Reading summaries

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.