Revisiting Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

We were optimistically mistaken to think that the work of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory was accomplished by the end of the twentieth century. The flaws of the liberal-modernist state with its economic system of market capitalism were laid bare by the time the global Great Recession of 2008–2012 was in full view. If the Habermasian attempt to reconcile old concerns with contemporary discursive options seemed reasonable—replacing the instrumental with the communicative rationality of the decades of prosperity in the Europe-American axis—by now we realize that more is needed to ensure a path toward any kind of radical change that offers some modicum of human dignity or even economic (if not social and political) emancipation, personal or communal. Are the messianic dreams of emancipation still valid by the twenty-first century? In what follows, Andrew Feenberg’s contribution of Critical Theory in general and the philosophy of technology in particular are reviewed so as to shift the discussion to a postmodern fold. As will be seen, the classical immanent critiques of technoscience have to be modulated for the Digital Age, given the different material conditions of the time and the financial and institutional contexts within which they are debated. One must concede, though, that the original Marxist-laden terminology of the Frankfurt School all the way to its Americanized permutation in the hands of Herbert Marcuse and his student Andrew Feenberg are still relevant in the postcapitalist age.