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I think that the idea that critical theory is an activist philosophy is self-contradictory and that those who practice critical theory to change the world in some way, or motivate action, are basically destined to have an incomplete, irreconcilable worldview.
(edit for clarity: Modern critical theory obviously is often activist, and believing that is not self-contradictory. But believing that critical theory at its core is activist, and should be practiced as a kind of means-to-an-end to affect social change, as many critical theorists believe, I think contradicts with the actual core of critical theory philosophy)
I started coming to this idea watching the Foucault/Chomsky debate, where Foucault is suspicious of Chomksy's Anarcho-syndicalism as a way to bring out a kind of ideal human nature, because he thinks the formulations we make about an ideal human nature, or society without political violence, are informed by the society we live in, which makes violence and non-ideality kind of unavoidable.
This argument is interesting in terms of the political spectrum because on one hand, it "out-criticals" the critical activist, but it also echoes the basic conservative reaction to leftist societal transformation projects.
There's no reason to me that a critical theory couldn't exist critical of social justice projects, BLM, modern Marxism, etc. The modern leftist capture of critical theory appears arbitrary.
But the Foucault debate led me to think, that conservatives, or just anti-progressives, could be a lot more bold in using their own critical theory against them in a way. I think it would be a field worth studying as a way to deconstruct leftist idealism and activism in a way that, like Chomsky, would leave them looking kind of pathetic in debate.
Doing that would kind of require doing the Nietzschian thing of acknowledging power, political violence, etc. and working with it in the debate, which I feel like is probably a step too far for most politicians. But I think specifically that rather than debate competing visions, there's room for a thinker to basically just deconstruct modern "critical theory" on its own terms, argue that it is self-contradictory and unlikely to do anything but breed new forms of political violence and power imbalance.
To tie it back to Nietzsche, it seems his works have an irony to them, even a self-aware irony, and that is what makes his calls for action "work" in some sense. It seems to me that a modern critical theory text that calls for action with no sense of irony is not thorough, and has a huge blind spot by basically not applying self-criticism.
I've been kind of working this idea out on my own, not sure if this is well trodden ground elsewhere, apologies for the half-baked quality.
This paradox is something that Critical Theorists acknowledge themselves - the paradox being that once the oppressed gain power they can become the new ruling class. However this is not a bug, but a feature - Critical Theorists are not afraid of contradictions and paradoxes, in fact contradictions only reveal that there is more work to be done between Theory and Praxis. The idea even in older strains of Marxism was that it is not bourgeoisie that is the final boss of the revolution, the final boss is the proletariat itself. However the belief is that once the oppressed class(es) gain full consciousness, they will dissolve themselves voluntarily to usher the utopia without oppression. If they do not do it, then it means that another literal revolution of dialectical process needs to take place, the consciousness was not achieved, the "true" communism was not tried. In fact the whole idea of creating socialism as precursor to full communism was to speed up the dialectical process inside permanent revolution framework.
For instance Theodore Adorno stated that “[o]ne may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner”. However the feeling of oppression is the sign of a prison that prevents utopia to realize. So endlessly criticizing all forms of oppression is a process to get rid of all the obstacles, utopia will be realized and crystalized through negative thinking. This is the literal basis of "Critical" in "Critical Theory" - to endlessly hunt for and criticize and denounce oppression everywhere all the time, in order to announce the new world.
Now one key difference in modern woke leftism as opposed to old Critical Theory is that there is a "hope", which Paolo Freire described in his Pedagogy of Hope. This is an older idea by Gramsci that the consciousness can be taught, Freire formalized it in his version of "education" which actually means the political education into revolutionary consciousness. So there is still a lot of denouncing going on, but now there is a "positive" thing activists can do - multiply themselves by roping in new generations of activists into the program, with the hope that even if there are no concrete steps to follow into utopia, the next generation of revolutionaries with refined consciousness will get us there.
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