Critique is a thing of this world

Problematizing critique

Even critical theorists are concerned that critique is not as effective as their theories suggest it should be (Willig, 2009). Thus, I would suggest that critique is gradually becoming ‘problematized’ in Foucault’s sense that an aspect of social and cultural life emerges as a problem through the work of thought (Foucault, 1997b). Thinkers begin to pose the question of present practices, something which was a ‘given’ becomes a ‘problem’. Initially, phenomena are problematized in diverse and specific ways, but after a time ‘any new solution which might be added to the others would arise from the current problematization, modifying only several of the postulates or principles on which one bases the responses that one gives’ (ibid.: 119). Thus, problematization is itself social, and how it occurs initially has consequences. For Koopman (2013), problematization gives genealogy its specific character, it interrogates things which appear ahistorical and constitute the fabric of ordinary life. Interestingly, Koopman suggests that problematization makes genealogy critical, and therefore a genealogy of critique might seem to pose a paradox. However, I would suggest that problematization need not be critical, as it may simply be an analysis of the conditions of possibility of certain arrangements of power/knowledge. Furthermore, to use critique in understanding critique is no more a paradox than Foucault’s use of reason to understand the genealogical construction of madness and reason.

Interestingly, ‘critic’ derives from the Greek kritikos, a judge (Koselleck, 2006), a powerful role taken on in the 18th century by criminologists or psychiatrists, but also by Enlightenment philosophers and artists, musicians and writers. Furthermore, these were all suspicious investigators, detectives scouring the visible world of appearances for clues symptomatic of hidden truths and realities; diffusing into popular culture and becoming a critical optic from academic reading to the everyday interpretation of behaviour: ‘the text is held to be symptomatic of social conditions which it seeks to repress but to which it nevertheless unwittingly testifies’ (Felski, 2010: 223). While Foucault suggests that critique responds to governmentality (1997a), it is also taken on by subjects, from suspicious reading practices to interrogations of the self in fashion magazines.

Foucault locates the emergence of critique earlier than the Enlightenment in the 15th and 16th centuries in terms of the attempt to read scripture differently from pastoral powers, in terms of struggles over science and truth and, of course, around the limits of sovereignty and individual rights amid an expanding governmentality (1997a). Critique appears as a practice of freedom wherein the individuals take themselves and their present circumstances as an object of reflection, and make an ethical stand: ‘I will not be governed thus.’ Thereby, the subject does not repudiate all government of his conduct, but sets a limit to the rule of others and gives a rule unto himself, that is autonomy, literally ‘self-rule’. Thus, critique is the ethical foundation to counter-conduct, which is not simple disobedience but a deliberative indocility, a carefully shaped life-conduct (2009: 191–226). Foucault rarely definitively explicates his terms, and this characterization of his sense of critique focuses on the year 1977. Of course, Foucault is critical and broadly in favour of critique and various forms of counter-conduct, but what is more important is how he eventually problematizes critique.

In an interview for Le Monde in 1980 Foucault maintains his anonymity, appearing as ‘The Masked Philosopher’, a strategy to ensure that his thought is heard rather than received according to his reputation – but also perhaps emphasizing the public and critical demand for unmasking. However, he is not merely concerned with professional critics:

It seems that Courbet had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: ‘I want to judge, I want to judge’. It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgement is being passed everywhere, all the time. … Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep. (1997b: 323)

For some critical thinkers, for instance, Boltanski (2011), judgement and critique are ontologically different things. Judgement appears as the application of power or hegemony to define reality through domination, and critique appears as the subversion of these definitions which call power to account and hegemony into question. From a Foucaldian standpoint, the point is to trace the emergence of a critical dispositif with its armoury of unmasking, deconstruction, or other methods, and the discursive divisions of true and false, critique and ideology, and so forth. Historically, a key question is how did the kritikos [judge] gradually become the critic? Is there something of nihilism in this denunciation of the world? Recall: ‘You have no right to despise the present’ (Foucault, 1984).

Latour problematizes critique as a modern phenomenon in two complementary ways. In We Have Never Been Modern, critique is part of the work of ‘purification’ which constitutes modernity; science purifies the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, and this creates a rupture with the past, wherein these purified domains were taken as hybrid networks – quite rightly in Latour’s view. Previous beliefs and the beliefs of others are critically revealed as ignorance and superstition: ‘Why do we get so much pleasure out of being different not only from others but from our own past?’ (1993: 114). The purifications of the modern constitution are repeated constantly with exponential growth in hybrids of the social and the natural – all technological developments combine the two – and within this sphere, critique becomes characteristic: ‘To unmask, that was our sacred task. The task of us moderns’ (ibid.: 44). Thus, from the Enlightenment to the contemporary landscape of critique, there is an extraordinary proliferation of critiques, which become more and more strident, but simultaneously, for Latour, more desperate and fragile. Eventually, the modern constitution may collapse into an amodern time, neither modern nor anti-modern, but one where social and nature, past and present, are inseparable.

In ‘Why has Critique run out of Steam?’ (Latour, 2004), critique is figured as a remnant of the intellectual arsenal devised for ‘the last war’, and now somewhat obsolete. Latour figures critique as two tricks: the fairy critique and the fact critique. The former refers to critiques which point out that all beliefs are mere social constructions, imaginary or ideological concepts which mystify and delude people. The latter refers to critiques which reveal the real factors which govern people’s behaviour, particularly impersonal forces ranging from biology, neurology, economic self-interest, pleasure-maximization to social structure and even the regime of truth! (There is no point in pretending that ‘Foucaldianism’ cannot be analysed as a critique.) Latour points out that these critiques are proliferating, from conspiracy theorists to everyday life. However, if these critiques are deployed simultaneously, they cancel each other out. If beliefs are entangled in social structure then they are entirely real, and if structural factors are understood through beliefs they are no less imagined, and the end result is that more or less everything is real, constructed and interconnected. So, in an amodern society, or sociology, critique should give way to recognition.

Boltanski and Thévenot are applauded by Latour for moving from a critical sociology to a sociology of critique. In On Justification: Economies of Worth they argue that states of affairs can be legitimated by recourse to different cultural criteria or ‘orders of worth’. For instance, there are domestic, civic, inspirational, market and efficient ‘orders of worth’, and many more, which vary from culture to culture and can emerge historically. Periodically, a state of affairs may become a subject of dispute, in a ‘critical moment’. In disputes, actors switch between justifications – a factory may be efficient, but is it fair or meaningful? ‘It is the reshuffle in the perceptions of the world stemming from a quick shift from one regime to another which gives the illusion of a glaring truth’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999: 362). Hence, critiques appear as situated articulations of different values, thereby producing the sense of ‘domination’ or ‘alienation’ rather than these phenomena existing neutrally to be discovered.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), this conception of critique is employed to problematize how critique has become incorporated by capitalism. From the 1970s onwards aesthetic critiques of capitalism which insisted that it was alienating, disciplinary and stifling were incorporated into new managerial styles which vaunted a new ‘projective’ order of worth, whereby creativity and synergy were valued. Furthermore, the capacity to work independently in a vibrant network on a series of projects was used as a justification against social critiques which attacked inequality in capitalism. This incorporation of critique was thereafter deployed against trade union organizations and state regulation. Even capitalism partakes of critique. More recently Boltanski has attempted to reconcile the sociology of critique with Bourdieusian critical sociology (2011). However, this is a remarkably critical procedure, purifying the wide panorama of critical discourse into the genuinely critical, the merely transgressive, nihilistic critique and the critical legitimation of domination performed by ‘projective’ capitalism. This attempt to salvage or purify critique is probably less worthwhile than attempting to understand critique.

Interestingly, The New Spirit of Capitalism also records the influence of Foucaldian style critiques in the world of work:

They had become experts in the Foucauldian critique of power, the denunciation of union usurpation, and the rejection of authoritarianism in all its forms, above all that of petty tyrants. Contrariwise, they specialised in humanist exaltation of the extraordinary potential secreted in each person, if only they were given consideration and allowed to express themselves. (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 198)

The critical problematic

Beyond problematizing critique, it is also possible to analyse critique as a particular mode of problematization. Of course, various concrete instances of ‘critique’ and ‘problematization’ overlap but they cannot be considered synonyms or conflated. Critique can be considered a problematization of power/knowledge and its social consequences in terms of both truth and justice. In broad outline, critique posits phenomena such as suffering and delusion as socially contingent results of aggregates of power which constitute domination justified by ‘ideology’. Of course, critique is not singular, thus different postulates of this outline may be altered or omitted. Nonetheless, it is vital that this critical problematization of aspects of the world becomes visible; phrases such as ‘structurally reproduced inequalities’ or ‘cultural hegemony’ emerge from a particular perspective rather than neutrally represent reality. From this problematization, whose genealogy cannot be reconstructed here, emerges a critical regime of truth, truth-games and a world-view.

A regime of truth is constituted through the discourses and truth-games which operate within it; by no means can the regime be said to dictate ontological categories and the epistemological conditions of true and false statements to discourses. Rather, the regime is constituted by the aggregates and assemblages of diverse discourses. Thus, psychiatric science is constituted by the manifold operations of practice understood as psychiatry. Likewise, the critical regime of truth should not be conflated with critical theory, no matter how significant the overlap between the two. A regime of truth provides ontological categories and epistemological justifications for dividing between the true and the false. Among other regimes of truth, critique produces subjects, discourse and practical actions which constitute the contemporary world.

Critique is a truth-game which cannot exist by itself. Critique is always the critique of something – it is a discourse, which transforms other objects or discourses. What Foucault means by a discourse is a series of symbols, usually words though not always, which produce ‘truth’. Any particular discourse may have particular ‘truth-games’ wherein truth can be produced; say, for instance, the Christian confessional, in which the ‘truth-game’ of confessing sins produces ‘truth’ about the soul of the penitent (Foucault, 1997b: 223–51). Of course, such a truth-game only works if the participants believe in it; but social and cultural life is impossible outside of discourse. Thus, regimes of truth, approximated by theology or psychiatry, are made up of practices; the truth-game of the confessional or the diagnosis, with their asymmetries of power, production of the soul or the self and identification of sin or pathology, which are purified by further disciplinary practices.

What is the discourse of critique? It consists first in generalized conceptions about society as a social construct, institutions as the vehicles of power, culture as legitimating illusions, and about subjects, either conceptualized as heroic, embattled critics or docile pawns. Often it also carries idealistic or utopian visions about what society could or should become. Second, critique is a modifier of other discourses, so nationhood or psy-science or religion is rearticulated in a critical key, as ideologies, conformism or oppression. Third, critique can be considered as an arsenal of discursive practices, ranging from irony and parody through refutation and debunking to moral or ideal critiques. Critique can partake in polemic:

… determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. (Foucault, 1997b: 112)

Furthermore, critical discourse is elaborated and articulated within concrete contexts and inter alia constitutes institutions; academia, politics, the public sphere and art, and modes of conduct; alternative lifestyles, protest and polemics and various forms of ‘counter-conduct’ (Davidson, 2011). Though at the moment of its articulation critique is generally future-oriented its past articulations created currently existing power-relations, structures and the like; particularly subjectivities, discourses and practices which are considered as ‘liberal’ are implicitly the product of previous emancipation from power through critique and counter-conduct. Thus, phenomena as diverse as counter-cultural political engagement and hip consumerism are in diverse ways the concrete consequences of critique. Interestingly, critique does not necessarily lead to counter-conduct: Allen asks ‘What if the truth doesn’t set you free?’ (2008: 14), recognizing that that knowledge of the contingency of social practices and their injustice does not automatically lead to their transformation.

Critique makes distinctive truth-claims, strongly contrasting with our previous examples of the confessional or the psychiatric truth-game. Whereas these examples seem to produce truth via discourse, signs of God or holiness, or sin or the devil, or symptoms of disease and mental disorder, critique tends to variously displace, modify or even destroy other truth-claims from other regimes of truth. Following Foucault, critique always exists in relation to something else, typically a discourse or an institution, which itself must surely make some sort of truth-claim or produce some form of knowledge; clearly critique cannot accept or replicate these truth-claims and still be critique. For instance, religion is exposed as the ‘opiate of the masses’ and psychiatry as ‘oppression’, from Feuerbach to R. D. Laing. And yet, critique does not leave a void in place of the truth-claims dislodged. Instead, it replaces them with ‘underlying’ or ‘real’ factors, the many epiphenomenal ‘X’s become explained as manifestations of the genuinely real ‘Y’ (Kompridis, 2000). For instance, in Marxism, the truth of culture is exposed as ideology to reveal the economic base as an animating force; or in Bourdieu’s critique of the judgement of taste, a soulful response to art becomes the mere play of cultural capital. There is something of a double gesture in critique; those things which are believed are unmasked as merely illusory, and simultaneously they are exposed as symptoms of something else.

Thus, the critical regime of truth divides the world ontologically between real factors and illusions about them, with an episteme of revelation or unmasking which penetrates the fog of social life and thereby produces this ontological divide. These ‘real’ factors are implicitly factual, not ‘mere’ belief or truth-claim; the ‘reality’ of the economy, social structure, biology and so forth are considered impersonal factors which exist independently of observation and perspective. While they may be more or less accurately measured, they nonetheless animate the world, waiting for the audacious critic to unmask their machinery beneath social life. Thus, the critical regime of truth entails beliefs, tenets, or predicates which are not acknowledged as such but stand as implacable ontological categories. The critical regime of truth does not articulate itself by the profession of beliefs, to say: ‘I believe everyday life is governed by underlying power structures’ is almost inadmissible as critique, properly it would run: ‘I reveal the everyday life believed to be natural or animated by individual choice as actually governed by underlying power structures.’ While there are innumerable conceptions of critique, placing different emphasis on oppression, ideology, resistance, solidarity, or emancipation, the discourse does not offer alternative beliefs, but a position beyond them. Even utopian critiques offering a ‘better’ society entail a world where no ideology remains so that all society sees the ‘truth’ through a critical optic.

Within this regime of truth, renewing meaning in cultural beliefs is problematic or impossible. For instance, once popular and widespread patriotic beliefs are shown to be exaggerated self-flattery or myth and simultaneously these very myths and beliefs are revealed as ‘really’ constitutive of collective identity around the state and maintainers of national morale. ‘Nationalism, the last refuge of the scoundrel’ as Oscar Wilde had it. Once such critiques have had their full effect it becomes difficult to have a meaningful sense of collective identity, because the inchoate beliefs have been mercilessly unmasked, and replaced by the instrumental question of the engineering of group solidarity. As such we can go so far as to suggest that critique is antipathetic to meaningful social life. Who can enjoy art if they accept Bourdieu’s critique of their behaviour as the reproduction of cultural capital?

Thus, critique does not simply involve a range of truth-games in a regime of truth which produces truth, but the undermining of other truths and their replacement with stark and unpalatable visions. For instance, there is Marx’s unpalatable suggestion that ‘consciousness does not determine reality, but reality determines consciousness’, that is, we are not creatures free to think as we choose, but locked into our high or low culture by class. Or there is the equally unpalatable deconstruction which renders our most heartfelt beliefs as nothing more than a fiction. For the Marxist or the deconstructivist, these are not possible beliefs but necessities, ineluctable and inescapable, to which the alternative is error. Indeed, what else is meant by ‘truth’ – it cannot be optional like belief, nor can it be something contrived like ideology, rather it is the inescapable, unshakeable reality regardless of our desires. But there is something terrifyingly bare about these critical truths. Perhaps they appear to have the inhuman factuality of science, but, although this is not the place to digress into a sociological discussion of science, they do not have the incremental aspect of science (Kilminster, 2011). Science is achieved only to be superseded by more accurate science, coming gradually closer to an accurate picture of how things work. These critical truths have something more like the character of revelation. Suddenly the errors and delusions which confound and obfuscate the world are unmasked, and the undeniable reality is revealed.

Critique as revelation brings into view a rather stark world; no matter how varied the myths that obfuscate it, what is revealed is much more rational and impersonal. But to respond to this vision, it is worthwhile recalling Bataille’s argument that ‘the absence of myth is the coldest, the hardest, the only true myth’ (1994: 48). Thus, the overcoming of all myth through critique may in itself be just as mythical as the utopia of emancipation or rationality idealized by critique. Ironically, a world where the specificity or contingency of our own truth-claims is unrecognized is acritical or even mythical. The vision of the world as a starkly economic competition, or a world of naked power-politics, or a struggle over competing identities is not necessarily more factual, but is itself a specific cultural vision. The stark critical vision prioritizes truth over meaning, and is the end of the world as we know it, something of an apocalypse, a revelation, a ‘judgement day’ underscored by the term kritikos. Thus, it is also apt that both Boltanski and Foucault discuss the problem of nihilism; the former to condemn nihilism in favour of ‘genuine’ opposition to domination, and the latter to consider the question of what ethical form of life is possible after the revelation that nothing is true (2011: 190, n.).

Foucault’s genealogy of critique

Foucault positions his own practices through his analysis of Kant’s ‘Was is Aufklarung?’; this analysis both elaborates on his own practices but also historicizes them; to ‘seek to know how the constitution and development of this critical game, this form of thought, was possible’ (2010: 6). Kant’s questions about the specificity of the present, human progress, the Enlightenment and the Revolution form a key critical problematization. Foucault explicates the problem of ‘self-incurred tutelage’ and ‘enlightenment’ at length. First, individuals are considered partially complicit in their own subordination, but seem incapable of independently emancipating themselves. Second, would-be liberators inevitably bind those they emancipate to their own power. For a genealogy of critique this is especially significant, as it indicates that critique itself is a form of power/knowledge which subjugates and constitutes individuals. The only remaining possibility is for individuals to emancipate themselves, through the special qualities of the ‘public’ – here, overseen by a liberal state, individuals may reason as much as they wish, and even carry out a revolution: ‘What is significant is the way the Revolution exists as a spectacle’ (ibid.: 17). Reasoning in public and having enthusiasm for the revolution no matter what its actual course appear as catalysts for emancipation and critique (Szakolczai, 2013). How critique or counter-conduct is carried out in a specifically public manner connects to a longer ‘genealogy of truth’.

Foucault’s final lectures (2011) analyse parrhesia and cynicism. At its earliest, parrhesia is a response to political changes in Athens – freely, frankly and clearly telling the whole truth despite personal danger to a democratic assembly or a monarch. Parrhesia represented a new mode of ‘veridiction’, a new relationship to truth contrasting to the prophet’s truth derived from divine inspiration, the sage’s mastery of wisdom and the teacher’s mastery of technical truth. Unlike these, parrhesia denoted an existential and circumstantial truth-telling in public, a response to the present which risks subjectivity – very close to Foucault’s own concept of critique (Lemke, 2011).

Clearly, parrhesia is significant in the history of philosophy as the attempt to establish truth in discourse independently of the authority of divinity or tradition. Furthermore, parrhesia is associated with Socrates’ practice of dialogue and his interlocuters seek him out because he has the courage to tell the truth, even if it is only about his and their ignorance. Yet Socrates does not go to speak before the Agora, and he even suggests in the Apology that if he were to speak rhetorically in public, he would begin to forget himself. This brings into view a further element of parrhesia, which is to tell the truth about oneself, the harmony of bios and logos, which introduces the ethical question of the ‘true life’. Telling the truth in terms of logos alone is insufficient; one must also conduct oneself according to this truth. Furthermore, the duty to tell the truth also becomes a matter of telling the truth about oneself, so that self-knowledge becomes foundational for ethical behaviour. Telling the truth, knowing the self, becomes an element of the care of self, the duty to remember who you are.

Socrates, of course, was misunderstood in his own day as a Sophist; furthermore, his ethos was also appropriated by Greek Cynics (2011: 172–208). Cynicism, particularly as represented by Diogenes, takes on the theme of the true life in a particularly critical manner. Clearly, the Cynic has certain critical qualities, in that he rejects all conventions and lives without status or home. This ascetic style of life sets the Cynic up as a parrhesiast by way of a scandal to society in general: ‘It involves trying and testing all rules known by men’ (2011: 264, n.). Perhaps elements of this may be seen in Socratic dialogue and irony, which prefers the soul to the body, the self to society and philosophical conversation to mystical religion. However, in cynicism, this testing is played out in public, a situation of complete visibility. And, rather than insisting that man reflects eternal forms, the principle of the animal becomes the principle of man. Cynikos is literally dog-like, and bases ethical conduct on animality, without distinctions of public and private, with instinctual desires for food, warmth, or sex taken as the unalloyed truth of mankind. Diogenes famously relieves his sexual desires in public, and Antisthenes makes love to his wife in public; these public scandals are intended as a critical challenge to the conventionality of all norms. As a philosophical movement Greek Cynicism has little significant doctrine, and appears scandalous and yet curiously banal, described by classical commentators such as Lucien and Julian as an ethos without a philosophy.

Curiously, the Cynic resembles the sovereign, captured in Diogenes’ encounter with Alexander. The Cynic philosopher appears the reverse of the sovereign, as Cynics need no private court, they have no pleasures, they have no power, yet this reflects their total autonomy. The Cynic is the quintessentially autonomous individual: his conduct serves as the manifestation of a certain critical vision of the true life. Just as Sophism distorts Socrates’ logos, Cynicism distorts his bios; the search for the truth becomes a play with language and a constant refutation of any truth-claims, and the life of truth turns from the care of the soul to the reduction of humanity to the body. Finally, it is worth noting that the Cynics recognize their own parrhesia (Foucault, 2011: 284), a short circuit of identity formation which emphasizes autonomy.

These lectures outline a genealogy of critique via Cynicism; Foucault traces their ‘philosophical militancy’ through monks and friars to contemporary revolutionaries and artists engaged in ‘exposure, stripping, excavation and violent reduction of existence to its basics’ (2011: 188). In his commentary Gros suggests rightly that Foucault calls ‘for truth-telling, which calls for courage and especially a care for the world and for others’ but goes too far in suggesting that this demands ‘the adoption of a “true life” as continuous criticism of the world’ (ibid.: 349). Foucault certainly recognized the problem of how to continue an ethical life in the face of the nihilistic absence of truth; however, his strategy was hardly one of philosophical militancy, but of attention to things of this world. The point is to understand critique, not radically return to cynicism.

While there are differences between religious, political and artistic incarnations of cynicism, there are some characteristics in common. First, they self-consciously set themselves apart from society in general. Second, they shape their life as distinctively different and transgressive. Third, their lives, works, or words are displayed publicly. Together, these constitute a critique of existing society and culture (2011: 181–9). Cynical incarnations of critique can be linked to Foucault’s 1977 discussion of ‘counter-conduct’; a practice often lauded by Foucault and Foucaldians (Davidson, 2011), yet nonetheless historicized as a specific form of conduct. Counter-conduct exists in relation to pastoral ‘governmentality’, but not only that, it has historical precedent in Gnosticism, which strongly resembles the cynical testing of all norms: ‘One must respond to every law established by the world, or by the powers of the world, by violating it’ (Foucault, 2009: 195). Thus, within Foucault’s genealogy of truth, there are hints towards a genealogy of critique, precisely because his practice is both critical and a Kantian ‘ontology of ourselves’. If we are critical, then Foucaldian thought leads to a genealogy of critique.

A final example: Foucault’s most contemporary genealogy analyses ordo-liberalism and neo-liberalism as critiques (2008). Clearly, in their opposition to state control of markets the classic liberals follow the formulation: ‘I will not be governed thus.’ Ordo-liberalism is analysed as critical governmentality, busily limiting the effects of the state: ‘it is a market criticism, the cynicism of a market criticism opposed to the action of public authorities’ (2008: 246). Something of a genealogical trace of Greek Cynicism can be seen in neo-liberalism; for instance, Gary Becker’s work on ‘human capital’ suggests that choices regarding crime, marriage, child-rearing and education not only should be but fundamentally are governed by the pleasure principle. Thus, all human values are replaced by the calculations of Homo oeconomicus. Ordinarily, critics describe neo-liberalism as an ideology, yet for Foucualt it is clearly a critique.

Cynicism and cool

The contemporary relationship of critique and cynicism is discussed by Sloterdijk, who asserts that ‘ideology critique is truly the heir of a great satirical tradition in which the motif of unmasking, exposing and barring has served for aeons as a weapon’ (1988: 16). He analyses historical critiques from the Enlightenment to the present as transformations of cynicism, until he arrives at the present as an epoch of generalized cynicism: ‘Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken’ (ibid.: 88). Cynicism here amounts to a boundless unmasking critique, not only can power or hegemony be exposed as domination or injustice, but any ideal can be derided as mere wishful thinking or naive belief. Interestingly, cynical critique in Sloterdijk’s account is also coopted by hegemonic forces. This appears paradoxical if one assumes that critique challenges ‘false consciousness’, but what Sloterdijk suggests is that cynicism is ‘enlightened false consciousness’, which simultaneously unmasks hegemonic ideologies but also thereby suggests that they are necessary and unshakeable parts of the power structure.

Of course, Cynicism is a very particular form of critique which has no utopian horizons or ideals because these could be undermined by critique, and there are many other variants, especially within the fields of active politics and academia. Crucially, it is generalized critique throughout modernity:

In the cynical twilight of a disbelieving enlightenment a peculiar feeling of timelessness arises that is hectic and perplexed, enterprising and discouraged, caught in the middle of everything, alienated from history, unaccustomed to any optimism about the future. (Sloterdijk, 1988: 90)

Thomas Frank traces the uses of cool within advertising from around 1951, where the extant ‘science’ of advertising was overturned by what Fortune magazine hailed as a ‘creative revolution’ spearheaded by Bill Bernbach. This entailed the co-opting of the ‘counter-culture’ with its emphasis on irony, hedonism and youth; advertising appeals to or even constructs what is ‘cool’. Volkswagen advertising famously sold its product through a critique of the ‘crassness’ of other automobile branding; ‘Consumerism itself is a machine propelled madly onwards by no less plentiful a fuel than popular disgust with consumerism’ (1997: 257). Frank’s account concerns the ‘critique of mass-society’ wherein conformity or ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ becomes suspect, a cultural idea that can be reapplied in many different circumstances, in tune with our concept of critique as a discourse, and Boltanski’s account of capitalism incorporating aesthetic critiques.

Subsequently, in One Market under God Frank traces how the ‘critique of mass society’ is incorporated by businesses, manifested in organizational practices like flat ‘democratic’ hierarchies, open-plan offices and the emphasis on creativity. Thus, neo-liberalism has ‘swiped the righteousness of genuine social movements’ (Frank, 2001: 19) with critiques of soft liberals and tough regulators, political correctness and traditional morality, and especially elitism and hierarchy. From Reagan and Thatcher through the bullish market populism of the 1990s until the current credit crisis, a transformation of critique occurs; ‘The true capitalist is the ultimate social revolutionary, at once a man of the people and a rule-breaking outsider’ (ibid.: 142). What must be recognized is that these are critical projects, even though they are generally glossed with terms such as ‘ideological’ rather than ‘critical’ by most academics, particularly social scientists.

Heath and Potter draw from Frank’s diagnosis of the ‘critique of mass-society’ or the ‘counter-cultural critique’ in order to look beyond the self-presentation of ‘alternative’ forms of consumerism. To his account they add an emphasis on alternative consumption as a ‘positional good’; that is, a taste for rock and roll and a large record collection conveys status and positive identity, until everyone has one, making it mainstream then passé, which prompts a search for ‘cool’ or alternative music, which is a positional good until everyone else has it. One cannot like a ‘cult’ band if everyone else does. Heath and Potter extend this analysis to many areas, from travel to extreme sports or organic food. In every case, cultural capital in the Bourdieusian sense is only acquired by those who dissent from the mainstream: ‘dissent is the system’ (Heath, 2001: 16). As always, the problem of the critique of critique remains; Frank renders ‘counter-cultural critique’ as something of an ideology, Heath and Potter critically render individual choices as mere status-seeking for cultural capital. Nevertheless, both of these accounts provide ample evidence of the diffusion, proliferation and trivialization of discourses, which, whatever academics argue, are nonetheless critical for those subjects who deploy them.

Conclusion

If genealogy is inherently critical, then a genealogy of critique is slightly paradoxical, but also necessary if we are concerned with the ‘ontology of ourselves’ and the Kantian question of the present. Beginning from Foucault’s genealogy of counter-conduct, critique and cynicism, a genealogy of critique is possible, albeit extraordinarily difficult. One challenge is that in writing a genealogy of critique we inevitably find that critique is not singular but multiple, it is promiscuously connected with cynicism, Gnosticism and heresiology, and related to pastoral power and governmentality. Discontinuity, proliferation, adulteration and transformation characterize the history of critique, so that it is not a pristine academic tool, but a thing of this modern world.

Why is the modern world particularly critical? First, the very general pattern of forming the modern by way of a break or a rupture with tradition has a clearly critical dimension, as identified by Latour (1993) and Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1984). Not only is modernity constituted by critiques, but these ruptures occur in times of crisis. Koselleck (1988) links critique and crisis, providing a history of the emergence of Enlightenment critiques within closed societies. The term ‘crisis’, which in the original Greek referred to a decisive moment in medicine, in the Enlightenment came to be part of modernity’s self-representation: ‘It now comes to signify an epochal threshold which at the same time anticipates a final reckoning of universal significance’ (Koselleck, 2006: 374). According to much critical theory (Willig, 2009), critique responds to crises, but equally critique amplifies, exacerbates and creates crisis. Enlightened critiques of the ancien régime, for instance, form part of the dynamic of the French Revolution (Furet, 1981). Similarly, discourses which deconstruct any social form may gradually precipitate a crisis, from the legitimation crisis of modern states to the ‘crisis of masculinity’.

Despite the dramatic connotations of the term crisis, not all crises are resolved and many become chronic. Therein, critiques become part of the intellectual and cultural landscape. Indeed, it is even possible that they become part of the taken-for-granted. For instance, the sort of individualism which is championed by liberal critiques becomes a sort of permanent and variegated opposition to different forms of constraint, whether governmental, or just social convention. Since Marx, individualism is frequently considered as an ideology, but a Foucaldian genealogy would find that individualism emerges from a series of critiques and crises: there are the ancient Greek elements in the problem of democratic and aristocratic styles of rule and emerging techniques of self (Foucault, 2011); there is Protestant individualism emerging from the critique of Christian institutions and the crisis of religious schism (Foucault, 2009); and of course there is the Enlightenment and the Revolution and after that Romantic critiques of mass conformity amid the crisis of meaning in the consumer society (Campbell, 1987). Many so-called ideologies of modernity emerged as critiques, they are various rather than monolithic, articulated in many distinct spaces, from questions of politics to questions of lifestyle, and intersect in complex ways – individualism with secularism with progressivism with scientism. Beyond these clearly recognizable modern critiques, anti-modern critiques with their imaginary of a radical return to the authentic or the real are just further transformations of critical discourse (Latour, 1993).

So, the disciplinary society is also a critical society, and while Foucault’s work constituted a critique of disciplinary power, there are nonetheless strong similarities between critical discourse and other sorts of psy-power. If disciplinary powers of psychiatry or criminology incite the subjects to regulate and master themselves by identifying and removing their ungovernable impulses, critique also entails a suspicious interrogation of the self, to root out irrational traditions, biases of social conformity and any other impediments to individual self-mastery. Like the psy-powers critique devolves into a very stark vision of the social world. No matter how varied the myths that obfuscate it, what is revealed is much more rational and impersonal; this is characteristic of economic laws, or Marx’s ‘historical necessity’ or the biological/psychological tendency revealed by Freud, or realpolitik revealed from Machiavelli to the cynicism of present-day ‘public choice theory’. In a critical vision of the world, culture and society become symptoms of the underlying reality, and meaning appears as so much froth. Yet, the overcoming of all myth through critique may in itself be a myth. The vision of the world as endless economic competition, or the site of naked power-politics, or a struggle over competing identities is a vision from within the critical regime of truth. If we are critical, perhaps the challenge is to overcome ourselves, and ‘dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life’ (Foucault, 1997b: 323).