12. Critique

Abstract

Chapter Twelve ("Critique"): According to Bruno Latour, the radical project of critique has "run out of steam" because the binary organization of power that gave "critique its steam and modernism its impetus" ("Compositionist," 477) has been displaced by a new "flat" world; a "biological and cultural network" (472) composed of "billions of people and their trillions of [nonhuman] affliates and commensals" (477) collectively engaged in "composing" a "common world" with "the certainty that this common world has to be built from utterly heterogenous parts that will never make up a whole" (474). It is of course telling that on these terms, cultural theory must abandon even the "mere invocation of the word capitalism" ("Affects," 9) as a way to systematically connect and explain such cultural events as part of the global series of struggles over social resources. The result is to discourage inquiry into the root cause of critique in the social —where, as Marx says, "critique represents a class" ("Postface to Second Edition of Capital") whose dehumanized condition stands as the "ruthless critique of all that exists" (Marx to Ruge, 1843)—and to direct the focus instead to the alien appearance of critique in the everyday because of its defamiliarization of the "normal" (in the Kuhnian sense) mode of sense- making. The dominant attack on ideology critique—whether from the Right or the Left, from above or below, in the academy or in the popular culture—relies on a sentimentality, which is itself the product of the anti-intellectualism of popular media, that makes complex thinking out to be the other of life itself. The (post)critique of the (post)humanities advanced by Rita Felski, for instance, a close supporter of Latourian descriptivism and phenomenalism in such texts as The Uses of Literature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015), Critique and Postcritique (2017), and Latour and the Humanities (ed. Felski, 2020) is in the end, not ideologically very far from the post-truth politics of Trumpism, which wants to purge the cultural lexicon of its alienating languages so as to liberate the "spirit" of the people from the "tyranny" of "experts" and "elites". But the task of the humanities—if they are to live up to the urgent requirements of the present moment—is to resist the encroaching authoritarianism of this manufactured faux populism and take a stand on the unrelenting necessity of critique against the brutality of class. Keywords: critique; postcritique; Bruno Latour; Rita Felski; class; posthumanities.