POSTCRITICAL THEORY? DEMANDING THE POSSIBLE

In addressing the titular question of his essay "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" Latour concludes that it is not so much the operation of critique itself that has become moribund, but that the methodologies long associated with the practice - the analysis of truth claims in reference to the ideological dispositions of its claimants, the presumption that no institutions of any real social influence are innocent of the effects of social power - had been shown to be equally (more?) successful in the hands of climate-change deniers, libertarian-influenced conspiracy theorists, and conservative culture warriors of almost all stripes as they had previously been for science and technology studies scholars such as Latour.3 Latour 's focus on the amateur theorizing of republican image consultants was to become only one of the first in a long series of such ironic appropriations documented in the coming years; indeed, by the end of the decade, it was increasingly hard to feign surprise at reports that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were required reading for members of the Israeli Defense Force or that Jean-Francois Lyotard's writings were becoming as popular with advertising and marketing students as they once were with English Lit graduates.4 As always, however, the most revealing description comes from the loyal opposition. (Who knew that during the same time center-left voters were crowing about the need for a "Democratic Rove," at least one conservative was hoping for the appearance of something like a "Republican Adorno"?) Breitbart is only one of the more vocal members of a larger group that seemed to have learned a similar lesson and been eager to close the lead that progressives had supposedly gained in the area of cultural critique; from the populism-baiting of the Tea Party, to the by-nowclichéd critiques of the "liberal media," to outright conspiracy theory, skepticism, particularly on the level of whatever is defined as the consensus of "the elites" or of "dominant culture," has become as much, if not more so, the domain of the mainstream conservatism than of intellectual progressivism.