Search results
This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. It revisits some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose varied engagements with the subject of melancholia prove to be far more mobile and complex than traditional accounts. It also looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory's engagement with the world of objects, exploring the affective politics of hope. Situating the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical', it explains how critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The book presents an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent. A note on the timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis follows. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the 'end of history', created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. The book notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions.
social research, one must revitalise the tradition’s diagnostic core: its understanding of social pathology . While traditional ‘liberal’ social criticism targets injustices and illegitimate claims to authority, critical theory focuses on the irrationality of the social world, drawing upon Hegelian, Marxian, Weberian, and psychoanalytic concepts (Horkheimer, 2002 [1937]; Held, 1980 ). It is
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the tragic inequalities and irrationalities of neoliberalism. But is has also emboldened activists and academics to return to the primary research questions which first inspired critical theory. How is this irrational and exploitative social formation maintained? Why has the pandemic not
In the last chapter, I argued that Erich Fromm’s work can form the basis for a reconceptualisation of social pathology, enabling Frankfurt School researchers to move beyond their current ‘recognition-cognitive’ approach to social research. In place of the dominant vein of critical theory which invests in the norms of neoliberalism (as criticised
for Berg and the soixante-huitards ’ barricades could not have been more striking. In the eyes of his militant students, Adorno was increasingly seen as a bourgeois irrelevance, and even as an obstacle to socialist transition (see Müller-Doohm, 2005 : 475). Habermas is typically presented as ‘rescuing’ critical theory from this impasse, offering a much-needed reshaping of the research programme
Knoll Pharmaceutical Company, a subsidiary of BASF) commissioned the research scientist Prof. Betty Dong of the University of California in San Francisco to investigate the effectiveness of Synthroid, the most frequently prescribed thyroid medication in the US, in return for a research subsidy of a quarter of a million dollars. Dong had to sign a contract stating that she would not publish any negative
with Foucault’s work, most commentators either describe him as incoherent for his opposition to normativity or attempt to ascribe a deep normativity to him. ( 2018 : 10) I quote this passage because it demonstrates the limitations in the understanding of normativity that Kelly possesses, in my view. While one can seek to proceed, as Foucault did in his major genealogical researches, to eschew a concern with normative disciplines such as politics, law, ethics, or morality, and avoid commitment to a narrow political agenda, this does not mean that his
such an approach, while not necessarily embracing the culture industry thesis in toto. The culture industry writings had certainly been largely silent on one of its core commodities: the journalistic production of news. Noting this absence in 1985, four years before the English translation of Structural Transformation was published, the US critical political communication scholar Daniel Hallin remarked that: ‘[O]ne might think that by now … critical theory might have produced a substantial body of research on the institutions of political
represented this before in several papers on complexity science as the complex ontological-historical approach that best describes Foucault’s oeuvre overall. Although complexity research takes its origins from its applications in physics, chemistry, and the ‘hard’ sciences, undergoing its formative development in the early and mid-twentieth century, during the second half of the century it has exerted an effect on the social sciences as well. Over the past half century, complexity research has generated a ‘quiet revolution’ in both the physical and social sciences. 8
that builds on the wars, atrocities, and sufferings of the first half of the twentieth century. Similarly, just as burgeoning nation-states established universities to promulgate national histories, so the member-states of the EU have created the European University Institute in order to research ‘the great movements and developments which characterise the history and development of Europe.’ 21 Despite these institutional efforts, scholars of integration are usually sceptical of attempts to root integration in the shared continental experience of total war. For