Befriending the Critical Voice
Reading the very lovely Michael Newman from that profound source infed this morning. He makes a strong case for a renewed emphasis on critical theory.
Michael is primarily directing his words to a group of Adult Education academics in this context, just last year. Through these ‘meta-meta-professionals’ he is in turn addressing a much wider audience.
By looking back on the work of people like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (I will be following up on Dialectic of Enlightenment), Michael is nostalgic for:
“a state of mind and a stance of constant and continual critique. Nothing was to be taken for granted. No utterance was to remain unexamined. It promoted the kind of positive scepticism which could enable us to withstand the doomsayers, the mean-spirited, the manipulators, the malign and the propagandists who might otherwise force us to think in the way they wanted us to. Critical theory helped us combat a Gramscian kind of hegemony. It helped us resist being hoodwinked. It helped us see through the people, ourselves included. It enabled us to make up our own minds.”
These words are more important now than ever before. Individuals, communities and ecosystems face a perilous future, while governments and corporations continue to manipulate the agenda in support of their own short-term vision of greed.
The last decade of my life, primarily as an activist, was spent working as an antidote to their propaganda. The reasons why I thought I could and should attempt this go way back, and other entries touch on themes of an emerging social and environmental consciousness, and emancipation, planted in the womb and nurtured in the family, schooling (eg. Lance Holt) and the wider context.
Having a critical faculty, a ‘positive scepticism’ (I like that) was encouraged from a young age.
Looking specifically at Critical Theory in a formal context, I was 17 when I embarked on a course called Structure, Thought & Reality at Murdoch University.
Searching for information on this foundational course at a university cut from similar cloth to Sussex, I am not surprised to find the course description”
“In this unit you will be asked to think differently about reality. Rather than taking reality to be natural or objective, we will treat it as social or subjective. When we think of reality in this way, we start to understand “truth” and “knowledge” in a very different light.
After considering reasons to treat reality as social or subjective, we apply this view of reality to topics including: human sexuality, childhood, death, virtual reality, God and the war on terror.”
It was a grand and often frustrating adventure for such a young, freedom loving person. While my mind was finding ways, in the longer term, to be free, it was hard to still be institutionalised after so many years of formal education.
At 19, I was looking for a less abstract path and a financial way to freedom (read: employment) and began studies in Media and Communication theory and practice. This then led to a highly engaging strategic framework that would make use of practical communications (writing, journalism, stakeholder relations, film making etc) along the way, if not a cohesive philosophical one, called Public Relations. Not ‘PR’, sweety. Not by a long shot.
The development of my early career in strategic stakeholder relations as I prefer to refer to is, will need to be elaborated on. But let’s move on to a vital juncture.
I remember a key moment during the beginning of my course in Critical Film Analysis, where we were asked to stop just consuming the tasty film we were viewing, to STOP ‘willingly suspending our disbelief’ in the darkened womb of the cinema - and to start engaging critically.
My world was shattered. I could not see a way to continue my deep love of immersion into the screen, the ‘text’, any text, the moment, while also fulfilling a critical function. I could not yet conceive of both processes running in parallel, indeed in conversation within me.
Yet within days, this turning point in learning just happened. From then on, the immersion, the deep engagement with ephemera could happen at the same time as the internal (eternal?) conversation. I was no longer one of the other. They were voices, in a way, I could turn up or down.
….
So I had a very good idea of how to ‘manipulate’ the masses and indeed individuals from a young age. I worked and saw deep inside the ‘belly of the beast’, and indeed my own beast. And I did not like what I saw.
At 26 I decided to have an early ‘mid-life crisis’, out of which a more integrated and authentic self emerged.
A future entry will reference the importance of Thomas Moore, Matthew Fox and Michael Leunig.
L