Postcritique and the Form of the Question: Whose Critique Has Run Out of Steam?

What strange, wicked, questionable questions!

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Whose critique?

To say that the question of critique has come back is, from a certain perspective, rather like noting that the eternal return is here again. Well, yes, and isn't that the point? Where could it possibly have gone? What is critique if not the perpetual examination of problems that demand, for one reason or another, to be thrown into question? Yet this definition already presupposes the answer to many other questions that would establish a theory of critique—as something ongoing, evaluative, problematic, demanding. The question of critique returns, in this sense, as the recoil of metacritique forever rebounding against itself, testing its own premises and protocols, establishing and evaluating its conditions of possibility.

Yet there is another sense in which the question of critique has come back, and this time it is not a matter of inquiry trained on an object or turned against itself but, rather, critique as such that has come to be questioned. Do we still need it? Has it reached a point of diminishing returns and devolved into mere habit? Has the power of critique to forever cycle through its own possibilities and endlessly confront an infinite series of objects been exhausted? Has critique become the default mode of critical thinking at the expense of more generous ways of engaging with the world? If critique once armed us with powerful questions, does it now rest content on a stockpile of ready-made answers? What if critique shouldn't return?

These are the kinds of questions posed by postcritique, an amorphous yet stubbornly persistent rubric that covers a broad range of theoretical – at times antitheoretical – positions whose most general characteristic is a turn away from, if not outright disavowal of, forms of critical theory indebted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Grounded by the work of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, radicalized by Saussurean linguistics and structuralism, this critique instantiates a "textual" model associated with a rigorous approach to interpretation. No longer understood as one method among others, runs the complaint, but now promulgated as the horizon for all serious and legitimate work in the humanities, critique derived from the hermeneutics of suspicion views the world as a text to interpret with suspicion, paranoia, and hostility. Predicated on the assumption of a "depth model" wherein nothing is what it seems, where language, representation, consciousness, and culture are surface symptoms of the repressed forces that determine our lives, critique (says postcritique) has tasked itself with a project of aggressive demystification. Poststructuralism and psychoanalysis are the exemplary avatars of this program, yet, however varied the projects of symptomatic reading, deconstruction, ideology critique, or linguistic psychoanalysis may be, they are united by a protocol of disclosing (then attacking) the illusions of consciousness and culture determined by various social, political, and psychic mechanisms. The net effect of such critique, from a postcritical perspective, is the installation of a method at once infinitely paranoid and perpetually assured of its vocation. Worse yet, the reflexive satisfaction built into this critical exercise has led to the abandonment of engaging with our most pressing problems. These range, depending on whom you ask, from mediocre student papers to the fate of biological life on our planet. If critique has been faulted for not making good on its revolutionary aspirations, post-critique manages to sound at once therapeutically modest, handing itself out like methodological Xanax for grumpy academics, and inflated to global proportions.¹

Who is making such claims? Postcritique, like the practice it aims to overcome, is a highly overdetermined descriptor covering a field of positions and counterpositions so complex as to defy easy mapping. The current vogue for a postcritical disposition has been embraced by, or imputed to, philosophers (Jacques Rancière), sociologists (Luc Boltanski), science and technology scholars (Bruno Latour), and political theorists (Jane Bennett).² Numerous schools of speculative thought might be characterized as postcritical, notably new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and various turns to ecology and "the nonhuman."³ Calls for a postcritical...