Page 227 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-11.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 216

••• Maggie O’Neill •••

those involved and the audiences of the research outcomes. Outcomes can be print
based or performance based, or art/exhibition based. The combination of popular
knowledge and academic knowledge can create change. Fals Borda tells us that ‘pop-
ular knowledge has always been a source of formal learning. Academic accumulation,
plus people’s wisdom, became an important rule for our movement’ (1999: 7).
The inter-relationship between research and praxis is fraught with tensions.
Renewed methodologies which incorporate the voices of citizens through scholarly/
civic research as participatory research not only can serve to enlighten and raise our
awareness of certain issues but can also produce critical reflexive texts which may
help to mobilize social change. Ethno-mimesis as critical praxis seeks to speak in
empathic ways with the participants in the research, re-presented through the per-
formance text in ways that counter valorizing discourses, and the reduction of the
Other to a cipher of the oppressed/marginalized/exploited.

Critical Feminist Theory and Ethnomimesis

‘Critical theory’ emerged from Western Marxism and its most famous proponents
were the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The
work of Adorno and Benjamin are inextricable connected (Weber-Nicholsen, 1993;
1997; 1999; O’Neill, 1999; 2002). I have argued elsewhere that Adorno has proved
useful to feminists because he illuminated the contradictory nature of sexual and
social oppression (see Benjamin, J; Braidotti, 1994; Weber-Nicholsen, 1997; Battersby,
1998; O’Neill, 1999). For Shierry Weber-Nicholsen (1997), the importance of
Adorno’s usefulness for us today is his focus on the role of the subject and subjective
experience, particularly the imaginary and imagination. In the words of Buck-Morss,
‘His was a negative anthropology; and its knowledge was to keep criticism alive’
(1977: 186). Adorno was an outstanding social and cultural theorist, member of the
Frankfurt School, and Professor of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Frankfurt. His work is notoriously difficult to understand. Adorno refused to simplify
his ideas into the conversational form of everyday language and ‘demanded of the
listener not mere contemplation but praxis’ (see Jay 1984: 11). Robert Witkin con-
cludes his book on Adorno and Music as follows: ‘No one has done more to persuade
us of the moral dimension of all cultural construction and of the sociality that is the
basis of anything truly creative and liberative’ (1998: 200).
The usefulness of Adorno’s oeuvre is that his work gives voice to the critical, moral, cre-
ative potential of non-identity thinking, Kulturkritik, and the social role of art in dialecti-
cal tension with the role of subjective experience, within the context of a social world
marked by identity thinking and instrumental reason. Thinking against the grain
through what he termed ‘micrology’ using ‘non-identity thinking’ and ‘Kulturekritik’,
Adorno’s critical theory inspired my critical feminist theory and ethnographic work with
sex workers and other marginalized groups. Adorno famously said, ‘The splinter in your
eye is the best magnifying glass’ (1978: 50) and for Walter Benjamin, a fragment of a story
of a life can tell us so much more than one hundred pages of information about a life.
• 216 •