too obsessed with fascism and the holocaust.

Sage

C'mon he was writing at the time it happened and immediately after.

Apparently she never said this? Idk. I have a hard time finding the actual quote from her, rather than sources that reference Fashionable Nonsense.

It is nice that Holla Forums is becoming less subtle about just being an outpost of Holla Forums with a coat of red paint.

She did very much say words amounting to that. Twenty seconds on Google will find you the exact quote and which work.

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Actually, 20 seconds on google just finds more people doubting the quote or even debunking it, with the occasional "I have a copy of the book at home, I'll confirm next month when I can get home and see it."

Given that Sokal is a morally bankrupt snake oil salesman and exemplifies the worst aspects of what he tried to accuse postmodernists of being, I'm gonna say he made the quote up for his shitty book.

How is Holla Forums any better ahahahahaha you faggots don't even know what the word discourse means

read a book and try again


not surprising, but post-3rd wave gender theorists do get up to some stupid shit and should be reigned in.

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Details on Sokal? He did seem like kind of a prick, but I never heard of him being that bad.

he's written multiple books criticizing the lives and works of people he has 0 understanding of and has admitted as much. he's scientism incarnate.

OP, I think you have to draw a line between the works of the Frankfurt School and what often gets passed off as "Critical Theory" these days. The infiltration of postmodern bullshit into what was once a really interesting and useful field of study has really fucked the entire thing up.

Critical Theory really came about from people on the radical left getting shitty that the Soviet Union turned out to be pretty shit, and put together a really good effort explaining why several of Marx's ideas were wrong: understanding their work in empathizing how culture and non-economic factors can lead to dictatorships should be a primary factor for anyone who considers themselves left.

Fuck off and stop posting here

Every day the cancer of the anfem flag is reconfirmed. Plz leave feminigger.

"Postmodernism" is precisely what you're describing in the following paragraph whether thats Frankfurt school, people like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and even post-structuralists like Foucault and Deleuze. What has turned academic critical theory into what it (appears to be) now is much more fine-tuned than "muh pure modernism soiled by post-modernism" and has much more to do with the trends, relationships and funding within academia, who is in academia and writes what, and what readings they apply to particular figures (and needless to say hegemony, counter-hegemony, gender/race relations (and counter-relations), class within academia, et al)

Nope

Nah.

Understanding the dynamics of social change should be the primary project of people interested in egalitarian societies, because without being able to understand and relate to society and social forces, all we're doing is rehashing tired old economic theories with no real praxis behind them, with no real ability to ever put them into practice. A radical left that does nothing besides selling copies of shitty Trotskyist newspapers and waving a couple flags at ineffectual rallies every now and again does absolutely nothing to challenge global capitalist hegemony, it appeals to nobody, and provides no emancipatory alternatives to the status-quo. There are non-economic factors that reinforce economic exploitation, and unless we get rid of those too any kind of leftist politics is doomed to failure.

I reckon there's a pretty big gulf between the earlier (modernist) Critial Theorists who were more worried about authority and injustice in social and cultural systems that evolved alongside capitalism as a political system, and the more contemporary (postmodernist) ones who attempt to undermine the idea of modernity who tend to reject universalist ideas of theory (such as Marxism or class struggle). Are you saying that the reorientation of critical theory away from modernism and towards postmodernism is because assblasted academics are too cucked to bother saying/doing anything that might lose them tenure, so they have adopted less relevant, more oblique politics to avoid being painted as radicals, or something? 'Cause I haven't really considered that before.

It's post structuralism you fucking retard.

Those who reject universalist theories and their application entirely, such that someone thinks there is no such thing as class struggle or thinks capitalism is irrelevant in our political-cultural world are few and far between.
Those who reject universalist theories broadly but adopt parts of them in their work or in their political life aren't all that different from those who came before. Just because you don't think (PCF-approved) Marxism, or any other theory, governs reality, or are critical of aspects of Marxist theory, doesn't mean you don't approach the same worries from the same direction and even get into political shenanigans with the commies, ex: Foucault.
I won't say the skeptical worldview of pomo doesn't have something to do with where contemporary crit theory is, but it really isn't the dominant part.

It's not the only thing that happens, and probably isn't often consciously decided like that, but in NA academia this is a fact.
It is not a coincidence that idpol academia is useless whereas economic academia has effectively invented neoliberalism.

Chomsky has shown how Hegelian dialectics could be used to justify mass slaughter of innocents.

You shouldn't. Why waste time with muh subject relativist/post-modernism 2.0 repackaging philosophy, when you COULD be engaging with philosophical methodology that produces useful results having been created within the framework of established & practical standards?

"Holy shit! There's a terrible disease wreaking havoc on our human species! What should we do?"
Zizek

Benjamin

Marcuse

Adorno

Foucault

Derrida

Karl Popper

THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Embrace Pragmatism and/or Satanism

pick one and get the fuck out

fuck outta here

Holy fuck, this is great.

That's not how it works.

Karl Popper

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kek no

Are you sure that's how falsification works?
Pretty sure it's

This is in several ways sufficient to illustrate its reactionary character and forms a direct parallel to the reactionary discouragement of those students radicalized in the '60s and '70s who now form the present postmodern glut in western academia.
Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed was submitted for publication before the Moscow trials began. In contrast, Benjamin's definitive essay on the alleged theological dogmatism of historical materialism waited until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Much of the Frankfurt work reeks of the authors' own discouraged psyches and insecurities, of a series of concessions to the injustices of Stalin's regime by people trying to be "good leftists" who only once the cognitive dissonance became too great decided the problem must be Marxist philosophy as a whole, rather than the pronounced weakness of their own theoretical foundations and grasp on Marx demonstrated up to that point.
Goldman and Berkman were disillusioned in the early days, not long after their deportation.
Chomsky has argued the early days of the USSR saw an assault on socialist institutions, a manner of killing or gimping the soviets in favor of central bureaucracy


Pic related is just bizarre. Navier-Stokes existence and uniqueness is a millennium prize problem for chrissakes.
If there's reason to doubt its authenticity (you can never tell with this academic clique, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt) we still have that paper on "feminist glaciology" and detailed analyses of postmodern attacks on science published at length elsewhere. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/

I was giving a short version.

Does this satisfy your autism?

Foucault works are so bad I doubt they'd pass by a legit historian.

Walter Benjamin based 90% of his work on the teachings of his dead rabbi guru, "Ari." (Luria)

Adorno can be blamed for the rise of the Neocons.

How does that work? Weren't the neocons mostly just Jewish ex-Trotskyites pissed that the American Left wasn't doing enough for Israel?

Adorno was a Zionist.

youtube.com/watch?v=Qj2ozMbvldw
Foucault is a bad historian on purpose. He uses archival materials only to bait his readers into a positivist frame of mind which he proceeds to deconstruct from inside. He mocks historians first by writing like them, only later to show that history is itself a central element in the modern episteme which will soon disappear.

Mostly of Hitler's works were based in his relationship with his lover, Tyrone

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That's a funny way of saying "Thule Society."

kek

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"I was only pretending to be retarded" for academics.

more plz

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Post this to /r/badphilosophy pls.

This triggers the pollyp

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic … Accordingly we state:… War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others … Poets and artists of Futurism! … remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

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Benjamin was right about failed revolutions and fascism. He was also right about man's self-destruction experienced as aesthetic pleasure.

Adorno was right about the culture industry.

Deleuze was right about the horrifying effects of deterritorialization intrinsic to capitalism.

Foucault was right about the relationship between madness and reason.

Derrida was right about transcendental signifieds and the deconstructability of law.

Marcuse was right about the totalitarian tendencies of one-dimensional society and the impossibility of political opposition in such a society.

To act like everything these guys said is nonsense, or that literally every leftist takes every word they said as gospel, is pure sophistry.

Also, Popper himself once said "science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." Critical theory is the criticism of myths rooted in Enlightenment thought. It's really as simple as that.

this. adorno was based. reactionaries would love him if they actually read him himself instead of second-hand conclusions based on "readings" of his work by other mongoloids like kellner and lind.

If pollyps read anything, other than their Ebola man, they wouldn't be pollyps tbh

This.

It's been tried tbh

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You're acting like its pedantry when you've just said, again, something completely incorrect regarding the theory. There are ways to account for things like that which Popper agreed with, such as S T A T S T E S T S.

beyond hope

Every time…
Just hearing the "I believe in reality, objectivity, rationality, logic, facts, et c," argument makes me cringe, not just because it's exceedingly arrogant but also the unironic Randism that comes along with it, lacking even Miss Rand's willingness to enquire into its philosophical foundations. At least she dared to be wrong on firm grounds…

Proves how fucking stupid you are then. The content in question is directly available in her wikipedia article.

Butthurt postmodernists detected.

Sounds A-OK to me!

Also: *Walter (((Benjamin))). Of coooooooourse!*

We have Holla Forumsacks here. They are under some delusion that they can re-educate us with Cold War slogans.


Yes, there are ways to account for things which Popper agreed with. But when it comes to Marxism Popper is unrelenting.


This is glorious.

youtu.be/ppT8JK1loSg?t=26m28s

disgusted_marcion.xcf

The truth lies beyond and above this world; morality, matter, temporality are no concerns of those higher spheres of being, which, through infintely beyond our imagination, are merely shadows of the totality of being that is the absolute infinite, the I-contain-myself, the within-me:-all. Demiurge is a fuck.

Try reading what he actually wrote, pollyps.

Lurianism and Gnosticism aren't that far off from one another.

Why truth? Why not lies?

ITT: Holla Forums collectively gets butthurt over a joke post.

Anti-realists pls go.

We do everything collectively. Have you forgotten where you are?
youtube.com/watch?v=gEG0yPvUt4g

Okay, assuming all of this is true, why didn't Benjamin use all that Jew-magic to escape the Nazis instead of being forced to an hero?

Post proper Popper properly.

"All" includes lies as well. The absolute infinite is inconsistent.

A theory T is inconsistent iff, for all statements S, T implies S. Specifically, T implies 0=1.

We are merely a consistent, finitary fragment induced by the All.

It's like you haven't even gone to logic school, user!

I am banned there.

The guy was alive as it was happening and directly after I think it would be a big deal

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Why, did you violently misgender a trans-pansexual demiromantic diaperkin whose pronouns were poopo/peepee/peem?

Postmodernism hasn't lead to anything relevant.

Meanwhile, the Kurds are taking cues from Chomsky and have a full-blown anarcho-syndicalist society.

If argue that what the Kurds are fighting for is largely irrelevant

Name a single revolutionary group or movement influenced by PoMo.

The successful ones in the future involving internet with a dash of financial crime. That isn't in a war zone that can be easily wiped out by the west.

JOJ.

libcom.org/library/rojava-reality-rhetoric-gilles-dauvé-tl

How are they not influenced by Chomsky and Bookchin?

They are influenced by Öcalan, who took cues from Bookchin, and only very generously. And the only reason, as stated in article above (look at my fucking flag and READ you dumb nigger), that they're still even out there doing something of relevance is because they make use of the state, which is 'integral to Öcalan's democratic confederalism'.

No. The fuckers like to ban everybody for fun.

Foucault

Holy fuck, I honestly can't tell if you're making fun of Holla Forums's (mis)conception of who Foucault, or you're just a legit fucking retard.

Either way, keep it up cause it's been awhile since I've laughed this hard.

*who Foucault was

Everyone on tumblr thinks they understand Foucault. Most don't.

And honestly, the fact anyone puts thinkers as different from each other as Adorno, Zizek, Foucault, etc., into this "Critical Theory" group just shows that reactionaries really really don't like to read.

Yeah I don't know how anyone could read him and come to the conclusion "THIS DUDE THINKS GENDER IS OPPRESSIVE AND SPIVAK PRONOUNS ARE THE TRUE WAY TO LIBERATION"

Then again people think Nietzsche was a proto-Randian/proto-Nazi, and that Adorno was being paid by the Soviets to secretly destroy Western Civilization…