critical theory and post modernism

7/27/2019 Critical Theory and Post Modernism

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Organization Theory Naveen Bharathi

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Critical theory and Post modernism: New ways of seeing the World

If one has to name two intellectuals and philosophers who changed how the

world thought and gave new perspectives to see things society, culture and

knowledge it is Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. The perspectives provided by themgave us radical methodologies to analyze and understand society.

Marxs ideas of how the society worked and progressed still continue to influence

a lot of intellectuals from various disciplines philosophy, sociology, history and

economics. Marx was much more than a Communist theorist and a critique of

modernism. His theories of dialectical materialism and alienation could explain most of

the social structures of modernism. Whatever the results of Marxist theories may have

proven to be historically, they are nevertheless even to this day the most devastatingcritique of existing ideas about things and states of affairs. He saw history as a class

struggle eventually resulting in a socialist proletariat revolution. Critical theory

attempted to explain why this proletariat revolution prophesied by him did not occur as

expected. Critical theorists, mostly Marxists initially try to combine the theories/

methods of Marx with other philosophical discourses for their analysis of the society and

human condition as a whole. While on this path, many thinkers of the so called Critical

school like Jurgen Habermas have departed from the Marxist perspectives of the

founders and have built a very different epistemological method to analyze and

understand the internal dynamics of the society.

The origin of critical theory can be traced to the Institute for Social Research in

1937 to describe their different approach to the dialectical Hegelian Marxism which

aimed at a more inter disciplinary approach to play a progressive role in social theory by

developing concepts that are subversive of the prevailing ideologies and can provide

weapons of critique in the struggle for a better society.1 Many critical theorists like

Herbert Marcuse were not averse to emancipatory elements in the bourgeois tradition,

while criticizing its tendencies of repression and domination. Critical theory argues that

specific phenomena can only be comprehended as parts of a whole; hence a crucial task

of social theory is to describe the structures and dynamics of the social system.

1TOWARDS A CRITICAL THEORY OF SOCIETY Introduction, Pg 10


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Following the tenets of the Marxian theory, Marcuse stressed the importance of

recognition that social and human existences are constituted by the totality of the

relations of production. 2 But thinkers like Habermas have departed from this Marxian

perspective to analyze social norms. To quote him

For Marx, the phenomenological exposition of consciousness in its

manifestations, which served Hegel only as an introduction to scientific knowledge,

becomes the frame of reference in which the analysis of the history of the species stays

confined. Marx did not adopt an epistemological perspective in developing his

conception of the history of the species as something that has to be comprehended

materialistically. Nevertheless, if social practice does not only accumulate the

successes of instrumental action but also, through class antagonism, produces and

reflects on objective illusion, then, as part of this process, the analysis of history is

possible only in a phenomenologically mediated mode of thought. The science of man

itself is critique and must remain so. For after arriving at the concept of synthesis

through a reconstruction of the course of consciousness in its manifestations, there is

only one condition under which critical consciousness could adopt a perspective that

allowed disengaging social theory from the -epistemological mediation of

phenomenological self-reflection: that is if critical consciousness could apprehend and

understand itself as absolute synthesis. As it is, however, social theory remainsembedded in the framework of phenomenology, while the latter, under materialist

presuppositions, assumes the form of the critique of ideology.3

In the above text, we can see Habermas is trying to critique Marx and defend him at the

same time. According to him, as we can see in the excerpt, Marx overreacted to his

philosophical guru Hegels dialectics.

2Ibid, Pg 12

3KNOWLEDGE & HUMAN INTEREST, 1968. Chapter Three: The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory


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Postmodernism Lost in translation?

Doubtless there was a certain universality of writing which stretched across to

the elite elements of Europe living the same privileged life-style, but this much-prized

communicability of the French language has been anything but horizontal; it hasnever been vertical, never reached the depths of masses.

-Roland Barthes, Oeuvres Completes Vol. I (1942-65)

A great deal of post-modernist theory depends on the maintenance of skeptical

attitude: and here the philosopher Jean- Fancois Lyotards contribution is essential. He

argued in hisLa condition postmoderne that we now live in an era in which legitimizing

master narratives are in crisis and in decline. These narratives are contained in or

implied by major philosophies, such as Kantianism, Hegelianism and Marxism, which

argue that history is progressive, that knowledge can liberate us, and that all knowledge

has a secret unity. The two main narratives Lyotard is attacking are those of progressive

emancipation of humanity from Christian redemption to Marxist utopia and that

triumph of science. Lyotard considers that such doctrines have lost credibility since the

Second World War: Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity

towards metanarratives.

These metanarratives traditionally serve to give cultural practices some form of

legitimation or authority. One example could be the Constitution of any country for

example India- its enactment based on democratic principles and the sovereign

authority of the state. For any solution plaguing the Indian society, we look for solution

in the Constitution. Many Supreme Court judgments go back to interpret and

reinterpret every word in the constitution to define the rights of a citizen. These

metanarratives are built over years.

So what is wrong with these meta-narratives? These metanarratives - be it

nationalism, patriotism, state, constitution, development, democracy and even

secularism etc. have in fact responsible for so much repression, violence, war

everywhere. Modern project or enlightenment was essentially about building such grand

metanarratives. The basic attitude of postmodernists was skepticism about the claims of


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these metanarratives to offer a kind of overall, totalizing explanation. They felt that an

intellectuals task was to resist these metanarratives, and any kind of consensus or

collusion was suspect. Postmodernists responded to metanarratives by siding with those

who didnt fit into the larger stories the subordinated and the marginalized. This

heralded a pluralist age, in which, as we can see, even the arguments of scientists and

historians are to seen as no more than quasi-narratives which compete with all the

others for acceptance in other words critiquing the enlightenment. They are just like

any other theory.

Much significant postmodernist writing has therefore turned on articulating this

kind of skepticism- for example- Edward Said in his orientalism attempted to show the

distorting effects of the projection of the western grand narrative of imperialism upon

oriental societies. One of the foremost anti- modern (if not postmodern) Indian thinkers

of our times has been Ashis Nandy. According to him, Modern colonialism won its great

victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its

ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.

Metanarratives see the world in black and white. To quote Ashis Nandy,

As this century with its bloodstained record draws to a close, the nineteenth century

dream of one world has re-emerged, this time as a nightmare. It haunts us with the prospect of

a fully homogenized, technologically controlled, absolutely hierarchized world, defined by

polarities like the modern and the primitive, the secular and the non-secular, the scientific and

the unscientific, the expert and the layman, the normal and the abnormal, the developed and

the underdeveloped, the vanguard and the led, the liberated and the savable.4

The western grand narratives saw themselves to be rational, ordered, peaceful

and defined the Orient as the opposite of this just like EM Forsters saw India in hisA

Passage to India and always had the confidence that that is representation of them

would prevail. The grand imperial story of progressive development was superimposedon a merely local and deviant Oriental practice.

4THE INTIMATE ENEMY-Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Pg 10


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Deconstruction Playing with the text

The central argument for deconstruction depends on relativism, which essentially views

that truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing

intellectual frameworks of the judging object. Hence a deconstructor doesnt have adefinite philosophical thesis. Indeed, to attempt to define deconstruction is to defy

another of its main principles which is to deny that final or true definitions are

possible, because even the most plausible candidates will always invite a further

defining move, or play with the language. For the deconstructor, the relationship of

language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all language systems are

inherently unreliable cultural constructs.

As Barthes put it:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning

(the message of the Author God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of

writings, none of them original, blend and clash Literature by refusing to assign a secret,

an ultimate meaning, to the text, (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an

anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is

in the end to refuse God and his hypostasis reason, science, law.5

Homi Bhabhas Post-colonialism

The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to

conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the

diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. It is the

inbetween space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third

Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Congruent with postmodern understanding of power/knowledge and in keeping

with other streams in postcolonial studies (especially that associated with Edward Said),

Bhabha seeks to understand the formation of colonial knowledge as emerging out of the

asymmetric and power-laden encounter between the colonizers and colonized, and as

5IMAGE- MUSIC- TEXT 1977 The Death of the Author.


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serving to naturalize and legitimize the colonizers domination (Bhabha, 1994a).

However, diverging from the Saidian tradition, Bhabha does not limit his analysis to the

accumulation of Western knowledge about the Other but, rather, seeks to analyze the

implementation of ostensibly universal Western knowledge in the colonies. Bhabha

refers to the colonial discourse surrounding the transfer of the metropoles knowledge

into the colonies as the discourse of mimicry. (Frenkel, 2008)

Discussion Papers in the light of the above theories:

Calas and Smircich (1999) examine the impact of postmodernism and

poststructuralism on organization studies. Their explanation of the genealogical analysis

and deconstruction with examples using this approach helps familiarize these theories

to scholars in organizational studies. To cite one such example,

For instance, one may ask, "What do a prison observation tower and total quality

management (TQM) practices have to do with one another?" (e.g., Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992).

Or, one may ask, "What does a population census have to do with HRM practices?" (e.g.,

Townley, 1993). In both cases one may answer that the prison's tower and the census have

contributed to the appearance of a particular kind of contemporary subjectivity. It is only

because we, in our society, take for granted such understanding of "self" that it is conceivable

to us that there is anything normal about HRM or TQM.

Frenkel (2008) adopts a postcolonial perspective based on the work of Bhabha

(1990) on management discourse in cross-national knowledge transfer within MNCs.

Her critical theoretical analysis reveals how this discourse is more complex than usually

assumedinvolving mimicry, hybridity, and the third space (in-between the

colonizer and the colonized). Post-colonial studies stress the significance of unequal

power relations to understand the transmission of knowledge and culture For example,

the colonized are encouraged to mimic the colonizers practices for their own good, to

adopt a purer form of a given practice. However, through adaptation of mimicked

practices and by selection of only some areas of mimicry, the colonized are able to enact

the creativity involved in moving among various cultural frameworks and in resisting

the colonizer by disrupting its imposed knowledge and practices.6 The dynamic hybrid

6http://isb.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/29/0266242611404261.full.pdf+html


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culture that emerges from such creative disruption, such iterative reinterpretations,

enacts a third space, a space of the in-between. This paper also can make us think on

multinational acquisitions and mergers.


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References

Bhabha, H. K. 1990. Nation and narration. London & New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. K. (Ed.). 1994a. The location of culture. London & New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. K. 1994b. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. In H.

K. Bhabha (Ed.), The location of culture: 8592. London & New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, H. K. 1994c. DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern

nation. In H. K. Bhabha (Ed.), The location of culture: 139170. London & New York:

Routledge.

Derrida, J. 1974. Of grammatoJogy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage

Lyotard, J.-F. 1979. (1984 English translation.) The postmodern condition; A report on

fcnowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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