Will Critique Destroy Us?

 I admit an attraction to anarchy - more of a Noam Chomsky variety, than the let's blow everything up sort - yet I do not think humanity is ready for anarcho-syndicalism. Reading Malloy Owen's From Frankfurt to Fox The Strange Career of Critical Theory leaves me thinking critical thinking is a beast devouring itself.

 These days the attacks are coming from all sides, and nothing is safe. Everyone hopes that to steer close enough to the void to escape the painful sacrifices imposed by the common life we already have, and everyone hopes that one’s own private ideals can be preserved from deconstruction. The Frankfurt School was modestly successful in pulling off that trick: It managed to dissolve some of the categories it rejected without destroying the possibility of faith in the redeemable ideals of the Enlightenment. As more and more warring groups take up the methods of critique, however, it remains to be seen whether critical theory itself can continue to navigate safely between Habermasian mildness and Foucauldian fury. As a style, critical theory is in many ways a rational response to the massive accumulation of mechanisms of power over the past century. But the more it is taken up by groups in whose hands it becomes a destructive force, the less we will have to build on if, against all odds, we ever again find ourselves in a position to establish forms of life and order beyond the dominion of the machine.

sch 3/17