Critique

“Critique” is an everyday practice. We all disagree, object, and express negative judgements in our daily lives. In intellectual discourse, however, critique has some much more analytically specific and yet emotionally invested meanings. The “critique of critique” has, in recent decades, become a mainstay of theoretical debate in the humanities, cultural geography included. In this chapter, I engage in a close reading of one of the most influential contributions to these debates: Rita Felski's 2015 The Limits of Critique . Its conflicted mockery of critical practice, I argue, betrays an underlying confusion between the dispositions of humour and irony – that is, between laughter that can be shared, and that which is directed outwards against those who “do not get it.” Finding Felski's “postcritique” to be (ironically enough) insufficiently postcritical, I turn to Isabelle Stengers's engagement with critics of modern technoscience, and particularly her conception of “diplomacy.” By embracing “constraint” in her propositions and taking “humour” as her disposition, Stengers is able to treat critique as one practice amongst others, yet without engaging in the sort of dismissive polemic that characterises Felski's Limits . Treat those you critique with humour, I conclude, and you just might be able to take them seriously.