Critical inquiry today

Critical forms of research call current ideology into question, and initiate action, in the cause of social justice. In the type of inquiry spawned by the critical spirit, researchers find themselves interrogating commonly held values and assumptions, challenging conventional social structures, and engaging in social action.

Fuelling this enterprise is an abiding concern with issues of power and oppression. Critical inquiry keeps the spodight on power relationships within society so as to expose the forces of hegemony and injustice. It is at all times alive to the contribution that false consciousness makes to oppression and manipulation and invites researchers and participants (ideally one and the same) to discard false consciousness, open themselves to new ways of understanding, and take effective action for change.

Critical inquiry cannot be viewed as a discrete piece of action that achieves its objectives and comes to a close. With every action taken, the context changes and we must critique our assumptions again. Viewed in this way, critical inquiry emerges as an ongoing project. It is a cyclical process (better seen, perhaps, as a spiralling process for there is movement forward and upward) of reflection and action.

The goals of critical inquiry—the just society, freedom, equity—may appear Utopian. Nevertheless, while critical inquirers admit the impossibility of effecting consummate social justice, they believe their struggle to be worthwhile. It can lead at least to a more just and freer society than we have at the moment.

Kincheloe and McLaren (1994, pp. 139-40) offer us a picture of ‘criticalist’ researchers and theorists. They believe that criticalists, people who use their work as a form of social or cultural criticism, accept these basic assumptions:

• that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are social in nature and historically constituted;
• that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from ideological inscription;
• that the relationship between concept and object, and between signifier and signified, is never stable and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption;
• that language is central to the formation of subjectivity, that is, both conscious and unconscious awareness;
• that certain groups in any society are privileged over others, constituting an oppression that is most forceful when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary or inevitable;
• that oppression has many faces, and concern for only one form of oppression at the expense of others can be counterproductive because of the connections between them;
• that mainstream research practices are generally implicated, albeit often unwittingly, in the reproduction of systems of class, race and gender oppression.

Of obvious and, indeed, primary concern to critical theorists are dominative relationships. Critical inquiry illuminates the relationship between power and culture and, in this picture of things, culture comes to be looked upon with a good measure of suspicion. For most of our civilised past it has not been seen in this light. In fact, culture has tended to be canonised. Marcuse (1968) points out how, from Plato on, culture is seen as a realm apart from the nitty gritty of social life and material necessity. The ancients were honest enough about this. They accepted (‘with good conscience’, Marcuse says) that most people had to spend their lives providing for material necessities while a smaller number could devote themselves to enjoyment and truth. In this view, culture was at least able to act as the critic of society, society coming to be seen as an imperfect and inferior mode of existence with ‘culture’ upholding the ideal.

This ‘good conscience’, according to Marcuse, disappears with the emergence of capitalism. Bourgeois society transforms culture into a matter of the ‘soul’, the inner self, setting up a dichotomy between ‘the real and the ideal, the transitory and the permanent, the material and the meaningful, the outer world of ugly fact and an inner world of harmony called the soul’ (Brenkman 1987, p. 6). Strangely, the one now becomes the justification for the other. Instead of challenging and condemning the visible world of society, culture becomes a justification of it and an apologia for it. It becomes, in Marcuse’s term, ‘affirmative’. We can now play down the fact that so many people are excluded from the earth’s material riches because, it is claimed, they all have equal access to the richness of culture. This, Marcuse tells us, is ‘the thesis of the universality and the universal validity of “culture”’ (Marcuse 1968, p. 93). Meaning, value, truth—they are there, without discrimination, for all who want them. In this fashion, affirmative culture ‘exonerated external conditions from responsibility for the “vocation of man”, thus stabilizing their injustice’ (1968, p. 120).

In contradistinction to this view of culture as affirmative is the recognition by critical inquirers that culture is not a realm apart from the give-and-take of everyday society but mirrors its contradictions and oppressions. More than once we have recalled Marx’s tenet: social being determines consciousness, not the other way round. Consequendy, the Violence that founded and continues through our social history is also a violence against consciousness’ (Brenkman 1987, p. 4).

This is why criticalists cannot share the unalloyed confidence interpretivists tend to place in accounts of experience turned up by their research. Where most interpretivists today embrace such accounts as descriptions of authentic ‘lived experience’, critical researchers hear in them the voice of an inherited tradition and a prevailing culture. John Dewey (1929, p. 34) alerted us to that voice many decades ago. Our experience ‘seems to be fresh, naive empirical material’. Yet, Dewey warns us, it is ‘filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought’. It ‘is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages’. According to Dewey, these ‘incorporated results of past reflection’ are likely to Obfuscate and distort’ unless they are detected. Criticalists make a sustained effort to detect them. In addition, they emphasise, as Dewey did not, that the tradition echoing though personal accounts of experience is a tradition founded on exploitation and resounds with overtones of domination and unfreedom. Where most intepretivists are content to adopt a professedly uncritical stance vis-a-vis the culture they are exploring—indeed, may demand such a stance—criticalists insist that the culture and the accounts it informs be radically called into question.

Critical inquiry may be as radical as Adorno’s negative dialectics or Freire’s movement towards conscientisation—or it may not. The spirit of social critique, as we have seen, expresses itself in many ways. Through all this diversity, however, critical inquiry remains a form of praxis—a search for knowledge, to be sure, but always emancipatory knowledge, knowledge in the context of action and the search for freedom.

It is in this mood of critical reflection on social reality in readiness to take action for change that critical researchers come to the tasks of human inquiry.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.