Anatomy of a kvetch

It appears to be an unspoken conviction, among academics, that there is no field of study so uncool that it cannot be made at least somewhat cooler by appending the word “critical” to its title. This is what has led to the emergence, over the years, not just of “critical legal studies” and “critical race theory,” but also “critical coding studies” and “critical university studies.” My personal favorite is “critical genocide studies” – with its apparent implication that practitioners of the traditional variant had been overly complacent about the phenomenon.

Indeed, we now live in an age of overcritique. A major consequence has been the growing movement, within the academy, for a critique of critique. To get the flavour of this, consider Tom Boland’s book, The Spectacle of Critique, which opens with this banger:

Today there is no dearth of critique, but abundance, proliferation or even superfluity. Any account of ‘Critique’ can be critiqued, therefore this book concerns critiques in the plural. Critique abounds in contemporary society and constitutes a major dimension of modern thought. Thus, this book is inevitably also partially a critique, partially a ‘post-critical’ account, in that it refuses to be critical in a certain way, but nonetheless the book is partially an ‘acritical’ or ‘non-critical’ account of critique, which attempts to recognize critiques as complex cultural forms which should be better understood.

Despite the writing style, I loved this book, because it addresses such an obvious and yet neglected question. Critical theorists have always prided themselves on their commitment to reflexivity. Boland basically stands up and says “okay then, WTF are we doing?” He demands that we subject critique – as an academic practice – to the same forms of critical sociological investigation that we apply to all other ideological configurations. After all, it does look like a power/knowledge complex...

The source of this reflexive turn – the point at which the serpent of critique began to nibble its own tail – was undoubtedly Bruno Latour’s mea culpa “Why has Critique Run out of Steam?” The important thing to observe about these reflections is that they are not being made polemically, by people on the outside, repeating the usual complaints about postmodernism. They are coming from within the church. Furthermore, the critics of critique are using what everyone can easily recognize as the conceptual arsenal of critique to carry out their investigations.

I myself have been something of a bystander – or perhaps an amused onlooker – in these developments. Since I was never tempted by the more totalizing forms of critique that are now self-imploding, I don’t have much at stake. My own work fits squarely within the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory that basically evolved into liberal Kantianism sometime in the late 20^th century. This particular variant was always concerned, sometimes to a fault, with making explicit the normative foundations of its own enterprise, and so these sorts of “what are we doing?” questions are less difficult to answer.

Nevertheless, I do share the general sense that use of the term “critique” and “critical” has gotten out of hand. My own understanding of critical theory is just the old-school position, that critical theory, or critical social science, is a form of social-scientific inquiry that combines in an explicit manner normative, empirical, and pragmatic concerns. As James Bohman once wrote (with respect to Max Horkheimer’s article “Critical and Traditional Theory”):

It follows from Horkheimer’s definition that a critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative, all at the same time. That is, it must explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation.

According to this standard, most of what gets passed off as “critical” scholarship these days does not actually qualify as critical theory, at least not in this traditional sense. Most obviously, it makes no effort to state explicitly the normative grounds of its inquiry. Much of this work employs an analytical framework derived from Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, both theorists who explicitly denied the possibility of a normatively grounded critique of society. This explains why theorists working in this vein, despite being clearly motivated by a commitment to social justice, are so evasive when it comes to actually stating what they think justice requires of us.

A lot has been written on this subject, to the point where people are pretty much sick of the whole “normative grounds” debate. Lately I’ve become more interested in the pragmatic dimension of critical theory, or the idea that critical theory is not supposed to be engaged in just abstract moral condemnation of social reality, but rather action-guiding identification of problems that can be alleviated. All of this is downstream, in a sense, from the distinction that Herbert Marcuse drew, back in the 1950s, between “necessary” and “surplus” repression. He was granting Freud’s point that all of society is based on repression of our instinctual nature. Simply pointing this out does not amount to a critique though, because there are good reasons to maintain a lot of this repression. Our problem, Marcuse observed, is that a great deal of the repression is unnecessary, in the sense that it is not actually needed to maintain the desirable features of the social order. The task of critique is therefore to identify this “surplus” repression, precisely because it can be abolished without ill consequence.

These reflections have led me to want to gatekeep the word “critique,” at least a little bit, based on the thought that you’re not really doing critique if you’re not at least making an effort to show that the problems you’ve identified are remediable. (Consider again Bohman’s insistence that critique must present “achievable practical goals for social transformation.”) Nowhere is this gatekeeping more needed than in the rhetoric surrounding “capitalism,” along with the recent trend in political philosophy toward highly moralized complaints about the imperfections of that system. This discussion is positively suffused with bad faith, because despite all of the semi-Marxist posturing and rhetorical condemnation, no one has the faintest idea how to design a socialist system that would represent any sort of an improvement.

Probably the most comical example of this can be found in Mark Fisher’s book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, in which he condemns as ideological the view that there is no alternative to capitalism, spends a hundred or so pages complaining about the cognitive capture of the left (“the ‘realism’ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion”), and then wraps up the book without presenting any alternative to capitalism.

Unfortunately, these debates about capitalism have a tendency to become polarized, because it’s always possible to find someone willing to deny that the obvious flaws and injustices of the capitalist system are actually flaws or injustices. This puts me in a somewhat awkward position, because I think that the usual complaints are for the most part justified pro tanto (as we philosophers like to say), but that given the absence of feasible alternatives, they do not add up to an all-things-considered indictment of the capitalist system. Because of this, I want to signal my agreement with the critics of capitalism, and yet deny that their criticisms have any practical import.

The frustration that I have, with most of these critics, is that if you gave them a menu of feasible options for organizing a complex economy and asked them to pick one, the vast majority, after a bit of foot-dragging, would choose some form of suitably regulated market economy with a generous welfare state. So then what is the point of all the bluster about capitalism, if you don’t intend to do anything about it? It just seems like an idle complaint. More specifically, it seems like kvetching (definition: kvetch, an English word of Yiddish origin meaning “to gripe,” “someone who complains habitually”).

This little terminological innovation, I realized, was the solution to my problem. By introducing a distinction between critique and kvetch, I was able to state, in an economical fashion, my frustration with a great deal of the current literature in political economy (and “critical studies” more generally). Most of it is just a list of complaints. The problem is not that these complaints are wrong, but that they don’t add up to anything, because no effort is made to show that they are remediable. As a result, the entire exercise amounts to just kvetching. Critique, in my view, is not a label that one can stick on anything, it is a status that one must aspire to.

I started using this terminology mainly to pressure some graduate students into upping their game, but I had an opportunity to employ it more seriously when I was asked to contribute to a symposium on Waheed Hussain’s book, Living with the Invisible Hand. Waheed, as many of you will know, was a colleague of mine at the University of Toronto who died of cancer at a tragically young age. His book, which I had read several times in draft, was published posthumously in 2023. My central disagreements with Waheed, over the years, had been on precisely this point. His criticisms of the market, I felt, were based on incredibly strict moral principles, which not only ruled out the market, but basically ruled out any institutional system that realistically might be used to organize a complex division of labour.

The resulting paper, “Hussain on the Market: Critique or Kvetch?” has recently been published by the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. There are also nice pieces from the symposium by Andrew Franklin-Hall and Louis-Philippe Hodgson. So for those who find my remarks above provocative, but insufficiently developed, I would heartily recommend the full paper. I should mention, by the way, that when I gave this paper outside Toronto some people thought I was being mean with the title. The reality is quite the opposite – it is both an expression of affection and a bit of an inside joke. Because anyone who knew Waheed knew that he was an epic and unrepentant kvetcher.