The tragedy of critique -- The sound and the fury : the insights and limits of the critique of critique -- The experience of critique : inside permanent liminality -- Critique is history? : understanding a tradition of tradition-breaking -- Unthinking critical thinking : the reduction of philosophy to negative logic -- The cacophony of critique : populist radicals and hegemonic dissent -- Asocial media : an auto-ethnography of on-line critiques -- Towards acritical theory -- Bibliography -- Index.

Confessional critiques proliferate in contemporary culture, remodelling critical politics as self-purification. Within Foucault’s work, critique is associated with resistance to power and subjectification, whereas confession appears a technique of disciplinary and pastoral power. However, genealogy creates hybrids, and herein we observe how critique and confession are entangled in contemporary social justice discourses, focusing empirically on contemporary anti-racist texts. These critique their imagined readers and society more generally, demanding confessions, castigating denials and exhorting interminable purificatory self-work. This analysis draws from Foucault’s (...) genealogies of parrhesia and avowal, through his latter works on the problem of ‘truth-telling’ and how it forms subjects, even by critique. Recognising this historical hybridisation of critique and confession within discourses such as anti-racism may help to clarify the political stakes of critique. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

Contemporary commentators, primarily on the broad right, tend to critique their opponents as being ‘just like a religion’, invoking figures of zealots, dogma, mantras, high priests and so forth. While openness to debate is often a key value of these commentators, this discursive manoeuvre tends to position the other as an unthinking ideologue or a duplicitous manipulator, not worth engagement. This critique has become commonplace from books to social media, disfiguring opponents as ‘post-modernists’, ‘critical social justice’ or ‘woke’ in a (...) negative valance. These ‘iconoclastic critics’ position themselves as reasonable, dedicated to debate, and describe opponents via a dichotomy of ideology and critique, employing metaphors of depth. Crucially, they tend to distort or disfigure their opponents’ claims, redescribing them through religious metaphors. This analysis informs a reflexive consideration of critical discourse generally and considers the extent to which characteristics of this ‘iconoclastic critique’ are shared across political divides. (shrink)

While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault’s work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in ‘economic theology’. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. (...) From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as ‘pastor’ but with the market as the ultimate ‘test’ of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through ‘telling the truth’ about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised. (shrink)

A foundational assumption of social theory is that things change: structures, institutions, organisations, groups, cultures, and selves all are contingent and subject to transformation. Herein, this malleable foundation is termed transformativity, drawing attention to a specific conceptualisation of change, which predominates and displaces other accounts of change, elaborated via a typology of change that positions transformation between reconfiguration and metamorphosis. Transformativity posits society as contingent, open to reconstruction, but assuming that change acts upon a substrate, which is continuous; altered, yet (...) retaining identity through time. Transformativity is situated culturally by tracing historical conceptions of change from ancient to modern. Next, Turner's liminality, Foucault's power relations, and Butler's performativity are analysed in depth as influential contemporary models of transformativity. Furthermore, transformativist thinking animates governmentality, neo-liberal capitalism, technological thinking, and cultures of self-work. In particular, transformativity intersects with contemporary ideas of ‘experience’, incorporating notions of contingency and change into modern experimentalism. While transformativity facilitates critique and social change, this implies a gradualist model of slow purification and refinement, which may be inadequate to deal with contemporary challenges. (shrink)

This article considers `critique' as performative, being on the one hand a reiterative performance, that enacts the `critic' through the act of critique, and on the other hand reflecting the constitution of the subject. While this approach takes on the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's work, it differs by refusing critique — or its correlates; parody, subversion or similar — any special status. Like any other performance critique is taken here as a cultural practice, as a Foucauldian `technique of self', (...) though the complex genealogy of such a technique lies outside the scope of this article. In order to illustrate this argument I interpret a number of Butler's prefaces, interviews and digressions which diverge from her own theoretical framework, and argue that these `fictions' arise from critical `disavowals': that is, a `self-transformative' turn against power. The subjective `crisis' that prompts critique is then elaborated by comparison to Girard's work on imitation and sacrifice. (shrink)

Unemployment is not just an economic category but is constituted by governmentality, most evidently by the increase of interventions into the lives of the unemployed through Active Labour Market Policies. Furthermore, the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment as being without work, available for work and seeking work is a shifting classification which categorises unemployment on multiple temporal horizons, with the passive element of being without work increasingly superseded by the emphasis on seeking work. Through biographical interviews with unemployed in (...) Ireland, spanning from 2012-2018, we trace this transformation of temporality empirically and conclude that governmentality constitutes multiple, contradictory, indefinite forms of time. Particularly, we offer an imaginative reading of two overlapping temporalities: Kairos, waiting, enduring, suffering nothingness in anticipation of transformation by getting a job, and Cronos, not cyclical time, but the devouring of time, where the days and leisure of the unemployed people are deliberately consumed by job-seeking. Ironically, states implement ALMPs in the kairotic hope of transforming their economy, yet these policies do little but make the experience of unemployment even harder to endure. (shrink)

While Latour criticises the tautologies of the ‘sociologists of the social’ as an intellectual shortcut, here sociology in the broadest sense is reconsidered as informed by unrecognised theological ideas, inter alia. Durkheim’s classic account of religion, wherein ‘society is God’ is taken as a starting point to explore the intersection of sociology and theology. Thereafter the article examines three social theorists, Elias, Giddens and Boltanski, each of whom attempt a re-casting of sociology, yet rearticulate theological models. In particular, this includes (...) an ontological conception of society, structure or system in terms of over-arching and invisible forces which is derived – inter alia – from religious models of divine will and providential order, which incorporates human choice – or agency in contemporary parlance. Accompanying this ontology is an epistemology of deciphering ‘deeper’ or ‘structural’ or ‘transcendent’ aspects of society by observing trends, cases or culture, akin to divining the providential will by observing its manifestations, which can be conducted in a more critical or forgiving manner. By examining these theological strands which persist in sociology, this aim is not to critically repudiate them, but to recognise the productive contribution of these models of thinking to imagining the ‘social’. (shrink)

This article addresses contemporary concerns about critique through an interpretation of the “writing prophets.” This approach draws on Foucauldian genealogy and suggests that alongside Greek parrhesia, Old Testament prophecy is a key forerunner of contemporary critical discourses. Our analysis draws upon Weber’s interpretative historical sociology and Gadamerian hermeneutics but shifts the emphasis from charisma to critique, through a direct engagement with prophetic texts. In particular, prophetic discourse claims to reveal injustice and idolatry and speaks from a position of transcendence within (...) immanent historical moments. Prophets position their own era as a moment of crisis, and themselves as liminal figures, opposed to the delusion of others and “false prophets” which resonates with contemporary conceptions of “ideology.” Rather than focusing on historical individuals, we approach prophecy as a discourse, multiple and hybrid, discontinuous, and contradictory, yet constituting a distinctive precursor which informs contemporary critique. (shrink)