Towards an anthropology of critique: The modern experience of liminality and crisis

The sociology of critique

As a substantive social phenomenon, critique is multi-faceted and alloyed with other discourses and practices. Most recently, I have compared critique amongst the Occupy movement and liberals, finding that both view society as stifling to individuality (Boland 2013). However, critique is not restricted to sub-cultures or elites, but diffuses widely alongside social transformations and uncertainty. Keohane and Kuhling (2004, 2007) describe how rapid social change dissolves ordinary social institutions such as the meal, gift-giving, sociability and relations with the state. Liminal transitions dissolve social structures which regulate ordinary social interaction, removing limits from everyday life. Increasingly, regulatory approaches to collective problems – from parenting to environmentalism – are displaced by counter-cultural critiques, as individuality becomes an ‘arms race’ for difference and distinction (Heath and Potter 2004). Even consumerism, the whipping boy of critique, is now constituted through critique – purchases are motivated by the attempt to avoid conventionality and conformity. What was once cool, rebellious or alternative is recycled through consumer culture into the meaning of commodities. Contemporary public debate is animated by critique; critics describe European technocrats as being less rational bureaucrats than delusional romantic idealists, desperately pursuing a ‘blinkered’ economic policy. These bureaucrats returned the critique, ‘exposing the ideology’ of their critics. Contemporary political discourse comprises a spiral of mutual accusations and unmasking, so that the left and the right both expose each other’s ideological bias. In the realm of identity politics, critique is not the preserve of any group – feminists and post-feminists both deploy critique on society and against each other. Within such liminal sites, critique is incited, imitated, imperative, and even contagious.

These critiques have social consequences; The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) charts the incorporation of critique by capitalism. The authors distinguish aesthetic and social critiques of capitalism, the former being concerned with the alienating and homogenizing processes of work, and the latter with inequality and selfish individualism. Management texts and practices then attempt to restore the meaning of work by deploying critiques taken from the wider world – the revolts of 1968 and the 1960s ‘counter-culture’ – against organizational structures in work. Management texts of the 1960s promulgate a critique of patrimonial structures, especially in family firms: ‘there will be an end to nepotism, favours, “string-pulling”, “the grapevine”’ (2005: 88). Instead, success will be benchmarked against set targets so that efficiency is paramount and ‘rational’ work practices prevail. Furthermore, this liberates ‘cadres’ – well-educated but unconnected and often younger workers – who feel cramped ‘by structures that have developed without a change in the centralised quasi-autocratic managerial mode’ (2005: 65). This critique is intensified and modified in the 1990s, where critique is re-directed against hierarchy, planning and rationality: ‘hierarchy is a form of co-ordination to be excluded in that it is based on domination’ (2005: 70). Contemporary management texts imagine a world of projects, synergy and creativity, a vibrant space of constantly shifting networks which fulfil human needs for connection and adaptation. Critiques from elsewhere are re-deployed, challenging and transforming workplace structures, liberating groups and individuals. Sometimes newer critique undermines older critique – as rationality becomes unmasked as produced by hierarchy – but generally, the critique intensifies; hierarchy is persistently questioned. This resonates with liminality, transition, reflexivity and the liberation of a special communitas – both cadres or networks imaginatively represent ‘human nature’ as unstructured.

Theoretically Boltanski (2011) locates critique within the pragmatic context of social action, so critiques are used more or less frequently in all societies, not just by intellectuals, artists or revolutionaries but by ‘ordinary’ people. For Boltanski, all societies are arranged and organized by institutions which define social reality, and also justify or legitimize themselves. These institutions also deal with the non-social and genuinely real world of nature – Boltanski is at most a ‘weak’ social constructionist. Boltanski’s range of institutions is vast, and though his empirical research concentrates on the world of work, his theoretical account extends to all institutions which define social reality. Beyond this, Boltanski suggests that institutions subject persons and situations to tests to determine their value according to a criterion of worth. Whilst at first this appears irreducibly abstract, in my reading it parallels liminality; only in a destructured moment can social reality be re-defined, and liminal rituals are generally tests or trials.

Generally, institutional definitions and social arrangements are accepted, but occasionally they are brought into question or disputed, leading to the exchange of critiques and justifications. Then institutions themselves are tested: ‘The sociology of critique undertook to describe the world as the scene of a trial’ (2011: 25). Firstly, institutional criteria of legitimacy may be tested to see if the social arrangements meet their own ‘order of worth’ (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999). For instance, bureaucratic self-justifications via efficiency and disinterested operation can be tested by these very criteria. Potentially, the bureaucracy’s definition of reality is undermined, its actions may be revealed as inefficient and its decisions as biased. Yet, for other institutions there are other criteria, for instance, leadership may be justified on the basis of loyalty and trust, or its inspirational qualities, or renown and popularity or on the criterion of successful performance. These criteria vary between societies and their importance changes over time: the criterion of blood lineage is less important in Europe than it was a century ago. This leads us to the second means of testing, which is to assess the criterion itself, and whether it really justifies the institution. Critical voices can examine whether popularity or inspirationality are valid justifications for leadership – perhaps only efficiency matters. Clearly, this is a more radical critique than the previous, merely reformist critique; it shifts the ground on which institutions are justified, and opens up doubt and uncertainty about social life generally. Finally, critique may devise new criteria of worth, like sustainability, equality, transparency and so forth.

Boltanski’s analyses of managerial texts (above) suggests that out of the crises of capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s a new criterion of justification arose – worth and wealth were justified by the ‘projective order’ where workers became valued on the grounds of their protean adaptability. This ‘projective order’ is minimally stable, allowing and demanding creativity and fluidity, enforcing synergy with new connections and team-work. Interestingly, ‘projectivity’ emerged as a response to critiques of capitalism as stifling, routine and unfulfilling, which demonstrates the relationship of critique and justification. Furthermore, ‘this change consisted in substituting self-control for control and consequently in externalising the very high costs of control by shifting the burden from organisations on to wage earners’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 191). Broadly speaking, the shift described here is from external constraints to self-control, and a concomitant re-location of meaning and identity from the collective to the individual level. Thus, critique plays a part in the re-deployment of power and institutions, especially in modernity, and usually under the impetus of crises. Crises and critique, like revolutions are, ‘located at the moment of juncture where old institutions are overthrown and new ones have not yet been constructed’ (Boltanski 2011: 99). The resonances with liminality cannot be missed.

For Boltanski, institutional definitions of reality and justifications of society are necessary because of ‘uncertainty, which is at the heart of social life’ (2011: 70). Institutions operate to fill the void of this uncertainty, and to legitimize the cultural conventions on which social life is built. However, critical moments and crises of legitimacy produce uncertainty, so that critique can confront institutions with the ‘arbitrariness’ of their definition of reality. The term arbitrary here has both the connotation of indeterminacy – pointing up how institutions are changing, situated and relative – and the connotation of ‘arbitrator’ or judge, that institutions define reality, which for Boltanski is a form of power which often entails symbolic violence at least. Ideally for Boltanski, critique forces institutions to become fully justified according to criteria which are universally legitimate, but acknowledges that critique sometimes devolves into mere rituals of transgression or into nihilistic critique of ‘everything’ without any concern for justification (2011: 113–15). For Boltanski, critique is ontologically continuous with legitimation, a series of justifications or disputes about social institutions, but it can spiral into completely anti-institutional standpoints. For Boltanski, critique is the source of new institutions – again, the parallels are striking; liminality is ‘the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all’ (Turner 1967: 97).

Boltanski insists that social reality is fundamentally uncertain, that institutions are artificial constructions upon it which are presumably unjust, oppressive and stifling, and that critique is the key task of creating better institutions. So Boltanski is not just a sociologist of critique but a critic, with all the hallmarks of liminality: from his perspective structure or institutions appear as ossified impositions, everything is open to question and radically uncertain, and transformation is both possible and necessary. This conjunction of opposites, structure and formlessness, is paradoxical, but reflects the liminal experiences underlying critique. Interestingly, Boltanski refers once to Turner in a footnote (2011: 177), yet treats rituals as ‘reality fixers’, merely empty ceremonies, full of wooden language. Of course, this does not mean that critique calls ‘everything’ into question; only those structures which are suspended are criticised, many continue unquestioned. For instance, class structures may be critiqued and patriarchy accepted, or vice versa.

Latour’s work (2004) situates critique as a discursive practice constitutive of modernity. For Latour, modernity is constituted by discursive purification of phenomena into dichotomies, especially the social and the natural, and the incapacity or refusal to recognize hybrids of the social and natural (Latour 1993). This is maintained through two ‘critical tricks’: first, critique renders all cultural beliefs as merely arbitrary, which gives a sense of the world as being open to radical reconstruction; second, critique renders most phenomena as epiphenomena, determined by real factors – the implacable forces of economics or biology or social structure or power – so that actors lack autonomy. Applied simultaneously, everything is subjectively constructed and impersonally determined; the critiques clearly contradict each other – the final trick of critique is keeping these separate. Otherwise critique lapses into recognizing that everything, including culture, is more or less real and interconnected. Latour eschews these ‘critical tricks’, especially as manifested in social constructionism. Thus it becomes clear that critique is a discourse applied to other discourses, converting or transforming their truth claims, either unmasking them as mere delusion or as consequences of impersonal discourses. On the one hand, all institutions appear as arbitrary constructions, yet on the other, institutions appear as implacable impersonal forces ontologically separate from the critic and from society. The former corresponds to the sense of formlessness and questioning and the latter to the liminal experience of subordination, vulnerability and passivity.

Sloterdijk’s (1988) history of cynicism connects closely with critique. He 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’ (1988: 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 delusionary. Interestingly, cynical critique in Sloterdijk’s account is also co-opted 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 unmasks hegemonic ideologies but simultaneously suggests that they are necessary and unshakable parts of the power structure. Cynicism has no utopian horizons or ideals because these could be undermined by critique.

By historically linking satire and critique Sloterdijk’s work foregrounds the liminal dimensions of critique. Theatre has roots in ritual (Turner 1982), which suggests that satire is located within the experience of liminality:

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. (1988: 90)

Felski (2011) provides a complementary perspective within literary criticism to the sociology of critique. ‘Literary criticism’ once meant literary appreciation, but Felski finds it is increasingly permeated with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Literary criticism has become an exercise in unmasking the social predicates of the text or its underlying ideological structures, whether focusing on capitalism, patriarchy, ethnocentricism or logocentricism. Contemporary reading practices insist on penetrating surface meaning, refusing closure, unpicking narrative strategies and resisting mystification. Alternatively, the operation of critique is displaced onto the text itself, re-situating it as resistant, subversive or even transgressive of the ‘mainstream’ or prevailing ideology. Felski suggests that other practices of reading must succeed critical reading practices as they have become dominant, ubiquitous and underwhelming: ‘Unchecked by counter-forces, locked into a complacent and self-confirming circle of argumentation, a hermeneutics of suspicion dissipates its problem-solving powers and loses much of its allure’ (Felski 2011: 230).

Furthermore, the practice of critical reading reflects wider critical discourses, which Felski traces through a genealogy of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry and sociology, but also through the critical dimensions of modernity. A Foucauldian approach to critique would style it as a discursive ‘regime of truth’ with specific ‘truth-games’ which are used and redeployed in many circumstances, leading to the diffusion and perhaps even the trivialization of critique. However, describing critique through the lens of Foucault’s ideas around power/knowledge is also a means of critiquing critique and unmasking critical claims to truth as nothing more than the deployment of discourse. What is important here is that critique is re-located from the level of supposedly ‘pure’ theory to that of situated cultural practices, yet the task of understanding critique remains. Drawing together Foucault’s explicit remarks on critique Lemke (2011) suggests that critique is an intervention made within existing power/knowledge struggles which risks subjective identity. Strikingly, critique rarely makes any strong truth claims of its own; rather, it presents a rather stark version of reality, without beliefs or myths; a perspective which is not transcendent but stranded in a specific dimension of liminality. Our aim here is not to deconstruct or unmask critique as a regime of truth but to understand it socially.

Liminality and critique

Turner (1969, 1982) relates liminality to social structures: society is ordinarily structured and confined to definite statuses, relationships and behaviours, but occasionally change takes place. Firstly, seasonal changes require different sorts of human behaviour – sowing, harvesting or resting. Most human communities mark these changes culturally, giving meaning to the natural world. Secondly, individuals change physically, through birth, puberty, maturing, aging and dying; such physical changes are marked culturally as transitions and transformations. Rituals do not just reflect change, they actually enact it. The ritual does not merely ceremonially mark a change which exists neutrally but it defines and gives meaning to the change – it symbolically performs the change. Thus, rituals have a distinctive relationship to existing social structures; rituals alter structures, they both put structures temporarily into abeyance and are the source of all social structures.

Rituals begin with a first stage during which structures are suspended, order is temporarily dissolved, at least, for whomsoever is undergoing the ritual – if it is one of seasonal change, it may be the entire social group, if it is a number of neophytes becoming adults, then order is mainly suspended for initiates. This creates communitas, a group who lose some structural characteristics. During this distinctly marked and temporary time, there are fewer limits on behaviour, norms are loosely prescribed and scarcely enforced; liminal communitas is beyond the law, at once criminal and untouchable. Liminal rituals entail de-structured or anti-structural behaviours, from carnival inversions to transgressive challenges. Thereby order and social structure emerge from the background or are taken for granted and become a matter for reflection:

If liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs. (Turner 1969: 167)

Having suspended order and reflected on existing culture, the next stage is genuine liminality itself, a threshold moment – betwixt and between. This second stage requires a performance of some kind, a ritual act which not only signifies change but also constitutes transformation. The second stage is equivalent to performative speech acts which create the situation described; by announcing the New Year, or by declaring a couple man and wife, that which is described is accomplished. Such performances need not be linguistic or literal, very often they point beyond language through cultural symbolism – for instance, immersion in baptism. However, performative speech cannot transform identity outside of the distinctive situation of ritual. Thereafter, a third stage brings the ritual to a close, re-aggregating the community to the new situation, with those undergoing the ritual absorbed to their new status, whether mature adults, or a married couple or whatever. This final stage is characterized by feasting and sociability, by a celebration of the renewed structures by the society, because the meaning of its culture is re-established through the ritual process. The ritual process renews and reaffirms cultural values which may have been taken for granted, transforming them from mundane aspects of structure into reflexive or even sacred values. Thus, the apparent disorder of ritual creates order.

While Turner eventually analyses many phenomena as liminal, initially he remains close to his fieldwork where critique is limited in scope. Mainly, ritual allows some jeering and lampooning so that ‘individuals are purged of rebellious wishes and emotions and willingly conform once more to the public mores’ (1967: 50). One exception is Muchona, who ‘achieved an amazing degree of objectivity about the sacred values of his own society’ (1967: 150). Nonetheless, liminality is described as a ‘period of reflection’ where ‘neophytes are alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos and the powers that generate and sustain them’ (1967: 105). This approaches critique, ‘enfranchises speculation’, allowing ‘a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence’ (1967: 106). Thus, when structures are suspended, there is the potential for critique, but only within certain limits:

‘But this liberty has fairly narrow limits… there are usually held to be certain axiomatic principles of construction, and certain basic building blocks that make up the cosmos and into whose nature no neophyte may inquire’ (1967: 106).

Central to these performative speech acts are ‘masters of ceremonies’ who symbolically suspend structures, bring the ritual participants through the liminal performance and complete the ritual by presiding at the re-aggregative feast. These shamans, witchdoctors, wise-women or priests stand on the threshold of ordinary social structure. Masters of ceremony require the initiates to question and reflect upon social structure; for instance, that gadfly Socrates, who makes us realize we do not know what we thought we knew. However, their role is not only questioner or critic; they also must provide a model of the values or truths which are affirmed and renewed in the second stage. They do not just dissolve order but also provide the resources for it being restored again through the cultural treasury of meanings or truths. Liminality is not just a time of questioning and criticism but also a dangerous time in which there are no sure standards for behaviour, a frightening, bewildering limitlessness; it is a moment in which society appears arbitrary and culture merely illusionary, a moment of touching the void. Nonetheless, again and again, meaning and structure return and prevail and are even refreshed and renewed by liminality. Why? Firstly, the memory of structure and its value is rekindled by liminality – chaos is exciting for a time but is soon unfulfilling and even boring. Secondly, the suspension of everyday trivial life makes the sacred and the extraordinary central, and life can be imbued with higher values – beliefs become heartfelt rather than mundane. Thirdly, structures reflect the distilled wisdom of experience, and while culture may lose its lustre and become taken for granted, liminality allows us to reflexively recognize and appreciate meaning and value.

The ritual process resembles a trial or a test; indeed, it tests the initiates by pushing them to the limit, similar to Boltanski’s idea of ‘tests’, with society as the scene of a trial, but anthropology shows that these tests are ordinarily confined to certain occasions and that whatever questions are asked are generally answered decisively by the master of ceremony, who must be personally or institutionally charismatic in Weber’s sense of answering cosmic questions of meaning (1991: 281). Such wider breaches in the order of society either by outside forces or, more importantly, internal tensions, contradictions and transformations, are discussed by Turner (1967) as ‘social dramas’. The initial breach builds into a crisis, leading to debate and reflexivity, but usually ends in reconciliation. Where reconciliation is impossible, the result is schism. Yet, in modern society these disputes and social dramas become chronic, for instance, between religionists and secularists, liberals and socialists and other unresolved disputes, which provide the social backdrop to interminable critique.

Turner’s theories have enjoyed widespread popularity, especially amongst theorists who celebrate the freedom, creativity and potentially subversive or transformative powers of liminality. Frequently, Turner’s description of liminality supports this, for instance, ‘the feeling of endless power’ (1969: 139). However, modern society places much less emphasis on ritual, indeed ritual is now often seen as empty ceremony – like Boltanski, above. Indeed, modernity is characterized by a critical questioning of ritual (Cressy 1997). Eventually, liminality becomes less contained within ritual boundaries, leading either to the dissolution of order, or charismatic renewal. Thus, we must move now from critique within the limits of ritual to crisis and interminable liminality.

Crisis and the experiential basis of critique

Critique and crisis are linked by Koselleck’s classic work (1988), and also by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999), who suggest that a critical moment or crisis facilitates and stimulates critique. Koselleck (2006) traces crisis etymologically from Greek, where it refers initially to a medical situation in which decisive, immediate intervention must be performed on a patient in a ‘critical condition’. This trope of crisis is also connected to legal justice, where a kritikos was a judge. The term ‘critic’ derives from this, preserved in the sense aesthetic criticism judging the qualities of art, but lost in the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Political criticism, in the sense of accusation or agonism, is further from the original sense of the term, as is the sense of critique as unmasking, exposure or deconstruction discussed here. What is most important in Koselleck’s etymological study is the emergence of ‘crisis’ as a moment in time when decisive change is possible, and of critique as a revelation of truth within crisis. Yet, by the 19th century this is transformed into a sense of an interminable crisis in modernity, with a turn from truth-telling to scepticism and questioning. These crises, from the reformation and religious civil wars to political and industrial revolutions, and critiques, from Protestantism and Puritanism to enlightenment, liberalism and socialism, are concrete historical phenomena and form a self-reinforcing circuit: critique and crisis become linked. ‘Because it is able to see the direction of history, this critique is propelling the crisis’ (Koselleck 2006: 384–5). This reflects a distinctive kind of liminality which is incomplete; either the ritual process is never brought decisively to a close, or it is constantly re-opened again by critiques which suspend structures.

Liminal rituals are in decline in modernity whereas critique is increasingly prevalent, which would seem to suggest an inverse relationship between them. However, this assumes that social change entails a movement from old structures to new, where new structures are always ontologically consistent with those of the past. Modernity is characterized by acute social transformations such as revolutions, wars and other crises (Thomassen 2010). Such occasions have the potential for utter social transformation: ‘the totalistic reconstruction of the mundane world according to sharply articulated transcendental visions’ (Eisenstadt 1999: 25). Although such events are more frequent, significant and decisive in modernity, what is crucial here is the long-term, continuous or permanent experience of liminality, an interminable transition generated by the cumulative suspensions of structures and the dissolution of order and norms. The chronic experience of transition, crisis and transformation may lead to patterns of behaviour and social organization which are structural in the sense of being patterned. Yet these are hardly stable structures, given that they are avowedly times of constant change, like the socialist ‘permanent revolution’, ironically mirrored when Fortune magazine trumpeted the ‘permanent revolution’ of business in 1952.

Critique is characteristic of such transformations:

In the realm of thought, this involved a specific kind of systematic, institutionalised uncertainty where, not surprisingly, the faculties of radical doubt and scepticism became the cardinal values of knowledge … [based on experiences of] … the breaking of any existing boundary or sacred taboo; fundamental doubt as to the character of one’s person and one’s identity; repeated testing and rehearsals of self-overcoming. (Thomassen 2010: 335–6)

What I argue is that severe and widespread social dislocations make ‘repair difficult’ and that a ‘novel re-articulation’ becomes less possible due to the circulation of critique. Clearly, critique cannot create this situation by itself; rather this chronic liminality must arise from problematic events, perhaps natural disasters, but more importantly from crises of meaning – which indicates a problem with the ‘master of ceremonies’. ‘The shaman or prophet assumes a statusless status external to the secular social structure which gives him the right to criticise all structure bound personae’ (Turner 1969: 116). Does every society have masters of ceremonies equivalent to the shaman or prophet? Granting Turner’s assertion that the ritual function of the shaman was partially critical, how critique has been transformed in modernity is the crucial question. Of course, the other function of the master of ceremonies is to guide the initiates through a performance, to test them and bestow a new status upon them. Perhaps this role atrophies as the critical one increases, keeping in mind that performance is not merely ceremonially testing and granting of a new status but the renewal of meaning, the establishment of ethical values and the verification of higher truths. Lastly, critique seems to have once been contained within the ritual setting, that is, temporally and spatially limited. Within modern times it is hard to identify such boundaries; critique has gone from ritual occasions to the stage and the public sphere into everyday life, becoming mandatory and constant.

Liminal ‘coming of age’ entails an exposure of the relative or arbitrary quality of culture and identity – the initiates ‘have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society’ (Turner 1969: 103). Not only is this demonstrated to the initiates, it is something they must take up; once the structures of society are suspended initiates are ‘alternately forced and encouraged’ to question their culture, just as Boltanski’s cadres became fluent in the critique of hierarchies While humans are ordinarily reflexive about their own culture, this is accentuated during ritual moments. Generally, critique eventually gives way to a performance which renews cultural values. Yet, in modernity, the first stage of liminality turns from a temporarily bounded communal experience under the supervision of a master of ceremonies to a generalized disposition. How?

Szakolczai (2000) characterizes modernity as ‘permanent liminality’ (2000: 218–23). What exactly does this claim entail? Turner recognized certain groups as ‘permanently liminal’, for instance, the Franciscans or the Hippies (Turner 1969: 112–13). He describes chronically liminal people or places such as writers or rock stars or holiday locations or theatres as ‘liminoid’ (Turner 1982). However, these groups, persons and locations are implicitly contained within a structured society. In modernity, crises and events have overstepped the bounds of ritual and defy the limits of space, time and structure. Szakolczai claims that the apparent structures of modern societies are in fact the institutionalization of the experiential conditions of liminal communitas. A paradigmatic example is the slogan of the French Revolution (Sewell 1996), ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’, which reflect liminality as a realm of possibility, anti-structural levelling of initiates, and a strong bond of communitas. Unsurprisingly, the ancien regime is critiqued as stifling, oppressive and conventional. And it is not just the revolutionary party which becomes permanently liminal and critical; liberals, socialists, anarchists and feminists share these tropes within the century, and even anti-modernist politics today simply invert the critique and ‘unmask’ modernity as the nouveau ancien regime: ‘To unmask is our sacred task, the task of us moderns’ (Latour 1993: 44). Beyond the realm of politics, everyday life in modernity is premised on the world-view of the initiate in communitas; everyone is equal, freedom and choice are mandatory, and not only is everything open to question but it is vital to be sceptical, critical and even cynical. Hence, apparently contradictory elements of modernity can be reconciled, for instance, individualization and homogenization appear as two elements of communitas.

Concerning the suspension of structure, Turner focuses on the way in which individuals are deprived of their ordinary comforts, food, shelter, recognition, and even names. For Szakolczai, this resonates with the stripping of identity that occurs within disciplinary institutions, as life transitions such as birth, maturation, sickness and death are sequestered into various institutions (Szakolczai 2000: 203). Although the first stage of liminality is renowned for complete obedience to the ritual masters, nonetheless the voice of communitas opposes ‘the coercive power of supreme political rulers’ (Turner 1969: 110). There is simultaneously obedience to the masters of ceremony and opposition to, questioning of, and even transgressing social structures. A shaman can scrutinize all structure, a model followed by the initiates, eventually to be supplanted by a performance and renewal of the meaning of those structures. Yet, if the initiates become stranded in the first stage, perhaps without a genuine master of ceremonies, the result is interminable critique, a society dedicated to questioning rather than renewing meaning. ‘Liminoid phenomena… are often parts of social critique, or even revolutionary manifestos’ (Turner 1982: 54–5). And, if the master of ceremonies is a critic, everything can be questioned bar critique.

Turner typifies the state of communitas as resembling both the grave and the womb, not just outside of the known world, but unknowable, formless (1969: 106). Within communitas structural characteristics of society are irrelevant and even slightly unreal – the initiates cannot go through the ritual process without relinquishing structure, rendering them anonymous, equal, homogeneous, naked or uniform. The initial suspension of order dissolves structures, rendering many structures as apparently contingent or arbitrary or even false and illegitimate. From the perspective of communitas, everyone is the same, mere dust, mere clay or even a tabula rasa on to which culture, society and structure are artificially grafted. Communitas provides the possibility of unfettered, spontaneous free association, without limits on behaviour, desire and imagination. Hence, structure appears from this experiential position as the stifling of humanity and the constraint of freedom, the imposition of mundane and closed beliefs on wonder and imagination. Once temporary, it is a foundational experience of modernity; it constitutes the relativist and constructivist ontologies and, according to Latour (1993), critical purification also underlies the scientific perspective. Hence, liminality entails an experience of formlessness, and in permanent liminality, this anti-structural experience is taken as the paramount reality; constructionists might never undergo rituals, yet if critique appears to suspend all structures, then sharply articulated anti-structure appears as the reality.

If the first stage of liminality is taken as the paramount reality, then the subsequent stages can hardly be experienced as meaningful. Crucially, existence is re-defined as essentially formless, open and unfixed, but overlain with arbitrary social structures, understood critically as a construct. Thus, if initiates pass through a ritual – or experience rapid social change – the meanings generated through it are not accepted as genuine, the transition is not transformative, and the meanings of social structures are not replenished or renewed. Thereby society comes to appear hollow or fake, full of empty formality. Of course, this is the critical vision, questioning to the point of cynicism, actively corroding the meaning of life; and it is by now an almost ubiquitous vision, taken for granted – ‘of course social norms are arbitrary, of course, tradition is invented, of course, identity is an illusion’. However, situated within liminality, critique becomes an area of investigation not just by critiquing critique but by recognizing it as a concrete experience of permanent liminality.

Conclusion

Clearly, critique extends beyond ‘critical theory’, as critique has become diffused across the social sciences. The experience of liminality involves casting existing social structures or institutions as merely arbitrary, and probably as constricting and oppressive to the potentials of human freedom, though putatively ‘most people’ aside from the critic are deluded into respecting them as natural. From this standpoint – epitomized theoretically by social constructionism – these institutions appear ‘structural’ in the sense of ossified, impersonal powers and somehow separate from the concrete human beings who reflexively negotiate them, with skill, irony and critique. Paradoxically, reality seems utterly formless, open to reconstruction by fundamentally unfixed subjects, yet these potentials are always controlled by ossified structures. Within the experience of liminality people appear free and trapped, structures appear external and open to reconstruction. Although many theories attempt to steer between these schismatic opposites, both elements of this vision are persuasive. Why? Because critique emerges from liminality, wherein the critic becomes experientially separated from institutions and hence experiences them as ‘external’ structures, then undergoes a radical sense of doubt and relativity and faces apparently completely open freedom. Indeed, for many individuals, especially theorists, being initiated into critique is a central liminal experience; other rituals appear as mere empty ceremony, as in the case of Boltanski. Arguably, the abstractions of ‘theoretical architectures’ also derive from liminality, as imaginary self-referential and self-confirming systems appearing consubstantial with reality to their creators.

Of course, there are different emphases amongst critical theories. For instance, critical realism tends to emphasize the influence of definitively real forces, such as demography, economy or relations of power. By contrast, Bourdieu’s critical sociology places a stronger emphasis on individuals taking up a heterodox relationship towards their own habitus, even if such a transformation is unlikely without an extensive understanding of social forces, such as that provided by his critique of capitalism (Boltanski 2011). Elements of cultural studies are more inclined to suggest something of a communitas of sub-altern critics resisting reflexively against structures of domination (Ortner 2005). Critical theory has been strongly influenced by these strands of thought, but still places a greater emphasis on comparing existing conditions against an alternative social standard, even if this is utopian (Wright 2009). Such a relationship to ideals becomes somewhat unusual as ideals in turn submit to critique – say in post-modernism – thus much critical thinking admits of no attachment to cultural values or symbols without deconstructing them. However, the ideals of critical theory more or less equate to the liminal experience of communitas: the absence of hierarchy and power relations, questioning all beliefs and values, and complete equality and freedom. While the anthropology of critique is not simply a critique of critical theory, it should make us more reflexive about how critique shapes research and to value concrete empirical work over mere critique.

Empirically the anthropology of critique emphasizes the relationship between social transformations and critical discourses or practices. This relationship must be situated in the ongoing proliferation of critique within modernity, so critique both emerges from crisis and fosters it. Crucially, critique does not occur outside of the context of the suspension of structure within ritual or crisis, and if it precipitates further crises in turn, it is because of the absence of masters of ceremony capable of decisively restoring meaning and order. Thus, the anthropology of critique would locate critiques of capitalism and consumerism within the rapid social transformation of the culture of work and everyday life. Methodologically, this prevents the attribution of critical thought to singular individuals in isolation, but situates it in social transitions. Furthermore, critical subjectivities are formed through the experience of crises which prompt the re-formation of identity through critical stances towards culture and society – authenticity, free-thinking, alternativism. By orienting directly towards actual critiques or problematizations, this approach also helps us to specify and make more concrete the complex processes glossed by terms such as ‘modernization’ or ‘liquid modernity’ or even ‘permanent liminality’. Aside from a Foucauldian approach which interprets various critiques as truth-games, they can also be read as articulations of the experience of the suspension of structures. In turn, empirical study of the diffusion and adaptation of critiques, perhaps from academic elites through the media to other groups, or between geographical areas, or amongst generations can be worthwhile, not just as discourse analysis but to track the diffusion of liminality. Finally, what is important here is that critique – like truth – is a thing of this world, and is limited to those structures which are actually suspended, even though the proliferation of critique may serve to question and suspend further structures.

More broadly, critique should be recognized as constitutive of modernity. Consider the Communist Manifesto, a classic but illustrative critique of capitalism which sits between the intellectual, political and popular registers, but paradoxically recognizes the critical nature of capitalism:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part… tears asunder feudal ties… It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. (1998: 36–7)

What does this tell us about critique and liminality? Firstly, critique occurs within the context of the suspension of structures, liminal transformations which admit of no simple genealogy, but emerge and grow gradually from the demise of ritual and the displacement of masters of ceremony since the Reformation or earlier. Thus, modernity is an increasingly critical social order as more structures are suspended for more people over time and space. Secondly, critique spreads through a process which is almost contagious, partially because it is imitative in the sense that those whom it confronts tend to repeat critical discourses to their own purposes, but also because it opens up liminal questioning and doubt and undermines masters of ceremony and the meaning of cultural symbols. Hence, modernity is made up of critical citizens. Thirdly, the experience of liminality does tend to emphasize certain narrow elements of human existence as the ‘genuine reality’ – for Marx it is economic conditions and the historically conditioned mode of production, for neo-liberals it is the freely choosing agent, for neurologists it is observable brain processes. Inter alia the perspectives of these critics imply that culture is somehow less real, and that our critical thoughts are somehow not cultural. These stark visions designate a-cultural ‘facts of life’ as the only ‘real’ reality, so that culture, values and belief, the stuff of the second phase of liminality which restores the meaning of structures, are only ideologies, delusions and fictions.

The anthropology of critique suggests that cultural analysis and interpretative approaches should not be reducible to critique. If we take the idea of liminality seriously, this also means that the interpretative pursuit is akin to the second stage of liminality – recognizing that although ideals, values and symbols do not correlate exactly to the empirical world, they make it meaningful, which is not mere window dressing or ideology but genuine forces within human life; the act of belief and the practices of culture are real in themselves and decisively form society. Recognizing the importance of culture in spite of critical or reductionist perspectives is not just of disciplinary importance but of social importance, as the truth of economism or instrumentalism or individual choice increasingly holds sway. Merely critiquing these as ideologies leads to further critiques, but to recognise the cultural experience underpinning these critiques is a much more fruitful avenue. Particularly, it can lead to a diagnosis of the ‘great age of critique’ as a culturally specific liminal event, which in time may pass, or even be transformed.