Power, Emancipation, and Complexity: Employing Critical Theory

Critical theory, if nothing else, is a moral construct designed to reduce human suffering in the world. In the critical theoretical context, every individual is granted dignity regardless of his or her location in the web of reality. Thus, the continuation of human suffering by conscious human decision is a morally unacceptable behavior that must be analyzed, interpreted and changed. In this context the genesis of this type of decision-making process is uncovered and new ways of thinking that would negate such activity are sought. As critical theorists have engaged in this process, they have come to describe a set of practices that contribute to forms of decision making that perpetuate human suffering. This article focuses on a few of these dynamics in order to situate the moral dimensions of a twenty-first-century reconceptualized critical theory. The authors' notion of critical theory is described as ‘reconceptualized’ in that it is more sensitive to modes of domination that involve race and gender and to the complexity of lived experience than in the Frankfurt School's original articulation of the notion in the 1920s in Germany. It is also informed by what they describe as the theoretical bricolage, which infuses numerous theoretical advances formulated in the eight decades since the inception of critical theory.