What is Critique? Slouching Toward an Understanding.

Critique is deeper and more fundamental than the act of critical judgment. Critique reveals the shape of the apparatus in which judgment occurs. Knowledge-power structures are revealed, exposing these epistemological regimes to destabilization. At the collapse of the structure, the subjugated witness ‘the shape of the horizon’ of knowledge once obscured from view. Within this normative void, critique is an act of self-transformation – a shift from obedience to what Foucault refers to as ‘virtue.’ The shift is the catalyst for this set of operations – which as a whole is simultaneously the practice of critique and the practice of self-making. Self is the site of the critique that is reflected within a wider political/ethical context.

What is at stake, for our purposes is the widened scope, or delimiting that occurs when Foucault establishes self-making as an “art of existence.” Critique expands far beyond, or digs beneath what is on the surface. In parallel, objects of critique in the context of art institutions are not zones of aesthetic autonomy but rather points of departure (upsetting the formalist). When the work becomes a discursive site, the artist has a responsibility to see the work not only as an action/object, but also the multiplicity it holds in its form.

I’m interested in the extent to which individuals have agency to go beyond, beneath, outside, etc. of power structures and cultural normativity. I’m going to use sitting as an example. In the west, many people suffer from poor posture, tight hamstrings, weak knees, etc. due to systematic errors in the ergonomics of daily life – especially the chair. Try sitting on the floor for more than half an hour and you will know what I mean. I believe that a healthy spine holds many keys to mental and physical health, and as such, I try to remain as erect as possible throughout my periods of sitting. Likewise, I try to remain conscious in selecting where to sit, but our world is so full of soft surfaces that my spinal austerity (or lack-thereof) readily rounds into the crack of the couch. “…renunciation and proscription do not necessarily enjoin a passive or non-active ethical mode, but form instead an ethical mode of conduct and a way of stylizing both action and pleasure.” (Butler p. 8). Would an active critique of the way we sit in the west be to proscribe myself from sitting in chairs altogether? Indeed, I sense there are hidden power dynamics in both posture and furniture design, but this point demands deeper research. Yams Collective’s withdrawal of their work from the Whitney Biennial is a more concrete form of critique in practice – I quote Raymond Williams from our reading: “what always needs to be understood …is the specificity of the response, which is not a judgment, but a practice.”