Abstract

INTRODUCTION This paper sketches out some preliminary thoughts about what it might mean to conceptualise critique as a textured and variegated cultural practice, and whether it is possible and desirable to study it as we do other cultural practices, ethnographically. I would like to begin by posing three questions, taking as a point of departure Nikolas Kompridis’ statement that in modern capitalist societies there is nothing ‘more urgent today than to resist the sense that our possibilities are contracting or that they are exhausted’ (2006: 280). First, then, is this statement true, in the broadest sense of the term? Second, if this were the case, what kind of cultural practices, what kinds of knowledge, and what ways of being with others have the effect of opening futures up rather than closing them down—and should we necessarily accept the ones that critical theorists recommend as positive goods? Finally, if we can recognise these practices in theoretical or philosophical terms, should we also try to study them in more ‘empirical’ or interpretive ways?