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  • Postcritique and the Leakiness of Spheres1
  • Frida Beckman (bio)

In the final essay in Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski's edited collection Critique and Postcritique from 2017, Eric Hayot summarizes the status of critique as it has presented itself in this volume: "What we know is that something has been lost, that literary criticism, today, floats adrift on an open, darkling sea, which the sailors search desperately for new compasses" (2017, 279). But what is it that has been lost exactly? I will suggest in this very brief intervention that perhaps it is not critique's usefulness to literary practice that has been lost. Neither, I will propose, is it the political import of critique that has been lost. Rather, I will argue, what are at stake are the forms—the spaces, the spheres—that make critique possible, visible, viable. At least if we follow the Kantian, Arendtian, and Habermasian traditions, critique and the public sphere are inseparable. From this perspective, it makes very little sense to discuss the one without the other. Failing to pay attention to the changing role of the public sphere, I suggest, constitutes a troubling feature of most literary debates on postcritique.

As always, there is much more to say about the public sphere and its changing conditions generally and historically but here, and as the debates on postcritique are not only academic but tend also to turn inward, that is, to focus precisely on critique as an academic practice, I will limit myself to saying something about the university and its changing conditions for critique. Historically, the university has been a key space in which a vital public sphere has been fostered. Henry Giroux maintains that higher education is one of an increasingly few public spheres where knowledge and learning promote public values and critical hope (2016, 9). But while the university is thus recognized as harboring a lingering possibility for critique, many, not the least Giroux himself, have also noted how this public sphere is under serious threat. Universities, traditionally crucial spaces for producing critical citizens and the public spheres essential to the democratic ideals [End Page 523] of civic society, are increasingly forced into the instrumental, measurable, and market paradigms characteristic of neoliberal principles. In addition to decreased funding, the diminished influence of faculty, and the intrusion of market mechanisms, Giroux also recognizes the current and unprecedented scope and strength of the attack on higher education "by religious fundamentalists, corporate power, and the apostles of neoliberal capitalism" (6).

In the mid-1990s, when middle-brow media suggested that university research was out of touch with the "the demands of the real world," this occurred, Bill Readings argued, primarily because of an "uncertainty as to the role of the University and the very nature of the standards by which it should be judged as an institution" (1996, 1). At this point, the University had gone, Readings maintained, from being "a microcosm of the pure form of the public sphere"—to one that has lost much of this function, becoming, instead, increasingly governed by economic imperatives. In this "posthistorical university," the appeals of rankings and the appeals to "excellence" seem to surpass all other criteria.

Since then, the neoliberalisation of universities has, Gregg Lambert notes, continued to pushed U.S. universities from a more industrial—or perhaps disciplinary—model of students passing through programs, classrooms, and offices to students being placed rather "to the side" of the production process, and given the freedom to pick and choose. In this "cafeteria model," as Readings called it, students become customers who are expected to choose and also to be able to determine the criteria for what makes a good choice. Crucially, for the present argument, the university is thus transformed from a place that has previously been seen as somehow separate from society, and as a space that holds a particular expertise that might not always translate directly into its logic, into an increasingly integrated part of a general buffet of neoliberal self-realization.

Wendy Brown speaks to this same situation when she notes how scholars in the humanities and the liberal arts find it increasingly difficult to defend their work. The vocabulary of...

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