6) Finally, the position is married to what it tries to negate. Since it can neither advance a social movement nor theorize beyond its blinkered horizons, the position cannot but receive its strength from working within the structures it wishes to overcome.
If the politics adjunct to total critique are deeply, constitutively problematic, then a more careful form of analysis needs to replace the unfortunately sweeping tendencies of the Frankfurt School. What is needed is careful analysis of the structures of oppression and their inter-relation. A more nuanced critical theory will then be capable of accepting a totality of constraining conditions without on one side, pointing to interstitial spaces as relatively pure sources of critical development, or on the other, succumbing to grand pessimism. Of course, there is little new in the thought that if things are bad and trending worse, theory then ought to figure out how and why that’s the case. But the point is not only adequacy of theory, the point is also that good theory can specify more precisely what we’re up against, an honest appraisal of which is needed to inform the best organizational forms and strategies for resistance. As we’ve seen, hastily general theory can serve as the ideological backdrop for not just logically problematic, but dangerously counter-productive practice.