Traditional vs. Critical Cultural Theory

In his well-known programmatic article of 1937, Horkheimer established a distinction between two different concepts of "theory." ¹ The first refers to a set of propositions whose legitimacy lies in their correspondence to an object already formed prior to the act of its representation. This radical separation between the subject and the object of cognition turns theory into an act of pure thought and the theoretician into an unbiased spectator who limits himself to describing the world "as it is." This notion of theory, which considers the object under examination as a set of facts and the subject as a passive element in the act of cognition, is identified by Horkheimer as "traditional." In contrast to this notion, he distinguishes a second one, which he calls "critical theory." Unlike traditional theory, Critical Theory assumes that both science and the reality it studies are a product of social praxis, which means that the subject and the object of cognition are socially preformed. The object is not just there in front of us, waiting to be apprehended, nor is the subject a simple recorder of reality. Both subject and object are the result of very complex social processes, and therefore the main task of Critical Theory is to reflect upon the structures from which social reality and the theories that seek to explain it, including, of course, Critical Theory itself, are constructed.

Despite having been conceived as a weapon against the positivism of his time, I believe that Horkheimer's initial program could be very useful to draw a map of modern theories about culture. I will propose that such theories may be divided into two main groups: those that regard culture as a natural fact, meaning that they approach their object as if it were anchored in human nature, and, on the contrary, those that consider culture as something structured by praxis, in other words, as a social construct that includes the praxis of theory itself. Following Horkheimer, I will refer to the first group as "traditional theory," and to the second as "Critical Theory." I will identify some characteristic components of "traditional theory" and will attempt to contrast them with the concept of geoculture as developed by postcolonial theory. I thereby intend to present postcolonialism as a Critical Theory of culture in the time of globalization or, rephrasing Jameson's dictum, as a cultural critique of late capitalism.

The Metaphysics of the Subject and the Traditional Concept of Culture

A study of traditional cultural theory should start with the following epistemological consideration: culture becomes an "object" of cognition only from the point at which "man" has established himself as the "subject" of "history." The meanings of "culture," "history," "subject," and "man" share a common genealogical root that emerges and consolidates itself between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that time, culture was not a "thinkable" notion, simply because the episteme that allowed for the emergence of such a concept had not yet been configured. If we limit our inquiry to the theories that arose in the West, we will find that neither in Greece nor in Rome, nor in the Christian Middle Ages, was it possible for a theory of culture to arise in what I call its traditional form, much less in its critical one. This was due to the fact that ethics, politics, and knowledge were seen as simple extensions of the laws of the cosmos, that is, as a set of natural institutions arranged toward the fulfillment of a cosmologically predetermined end.

To Aristotle, truth, goodness, and justice become impossible without considering the "first principles" that govern the cosmos, since science, legislation, and ethics fulfill the purpose of revealing the being as being, i.e., the natural order as it really is and not as it appears. Aristotle did not consider speculative thought as belonging to the theoretical sciences (which deal only with the "first principles" of...