Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory: Its Origins and Developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary Thought

1981 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Antonio
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Immanent Critique

Duoethnography: A Polytheoretical Approach to (Re)Storing, (Re)Storying the Meanings That One Gives

2020 ◽  
pp. 396-423
Author(s):  
John Joseph Norris ◽  
Richard D. Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Third Space ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Feminist Inquiry

This chapter summarizes the advancement of duoethnography throughout its fifteen-year history, employing examples from a variety of topics in education and social justice to provide a wide range of approaches that one may take when conducting a duoethnography. A checklist articulates what its cofounders consider the core elements of duoethnographies, additional features that may or may not be employed and how some studies purporting to be duoethnographies may not be so. The chapter indicates connections between duoethnography and a number of methodological concepts including the third space, the problematics of representation, feminist inquiry, and critical theory using published examples by several duoethnographers.

The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kōzō’s Logic of Capital

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 201-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Walker
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Entire Range ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
The Core ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Modern Japan ◽  
Labour Power

AbstractThe debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most influential and widely known Marxist thinker in modern Japan. Uno’s work, and particularly his major theoretical works of the 1950s, developed an entirelogicalanalysis of the peculiar position of the labour-power commodity within capital’s drive, noting that this site marks the place wherein capital’slogical interiorand itshistorical exteriorinterpenetrate each other, generating a volatile force of excess at the core of capital’s supposedly smooth and pure circuit-process. By developing around this point an extensive theoretical discussion of its dynamics ofimpossibilityorirrationality, centred on a term –muri– that he raises to the level of a concept, Uno formulates a series of original theses in methodology, on the concept of population, and particularly around the figures of thelogicaland thehistoricalin the critical analysis of capitalism. Focusing in particular on this ‘impossibility’ ormurithat is nevertheless constantly ‘passing through’ the capital-relation, this essay investigates the entire range of Uno’s analysis, revealing not only a crucial thread of theoretical inquiry that remains contemporary for us today, but also another set of possibilities linking the critique of political economy to the renewal of revolutionary politics.

scholarly journals Life in the nuclear age: Classical realism, critical theory and the technopolitics of the nuclear condition

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Columba Peoples
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Energy Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Awareness ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Classical Realism ◽  
Post War ◽  
Production Industry ◽  
Nuclear Condition

Classical realist thought provides a diagnosis of the significance nuclear weapons that calls into question the very possibility of politics in the nuclear age. While sharing similarities with this outlook, critical theoretic reflections suggest a more expansive consideration of the nuclear condition as underpinned by combinations of dystopian fears of nuclear destruction and utopian visions of nuclear futures. Most prominently Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory intimates an understanding of the nuclear condition as one that is rendered tolerable so long as nuclear technologies are associated with and related to innovation, progress and modernity. The study of the technopolitics of the nuclear condition might thus look not only to classical realists’ concern with ‘Death in the Nuclear Age’ but also incorporate corresponding critical awareness of claims to the life-sustaining applications of nuclear technologies in areas such as energy production, industry and medicine. Applying an ‘aporetic’ form of immanent critique, and to exemplify how the international politics of the nuclear age has often been predicated on efforts to distinguish and relate different kinds of nuclear technologies, the article revisits the United States–led post-war vision of ‘Atoms for Peace’ and compares it to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s contemporary ‘How the Atom Benefits Life’ campaign.

Review: Claudio Celis Bueno, The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 331-337
Author(s):  
Ben Turner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Unanswered Question ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
The Core ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Labour Time

How should we conceptualise the turn to attention as a means of producing surplus value? Claudio Celis Bueno answers this question through a consideration of the attention economy in the context of a rethinking of Marxist political economy. Bueno accounts for the development of the economisation of attention through the concepts of value, labour and time, but also investigates how the shift to attention requires us to rethink the basis of these terms. Using the attention economy as an example, he develops a method of immanent critique which rejects a-historical understandings of labour, in order to show how the core concepts of Marxist political economy transform across different economic systems. Despite the clarity of this argument, Bueno opens an interesting but unanswered question as to how one transitions from this insight to a positive political project that may not be compatible with immanent critique.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghazala Jamil
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Sepoy Mutiny

The introduction begins with acknowledging rapid urbanization in India and moves on to a brief historical account of Delhi and its Muslim residents. It agrees with the historians that the fate of Delhi’s Muslim residents is entangled with the history of the city. The narrative traces several historical instances like the sepoy mutiny, partition, emergency, among others, as a background to the description of neoliberal Delhi and the contemporary topography of the city. Continuing in this aim to prepare a background, the introduction briefly gestures towards various attempts at (i) theorizing the city as spatialization of capitalism, and (ii) theoretically mapping the geographies of discrimination. Rationale for use of critical theory to provide the book its philosophical and conceptual framework of the work is discussed briefly. Within this framework ‘Positionality’, ‘Spatiality’ and ‘Identity’ are used as sensitizing concepts. The chapter closes with a brief statement of the core arguments of the work and their organisation in chapters to follow.

Critical Theory and the Critique of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique of Nancy Fraser's “Systematic” “Crisis-Critique” of Capitalism as an “Institutionalized Social Order”

2021 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-235
Author(s):  
Chris O'Kane
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Critical Social Theory ◽  
Alternative Possibility ◽  
Systematic Theory ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Nancy Fraser

The predominant approach to contemporary critical theory lacks a critical theory of capitalist society. Nancy Fraser has endeavored to provide such a critical theory in her “systematic” “crisis–critique” of capitalism as an “institutionalized social order.” Yet Fraser's “systematic” theory is not systematic, but fragmentary and internally inconsistent. The Marxian premises of Fraser's theory are at odds with its ensuing Habermasian notions of capitalism, contradiction, crises, and emancipation, and her theory consequently lacks a robust explication of these dynamics. This raises the alternative possibility of developing a contemporary critical theory of the crisis–ridden reproduction of the negative totality of capitalist society that brings Adorno and Horkheimer's critical theory together with the subterranean strand of contemporary critical theory: the New Reading of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory.

Illusion and Non-Identity Thinking in Nietzsche’s Critical Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110563
Author(s):  
Vasilis Grollios
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Core Values ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
The Core ◽  
Identity Thinking ◽  
Radical Character

The paper attempts to bring to the fore the radical character of Nietzsche’s critical theory. It argues that behind Nietzsche’s consideration of suffering lies both a critique of one-dimensional mass culture and fetishism, and a theory of alienation that is much closer to Marx’s critique of alienation in capitalism than is usually believed. Uniquely, it will also support the idea that Nietzsche holds a theory of a dialectics between content and form, that is of non-identity thinking, very similar to that of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and will attempt to connect it to an attempt to doubt the core values sustaining capitalism.

A Case against the Constructivist–Critical Theory Synthesis

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-146
Author(s):  
J. Samuel Barkin ◽  
Laura Sjoberg
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Critical Theories

This chapter builds on the understandings of constructivist and critical International Relations theories laid out in the book so far to make an argument that constructivisms and critical theories are not the same thing, naturally aligned, or necessarily productive bedfellows. Furthermore, there are both analytical and political downsides to the constructivist/critical theory nexus, which are evident in work in international relations that pairs the two unreflectively. In fact, many of the intersections between constructivisms and critical theories in the current International Relations theory literature are contrived at the expense of some or even most of the core tenets of either theory. This chapter suggests that the “end of International Relations” and the lost, confused nature of International Relations theory (particularly progressive International Relations theory) can find their origins in the underspecification and overreached application of pairings between constructivisms and critical theorizing in International Relations. These implications make it necessary to critically evaluate figurations of constructivist and critical International Relations.

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