Critique refigured: art, activism, and politics in post‐recession Dublin

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that the anthropology of critique has been hampered by an implicit framing of critique as the content of knowledge rather than an orientation to knowledge about the world. It does so building on an ethnographic account of a group of critical citizens in post‐recession Dublin, Ireland. It stages a comparison between two different forms of critique of importance to them: art and activism. Contrary to the assumption that activism and detachment, and moral advocacy and empiricism, are at odds, this ethnographic comparison reveals that here the ultimate critical skill is thought to be the ability to take up different critical attitudes. Moreover, it isn't a lack of detachment but the creation of a ‘critical community’ that makes critique political. Drawing from this ethnographic instance of what counts as critique, this article thus makes a case for an anthropology of critique as itself a critical practice – one that is becoming increasingly urgent as critique as we know it has come to exhibit a hegemony of form in the social sciences and public cultures of debate.