Re-imagining critique in cultural sociology

Critique and judgment were once regarded as the distinguishing features of an emancipatory social science, yet their role in the study of culture has become particularly contested in recent years. The growth of identity-based politics and the proliferation of new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, and the accompanying cultural turn within social theory, highlighted the analytical and ethical limitations of the authoritative knowledge claims that are often associated with critique. Recognition of cultural difference, now widely regarded as crucial for advancing claims for social equality and analyzing many aspects of social life, challenged universal conceptions of human freedom, including those that had been the basis of an earlier generation of critical theory. The crisis and collapse of Soviet socialism during this period seemed only to mirror the exhaustion with Marxist conceptions of domination and liberation that had been central underpinnings of both normative social critique and struggles for social justice. Within cultural sociology, these developments opened up the field to a rich exploration of cultural practices across a wide range of social and cultural groups, many of which were not previously recognized as “legitimate” culture or legitimate subjects of cultural study. This “democratization” of both the culture concept and its analysis seemed to favor interpretive over critical methodologies. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, there was a strong “discourse of suspicion” in the field towards any normative claims that linked culture specifically to the expansion or denial of human freedom, beyond the basic theoretical observation that in practice it may do both (Reed 2007: 12). However, although cultural sociologists may have become disenchanted with critical

theory, culture itself is not yet “post-critical.” During this same period, culture has become an “arena of intense political controversy” (Benhabib 2002: 1). From identityfocused struggles for political recognition and human rights to debates about localized cultural practices such as female genital cutting; from the symbolic mediation of terrorism to the political force of narratives about a geopolitical “clash of civilizations,” both critiques of culture and cultures of critique proliferate in everyday social practice (BuckMorss 2003; Calhoun et al. 2002; Eisenstein 2004; Fraser and Honneth 2003), and the

future and possibility of critical judgment in global political life have become matters of theoretical concern (Couzens-Hoy 2004; Duncombe 2002; Pensky 2005). Within the global North, social critics have also expressed concern that the autonomy of culture is being increasingly weakened through the criminalization of political dissent, the closing down of democratic public spaces and activities, and the commercialization of artistic production in a “new cultural environment” shaped as much by the economic and political centralization of cultural production as by the postmodern disarticulation of social meaning (Bourdieu 2003; Kellner 2002; Wolf 2007). The tension between a widespread disavowal of critique in cultural sociology and the

persistence of critical judgment in cultural life raises several questions for sociologists. Can, and should, normative judgment be an integral part of a fully articulated approach to culture, one which values in equal measure the interpretation of meaning, its normative evaluation, and its relation to action in the social world? Does sociology best fulfill its “democratic imperative” (Reed 2007: 12) by renouncing critical theories of culture, or can the normative practices of critique and judgment be reconceptualized and renewed to pursue democratic goals of dialogue, interpretation, and an empathetic “ethic of engagement” with others (Kompridis 2005, 2006)? Cultural sociologists have answered these questions in part by highlighting the analytical and ethical dangers of deterministic approaches, which preclude dialogue and close down interpretive processes. However, they have also concluded that critical theories of culture inherently do the same things, thus leaving little scope for exploring how and why normative analysis is important for making sense of the complex relationship between culture and politics, on the one hand, and for orienting our action with others in the world, on the other. Here, we offer an alternative perspective: that critical theory-including, and indeed

particularly that within the Frankfurt School tradition-offers important insights for combining deep interpretations of meaning-making practices (which are essential for cultural understanding) with their normative evaluation, which is a necessary element of critical participation in political life. First, rather than essentializing critique as elitist and interpretation as democratic, critical theory demands that we continually problematize how particular forms of knowledge-including critique, judgment, and imaginationare legitimized or marginalized in practice. It therefore opens up new lines of reflective inquiry into the role of critique as a cultural practice. Second, although critical theorists regard autonomous culture as a potential space of freedom and possibility, they also argue that cultural autonomy must be understood as a political problematic rather than a social fact. In other words, while we may “uncoupl[e] culture from social structure” for analytical purposes and recognize its centrality in shaping actions and institutions (Alexander and Smith 2004: 13), we cannot overlook its relationship to the political and economic logics that have consequences for meaning-making and expressive action. Finally, in contrast with deterministic approaches to critique, critical theory challenges positivistic epistemologies in which knowledge is created in order to arrive at a single, absolute, empirical truth. It points to the limitations of claims to “total” knowledge, suggesting that it is difficult to develop rich understandings of cultural action without attention to other modes of understanding such as aesthetics, affect, and imagination. Although these insights are developed in various ways throughout various feminist,

postcolonial, and post-structuralist forms of critical theory, their clear articulation within the Frankfurt School tradition-some of which prefigures the later developmentsmakes this body of work an important point of reference for contemporary cultural sociologists. Before examining what critical theory has to offer, however, we want

to discuss its current status within cultural sociology, and to explain how critique has come to be interpreted as antithetical to culture, rather than as a cultural practice in its own right.