1968: critical theory 'must either limit the argument concerning all-encompassing manipulation and must admit the presence of structural leaks within the system of repressive rationality, or it must renounce the claim to be able to explain the conditions of its own possibility. ⁷²

This critique applies not only to Marcuse's analysis, but to the theoretical paradigm defined as 'the critique of instrumental reason' in general. If it is assumed that societal rationalization has eliminated crises and conflict tendencies within the social structure, and that cultural rationalization has destroyed the autonomous personality type, then critical theory no longer moves within the horizon of prospective future transformation, but must retreat into the retrospective stance of past hope and remembrance. Critical theory becomes a retrospective monologue of the critical thinker upon the totality of this historical process, for it views the lived present not through the perspective of possible future transformation, but from the standpoint of the past.

One can interpret this outcome in two ways. First, one could claim that social critique once again becomes mere criticism in the sense ridiculed by Marx in his early works, and that the critical theory of society must justify its explicit normative commitments. Second, one could argue that critical theory does not become mere criticism, for it still appeals to norms and values immanent to the self-understanding of late-capitalist societies, but that the content of the norms appealed to has been transformed.

According to the first interpretation, critique becomes mere criticism for the following reasons: if crises and conflict potentials in latecapitalist societies have been eliminated; if this social structure has destroyed the very norms of rationality, freedom, and equality to which the critique of political economy could implicitly appeal; if, furthermore, the very boundaries between history and nature, culture and non-human nature, have become unrecognizable; then where are the normative standards to which critical theory could appeal, and how are they to be justified? The critical theorist must either speak in the name of a future Utopian vision to which he alone has access, or he must play the role of memory and conscience in a culture that has eliminated its own past. Neither this Utopian vision nor retrospective remembrance is based upon norms and values derived from the self-understanding of this culture and social structure. The standpoint of the critic transcends the present and juxtaposes to the existent what ought to be or what could have been had the past not been betrayed. Critique itself, then, is a mode of explicit criteriological inquiry. Marx's

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