If visibility no longer disrupts, then critique’s failure is not merely ineffective. It is productive in a very specific way.
This post makes the central inversion explicit:
Under contemporary conditions, critique often stabilises the very fields it claims to oppose.
This is not an accusation. It is a structural diagnosis.
1. From Disruption to Function
A practice stabilises a field when it:
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reproduces its rhythms,
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reinforces its distinctions,
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and confirms the positions through which participation is organised.
Critique now does exactly this.
By circulating analyses, condemnations, and exposures at high velocity, critique contributes to:
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attentional churn,
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moral differentiation,
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identity consolidation.
But none of these alter the architecture of participation itself. On the contrary, they help keep it running.
Critique has become functional.
2. The Identity Effect
One of critique’s most powerful contemporary effects is the production of recognisable positions.
To criticise is to occupy a role:
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the informed observer,
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the morally alert subject,
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the one who “sees through” appearances.
These roles are not incidental. They are stabilising positions within the field.
They allow participants to:
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locate themselves,
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differentiate allies and opponents,
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sustain engagement without reconfiguration.
3. Moral Sorting as Field Maintenance
Critique increasingly operates through moral distinction:
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who is complicit,
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who is awake,
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who is on the right side.
This sorting feels like resistance. Structurally, it is closer to maintenance.
Why?
Because moral sorting:
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channels attention laterally rather than structurally,
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intensifies interpersonal judgment rather than architectural scrutiny,
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converts systemic constraint into individual posture.
4. Critique as Signal, Not Intervention
Recall the earlier distinction between belief and attention.
Critique today functions primarily as signal:
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signalling awareness,
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signalling alignment,
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signalling refusal.
But they do not, by themselves, alter:
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constraints,
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affordances,
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or coordination mechanisms.
The field processes critique the way it processes all signals: as material for circulation.
5. The Critic’s Comfort
One reason this transformation is hard to acknowledge is that critique still feels right.
It provides:
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moral clarity,
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expressive relief,
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a sense of participation.
It reassures the critic that they are not complicit — or at least not naïve.
But comfort is not efficacy.
The stabilising function of critique is not a personal failing of critics. It is the predictable outcome of a practice whose leverage has been structurally absorbed.
6. Why This Is Not a Call to Silence
At this point, a familiar misreading becomes tempting: that the alternative to critique is quietism or resignation.
That conclusion repeats the very assumption under scrutiny — that speech is the primary site of intervention.
Where participation remains unchanged, speech becomes decoration.
7. The Uncomfortable Realisation
The difficult realisation is this:
Critique now often functions as a way of staying inside the field while believing one stands outside it.
This is why critique can be endlessly repeated without exhaustion — by the field, not by the critic.
The field feeds on it.
8. Where This Leaves Us
Once critique is recognised as stabilising rather than disruptive, the ground shifts decisively.
The question is no longer:
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“How do we sharpen critique?”
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“How do we make it louder or clearer?”
Those questions assume the lever still exists.
The real question becomes:
What kinds of participation actually reconfigure fields?
That question cannot be answered at the level of denunciation or exposure. It demands attention to design, withdrawal, constraint, and form — themes that critique has traditionally treated as secondary.
Post 4 will sever the final comfort:
Why “Speaking Truth” Is No Longer an Intervention.
That is where the last refuge collapses.
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