"Critical theory" and war

I found this academic news story interesting: Judith Butler: Thinking critically about war by Carol Ness Berkleyan 04/02/09. Judith Butler is a professor at the Univeristy of California-Berkeley in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, and is described in the article as a philosopher. The latter designation presumably owes in large part to her 1990 book Gender Trouble. She just received a $1.5 million award from the Mellon Foundation, which she plan to use to set up a program called "Thinking Critically About War".

Her "thinking critically" concept refers in this case to "critical theory", the general body of philosophical, political and sociological thinking first developed by the Frankfurt School. She hopes to build on that project to persuade the University to set up a permanent Critical Theory Institute, but that's a longer-term project.

Ness reports on her vision for the Thinking Critically About War project:

The last decade has been rife with examples of the stifling of dissent by the powerful, be they institutions (like government and media) or individuals (like a university president), Butler says. And that raises important questions for public intellectuals like herself.

Among the most potent examples came after 9/11. The government and media decided in concert that the lives of the people killed in the twin towers could be openly mourned, Butler contends, while the lives of those killed when the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq could not. Americans who criticized U.S. policy, who grieved Iraqi and Afghan losses along with America's, were called traitors.

"In the last years, we've had a whole question of what's the status of dissent within contemporary society," Butler says.

Simply interrogating the boundary between what's considered an acceptable viewpoint and what's not is risky — but it's essential, Butler argues, and Berkeley's interdisciplinary program in critical theory, a designated emphasis for graduate students in the humanities, was created for the task. It aims to develop a "critique" — not necessarily negative or positive, but an understanding — of the social structures behind politics, the arts, religion, and daily life.

Her article also includes a sidebar with definitions of "critical theory", including this one from the University's Townsend Center for the Humanities:

[T]he Frankfurt School intellectuals … established ... a form of social theory that was philosophically informed and also critically engaged with its own historic time ... a successor to the philosophical 'critique' that had defined the European Enlightenment. 'Critique' thus became an operation of a highly reflective consideration of society, offering ways to configure social life along alternative trajectories. Critical Theory sought to understand the social organization of politics, the arts, and ordinary ways of life, in order to imagine alternative social formations and to establish the grounds on which to dispute the value of some existing social forms, especially totalitarian and fascist socio-political regimes....The notion of critique forms a central component of any conception of the humanities and the social sciences committed, regardless of the pressure of the times, to safeguarding thoughtful, open, and grounded inquiry and debate on prevailing norms and values.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school