Critique

Reaction to  essays:  What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue, Judith Butler
                                  Being Critical, Marc Treib


The two essays describe the function, task, and meaning of critique at two very different registers of intensity. The Treib essay comes from a pedagogical perspective as he focuses on the development of  critical thinking as a foundational premise of teaching and learning. Through the student’s exposure to teachers and invited critics at design reviews, the process of critique leads to the student’s absorption of critical questions that she/he will later bring to their work as the make it, developing the skills of evaluation on their specific projects. Later this ability is transferred into constant critical thinking as they approach their own work and the work of others.  Treib’s hope is that critical thinking will inspire perpetual assessment of ones values while shaping those values at the same time.

The Butler essay pulls out from Foucault’s idea of virtue a deeply carved significance of critique as a means of self generation.  There is reciprocal action here also in the assertion that critique’s function is always seen in relationship to another thing or set of conditions.  Unlike in the Treib essay, critique does not express a process of evaluation, but rather it provokes a stance and a view that interrogates the structures that influence our perceptions, internally as well as externally.  Through the practice of critique our interactions in the world (with the world) can both illuminate the framework from which we see, question, and judge and open the opportunity to develop an ethical perspective that is individual because it is central to the formation of the self.  In opposing dominant power structures, virtue is inherently revealed by the act of resistance for Foucault.  Butler asserts the practice of critique is a state of poiesis, a critical moment when one thing is transformed into another, when the act generates a more virtuous and free self.