Unmasking Power

Abstract

This chapter establishes the centrality of direct experiential understanding to an unmasking critique of oppression. It argues that attentiveness to the lived experience of oppressed groups is a necessary theoretical and political entailment of the Frankfurt School’s claim that unmasking critique aims to make a practical contribution to their struggles for emancipation. Frankfurt School theory not only fails to attend to the lived reality of oppressed groups, but it is marked by a distinct retreat from experience because of the supposed parochializing effects it is held to have on critique. To offset such parochialism, Frankfurt School theorists have concentrated on issues of normative foundation and context transcendence. This foundational turn has given rise to a mode of ‘paradigm-led theorizing’ that prevents Frankfurt School theorists developing an adequate diagnosis of oppression, exemplified here in their tokenistic treatment of gender oppression. Paradigm-led theorizing also prevents them from realizing the dialogical and reflexive aspects of their theoretical practice, qua practical emancipatory thought. This chapter proposes a model of experience-led theorizing as an alternative to paradigm-led thought and draws on other types of radical theory, notably black feminist theory, to illustrate what this entails. Relativizing lived experience to power allows it to be recast as an indispensable source of knowledge for unmasking critique. It also serves to reconfigure context transcendence in dialogical terms as the insight that comes from reasoning across theoretical and experiential perspectives rather than, pace the Frankfurt School, the definitive viewpoint afforded by a monist paradigm.