On the Genealogy of Critique

Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant

Diana Stypinska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032175638
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429675737
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

On the Genealogy of Critique intervenes into both contemporary academic debates on critique, and today's mainstream criticism, by reflecting upon the relationship between criticality and social change in the age of post-politics.

What does it mean to be critical? When we are told that civilisation is facing extinction, does the idea of critique still hold any value? Today, more than ever, we seem to be critical of everything. Yet, paradoxically, our criticism exerts very little political influence. Taking this problematique as its starting point, this book reclaims the transformative potential of critique, challenging the common assumptions about criticality. It presents a counter-history of criticism, demonstrating how the modern notion of critical subjectivity embodies an imperative to the securitisation of the status quo. In elaborating on a range of contemporary critical (dis)positions, the book advocates new ways of thinking about critique and social change. Through this, it equips the reader with analytical tools useful for thinking the way out of our post-political predicament.

This book is of relevance to anyone concerned with social change. Particularly, it will be of use to academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students working in the areas of sociology, politics, philosophy and cultural studies.

Part I

The Idea of Critique

Chapter 1

The Origins of Critique

‘Genealogy’, Foucault asserts, ‘is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (2003d:351). It is, without a doubt, a bookish and sluggish endeavour that offers no certainties and brings no relief, hurling one ‘amongst countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’ (2003d:361). Deprived of any means of conventional recourse to scientific evidence, established facts, revered traditions, or even, worst of all, of the very ability to begin her study with a search for the origin of the phenomenon at hand, the genealogist seems to be faced with a truly overwhelming task. With each and every attempt at a location of a mere starting point to her exploration, she appears to do no more than clutch at straws, watching as all the painstakingly devised narratives, threads and concepts vanish before her eyes. The more she studies, the less she is certain of. In the dark, suffocating archival vaults even the minutest points of purchase on the subject-matter keep eluding her grasp, until the very idea of knowledge itself seems absurd.

Everything that was once familiar, now seems strange, disturbing and queer. Her diligent documentation of the past engenders mistrust towards both the records and the activity of recording – mistrust followed by dissociation. Consequently, all the axioms appear as if swept up in a catastrophic whirlwind that the genealogist watches transfixed, resembling Benjamin’s Angel of History (see 2005). But where the said Angel saw history turn into rubble, wanting, but unable ‘to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed’ (Benjamin, 2005), she sees the ruins being pulverised. What of critique’s modern heritage? Dust. What of critique’s secularity? Dust. What of critique’s normative orientation? Dust. What of critique’s political character? Nothing but dust. Dust is all she can see.

In her quest to ascertain the truth of critique the studious genealogist leaves no stone unturned, and yet she finds no riches, no secrets, no ‘profound intentions’ or ‘immutable necessities’ (Foucault, 2003d:361). Historical beginnings, continuities and indexes ring hollow, proving the futility of the pursuit of dependable facts in their midst. With history itself shown to be nothing but a fabrication, a story used to narrate and justify one’s lot, the genealogist faces a gloomy realisation: she has got as much chance of capturing the phantasm that is critique’s essence, as of piecing together dust.

Yet, all is not lost, for each and every genealogical pursuit is also, at the same time, a creative act. Not an epistemic assertion as such, but an invention. Not a sheer negation, but a parody – a ‘repetition with critical distance’, an ‘ironic inversion’ that ‘marks difference rather than similarity’ (Hutcheon, 2000:6). The genealogist must become a bookworm first and a creator second. Faced with the fact of the fabricated continuity of historical time, she has to mimic and caricature, making farce out of conventional narratives through their systematic and relentless mocking. It is precisely this parodic gesture that delivers the genealogist from the fate of Benjamin’s Angel who helplessly witnesses history turn into nothing more than a sky-high rubble-heap, whilst being blindly driven into the future by the storm of progress. Disregarding the solemnities of the past gives her a free head and a free hand, rendering her capable of intervening into the present.

The idea of origins is salient in this parodic undertaking. In replicating the chronological form, farcical mimicry must present a beginning of its narrative; it is obliged, as it were, to create its own foundations (see Nietzsche, 2010:76). These foundations, however, do not constitute secure ground upon which justifications can be built and endlessly extended. Rather than operationalising a tale of unbroken and unswerving existence, the genealogical origins expose the only truly definite historical fact, namely, that our understanding of the past is founded on nothing more than a methodical butchery of heterogeneous events – a butchery bent on pragmatic selection of convenient characteristics, meanings and values. In this sense, the genealogical putting down roots is the act of uprooting, ‘setting apart’ and ‘sorting out of different traits’ (Foucault, 2003d:355) that reveals the wondrous excesses discarded by the historical pursuit of the initial, essential and final.

These excesses, however, more often than not, cannot be revealed by means of meticulous archival inquiry. The disruptive, cutting and dispersive genealogical knowledge of the host of mobile elements at play in the ‘becoming’ of life (see Nietzsche, 1967:378) calls for a creative dramatisation. To be sure, there is ‘a drama beneath every logos’ (Deleuze, 2004:103) and the affirmative objective of the genealogical parody can only be accomplished by matching the theatricality of the historical fabrication point for point. The intervention into the present is thus always, first and foremost, a performative gesture that, by means of transforming history into a work of art, evokes long-forgotten imperatives and instincts (see Nietzsche, 2010:95–96).

This is why the genealogical origin has ‘nothing to do with genesis’ (Benjamin, 2003:45), but concerns instead the disruption of the supposedly natural flow of historical time and events, the shattering of its foundations and their continuous substitution with disjointed and ruptured elements. Replacing the essentialist ‘what’ with the questions of ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘how much’, the genealogical truth of critique defies the simplistic notion of the search for the roots of critique’s identity. Focusing on the context-dependent dynamisms that effectuate different actualisations of the idea of critique, genealogy demonstrates that its origin is not ‘a mere start which then disappears in what follows’ (see Agamben, 2011d), but an imperative, that is, a principle that determines both its conceptualisations and empirical expressions. The genealogical origin of critique is thusly invented not to substitute the historical one, but in order to break its spell and its monopoly.

Disclosing the inconsistencies, gaps, ruptures and ambivalences masked by the historical accounts, the genealogical dramatisation exposes and transgresses the latter’s limits, fashioning a space and a time for thinking critique anew. It follows that the pursuit of the history of critique’s origin is aimed both at the exposition of the ‘unpresupposed principles’ (see Agamben, 2002) that engender its contemporary predicament and at the intervention into its present. Simultaneously grey and carnivalesque, patient and restive, documentary and creative, meticulous and blithe, this genealogical endeavour is therefore itself an imperative of sorts – a nomadic counter-imperative.

Critical Fits and Starts

There is no recorded history of critique to mimic and caricature; no easily parodiable tale of foundational intention or exclusive goal. One finds but faint traces, vague inferences and retroactive extrapolations. When she stumbles upon some axioms, they turn out to be self-referential at best. There is talk of Enlightenment, of Kant, of critique as modern, secular, rational, normative and blunt. With no history, but in a true historical fashion, there are the assumed ‘whats’. Marking critique at, what appears to be, the level of its pure existence, these axioms operate as indexes that temporarily determine and condition its legibility (see Agamben, 2009a:73). To be sure, at once dictating its interpretation and distributing ‘its use and efficacy according to rules, practices, and precepts’ (Agamben, 2009a:64), these seemingly innocuous ‘whats’ are the building blocks of critique’s tradition, serving as signatures in this genealogical inquiry. It is not enough, however, to follow their course for what they are, in and of themselves, is but signs within signs that indicate the codes with which certain fragments of the history of the origin of critique can be deciphered (see Agamben, 2009a:59).

To read the contemporary axioms of critique as signatures is to perceive them as marks of some of its manifold displacements. To conduct the genealogy of critique, in turn, is to inquire as to their staging, uncovering the drama behind their logos. Tracking the signatures to their proper place – that is, the language itself – the genealogist must therefore resist the urge to abandon her historical object to that which only temporarily engenders its legibility. Travelling upstream, she must proceed from one singularity to the next, persistently replacing the ‘what?’ with ‘in what case?’, ‘who?’, ‘how?’ and ‘how much?’. Such an interrogation of the context-dependent dynamisms that preside over different incarnations of the idea of critique goes a long way towards documenting the heterogeneity of events and the motley of paradigms at play in the history of its origin. In fact, when conducted attentively, even a simple etymological enquiry reveals intermissions, imitations and jolts of disciplinary registers, testifying less to the essence of the term than to its fitful engagements in the service of different imperatives.

According to Terry Hoad, the word ‘critique’ did not appear in the English vocabulary until the seventeenth century (1986:105) at which stage it was already exhibiting, what Philip Durkin refers to as, ‘historical discontinuities’, which indicates that it has been ‘borrowed independently on two or more separate occasions’ (2009:59). Still, it can be ascertained that ‘critique’ appeared in English due to the considerable interest with which the word ‘critic’ was taken up by various leading writers such as William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Thomas Dekker and John Milton. Borrowed from the Middle French critique and initially denoting ‘one who passes judgement’, the noun ‘critic’ was popularised by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1588 and later amended to mean ‘one who judges the merits of books’ as a result of the influence exerted by the publication of Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning in 1605 (Barnhart and Steinmetz, 1988:236). Its derivatives – ‘criticism’ and ‘criticize’ – were employed as verbs in Dekker’s A Knights Conjuring and Milton’s Eiconoclastes, respectively (Barnhart and Steinmetz, 1988:236). The word ‘critique’ first came into use as a noun in 1702 (prompted by Joseph Addison’s writings) and it took another 49 years for it to appear in verb form meaning to ‘write a review’ (Barnhart and Steinmetz, 1988:236).

Interestingly, as Robert Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz point out, the English use of the word ‘critic’ as an adjective – that meant the crisis of a disease – predates the noun version by 44 years and is said to be derived not from French, but from the Greek adjective kritikos that bears no literary associations (1988:236). The French word critique, on the other hand, is traced back to the Latin criticus (Barnhart and Steinmetz, 1988:236; Chantrell, 2002:128; Hoad, 1986:105) that, in turn, is presented as originating in the Greek kritikē, that is, the ‘critical art’ (Hoad, 1986:105; Klein, 1966:374). At this point, most of the dictionary entries terminate, positioning the verb krinein denoting to ‘judge, decide’ (Chantrell, 2002:128) as the origin of both kritikē and its derivative noun kritēs, meaning ‘a judge’.

As krinein and kritikos share a common root in Ancient Greek, they constitute a crucial point of entry for this genealogical investigation. What becomes immediately evident in this context is that the Ancient Greek verb krinein signifying ‘cut’, ‘differentiate’ and ‘decide’ (Gadamer, 2003:44; Gasché, 2007:108) encompasses a far wider meaning than its English derivative, designating one of the functions of the senses: perception as a kind of discrimination (Irwin and Fine, 1995:578; Sorabii, 1995:35). The medical denotation, on the other hand, comes into play on the basis of krinein’s shared root with the term krisis, understood as a turning point that requires immediate response and action (Douzinas, 2005:47; Koselleck, 1988:103). The aforementioned adjective kritikos, which simultaneously implies something ‘crisis-related’ and ‘criticism-related’ (Nagy, 2013:367), thus appears as having been formed and interpreted on the basis of this semantic intersection.

References to the idea of critique in Ancient literature are also said to be found under the term diakrinein that translates as a capacity for making distinction (Douzinas, 2005:47), diakrinonta that refers to an act of discrimination or selection (Too, 1999:30), and krinesthai that implies the resolution of a quarrel (Nagy, 2013:382). In addition, hupo-krinesthai – the compound derived from krinein – signals the centrality of the interpretative aptitude for critique: the role of the critic includes the capacity ‘to see the real meaning of what others see and to quote back, as it were, what this vision is really telling them’ (Nagy, 2013:377).

Law and Critique

In the contemporary expositions of the Ancient Greek texts, krinein features predominantly within the juridical context. Although at first sight it seems rather obvious that the capacity for discernment and proclamation of truth falls within the remit of law – that is, the domain of judgement par excellence – on closer inspection one finds that, in fact, law does not beget critique and the relationship between the two is fraught with ambiguity and complexity. Indeed, as Reinhart Koselleck points out, whilst the Greek usage of krinein generally refers to jurisprudence and the judicial system, this is not the original meaning of the term (see 1988:103). Having acknowledged the secondary nature of critique’s affiliation with law, Koselleck does not, however, disclose either krinein’s antecedent denotation or the broader scope of its originary field of signification. In the absence of any better point of purchase on the advent of critique in Occidental thought, this analysis must take the legal sphere as its starting point and begin by posing the question: ‘How did law come to acquire the status of the privileged site of critique?’.

Hesiod’s writings on post-Homeric Greek laws constitute a pivotal point of departure for this inquiry as they shed light on the origin of the association between law and critique. Therein krinein receives a mention in the section describing the transformation in the modalities of legal decision-making brought about by the change in the economic relations, specifically, their extension beyond the family framework (see Foucault, 2013:102). Hesiod’s account explicates that up to this point the judiciary relied upon a form of legal decision-making called dikazein (or dikassai) that denoted ‘the justice of the kings, local chiefs, chiefs of aristocratic families, who are susceptible to gifts and corruption, and as a result render second-rate justice’ (Foucault, 2014:45). The defining component of dikazein was the practice of a shared oath, that is, the customary requirement for the accusers to be accompanied by people who swore alongside them, committing themselves to the individual they supported (see 2014:46). Importantly, however, these partisans were not truth-bearing witnesses, but co-jurors who manifested the social importance of the person who took the oath (see 2014:46). In other words, dikazein was essentially a question of the outcome of the relations of force and the judge’s ruling was always in favour of those who had influential acquaintances and were themselves in a position of power.

Hesiod explains that this prevailing form of judgement, dikazein, was however found to be increasingly inadequate for the resolution of the newly emergent legal disputes (see Foucault, 2013:102). The extension of economic relations beyond the family framework necessitated a different model of decision-making – one capable of dealing with the cases that eluded the procedural rationale of the existing judicial apparatus. This is how krinein first came to appear within the legal framework, designating a novel type of ruling that came into play when the law was lacking and the tradition silent (see 2013:102). Krinein enabled a resolution of the crisis of the legal system by providing it with the tools necessary to approach the new types of claims. That is to say, krinein opened up the possibility of a ruling based on the interpretation of the judge rather than the claimants’ socio-economic status. This meant that the judiciary was able to retain its central role in facilitating the order within the city-state as krinein re-operationalised its measures so that they were suitable for dealing with a variety of newly emergent disputes. Consequently, krinein became promptly institutionalised in Gortyn law and came to occupy an essential function in the Greek judicial practice (see 2013:102). In short, it was only due to the law’s crisis that critique came to establish itself so firmly within its domain as the legal system appropriated krinein for its own means, to ensure both its survival and relevance in the changing economic setting.

Hesiod’s writings on krinein seem to resonate with many latter accounts of critique found in the Ancient Greek texts. In Herodotus, for instance, krinein betokens truth-telling preconditioned by non-flattery (see Nagy, 2013:368,376); the discernment of truth hinges upon the critic’s ability to divorce his attent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Critical Paradox
• Part I The Idea of Critique
• Part II Critique Today
• Conclusion: The Twilight of Critique
• Bibliography
• Index