What Was Critique, and What Comes Next?

Course Description

Summary

If progressive scholarship holds anything sacred, perhaps it is critique. Over the past century, critique has become not only the guiding commitment of radical scholarship but also the unflappable identity of the public intellectual. Yet a number of unfortunate assumptions have been built into this manner of engaging the world. Among them, that intellectuals have privileged access to social reality and, on the flip side, that ordinary people are unable to either fully understand or directly confront that reality. Or, at another level, that somehow critique cannot be commandeered by the very processes it is directed at. Today those assumptions are coming into disconcerting focus as given forms of critique fall flat against surging inequality, racism, and ecological devastation. Moreover, many of the critiques of the Left find themselves repackaged and redeployed in the service of the very project they aimed to dismantle. Far from a consecrated property of the left, critique today appears to have a rather active, instrumental, and often contradictory social life. And now a sociology of critique is taking shape, turning new and dare we say ‘critical’ attention to the social context and consequence of critique itself. In this seminar we will review the intellectual history of critique (from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault, from the pessimism of Frankfurt School to boiling aspiration of Anti-Imperial Revolts) and familiarize ourselves with an emerging sociology of critique. Topics covered include: the critical capacities of everyday life, the new spirit of capitalism, architectures of rule and resistance, the critical capacity of identity, people centered forms of care, and the building of better worlds. This seminar will be guided by questions of how a more sophisticated appreciation of critique might contribute to more effective social change today.