"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..." (Butler 5)
My understanding of critique comes from Butler's metaphor "tears in fabric", spaces within a larger interwoven framework where the edges/limits become frayed and the openings become an arena for exercising possibilities of what can be known. Butler discusses the dangers of critique becoming a settled or fixed practice, and this works within the metaphor because a tear in fabric can be closed up or it can expand the more it is agitated. There will always be the tear once it opens up, whether it is exposed or covered up. I think that critique is finding or creating the tears in the fabric and working within those spaces, to continue to unravel or disrupt the methodical patterns that surround them. Criticism would be to point out that the fabric has been ruined and unusable, critique would be to reinterpret the tears as starting points for a new and perhaps better practice of approaching the world.
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