Kelly
McCracken
Design
Research
September 25, 2012
Reading
summary:
Judith Butler, What
is Critique? An Essay in Foucault's Virtue
In
this essay Butler looks at critique and evaluates the way it has been
discussed by Foucault along with and a number of other theorists.
Butler exposes the shared concerns of Williams and Adorno that
criticism should not be reduced to simple judgment; Adorno is quoted
to illustrate this point; “danger...of
judging intellectual phenomena in a subsumptive, uninformed and
administrative manner and assimilating them into the prevailing
constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose.”
By asking the question “What is
critique?” Focault challenges the
practice and simultaneously performs within it and in doing so takes
a position on critique itself. This statement brings Butler to
Habermas and the problem of normatively impoverished critique where
she asserts that in Focault's writing can be found a normatively
enriched critique where “...poiesis
itself is central to the politics of desubjugation”.
Foucault's
attempts to define critique as a thing can only exist in a state of
hetrogneity, that is critique requires an object and that the goal of
critique on objects is “to bring
into relief the very framework of evaluation itself.”
The paradoxical nature of critique that looks out to reflect it's
inner structure is challenging and Butler reminds the reader
“critique is a practice that
requires a certain amount of patience in the same way that reading,
according to Nietzsche, required that we act a bit more like cows
than humans and learn the art of slow rumination.” Only
when there is an idea that exists outside the normative structure can
critique be applied to identify it; as Butler puts it, “the
tear in the fabric of our epistemological web”
is the place from which critique forms.
Foucault
connects critique to virtue, as a by recognizing the critical
attitude as a critical relation to the normative, which Butler
describes as a “specific stylization of morality.” Butler
clarifies the concept of morality; “
Moral experience has to do with a self-transformation prompted by a
form of knowledge that is foreign to one’s own.”
The understanding of an object is limited to the prevailing
ontological domain, Foucault's example of austerity is used as an
example of this idea. The act of austerity as a self-production is
not a denial of pleasure but is a certain “practice
of pleasure in the context of moral experience.”
The connection Foucault makes between virtue and critique is
challenging to reconcile, Butler seeks to extrapolate the nuance of
his position by clarifying what it is not, a call for anarchy. In
recognizing relationship between the present normative state,
ontology and epistemology, Butler sees a threat to liberty. “Who
can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the
subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained
as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to
become that for which there is no place within the given regime of
truth?” This
liberty is another way to describe the virtue Foucault discusses.
The
process of rationalization as the governmentializing of ontology
results in the relationship between rationalization and power.
“Power sets the limits to what a subject can “be,” beyond which
it no longer “is,” .... But power seeks to constrain the subject
through the force of coercion, and the resistance to coercion
consists in the stylization of the self at the limits of established
being.” The
stylization of the self is a way of self forming, if this poiese
occurs “in disobidence to
the principles by which one is formed”
then the self is formed virtuously and in this process, desubjugated.
Reading
summary:
Marc
Treib, Being Critical
Trieb
begins his essay with a discussion of the studio critique, its
practice, process and goals. He clarifies that the goal of criticism
is not to judge so much as to assists the student in expanding his or
her thinking, developing a set of skills most useful to their future
success; the ability to meet goals, the ability to speak publicly and
understand which ideas are best conveyed through drawings and which
are best communicated with words. Listening is also a valuable
component of critique for the student as they hear the perspectives
and values of different judges reacting to the work of their peers.
He enumerates the uses of a design education with 3 items; the
experience of the instructors, learning how to learn, and the ability
to be self-critical.
Critical
thinking is the most important component of academic experience
according to Trieb. For landscape architects and designers, this
critical evaluation needs to extend to evaluating one's experience of
the world, in order create meaningful designs. He uses the various
works as a vehicle for asserting his own perspectives on landscape
design as a discipline and the primacy of theory in guiding all
creative work. In critically addressing issues related to number
of major works of landscape architecture, he describes his own
process of critical evaluation and the shifting theoretical
awarenesses that have facilitated changes in his values. In closing,
Trieb reinforces the the absolute necessity of critical thinking for
designers and the importance of imagination to better understand the
way the places designers create will be received and used.
