Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture

In his renowned 1937 programmatic article “Traditionelle and Kritische Theorie” [Traditional and critical theory], Max Horkheimer (1974 [1937], 223-71) established a distinction between two conceptions of “theory.” The first of them refers to a series of propositions whose validity lies in its correspondence with an object already constituted prior to the act of representation. This radical separation between subject and object of knowledge converts theory into a pure activity of thought, and the theorist into a disinterested spectator who is limited to describing the world as it is. Such an idea of theory, which considers the object of study to be a series of facticities and the subject to be the passive element of an act of knowing, is identified by Horkheimer as “traditional.” In opposition to this theory, he describes a second model that he designates “critical theory.” In contrast to traditional theory, critical theory considers that both science and the reality it studies are the product of a social praxis, which means that the subject and object of knowledge find themselves socially performed. The object is not simply “there,” deposited before us and waiting to be apprehended, nor is the subject merely the notary of reality. Both subject and object are the result of complex social processes. The fundamental task of critical theory is therefore to reflect upon the structures from which both social reality as well as the theories that seek to account for it are constructed—including, of course, critical theory itself.

Even when Horkheimer’s project was conceived as a tool in the struggle against the positivism of his time, it could, it seems to me, be very useful for drawing up a map of modern theories on culture. I will argue that such theories can be divided into two basic groups: Those that perceive culture as “natural facticity,” that is, that approach their object as if it were rooted in “human nature”; and those that, on the contrary, consider culture to be a realm structured by praxis, that is, a social construction of which theoretical practice itself is a part. Following Horkheimer, I will call the first group the traditional theory of culture and the second the critical theory of culture. In what follows, I will identify some characteristic elements of traditional theory and then contrast these with the concept of “geoculture” developed by postcolonial theories. With this I propose to present postcolonialism as a critical theory of culture in times of globalization or, parodying Fredric Jameson’s phrase, as a “cultural critique of late capitalism.”

The Metaphysics of the Subject and the Traditional
Concept of Culture

Any consideration of the traditional theory of culture should begin with the following epistemological reflection: Culture becomes the object of knowledge only when man constitutes himself as a subject of history. The concepts of “culture,” “history,” “subject,” and “man” refer to the same genealogical root, which, chronologically speaking, emerged and consolidated itself between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before this era, something like “culture” was not thinkable, simply because the episteme that made the concept’s formation possible had not yet been configured. If we limit ourselves solely to the types of theories arisen in the West, we will see that neither in Greece nor Rome, nor in the Christian Middle Ages, was a theory of culture possible in its traditional, much less critical, sense. This was due to the fact that morals, politics, and knowledge were viewed as simple prolongations of cosmological laws, that is, as a set of natural institutions ordered around the consummation of a cosmologically predetermined end (telos).

For Aristotle, truth, goodness, and justice are impossible without considering the “basic principles” which govern the cosmos, because the purpose of science, legislation, and morals is to manifest “being insofar as being,” that is, the natural order such as it is and not as it appears. For Aristotle, the reflection on the social life of men does not pertain to...