(NeMLA 2023) Using Theory in Times of Crisis: The Frankfurt School in the 21st Century
“Critical theory,” Hortense Spillers has written, “witnesses its most impressive moments of efflorescence in times of crisis”. Yet classical critical theory’s analyses of consumer society, of totalitarianism, of the public sphere, and of culture, were predicated on a wholly different set of crises to those which ‘we’ are now experiencing. Under today’s drastically different conditions of cultural and material production, what tools can critical theory offer for grappling with ‘our current moment’?