What is Critique?

Research Café is an informal seminar series where you can learn more about various research methodologies from different senior researchers from Rietveld Sandberg Research. These seminars are open to all students, staff, tutors, and alumni of the Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Instituut.

The concept of critique implies a questioning of itself. What is at stake in this questioning is not only how critique may be defined or understood, but also its relation to the present moment. The question “what is critique” is accompanied by another one: does the concept of critique still concern us today? Or has critique, as some would say, lost its purchase on the present? This seminar proposes to address this question through a discussion of the relation between critique and crisis. Critique is understood here as a mode of inquiry, a thinking “from crisis and toward crisis” (Christoph Menke). The questions guiding this mode of inquiry are twofold: are the foundations of the world as it is still tenable? And can we still rely on given models to transform the status quo – or, at least, find a way out? Taking the connection of critique and crisis as a point of departure, the seminar will discuss what today’s multiple, overlapping crises mean for our research, thinking and practice.