This is a sort of footnote diary, for clarification. I wrote three pieces on "popular music in the Sixties and Seventies: brief critical theory." They were fun to write, but I wasn't sure that regular readers of C99% liked them or were merely pissed off. Should I continue?

The term "critical theory" was initially coined by what was called the "Frankfurt School," a research institute in Frankfurt in Germany which took a specifically not-so-Marxist direction when it was taken over by an individual named Max Horkheimer soon before Hitler took over Germany. Horkheimer and his primary associate Theodor Adorno then continued their thread of philosophic thought in Oxford, New York, and Los Angeles when they lived in exile from Hitler's regime. And then, afterward, "critical theory" continued further when those two individuals moved back to Frankfurt after the war.

There seems to be a bit of confusion of what critical theory is. Part of this confusion is being spread by the general chorus of CPAC pseudo-intellectual writers who argue that Horkheimer and Adorno were merely intent upon the overthrow of the West. Horkheimer, dabblers in actual history may remember, supported the US "effort" against the government in northern Vietnam in the Sixties. I've read and researched plenty of the aforementioned CPAC pseudo-intellectuals, and can discuss them at length if you want, but honestly, doing such work is like compiling an encyclopedia of jive.

As I suggested in the comments section of the last diary, critical theory is something very general:

Perhaps the best definition is offered by Hans Kundnani, author of Utopia or Auschwitz, and here I'm paraphrasing: being a critical theorist means being an anticapitalist while at the same time recognizing that no meaningful alternative to capitalism exists in this time and place.

And then you have the definition favored by literary theorists: critical theory is theory for literary critics. For such people, critical theory is primarily French theory -- Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, and so on. Jonathan Culler wrote some readable books about this crowd. The main point of this version of critical theory is to help graduate students get doctoral degrees (and, eventually, tenure) in English and other language studies. Their professional association is the Modern Language Association, the MLA. I've attended an MLA convention. It featured a lot of wine and cheese and the bright lights of San Francisco.

Now, if you read something like Horkheimer's essay "Traditional and Critical Theory," you have something rather opaque, and so for instance in Wikipedia you have this very nice summary (which is nonetheless a problem because everything in Wikipedia is temporary and anonymous):

The core concepts of critical theory are that it should:
be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e., how it came to be configured at a specific point in time)
improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences

So that can be a lot of different ways of thinking, as long as such thinking is (for lack of a better word) omnivorous. Or, more politely: critical theory prides itself in taking everything relevant into account. One thing it can't be is something like mainstream economics, which attempt to separate out buying and selling from everything else happening in the world to analyze only that. But, otherwise, it can be a lot of things.

So why is it called "critical theory"? Well, the readers of that stuff (German philosophy), in that time (the 20th century), were hypersensitive to the words of Karl Marx, and so thinking of Marx they perhaps recalled a famous letter of 1843 written by the twenty-something Karl Marx. This was five years before the Communist Manifesto, at a time when Marx was still trying on philosophies (like you or I would try on shoes in a department store) to see what would fit him. At any point, the important passage in this letter read:

it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

So that was the point of having an idea like "critical theory" -- ruthless criticism. So, fundamentally, critical theory is a style. Or, maybe more specifically, critical theory attempts to use style against those who would use style merely as vacuous consumer fashion. So terrifying.