Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Fri, 24 Jul 1992 07:57:00 EDT
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         GOODALH@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      What is critique?

Jim,
Thank you for your excellent, thoughful responses to concerns I
think we share with many people on this network.  Two small bones:
(1)  "the danger is that we write fiction when we believe we're
writing science."
My question:  Aren't we then writing science fiction?
I realize this issue has deep resonance for you, so please under-
stand that I am not simply being cute.  My problem is that I
cannot any longer privilege science as a genre of knowing, perhaps
because scientific assumptions--from the Panopticon distancing of
the researcher/writer from those studied to the strict formats
used for reporting results--omit or excuse most of what I believe
is important from what scientists call "knowing," including what
I take to be the substance of the ethnographic research and writing
process:  authentic human dialogue.  I am speaking here about
dialogue that involves the researcher/writer in the process of
inquiry and becomes the self-reflexive experience that shapes
the written account.
(2)  "Critical interpretation is inherently emancipatory. . . .
What counts as critique and what does it matter whether something
(is or is not) critical?"
The issue of emancipation is, at least for me, always bordering
and sometimes crossing over into the land of elitism.  I realize
that teaching is inherently a critical process and one of its
nobler goals should be emancipation from ignorance (for lack of
a better term).  But to emancipate is to know, beforehand, what
kind of life one should lead, what values one should hold, what
experiences one should privilege, don't you agree?  And I believe
these issues are inherently bound to the broader, more difficult
issue you raise about the very nature of critique.  I remember
Remy Kwant's definition of critique:  "The application of standards
to the object of study."  I liked it because of its ambiguity, but
also because of its practicality.  Then I noticed that one question
I wasn't asking--and should have been--was:  Whose standards?
Then:  "*Object* of study???"  Perhaps in these questions I dis-
covered the stirrings of my critical voice.  At any rate, I hope
we can agree that emancipatory critique is necessarily problematic--
even in teaching.  For me, at least for now, I am more comfortable
raising the question than I am positing an answer.
On the nature of critique, also this from Michael Ventura in a
recent LA Weekly:
". . . that people fall so easily into the same behavior when they
struggle against each other, that they lose their essential identi-
ty--which is what they were really fighting for in the first place.
Set this basic human dynamic, true in all centuries, into our
technologically hallucenogenic world, where life manifests a
dreamlike surreality that constantly threatens and destabilizes
every identity, and the question rises:  Are people and causes
contesting each other, or is one lost or fragmented identity being
pitted against another in the desperate hope that, in winning the
issue, some sort of wholeness will be won as well?"
Perhaps critique--which I take to always be a struggle between or
among causes--is a search for wholeness.
And maybe that is what you and I have joined together toproduce
here.
Dr. Bud
aka H.L. Goodall,Jr.
Dept of Performing Arts
Clemson University
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