Critical Theory and Postmodernism

Abstract

In this chapter I explore the contemporary postmodernist challenge to Critical Theory via two of its leading protagonists, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. First, with regard to Baudrillard, I shall compare his account of the elimination of the subject as an active agent in mass society with that of Marcuse and Adorno. Using the concept of human need, I shall show that Critical Theory retains an important sense of the reality of the subject; something notably absent from Baudrillard’s work. Secondly, I shall examine in detail the counter-challenge to postmodernism brought by Habermas in his essay ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’. In this, he reminds us that the hopes generated at the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment for human progress and emancipation have not been fulfilled, but that this is no reason to reject the whole project, as postmodernists do. Postmodernism’s failure lies in its over emphasis on the importance of the aesthetic sphere at the expense of other systemic factors which play an equally influential part in our lives. I shall then consider the work of Lyotard who regards our grand modernist ‘stories’ or ‘metanarratives’, such as ‘progress’ and ‘emancipation’, as illusions, concluding that Lyotard has misunderstood Habermas’s claims and that if we have hopes that social science might contribute to a more rational future, we should look to Critical Theory for illumination.