Theory is at its weakest and most oppressive when it supports a commonsense understanding of the framing mechanisms that guide the actions of human beings. One consequence is that it disavows dialogue and critique, and shapes knowledge and ideas into fixed and absolute meanings. It also shuts down analysis and poisons the culture with an orthodoxy that limits critical agency to following the orders of others. As such, it is transformed into a pedagogical parasite on the body of democracy. This is quite different than a call for theory and critical thought that practice rigorous analytic work enabling students, intellectuals, artists, and journalists to be attentive to how they function as individual and social agents. Bad theory is also at fault for failing to address and engage the layered, complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape not only our desires, values, and modes of identification, but also guide, direct, and the commanding ideologies and institutions of society. As a form of intellectual inquiry, theory thrives in those public spaces that both legitimate the world of ideas and refuse to separate them from addressing the major troubles of our time. At the same time, it is an important register, if not reminder in such perilous times, for determining as Judith Butler observes, “not only the question of whether certain kinds of ideas and positions can be permitted in public space, but how public space is itself defined by certain kinds of exclusions, certain emerging patterns of censoriousness and censorship.” Rather than being a mechanistic enterprise, offering formulas and recipes, theory should provide the frameworks and tools for what it means to be a thoughtful, judicious, layered, complex and critical thinker willing to engage in communicative and collective action. Theory does not resemble the discourse of blind action, a stripped down instrumental rationality, or the vision of accountants. Nor, in this instance, does theory become an end in itself, an ossified discourse that defines itself to the degree to which it is removed itself from the world and vanishes in a black hole of irrelevancy and opaqueness. Theory as a critical enterprise is about both a search for the truth and a commitment to the practice of freedom. Not one or the other but both. Theory should be used to both understand and engage the major upheavals people face and to connect such problems to larger political, structural, and economic issues. In addition, theory is invaluable as a response to particular problems, allowing intellectuals, artists, academics, students, and others to connect their intellectual work and critical inquiries to the daily realities and struggles of a world in upheaval, one that is moving quickly into the clutches of a new type of authoritarianism. America has moved a great distance away from the critical theories of thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Ellen Willis, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. At the current historical moment, critical thinking is utterly devalued, viewed either as a nostalgic leftover of the weighty ideological and political battles that characterized the period roughly extending from the 1960s to the late 1980s or theory is dismissed as the province of overly privileged and pampered academics. Critical ideas and concepts in support of a equality, justice, freedom, and democracy, in particular, have lost their material and political grounding and have become sound bites either scorned by mainstream politicians or appropriated only to be turned into their opposite. Unfortunately for the promise of democracy, those who advocate theory and critical thought in the service of civic courage, engaged citizenship, and social responsibility are now either viewed as eggheads, elitist, or traitors. In this instance, theory is disdained and used as a form of self-sabotage, reduced to politically illiterate narratives couched in the discourse of critical thinking. How else to explain the disingenuous portrayal in the mainstream press of George Will, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks as public intellectuals, despite the fact that they trade in a kind of ersatz theory. In the latter case, theory becomes a weapon used to empty language of any meaning, employed primarily to make war on the possibility of real communication, all the while reinforcing the ideology of demagogues. If theory once inspired critical practice both in and out of the university, it seems that the heyday of critically informed thinking is over. As higher education has become corporatized, teaching and learning are increasingly defined through the metrics of commerce and profit while students are viewed largely as consumers. Critical thought and dangerous thinking is now viewed as beyond the pale of market considerations and thereby is seen as having little value. This is particularly true since the radical right has not only taken seriously the notion that pedagogy and changing consciousness is the essence of politics, but also have developed cultural apparatuses outside of the university that function as powerful forms of public pedagogy in promoting the values of a number of fundamentalisms, including religious, educational, and market-driven ideologies. Culture for the right-wing has always been a crucial site of power in the modern world and they have used this machinery of public pedagogy to create market-addicted subjects who appear hopelessly captive to the illiterate ideologies and slogans pumped out of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and the editorial section of the Wall Street Journal. Ideas matter in this instance, but not in the service of freedom or justice. Sound bites now pass for erudite commentary and merge with the banality of celebrity culture which produces its own self-serving illiteracy and cult of privatization and consumerism. Moreover, as the power of communication and language wanes, collapsing into the seepage of hateful discourses, the eager cheerleaders of casino capitalism along with the ever-present anti-public intellectuals dominate the airwaves and screen culture in order to aggressively wage a war against all public institutions, youth, women, immigrants, unions, poor minorities, the homeless, gays, workers, the unemployed, poor children, and others. In this instance, thinking degenerates into forms of ideological boosterism and the crucial potential of thinking to serve as a dynamic resource disappears from the American cultural and academic landscapes. When thinking itself becomes dangerous, society loses its ability to question itself and paves the way authoritarian regimes of power. The success of conservatives in colonizing, if not undermining, any model of critical reflection often takes place by reducing thought to a matter of commonsense while supporting rampant forms of anti-intellectualism—most evident in the Republican Party’s recent war on evidence-based arguments, science, and reason itself. At the same time, the success on the part of right-wing ideologues, conservative foundations, and anti-public intellectuals to shape domestic and foreign policy and gain the support of most Americans for doing so speaks to a roundly successful pedagogical and political strategy to manipulate public opinion while legitimating the rise of an authoritarian. At the least, this war on reason and politics raises serious questions about the failure of the academy to counter such views. In particular, it raises questions about the alienating nature of what passes for critical thought, theory, and informed commentary in the academy. Moreover, the issue here is not weather critical intellectuals can use theory to solve the myriad problems facing the United States and the larger world, but what role critical thought plays in various sites as crucial to developing the formative culture that produces critical modes of agency and makes democracy possible. Your support matters…

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#capitalism#critical thinking#education#henry giroux#neoliberal