Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Against Critique

Dont' get me wrong. I'm not saying that critique is a pointless enterprise and that criticism is dead. I'm just saying that it's a practice with a built-in bias. The trouble is not simply that it acquires cultural ascendency with the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. [1]   It's also that the presumed progressivity of criticism ("the truth will make you free") links it to a developmental narrative that has served for centuries to "race"--and I would say to "class"--the public sphere. [2]   In this sense critique is only half the story, and the hegemonic half at that. Ideology as opposed to what? We need a practice that exceeds critique in creative possibility. What, I wonder, would that look like? Genealogy? Deconstruction? Uh, oh my, Hip Hop?

Notes

1. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Boston: MIT, 1988).

2. David Lloyd describes this logic in detail in "Race Under Representation," Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 62-94. See too David Theo Goldberg The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

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