The Gender of Critical Theory
In her most recently published book, The Gender of Critical Theory, Professor Lois McNay argues that contemporary Frankfurt School critical theorists since the 1970s have increasingly failed to attend to the lived realities of oppression. According to her, Jürgen Habermas’ concern about the parochial limits of experience and his emphasis on the need for context-transcending critique from the late 1960s has detrimentally led Frankfurt School theorists to move away from sociological critique and towards ‘paradigm-led’ theorizing about normative foundations. For McNay, what is required instead to be able to satisfactorily explain and respond to the problem of gender oppression is for critical theorists to theorize dialogically and from experience. Only in this way can the Frankfurt School claim to speak directly to oppressed groups and serve as an emancipatory force.
Why is your book called The Gender of Critical Theory rather than The Critical Theory of Gender?
My book is about the critical theory of gender, but it is also about the gendered nature of much of the critical theory that has been done. The Frankfurt School is still, apart from a few notable exceptions, incredibly male dominated. It is still very patriarchal, even though it likes to think of itself as a progressive and emancipatory force. I wanted to capture this aspect of critical theory.
You seem to be trying to recover the insights of the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists; later generations seem to have gone astray. Can you say more about this?
I don’t think the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists have particular insights into gender; they are as gender-blind as the second and third generations. But certain aspects of the Frankfurt School critical theory methodology are more pronounced in first-generation theorists: its negativism, experience-based theorizing, and grounded social critique. But a lot of this has been lost with Habermas’ shift to questions of normativity. So, it’s more their methodological tools rather than their insights about gender or racial or even class oppression that I find valuable.
To be sure, there are problems with first-generation Frankfurt School theorists. If you read Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, there is no normative or emancipatory solution to what they see as a ‘totally administered society’. It is a totally bleak diagnosis which Habermas wants to overcome by locating normative foundations in Critical Theory. But those normative foundations cannot be the same as liberal analytic foundations; they cannot be free-standing moral principles because critical theorists are hermeneuticists who do not believe in any free-standing norms. So Habermas makes the move to find quasi-transcendental structures within social life; and he finds it in communication. This is an immensely important move. But this has been elaborated in very strong terms: ultimately these quasi-transcendental grounds operate more like transcendental grounds.
Despite your critique of Habermas, your idea of cross-perspectival reasoning as context transcendence sounds a lot like Habermas’ notion of intersubjective reasoning. Can you say more about this?
Latent in Habermas’ idea of communicative rationality is the idea of cross-perspectival reasoning; cross-perspectival reasoning takes place within a communicative paradigm. But it takes place on the terms that Habermas dictates. In this sense, it is a second-order dialogism because the actual framework is already set. If participants within a debate object to this rationalist and cognitivist way in which he frames intersubjective debate, they cannot really do that because the framework itself is not open to debate. So, it is a constrained dialogism or cross-perspectival reasoning.
Secondly, it is also irreflexive. There is not a moment where it is open for participants in intersubjective debate to say that they want to reason in a totally different way. Given that critical theory makes an awful lot of the fact that it is reflexive, responsive, and critically self-aware, this seems to contradict the basic tenet of what critical theory does in contradistinction to liberal philosophy.
An entailment of this irreflexivity is that it over-problematizes the experiential perspective which, as a result, always has to be filtered through a rational discourse in order to purify it of prejudice. But the theoretical worldview remains beyond reproach. Pierre Bourdieu is very keen on stressing that the theorists ought to be aware as far as possible of the scholastic assumptions that they import into sociological inquiry which may distort understanding. I am not saying that theory has nothing to offer; I am saying that theory needs to be more critically self-aware of its own tacit assumptions.
Is there anything redeemable at all from this kind of paradigm-led theory, as you put it in your book, or should it be completely rejected?
No, I do not think that it should be completely rejected; they offer a lot of resources which are very interesting for the Frankfurt School, especially in the neo-Hegelian variants. Nancy Fraser, for example, has been hugely important for advancing social critique. Indeed, Habermas’ idea of an intersubjective definition of rationality has been very important, and it is something that Frankfurt School critical theorists and radical democratic theorists cannot do without. The monological, Rawlsian alternative is not satisfactory for various reasons.
But I do think that the way in which context-transcendence has been formulated has been a massive block. Furthermore, this massive preoccupation with normative issues rather than with issues of power and oppression which Frankfurt School theorists say they prioritize is actually in contradiction with their own tenets of what Critical Theory should be and prevents them from analyzing how oppression operates in anything but the most tokenistic way — they have absolutely nothing to say on race, very little on class, and what they do say on gender is incredibly crude.
How might an experientially grounded critique inform not just feminist debates, but also debates about class, racial oppression, and postcolonial oppression?
I do not think I am offering anything that has not already been offered many times by critical race theorists. If you take Black feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Colins and Angela Davis, they all insist that theorizing about class, race, and gender has to be guided by how people experience structural constraints on their lives. You can develop the most sophisticated theoretical framework, but it cannot simply be applied in a top-down fashion because each situation is different and therefore some theoretical categories will be more relevant to understanding a given situation than others. One way of discovering which categories are more relevant is to ground yourself in what those who directly experience oppression tell you about that experience of oppression.
Indeed, a feature of recent Frankfurt School theories is that critique is grounded on a single overarching principle or normative foundation. This form of monism is inadequate for many reasons. Diagnostically, it cannot explain the complex intersections of power. As a result, it is also normatively inadequate, because if your social diagnosis is simplistic, your normative solutions are going to be fairly simplistic. Furthermore, monism violates the ethical precepts of Critical Theory because it inscribes a hierarchy between the theorist and the objects of inquiry. Instead of there being genuine cross-perspectival reasoning, where context-transcending insight is the result of mutual estrangement which expands our understanding of the world, there is an imposition of a kind of all-inclusive explanatory framework through which you can feed empirical data in order to interpret it according to some theoretical logic. Much of the literature by Frankfurt School theorists really is just second-order squabbles about which monist paradigm is the best, and hence social critique has really receded into the background.
What does that imply for our academic institutions?
This is a very, very difficult question. Historically, there has been strong links between feminism and activism, but with the professionalization of universities those links have become attenuated. The second-best thing that political theorists can do is to engage much more with sociological research and literature. It needs to be an interdisciplinary project. Indeed, this is how Frankfurt School critical theorists would describe their type of normative theorizing until they took a foundationalist turn. If you look at someone like Rainer Forst, who is very keen to stress that he is a Frankfurt School theorist, there is virtually no sociological content in his work.
Theoretical inquiry is always ongoing; it’s not as if a theory is going to just give us a definitive solution. Theory ought to be always engaged in this gradual process of expanding horizons rather than an attempt to define a definitive framework or category.
If I understand you correctly, your objection isn’t necessarily against the type of theorizing done by Frankfurt School theorists. Rather, it is an objection to the fact that they have failed to live up to their own name — that, in order to claim the title, they ought to be consistent with their own basic tenets.
Exactly. What I am doing is what Frankfurt School theorists would call an immanent critique of Frankfurt School theory. Given that Frankfurt School critique would describe itself according to its basic tenets — that critique ought to be grounded in experience, grounded in a concern with uncovering power, explicitly emancipatory by directly addressing oppressed subjects and contribute to their struggle to overcome oppression, and aware that the theorist is herself situated in the field of inquiry — all these tenets are violated by the way in which Frankfurt School theory has developed.
Your new book follows a very similar structure to your previous one, On the Misguided Search for the Political, in which you criticize radical democratic theorists’ focus on defining the political as an ontological category and argue in favour of a phenomenological approach. In both works, you are impatient with second order, metatheoretical questions which are largely self-referential and endorse instead an approach that takes lived experience more seriously. Can you say more about this?
Yes — what radical democratic theorists and Frankfurt School theorists share, although they come from very different traditions, is this dismissive attitude towards experience. Those who theorize about political ontology say that experience simply occurs in the realm of the ontic, and what is really important is to find the essence of the political. They are very dismissive of actual political movements; for them, these movements simply become a kind of content that endlessly reaffirms what they say are prior ontological structures. Similarly, the Frankfurt School theorists have a tendency towards theoretical vanguardism and a dismissiveness of ordinary people and their capacity to understand their situation and to resist their situation. This is a legacy not only of Marxist ideology critique, but also a legacy of Adorno’s intellectual elitism.
However, critical theory is supposed to be primarily a political intervention rather than a philosophical intervention. Feminist critical theorists are much more aware of this because they are more connected to activist concerns. Radical democratic theory and Frankfurt School critical theory both, for different reasons, juxtapose themselves to conventional liberal political philosophy by claiming to speak for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. And yet they do not seem to do that, or even attempt to do it.
Given that you have worked in an elite academic institution for a considerable period of time, your work is in certain respects surprising. The tendency for someone working in this environment is to reify purely academic or theoretical debates. How did you maintain this sensitivity or distance to these debates?
In contrast to a lot of tutors here who studied PPE at Oxford, my initial training was in English literature and literary theory, and I did it at Sussex which was very left-wing and interdisciplinary — I read a lot of Nietzsche, Foucault and Marx. As a result, I am quite isolated with respect to how political theory is usually done at Oxford. Now, isolation can either break you down or you can just cleave more strongly to what you think. I did the latter and just created my own space, so to speak.
However, the political theory group at Oxford has changed a lot in the last five years, so much for the better. It is a fantastic group. There are now more women than men, when for years it was just me and Elizabeth Frazer. This is totally unusual; politics and political theory as a discipline are still incredibly male dominated.
Do you enjoy teaching? And how has teaching informed your work?
Yes, I do enjoy teaching; I really enjoy graduate MPhil teaching. Students often ask very challenging questions, which often requires you to go back to first principles. And it is good to do that, because sometimes you just take for granted certain arguments and assumptions. As John Stuart Mill remarked, argument is a necessary feature of democracy, and it keeps beliefs alive and vibrant against dogma. It is a good exercise to remind yourself of what you think and why you think in that way.
This article was previously published in the Oxford Political Review.
