The End of Critique: 1 What Critique Thought It Was Doing

Critique has always understood itself as a disruptive act.

To criticise, in its canonical sense, is to step back from the field of practice, render its hidden structures visible, and thereby loosen their grip. Whether articulated as ideology critique, genealogical unmasking, or rational-democratic scrutiny, critique presumes that seeing clearly is itself a form of intervention.

This presumption is not naïve. Historically, it was often correct.

1. Critique as a Practice of Disruption

Critique emerged under conditions in which power operated through opacity. Authority depended on:

• naturalisation (“this is just how things are”),

• mystification (“the system is too complex to understand”),

• or explicit concealment.

Under these conditions, making structures visible did have destabilising effects. To expose:

• class relations beneath moral orders,

• gendered power beneath naturalised roles,

• colonial extraction beneath civilisational narratives,

was to interrupt the smooth functioning of the field itself.

Critique worked because it altered the distribution of attention. What had been background became foreground; what had operated tacitly became questionable. The field could no longer stabilise itself in quite the same way.

In short: critique once functioned as a genuine field perturbation.

2. The Structural Commitments of Critique

What matters for our purposes is not whether particular critiques were right or wrong, but the structural assumptions critique carried with it. At minimum, critique presupposed:

1. That power depends on invisibility
   If power is exposed, it is weakened.

2. That truth reconfigures practice
   Knowing differently leads, at least potentially, to acting differently.

3. That detachment enables judgment
   One can step outside the field sufficiently to diagnose it.

These assumptions were rarely stated explicitly because they did not need to be. They were embedded in the historical conditions that made critique effective.

Critique was not merely a theoretical stance; it was a situated practice that relied on specific field dynamics.

3. Critique as a Second-Order Operation

It is crucial to see that critique has always been a second-order activity. It does not intervene directly in practices; it intervenes in how practices are understood. Its lever is not force, law, or coordination, but interpretation.

This is not a weakness. It is its defining strength.

Critique operates by redescribing:

• actions as structured,

• norms as contingent,

• institutions as historical products rather than necessities.

By doing so, it aims to loosen identification, unsettle commitment, and open space for alternative alignments.

But this means that critique’s efficacy is entirely dependent on the relation between interpretation and participation within a given field. Where interpretive shifts reorganise participation, critique bites. Where they do not, critique becomes inert.

This dependence is not a failure of critique. It is its condition.

4. Why This Series Is Not a Rejection

It is tempting, at this point, to stage a denunciation: critique as obsolete, performative, or morally compromised. That would be a mistake — and a familiar one.

This series does not claim that critique is:

• conceptually incoherent,

• ethically suspect,

• or politically malicious.

It claims something far more precise and far more unsettling:

The conditions under which critique functioned as a disruptive practice no longer obtain.

To say this is not to blame critics, nor to celebrate power’s triumph. It is to acknowledge a field transformation.

Critique has not failed because it was wrong.

It has failed because the world it was built to interrupt has changed.

5. Setting the Question

The task ahead is therefore not evaluative but diagnostic.

The question is not:

• “Why don’t people listen anymore?”

• “Why are they so cynical?”

• “Why does truth no longer matter?”

Those questions remain trapped within critique’s own self-understanding.

The real question is structural:

What happens to critique when visibility no longer disrupts, when exposure is metabolised, and when participation no longer hinges on belief?

That is the question this series will pursue.

Not to rescue critique.

Not to mourn it.

But to understand what now operates in its place — often unnoticed, often unacknowledged, and therefore far more powerful than critique ever was.