Forms of Cultural Critique

There are three main ways of critiquing a culture. The most obvious way is to critique the actual institutions which operate in the culture. The next way of critiquing a culture is to critique how people talk about and argue for positions in the culture. Finally, one may critique how the way people talk about and argue for positions impacts how and what institutions are formed and operate.

If we critique a culture solely by critiquing the institutions which operate in it, we run into the problem that we must presuppose that some institutions are good and others bad. Perhaps democracy is good or private property is bad, but in either case the critique is performed in terms alien to the culture under critique. This is the form of critique at work when we object to institutions in terms of their results. It is a valid form of critique, but only where the presupposed good is a generally shared good.

The next way of critiquing culture is to focus on what are called discourses of legitimation, that is, the language in which claims are accepted as valid or invalid. This is the way of talking about and arguing for claims which is dominant and which all arguments must fit in order to be taken seriously. In this manner of critique, it is possible to uncover tensions in the discourse itself, ways in which its terms presuppose conflicting claims. This will not always be the case, however. A form of discourse can be bad without being inconsistent. Incidentally, this is a claim not taken seriously enough by presuppositionalist apologists.

The problem with this second mode of discourse is that it does not engage social reality. It stops at the level of terms, and fails to make the case for why the terms we use matter. It is, after all, at least possible that two different discourses might lead one to the same results, and so long as nothing too bad happens, it seems, no harm no foul.

The final mode of cultural critique manages to connect the previous two. In this mode, we articulate how the discourse gives rise to the institutions, and then how the institutions and their results fail to measure up by the lights of the language of legitimation used. We can also do a reverse form of this mode of critique, often referred to as genealogy, where we articulate how the discourse of legitimation arose from concrete institutions, in order to come to terms with the inadequacies of a previous language of legitimation and the institutions it gave rise to. Each discourse of legitimation, then, gives rise to a new set of insufficient institutions which then sets it to change into a new discourse of legitimation designed to rectify its old failings. This is one way of appropriating the Hegelian dialectic in our day.

Critique in this final mode attempts to expose people to how the way they are talking about their problems is giving rise to new problems or failing to rectify their situation. To be successful, it cannot simply show how policies give rise to the problem, but must show how our way of talking gives rise to policies which it either cannot accept or which can be clearly seen to give rise to problems which the discourse of legitimation is designed to solve. The critique needs to do this in such a way that the answer cannot simply be to claim that the discourse would work with better knowledge or better understanding, that is, the critique must show that these failures are not contingent but part of how the discourse works.