28. Experience and Temporality: Toward a New Paradigm of Critical Theory

This chapter develops a vision of critical theory as being engaged more concretely with forms of dissatisfaction arising directly from key facts about contemporary society. In particular, the author is interested in two fundamental kinds of dissatisfaction: (a) a loss of meaning due to the progressive evisceration of the past, and of tradition, as sources of orientation, and (b) an enhanced sense of transience as time is increasingly homogenized and made calculable independently of lifeworldly and narratively structured contexts of temporal awareness. The chapter starts by identifying some of the negative consequences for a critical theory of society seeking to identify and critique social pathology that arise as a result of Habermas’s turn from experience (which used to be the leitmotif of Adorno’s work) to validity. It then turns to the question of modernization, arguing for the centrality of the category of time. The chapter finishes by drawing up a research program based on a renewed conception of critical theory.