I refrained from commenting on this when you first posted it, but can’t now it’s come up a second time… I think the definition that you give of critical theory here, from the Stanford encyclopedia, is just wrong. Adorno’s /Negative Dialectics/ begins, for example, with an epigraph that rejects the totalities that you here ascribe to Critical Theory: “The whole is the false”, thereby countering Hegel’s Absolute. I do not think a single person I know who has read any amount of critical theory or even agreed with it would really think that people would ascribe universal values onto words and not understand that value systems and interpretations are historically and socially inflected. They might, as do Adorno and Horkheimer, consider the holocaust to be an absolute moral evil, but if that’s something that Lyotard is here supposed to free us from, I don’t quite know what we gain. Actor Network Theory is a powerful framework under which we can understand complex socio-technical assemblages. To justify using it through an extreme reductionist interpretation that “critical theory = absolutism” doesn’t seem to do it justice.