Critique questions the structures that engender criticism, what Raymond Williams was concerned focused on fault-finding, i.e. on value. His solution was to “find a vocabulary for the kinds of responses we have, specifically to cultural works ‘which [do] not assume the habit (or right or duty) of judgment’”.

One example of an institution that is actively pursuing Butler’s understanding of critique is the Read/Write Library in Chicago. Read/Write Library is a small alternative library that “accepts [all submissions] from the area (ever), regardless of perceived quality or importance in order to create a detailed index from which connections among the publications will emerge.” (Red/Write website).  The only explicit requirement for participation in the Library is a connection to the city of Chicago. “Creating a detailed index from which connections…will emerge” refers to the Library’s way of cataloguing.

This way of defining a library is a way of actively suspending value judgments, as they relate to the Library’s catalogue. Heeding Adorno’s call to critical discernment, Read/Write Library’s method for acquiring and cataloguing printed material is not “administrative” or “uniformed”, nor is it “assimilating [material] into the prevailing constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose”.

Foucault’s understanding of critique is “not to evaluate whether its objects… are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself.”

Read/Write Library takes up this definition as practice.

Part of Read/Write Library’s most problematic practice is the issue of cataloging. By accepting any and all material related (in any way) to the Chicago area—school projects, ephemera, diaries, zines, etc.—the Library self-consciously, critically takes a stab at “’What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” Currently the Library is in flux, its catalogue’s structure and limitations yet to be fully self-defined.Cataloguing, performed by volunteers, is a not-yet-instituted method here, not defined by pre-established canon and categories of printed material. Rather, by accepting all material “regardless of perceived (value)”, the Library must organize itself based on those “emerging connections”. These “connections”, having the potential to be ever emerging, facilitate the potential for an ever shifting and self-conscious organizational structure.

In addition to the critical potential of Read/Write Library, I would like to briefly expound on the potential that Butler’s essay offers the art school critique. The essay proposes a rethinking of critique that is less specific than the art school setting, and in point of fact, does not explicitly use the art school critique as an example. Butler’s, as well as Williams’, Adorno’s and Foucault’s focus, while still giving some attention to other forms of cultural production and “art” making, have much broader social implications. A critical position on art school critique offers an important, potentially productive means, for analyzing and deconstructing the “regime of truth” within the art academy. A critique of the art school critique calls attention to its actual cultural power—highly influential in the “training” of future and current cultural producers.

This begins to feel like a productive, critical way of deconstructing the power-dynamics of the art school critique. Crit dynamics, its language, its goals are pervasive within the “art world”, despite their end at a given producers time of graduation, and linger in the studio visit, artist statement, etc. I have also heard many former students mention, “hearing their professors talk to (them)” when making work outside of the classroom. This is not to evaluate its lingering, but rather to point at its presence having a continued effect on contemporary cultural production and an acknowledged divide between the devalued “world of the classroom” and the “art world”.