A World Without Norms

Historicizing Critique and Postcritique

  • Mitchum Huehls University of California, Los Angeles, USA
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2019.1163
Keywords: Critique, Postcritique, Norms, Michel Foucault, Governmentality, Paul Beatty

Abstract

Postcritical methodologies are reluctant to historicize themselves because historicization is itself one of the suspicious/symptomatic critical modes that they seek to replace. Nevertheless, a proper historicization of the transition from critique to postcritique could lend more legitimacy to postcritique, and would also help us determine if its methodological tools are adequate to our contemporary moment. This essay uses Michel Foucault’s description of the move from a disciplinary to a governmental regime of power to historicize the transition from critique to postcritique. Focusing in particular on the function and power of norms under disciplinarity and governmentality, I argue that our commitment to critique should be determined by the relative normativity of contemporary society.

Author Biography

Mitchum Huehls, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Mitchum Huehls is Associate Professor of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (Oxford 2016) and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time (Ohio State 2009). He is co-editor of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (Johns Hopkins 2017).

Issue
No 7 (2019): Critique
Section
_Essays