{"id":1514,"date":"2009-01-16T12:12:37","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T17:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=1514"},"modified":"2010-02-21T16:11:30","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T20:11:30","slug":"what-is-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/01\/16\/what-is-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"what is critique"},"content":{"rendered":"

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture<\/em> at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader<\/span> 2003. Sara Salih editor.
\nonline version<\/a><\/p>\n

For the question, \u201cwhat are we to do?\u201d presupposes that the \u201cwe\u201d has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited. But if those very formations and delimitations have normative consequences, then it will be necessary to ask after the values that set the stage for action, and this will be an important dimension of any critical inquiry into normative matters.<\/p>\n

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives<\/strong>. The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.<\/p>\n

To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.<\/p>\n

In Foucault\u2019s view, following Kant in an attenuated sense, the act of consent is a reflexive movement by which validity is attributed to or withdrawn from authority. But this reflexivity does not take place internal to a subject. For Foucault, this is an act which poses some risk, for the point will not only be to object to this or that governmental demand, but to ask about the order in which such a demand becomes legible and possible. And if what one objects to are the epistemological orderings that have established the rules of governmental validity, then saying \u201cno\u201d to the demand will require departing from the established grounds of its validity, marking the limit of that validity, which is something different and far more risky than finding a given demand invalid. In this difference, we might say, one begins to enter a critical relation to such orderings and the ethical precepts to which they give rise. The problem with those grounds that Foucault calls \u201cillegitimate\u201d is not that they are partial or self-contradictory or that they lead to hypocritical moral stands. The problem is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself. How does one call into question the exhaustive hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism. The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCritique,\u201d he writes, \u201cwill be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability [l\u2019indocilit\u00e9 r\u00e9fl\u00e9chie].\u201d If it is an \u201cart\u201d in his sense, then critique will not be a single act, nor will it belong exclusively to a subjective domain, for it will be the stylized relation to the demand upon it. And the style will be critical to the extent that, as style, it is not fully determined in advance, it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question. So the stylization of this \u201cwill\u201d will produce a subject who is not readily knowable under the established rubric of truth. More radically, Foucault pronounces:<\/p>\n

\u201cCritique would essentially insure the desubjugation [d\u00e9sassujetiisement] of the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.\u201d (32, 39)<\/p>\n

The politics of truth pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? Is this not precisely what is meant by \u201cthe desubjugation of the subject in the play of…the politics of truth\u201d(my translation)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing. Deriving a sense of critique from Kant, Foucault poses the question that is the question of critique itself: \u201cDo you know up to what point you can know?\u201d \u201cOur liberty is at stake.\u201d Thus, liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes place, the moment where a certain questioning practice begins that takes the following form: \u201c\u2018What, therefore, am I\u2019, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?\u201d(46) Another way of putting this is the following: \u201cWhat, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?\u201d If, in posing this question, liberty is at stake, it may be that staking liberty has something to do with what Foucault calls virtue, with a certain risk that is put into play through thought and, indeed, through language where the contemporary ordering of being is brought to its limit.<\/p>\n

The critic thus has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own \u201cconditions of acceptability of a system,\u201d but also \u201cto follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.\u201d <\/strong>So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands<\/strong>. What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability.<\/strong> In Foucault\u2019s terms, \u201cschematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.\u201d (58)<\/p>\n

Indeed, another way to talk about this dynamic within critique is to say that rationalization meets its limits in desubjugation. If the desubjugation of the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks precisely the fragility and transformability of the epistemics of power.<\/p>\n

How would this particular use of fiction relate to Foucault\u2019s notion of critique? Consider that Foucault is trying to understand the possibility of desubjugation within rationalization without assuming that there is a source for resistance that is housed in the subject or maintained in some foundational mode. Where does resistance come from? Can it be said to be the upsurge of some human freedom shackled by the powers of rationalization? If he speaks, as he does, of a will not to be governed, how are we to understand the status of that will?<\/p>\n

[…] he has shown us that there can be no ethics, and no politics, without recourse to this singular sense of poiesis. The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavors to form itself. Engaged in \u201carts of existence,\u201d this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The \u201cindistinguishability\u201d of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.<\/p>\n

We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of \u201cself,\u201d and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former. The self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader 2003. Sara Salih editor. online version For the question, \u201cwhat are we to do?\u201d presupposes that the \u201cwe\u201d has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which … Continue reading “what is critique”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,78,80,32,66,16,18,97,90,15],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abject","category-butler","category-citationality","category-foucault","category-hegemony","category-ontology","category-political","category-psyche","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5034,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/5034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}