Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic’s task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of interpretation in literary studies, and situates it as but one method among many, a method with strong allure—but also definite limits. Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible. By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.

The Limits of Critique, Felski

Just as Kant performed a transcendental critique of the dogmatic empiricism and dogmatic rationalism of his day in order to clear the way for what we could call a properly postcritical or transcendental empiricorationalism, so is my goal to perform a transcendental critique of the historically postcritical but still fundamentally dogmatic empiricism and rationalism in their most sophisticated respective guises today as logical positivism and inferentialism in order to put the finishing touches on transcendental empiricorationalism - or, in other words, in order to complete the system of German idealism.

22/8/22

Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible. This is not idealism, aestheticism, or magical thinking but a recognition—long overdue—of the text’s status as coactor: as something that makes a difference, that helps makes things happen.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

The role of the term “postcritical,” then, is neither to prescribe the forms that reading should take nor to dictate the attitudes that critics must adopt; it is to steer us away from the kinds of arguments we know how to conduct in our sleep. These are some of the things that a postcritical reading will decline to do: subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the prison-­house of language; demonstrate that resistance is just another form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015, p.173)

that postcritical line of thinking had me remembering a handful (multiple!) of the recent RIP The Architecture Critic pieces in which “the newspaper architecture critic” INCLUDING michael sorkin at the village voice (!) were positioned as the opposite of “accessible criticism”

These are some of the things that a postcritical reading will decline to do: subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the prison-house of language; demonstrate that resistance is just another form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

“Critique reflexively adopts a stance of ‘againstness.’ This is driven by its conviction that texts are primarily loci where large, abstract social forces — political, sexual, technological, economic — are churning away, exerting their subtle influence not only on the form and content of the work, but also on the reader’s attitudes. It is precisely the fact that these meanings and their effects are so well-concealed that makes the critic’s task of exposing them so urgent, and this in turn gives critique its credentials as the self-styled defender of marginalized peoples and perspectives. Felski argues compellingly that despite its many virtues, critique is a false idol. Perhaps its greatest failing is the inability to imagine anything outside of itself.”

“Meta-critic No. 2: How to live in a postcritical world, a review of Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique”   Dan Weiskopf

now that #finalcrit is #finally #over it’s time for cooking proper food again. trofie with homemade basil, spinach and walnut pesto plus local spring veg #vegan #whatveganseat #vegansofig #plantlife #plantbased #architecturestudent #postcrit #hardworkdone #5weeksleft (at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire)

Logos Free Book of the Month for June 2020 - Ancient Christian Commentary on Mark (Second Edition)

Logos Free Book of the Month for June 2020 - Ancient Christian Commentary on Mark (Second Edition) -

The theme of the Logos Free Book of the Month promotion is reading Scripture with the church fathers. Logos is offering two volumes of The Ancient Christian Commentary series from IVP Academic. There are now 29 volumes in the series. From IVP Academic’s website,

The ACCS is a postcritical revival of the early commentary tradition known as the glossa ordinaria,a text artfully elaborated with…

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Engaging Ethics in Postcritical Ethnography: Troubling Transparency, Trustworthiness, and Advocacy In this article, we engage with some of the ethical challenges we faced during a four-year postcritical ethnography that focused on the resettlement experiences of Burundians with refugee status living in southern Appalachia in the United States.We discuss how we navigated decisions about what and how to share all that we learned, particularly as we sought to protect and honor what participants shared and experienced. Broadly, we frame our decision-making process in relation to the notions of ethics in practice and relational ethics. Notably, we complicate commitments to transparency, trustworthiness, and advocacy, as we examine issues of responsibility and representation. We conclude by offering three considerations or "lessons learned" for qualitative researchers, including the: 1. value of generating a layered account of experience; 2. potentiality of experimental forms of writing, and 3. importance of foregrounding relational ethics. Jessica Nina Lester, Allison Daniel Anders https://ift.tt/eA8V8J In this article, we engage with some of the ethical challenges we faced during a four-year postcritical ethnography that focused on the resettlement experiences of Burundians with refugee status living in southern Appalachia in the United States.We discuss how we navigated decisions about what and how to share all that we learned, particularly as we sought to protect and honor what participants shared and experienced. Broadly, we frame our decision-making process in relation to the notions of ethics in practice and relational ethics. Notably, we complicate commitments to transparency, trustworthiness, and advocacy, as we examine issues of responsibility and representation. We conclude by offering three considerations or "lessons learned" for qualitative researchers, including the: 1. value of generating a layered account of experience; 2. potentiality of experimental forms of writing, and 3. importance of foregrounding relational ethics.

http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/3060

The schema of the specter is a postcritical, postsecular, post-Enlightenment, postphenomenological paradigm of life / death, of sur-vivance, which means, at one and the same time, of a life that is haunted by death: bygone spirits and spirits yet to come; as also of a death that continues to live: of the power of the non-living to live on, which frames the question of tradition and heritage-and all this precisely in the name of justice. For it belongs to the hypothesis of Derrida's reading that, while justice can and must be delivered to the living, justice is not just a matter of and for the living. Rather, if there is any hope of justice, justice is due to the dead and the not yet born. For justice means responsibility and we are responsible to the dead, to their dying and the heritage they have handed down through their death, as well as to the not yet born. The spirits of the dead constitute a flood of revenants, a revisitation of the so-called living present by the spirits of the past. But the present is disturbed no less by arrivants, by all those who are to come, and indeed by the revenant as arrivant, by what is to come as what is coming to us from the past, as repeatable.                                                                                                                        Marxism is inspired by one of religion's ghosts, by an irreducible and powerful "messianic" spirit, by an irreducible religious aspiration and respiration, by the specter of a justice to come that breaks the spell of the living present and haunts our present projects. The comment echoes Derrida's reference in 1980, in "Of an Apocalyptic Tone," to "that Marxist eschatology that people have too quickly (trop vite) wanted to forget these last years in France". This communist spirit also haunts "old Europe," which is scared half to death by the specter of a coming communist justice.

The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Caputo, 1997)

Is contemporary continental European philosophy preparing itself to break with Kant? An attack upon supposedly indestructible structures of knowledge is happening today: finitude of the subject, phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. “Relinquishing the transcendental”: such is the leading project of postcritical thinking in the early twenty-first century as it appears in Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude. Some questions that we thought could never be raised after the Critique of Pure Reason are reappearing with a renewed force: Was Kant genuinely able to deduce categories instead of imposing them, to prove the necessity of nature, to found the difference between “a priori” and “innate”? Should we consider, on the contrary, that the “problem of Hume”—the existence of an irreducible contingency of the world—has never been settled by the Transcendental Deduction? Such a claim implies that we are provided a sufficiently convincing concept of the irregularity of the laws of nature and of the possibility of a totally different world. Does After Finitude elaborate such concepts?

Can We Relinquish the Transcendental? | The Journal of Speculative Philosophy | Scholarly Publishing Collective

Luara told me today that her and Geoff’s main critique of my position is that I’m secretly a Hegelian in the sense of building a teleological, all-totalizing system. Need to think about this more, but my immediate reaction is there’s a difference between a system of the One (where everything coheres in and around an actual Being or ontological substance) and a system of the Multiple (which can only ever be a purely formal system, or an axiom from whence to derive potentially infinite theorems - in sum, can only ever be systematically anti-systematic). Just as there’s a difference between a precritical teleology that tends towards a final state in which time ends in pure stasis (as in the Platonic Idea or the Boltzmannian entropy), and a postcritical teleonomy or anti-teleological teleology that respects no norms except to kill all normies. In any case, food for later thought... In any case, xx

8/9/21

Postcrit (Project 1)

This was our final crit in studio concepts. I got some really good feedback from everyone yesterday. It seems like the class was sort of divided on whether or not I should have brought in the drawing device. I was also unsure about this, but decided to keep it out of the presentation because it’s kinda ugly and not really the final product. If I were to do this again I might have included photo documentation of the drawing setup. When I was looking at my project yesterday I felt like it definitely needed more documentation. 

“Thesis Statement”based on Psalm 65:5-12 and Mark 1:14-20

Sometimes it seems like my entire adult life has been about realizing that nothing works the way I thought it did, and everything is more broken than I had been lead to believe. Like the Psalmist, over and over again it has become clear what has seemed good, fair, and just wasn't even basically trustworthy upon further examination. In addition, I've learned that what people or organizations claim to be about often isn't directly correlated with what they actually DO.

One scholar summarizes Psalmist as saying, “No matter how weighty their social standing, we cannot depend on other people to provide security or stability in our lives.”1 Another scholar takes it a step further, adding commentary to the Psalmist's ideas, “Every human effort, finite cause, and mortal relationship is an unsuitable object for our absolute trust and final hope. The career that shows so much promise, the children that seem so exceptional, the nation that appears so strong: they are like shifting sand which offers no security, no permanent purchase.”2

I don't think the Psalmist and I are alone in our desire to find trustworthiness in what can't offer “permanent purchase.” Often, when I hear people in their deepest struggles, they are struggling with a change they didn't foresee - something they thought was more permanent than it was – and the harshness of reality adds a significant sting to something already plenty difficult. Something in human nature expects more permanence than there is, and wants to trust in that permanence.

The Psalmist concludes that only God is as sturdy, steadfast, and worthy of hope and trust as we need. God is able to be our refuge, time and time again. God doesn't disappoint, and God is as permanent as we need. Best of all, God's nature is steadfast love, and it is on God's steadfast love as a platform, that we can build our lives.

Thanks be to God for that.

The thing is, I'm not sure it is all that easy for us to figure out what it means to trust God while remembering the impermanence of everything else. How do we balance the concepts that God is worthy of trust, but that doesn't mean our loved ones will all live long happy lives, our jobs will treat us fairly, our bodies will remain strong and healthy, our homes remain in tact, or that our spouses will always treat us well. (To name a few.) God is good and trustworthy, but life remains complicated. I think that this seemingly obvious reality is really hard to master!

Figuring out how to trust in God while being realistic about the world, and without becoming cynical about everything is pretty difficult. It is also very important, in fact, I think it IS adult faith development! That is, adult faith development is: trusting God, seeing the world clearly, and holding hope – all at the same time. Marcus Borg gives a model of how faith develops, and helps clarify the process all people have to go through:

Precritical naiveté is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state (if we grow up in a Christian setting), we simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories. ...

Critical thinking begins in late childhood and early adolescence. One does not need to be an intellectual or go to college for this kind of thinking to develop. Rather, it is a natural stage of human development; everybody enters it. In this stage, consciously or quite unconsciously, we sift through what we learned as children to see how much of it we should keep. ...

Postcritical naiveté is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality. … Importantly, postcritical naiveté is not a return to precritical naiveté. It brings critical thinking with it. It does not reject the insights of historical criticism but integrates them into a larger whole.3

These ideas are larger than simply how we read the Bible. They apply to life in general. Pre-critical naiveté then, is trusting that God will make everything OK. Critical thinking comes when we acknowledge that lots of things aren't OK at all. And then post-critical naiveté is the time of trusting in God and seeing the world clearly and holding onto hope.

Now, I think that during his ministry, Jesus was clearly living in post-critical naiveté. He knew EXACTLY how broken things were AND he trusted in God and worked to make them better. If I'm honest, I tend to think of Jesus as being born in post-critical naiveté, but that's probably not really true! Mark says that Jesus came to Galilee (the location of the majority of his ministry) and started talking. He said, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Throughout all of my study of the Bible, I have come to believe that Jesus' words here are the thesis statement of his ministry, and thus of both the New Testament and the Body of Christ.

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Because it can easily get confusing, let's review what repentance is. Repent most literally means, “turn around” or “change direction.” I love my friend Rev. Dr. Barbara Thorington Green's take on it; she says it means to “turn around, look at God, look where God is looking, and refocus attention where God is looking.” In context, then, repentance is calling people to turn away from the ways of the world (domination, oppression, competition, hierarchy, etc) and turn TO the ways of God (cooperation, collaboration, mutuality, support, solidarity, etc).

Because it is the key to everything about Jesus, let's review the idea of the kindom of God. The kindom of God is the world as God would have it be, when all people are able to survive and thrive, when abundance and sharing define the ways of life, when justice comes naturally to people, when things are exactly as they should be. That is, when we can look reality squarely in the eye and see nothing wrong at all. Building the kindom of God was the work of Jesus, and is the work of the Body of Christ today. Our theologians tell us that it is both “fulfilled” and “not here in entirely yet.” It is what God is working WITH us in creating, and it exists in moments and instances, but not yet as the earth's reality.

To be fair, I think this whole thesis statement, and in fact this whole kindom of God thing is a form of circular logic. That is, repenting and refocusing on God and on God's kindom IS the thing that builds the kindom – it doesn't happen unless people do it. Believing that God's way is good news, thus taking on the good news itself as a way of life is the way of making the good news into reality. Living as though the time is now is what fulfills the time.

I'm OK with it being circular logic though. Mostly because I believe it ;) I also think this means that paying attention to the stuff in life that ALREADY is a glimpse of the kindom is one of the ways that we build it. And I think it is fitting, somehow, that this system only works if we trust that it works – it feels like the rest of faith.

Or, to put it more sufficiently, one scholar wrote, “Right away Jesus not only talks about the reign of God but enacts it.”4 This scholar explains himself saying, “Mark's brief account of the beginning of Jesus' Galilean ministry links Jesus' proclamation of the gospel with his calling of a band of disciples. These activities are by no means unrelated. Jesus' proclamation is not just a solo recitation of informative words but is an efficacious action that creates community and is taken up and continued by that community.”5 Now here is the key to it all. This same scholar says,  “wherever Jesus was active, the time was fulfilled and the kingdom was present.”6

Now this caught my attention. If wherever Jesus was active, the time was therefore fulfilled and the kindom was therefore present, then does that mean that when we are truly acting out the ministry of Jesus – sharing God's love with our neighbors – that the kindom is present with us too? Are we able to, together, create the kindom of God – at least in small times and places?

I think we ARE!!!

I see it often enough. I see love being shared in extraordinary ways, I see transformation happening that doesn't really seem possible, I see hope created in the things we do together, as well as laughter and healing. I see the kindom when we are together as the Body of Christ, it really IS present and the time is fulfilled.

This is humbling to realize, although it is also inspiring! It does lead me to some new questions: when and how are we most successful in having kindom moments? When aren't we? How can we attend to them well so that we can appreciate them? What keeps us from creating even more kindom moments? How can we change those realities? Is the creating the kindom more work, or play? Is it about authenticity? Does it require community or can it happen with just one? Does it have to happen AND be noticed to have the most impact, or if we miss it, is it OK?

And finally, how is it that the kindom of God can co-exist in the world with the brokenness that is our current reality? (I think that's just a reality of non-linearity.)

If Jesus, in his life, made the kindom into reality in his present; and if we as the Body of Christ continue his ministry in our shared lives; then we get to make the kindom into reality in our present. How cool is that???

During the passing of the peace today, I ask that you talk to each other about the kindom - when you've seen it, felt it, heard it – I think talking about it makes it even more real. "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." And, keep on paying attention when you see the kindom. Not only does it take away disillusionment, it also builds the kindom itself. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Marsha Wilfong, Exegetical Reflections on Psalm 65:5-12 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 275.

2 Timothy A. Beach-Verhey, Theological Reflections on Psalm 65:5-12 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 274.

3Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (HarperSanFransicso: 2001) 49-50.

4Lee Barrett, Theological Reflections on Mark 1:14-20 found in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 286.

5Barrett, 284.

6Barrett, 286.

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

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First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

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January 21, 2018

none of them ever mention how the postcritical thing in architecture was almost explicitly about the institutionalization of...women in h/t (like 99% of the time it was people mad at b**trix c*lomina), and ALL the “women just are too busy/fundamentally unsuited for theory :)” women are also like tweeting 24/7 about the architecture pay gap