German School and the French School of Critical Theory

I was introduced to the two schools of Critical Theory during my masters at Yale School of Architecture. While Peggy Deamer, our teacher mentioned that her course would be more to do with Marxist analysis of architecture (and that those who did not believe in it should strongly reconsider being in the course); and that there were two schools of Critical Theory - the Frankfurt School (German Tradition) and the French School - I had not quite understood what was the difference between the two.

Over the last many years after doing the course, the question took a back seat, and did not come to resolution even if I must have tried to relook specifically what separates the two in their ideological orientation. Finally last week, as a matter of time pass, I asked this question to ChatGPT and it gave me some of the most convincingly understandable response, which I want to note down here for my own understanding.

Very briefly, 

The German tradition of the Frankfurt School of critical theory has Marxist roots with strong engagement with capitalism and class. It is focused on the critique of mass culture that emerges out of it - how media and consumer culture shape consciousness. It is also concerned with the question of reason and emancipation - in other words "rationality". This is necessarily the Western notion of scientific rationality that developed through the renaissance. 

In summary, they analyze how modern society produces domination especially through capitalism, bureaucracy, technology and culture industries. Their work is generally systematic, moral-political, and reform oriented.

The French tradition mainly develops after the 1950s reacting against structuralism and classical Marxism. 

Their core features can be located in their distrust of universal explanations (like Marxism or Enlightenment theory) - in other words, the suspicion of "grand theories". They focuses on how meaning, truth, and knowledge are constructed with a focus on discourse and language. They conceptualize power as "diffused", meaning, power is not only in the state of economy, rather everywhere. Furthermore they are anti-essentialists, with no belief in fixed "human nature" or stable subject. 

They examine how power operates through knowledge, language, institutions and norms. Their work is often fragmentary, experimental, and skeptical of political blueprints 

ChatGPT articulates for me that in simple terms.

German Critical theory asks:

How does capitalism and modern rationality dominate us, and how can we overcome it.

whereas, French Critical theory asks:

How do language, knowledge and institutions produce what we think is normal or true.

I came to articulate then that, the essential different between the two is that one emerges from the critique of mass, whereas the other from the critique of the body. The AI helped me lay out that the key entry points for the German and French theory  are mass/system versus body/micropower. In a more precise academic formulation, the German critical theory begins with the problem of mass domination, while French theory begins with the problem of bodily and subjective regulation. One critiques how power works from above and through systems, the other how power works from within and through bodies.