On Critique:

Butler, Foucault, Spivak,

Latour

A Minicourse

Stephen Petrina, Professor

Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia

30 September 2015
Readings
1. Butler, J. (2009). Critique, dissent, disciplinarity. Critical Inquiry, 35(4), 773-795.
2. Foucault, M. (1978/2007). What is critique? (trans. L. Hochroth & C. Porter). In S. Lotringer (Ed.),
The politics of truth (pp. 41-83). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
3. Foucault, M. (1981/1988). Practicing criticism (A. Sheridan, Trans.). In M. Foucault & L. D.
Kritzman, (Ed), Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977-1984 (pp. 152-158).
New York, NY: Routledge.
4. Kant, I. (1784/2007). Was ist aufklärung? [What is enlightenment?] (L. Hochroth & C. Porter, Trans).
In S. Lotringer (Ed.), The politics of truth (pp. 29-38). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
5. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.
Critical Inquiry 30(2), 225-248.
6. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the
interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
7. Excerpt from Petrina, S. (2012). The new critiquette and old scholactivism: A petit critique of
academic manners, managers, matters, and freedom. Workplace , 20, 17-63.

On Critique
Etymologically, critique draws from Greek κρίσις, krísis, derived from κρίνω, krínō, krinein (Latin
iudicium, discrimen). Nearly all Sacred Books include various references to judgment (e.g., in Revelation
18, a form of uncompromising judgment of merchants and luxuries as God [YHWH, Θεὸς, Deus]
proceeds to level Babylon). Critique etymologically draws from ancient script but Indigenous cultures
have deep histories of complex language and references to judgment. Traditions of philosophy and
rhetoric are nearly part and parcel with critique and criticism. In Statesman, Plato uses kritikós (κριτικόν)
to refer to an ability to discern or judge, or divide (260b). And in The Republic, Plato coins the term
dialektikê (διαλεκτική) to refer to a form of division in dialogue and a method of undermining assumptions
to discern first principles and truth (533c-d). Similarly, Aristotle uses κρίνοµεν to refer to the faculty of
judgment, generally understood as the power of discerning, separating, or judging (critical art and skill)
(Aristotle, De Anima, 428a3, 432a16).
Critique, as dialectic, is part and parcel of the liberal arts, which were actually reduced to seven
"disciplines" as medieval European universities established a fairly uniform curriculum based on the
trivium (grammar, dialectic [logic] & rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music &
astronomy). The artes liberals did not refer to arts as we understand them today, but rather to the Greek
τέχνη and Latin sense of skill and techniques. Liberal arts provided a foundation of higher knowledge or
freedom (Latin liber) of thought, and eventually were prerequisite to the three higher faculties of law,
medicine and philosophy/theology (scholasticism). Dialectic, or the art and skill of reasoning or
disputation was used in two senses, (a) the art of definition or discrimination of ‘ideas’, (b) the science
which views the inter-relation of the ideas in the light of a single principle ‘the good’; corresponding
broadly to logic and metaphysic. By Aristotle, the term was confined to the method of probable reasoning,
as opposed to the demonstrative method of science. With the Stoics, rhetoric and dialectic formed the two
branches of logic, in their application of the term; and down through the Middle Ages dialectica was the
regular name of what is now called ‘logic’, in which sense accordingly dialectic and dialectics were first
used in English. (OED Online)
Foucault found that “since the Classical age, commentary and criticism have been in profound
opposition…. until the connection between language and representation is broken, or at least transcended,
in our culture, all secondary languages will be imprisoned within the alternative of criticism or
commentary. And in their indecision they will proliferate ad infinitum.” Commentary “halts before the
precipice of the original text, and assumes the impossible and endless task of repeating its own birth
within itself.” It is a glossarial practice of drawing “copious deductions” and illuminating a text; pia
interpretatio, reverent interpretation. Criticism questions language and the text “as to its truth or
falsehood, its transparency or opacity… examines the forms of rhetoric: the analysis of figures, that is, the
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types of discourse, with the expressive value of each, the analysis of tropes, that is, the different relations
that words may have with the same representative content… defines its relation to what it represents.”
Commentary “sacralizes language” and criticism judges and “profanes it.”1 In erudition, Foucault is
careful to concede that commentary and criticism are mutually pedagogical even over time when
“commentary has yielded to criticism.” Critique and criticism range from what Foucault dubbed “the high
Kantian enterprise to the little polemical professional activities,” albeit too often mistakenly distinguished
by differentiating between objects— criticism of works versus critique of practices and positions.2
In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant developed critique as a method to set limits on what can
be known beyond the ground of experience and how to firm this up as the empirical and objective ground
of reason (p. xix). Rather than “criticism of books and systems,” Kant founded critique to “expose the
groundless nature of the pretensions of” two faculties, reason and understanding (p. 54). He proceeded
with the Critique of Practical Reason (1785) and Critique of Judgment (1790), and a critique of Religion
within the Limits of Mere Reason (1793) in the face of a Censorship Edict and charges of insubordination
by the King after the second edition in 1794. Critics adjusted the method (i.e., simply put, “expose the
groundless nature of the pretensions of…”) or “critical theory” to an increasingly open field of objects.
Kant (1781) proclaimed: “Our age is the age of criticism, to which every thing must be subjected,”
including the “sacredness of religion,” “authority of legislation,” power of steam and natural liberty of
capital (p. xix).
By the time Kant wrote Critique of Pure Reason, the opposition between commentary and
criticism was elevated to an opposition between religion and critique. Kant was clear about which was
ascendant. One problem was completing the little polemical criticisms with critique. Kant gave critique its
modern place in philosophical analysis. The basis of critique is found in condensed version in “What is
Enlightenment?.” published in a Berlin newspaper in 1784. According to Foucault (1983/2007), Kant
“founded the two great critical traditions which divide modern philosophy.”
Let us say in his great critical work, Kant posited and founded this tradition of philosophy that
asks the question of the conditions under which true knowledge is possible and we can therefore
say that a whole side of modern philosophy since the 19th century has been defined and developed
as the analytic of truth. But there exists in modern and contemporary philosophy another type of
question, another kind of critical questioning… The other critical tradition poses the question:
What is our actuality? What is the present field of possible experiences? It is not an issue of
analyzing the truth, it will be a question rather of what we could call an ontology of ourselves, an
ontology of the present… an ontology of the actuality. (pp. 94-95)
Foucault (1981/1988) clarified that
critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out
on what kind s of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of
thought the practices that we accept rest…. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and
trying to change it: to show that things are not as s elf-evident as one believed, to see that what is
accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of
making facile gestures difficult. (pp. 154-155)

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 On Critique Minicourse

1. Part I. Lecture: On Critique (30 minutes)

2. Part II. Minipaper: Commentary (in class writing activity, 1 hour)

a. Choose one of the readings or texts wherein you have done a close reading or would
like to do a closer reading. Choose a section of this text and write a 500-600 word
commentary.
i. One could reduce writing to four registers, narrative, description, commentary
and critique. For this activity, you are writing a commentary. Let’s assume here
that texts are not inly iconic but are also communicative and referential. The
point here is that a text and its commentary have pedagogical functions.
ii. Commentary makes a text meaningful and enables interpretation. Hence,
commentary differs from interpretation.
1. Chambers (1978) clarifies: If the function of commentary is to create
meaningfulness, it follows that it will be particularly valuable in cases
where the narrative/descriptive elements of the text are not, in and of
themselves, meaningful. (pp. 326-327)
2. In short, it is an invitation to interpret and a guide to interpretation. As
an invitation to interpret, commentary presents itself as a form of
textual strategy aimed at involving the reader in the concerns of the
text. (p. 329)
3. The “contextualizing function” of commentary “is productive of what
we have called meaningfulness.” Commentary does not only gesture
towards its text, it also designates a "world" [or contexts] to which the
text is relevant. (p. 331)
4. Commentary does not in any way designate the right way to read a text;
it must, on the contrary, be read as part of the text, and most
particularly as forming part of the text's strategies of meaningfulness.
(p. 335)
5. Commentary’s “function is the production of meaningfulness, not truth;
and the function of the production of meaningfulness is to give
literature its social role” of mediation (p. 335).

3. Part III. Microteaching: Commentary (in class teaching, 5-6 minutes each student = 1
hour)
a. Take 5 minutes to focus on this section of text and teach from your commentary.
b. Reading the section of text and commentary is one common, scholarly approach to this
pedagogical function.
c. The options are yours.

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Critical Theory, Pedagogy, Literacies, Thinking & Inquiry
1. Critical theory v. critical pedagogy v critical thinking v. critical inquiry
a. Critical theory generally derives from Max Horkheimer's (Frankfurt School) 1937
essay "Traditional and Critical Theory." Horkheimer responded to the problem of
founding the human and social sciences on the natural sciences, which reinforced
individualized "liberalist bourgeoisie" attitudes of independence. "Under the
condition of monopolistic capitalism," he wrote, "a relative individual
independence is a thing of the past. The individual no longer has any ideas of his
own. The content of mass belief, in which no one really believes, is an immediate
product of the ruling and political bureaucracies, and its disciples secretly follow
their own atomistic and therefore untrue interests; they act as mere functions of the
economic machine. The concept of the dependence of the cultural on the economic
has thus changed. With the destruction of the classically typical individual, the
concept has as it were become more materialistic, in the popular sense of the term,
than before" (1937/1972, p. 237). In this short description is critical theory's
objective of theorizing power, capital, culture, the individual and the masses. The
Frankfurt School drew on Marx and political economy (ideology, alienation,
reification, historical materialism), and Freud and psychoanalysis (desire,
repression, sublimation), and directed theories / critiques of the "culture industry"
toward this objective.
b. "Often erroneously used to refer to contemporary theoretically informed criticism
in general, critical theory was a specific and hugely influential school of thought
also known loosely as the 'Frankfurt School.' Much preoccupied by 'mass' society
in the 1930s and early 1940s, when fascism so successfully mobilised mass
opinion and action, critical theory's most influential work was Adorno and
Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which argued that the Western
intellectual tradition of instrumental rationality— using reason as a tool to
manipulate the world— was complicit with capitalism's managerial approach to
organising human life in the interests of production and ultimately with the
totalitarian impulse to use people as mere disposable raw material. The ferocity of
this Marxist-influenced critique was especially directed at the mass media and the
'culture industry' that they sustained, the latter viewed as manipulative, deleterious
and distracting people from any political consciousness" (Fleming, 2000, p. 68).
2. Critical pedagogy draws from this basis of critical theory. According to Shor, critical
pedagogy is learning and teaching that address "habits of thought, reading, writing, and
speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official
pronouncements, traditional cliches, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand
the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any
action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass
media, or discourse" (Shor, 1992, p. 129).
a. Being critical generally means that first, “there is the element of evaluation or
judgment.” And second, “there is the element of knowing closely and ‘for what it
is’ that which is being evaluated: the object of evaluation or judgment” (Peters &
Lankshear, 1996, p. 54). Critical literacy, for example, then involves:
b. having a critical perspective on literacy or literacies per se;
c. having a critical perspective on particular texts;
d. having a critical perspective on— that is, being able to make ‘critical readings’
of— wider social practices, arrangements, relations, allocations, procedures, and

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 so on, which are mediated, made possible, and partially sustained through reading,
writing, viewing, or transmitting texts. (Peters & Lankshear, 1998, p. 55)
3. A critical pedagogy and literacy of new media and technology, for example, prompts
and guides students to ask fundamental questions about what particular media and
technologies offer (perception and description), what the media and technologies mean
with their embedded values (analysis and interpretation), and the particular media or
technology’s worth (judgment). How do specific media and technologies frame ecology,
equity or quality of life? A critical pedagogy of new media and technology is not an anti-
technology stance, but a fund of knowledge toward public understanding, regulation, and
sensibility. It encourages a critical attitude toward questioning technocratic assumptions,
and technologies’ interaction with notions of autonomy, determinism, and progress.
Questioning acknowledges the voice of those marginalized by western styles of mediated,
technological and cybercultural practice, such as aboriginal peoples, the financially
disenfranchised, differently abled, racially and sexually segregated, feminists and
ecologists.
4. Critical thinking, however, is much more of a liberal practice and to this day there
continue attempts to define the concept as neutral (e.g., "critical thinking is the art of
analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it" (Foundation for Critical
Thinking, 2006, p. 4).
5. Critical inquiry is split, partially parceled out to the liberal, neutral notion of critical
thinking and partially to critical theory. For example, critical inquiry is often defined as
"using various modes of inquiry and interdisciplinary perspectives or methodologies to
conceptualize, investigate, and derive meaning. It implies that learners are active learners,
self-motivated learners, and learners who understand the ambiguities and uncertainties of
achieving absolute knowledge, as well as the implications of various courses of action"
(Skidmore College, 2005, http://www.skidmore.edu/administration/assessment/ *See
"Critical Inquiry Report").
a. The journal Critical Inquiry was founded in 1974 for authors who "value
examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations… and insist
upon the highest standards of evidence relevant to conclusions drawn in practical
criticism… criticism that aspires to be a special kind of 'learning'— not in any
sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human
commitment with objectivity that Michael Polanyi characterizes as 'personal
knowledge'… disciplined criticism" (Sacks, 1974, p. iii). Hence, CI "aims to be
independent of any theoretical bias. It promotes discussion and controversy about
current critical trends, as well as reviving debate about more established critical
traditions [i.e., critical theory and Kantian philosophy]."
b. In "Critical Pedagogy and the Futures of Critical Theory," Peters (2002) cautions,
however, that critical inquiry as merely disciplined inquiry "does seem to rob
critical theory of its original critical intent or to tame it, recasting it as a method of
inquiry in the service of democracy… it is too easily denatured and stripped of its
critical intent and reduced to ‘thinking skills,’ critical or otherwise."
http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/oslo/peters.htm

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References
Chambers, R. (1978). Commentary in literary texts. Critical Inquiry, 5(2), 323-337.
Foucault, M. (1983/2007). What is revolution? In S. Lotringer (Ed.), The politics of truth (pp. 83-95). Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Gordon, A. (2004). The new cultural history and urban history: Intersections. Urban History Review 33(1),
3-7.
Peters, M. & Lankshear, C. (1996). Critical literacy and digital texts. Educational Theory, 46, 51-70.

1
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London,
Tavistock, 1970), 80, 81. On commentary, see Eva Matthews Sanford, “Renaissance Commentaries on
Juvenal,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 79 (1948): 92-112, on
93; Gerald Snare, “The Practice of Glossing in Late Antiquity and the Renaissance,” Studies in Philology
92 (Autumn 1995): 439-459. Sanford quotes Conrad of Hirschau to define the practice of commentary: “to
draw copious deductions from brief statements, and to illuminate the obscure words of others.” Lanigan
summarizes this section of Foucault as a contest between “language as grammar” and “ speech as
rhetoric:” “It is a contest that may be won or lost under both the semiotic guise of a rhetoric of science and
under the phenomenological guise of a science of rhetoric.” Richard L. Lanigan, “Foucault's Science of
Rhetoric: The Contest Between Practical Discourse and Discursive Practice,” symplokē 4 no 1/2 (1996):
189-202, on 190. See also Philip Smallwood, “Problems in the Definition of Criticism,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 36 (July 1996): 252-264.
2
Michel Foucault, “What is Critique? In The Politics of Truth ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lisa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1978/2007), 41-83, on 42. For the distinction
between critique and criticism, Childs and Fowler posit that “Critical theory too should be distinguished
from criticism, since it concerns itself with the analysis of concepts rather than works.” In a helpful
discussion of critique, they state: “when critique, and the forms of literary criticism associated with it,
question the prevailing distribution of political power, the alarm bells start to ring. By contrast, the
apolitical forms of critique are a tolerated part of the intellectual scene. But this distinction between the
political and the apolitical is not itself invariable and we cannot necessarily know in advance what form of
critique will strike a political nerve.” Peter Childs & Roger Fowler, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary
Terms (New York: Routledge, 2006), 38, 41.