by Mark Eaton
Reader Services Librarian / Professor
Kingsborough Community College Library
Brooklyn, New York

Abstract

This paper, adopting a perspective from the recent literature of “postcritique”, finds that criticism in librarianship can be constructively supplemented with other methodological approaches. Instead of exclusively using criticism to analyze, dismantle and find fault with texts, librarianship can expand its perspectives to find new reparative possibilities of care. Following the work of Nicholas Holm, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Rita Felski and others, we can see that while criticism has thrived as a disposition in librarianship and elsewhere, recent scholarly interventions suggest that it is not the only possible approach. This paper ultimately argues that a postcritical disposition can sit alongside a critical disposition, not as a replacement, but as an additive.

1. The Critical Disposition

In the past 20 years, librarianship – like many other academic disciplines – has seen a flowering of what Nicolas Holm calls the “critical disposition” (2020). Rita Felski similarly identifies a “critical mood” (2015b, p. 20). This paper will use these terms, as well as others related terms, such as “critical approach” and “critical method,” to designate what is described by Holm as a “disposition [that] encounters texts in terms of their politics: their entanglement in wider structures of power. To read a text in this way is to dwell upon the ideological meanings that lurk below its surface” (2020, p. 152).

This critical disposition, as described by Holm, is oriented toward the capacity of critique. Critical scholars deploy critique to understand and make sense of the world. According to Holm again: “the critical disposition is transposable, and can therefore read almost any object, artifact or texts in terms of its status as a social and political act.” (2020, p. 152). Yet it is also a tool that moves along familiar rhetorical lines; as Felski puts it: “critics read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text fails – or willfully refuses to see.” (2015b, p. 1). Over the past few decades, we can see this pattern repeated in scholarship across the humanities.

Many scholars who have recently written about the critical disposition have framed it as a conceptual apparatus that builds upon Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic of suspicion” (Felski, 2015b). Ricoeur himself contrasts suspicion with religious exegesis. As he says, for the scholar, suspicion will be met with further suspicion, or “guile will be met with double guile” (1970, p. 34). It is a mindset that is always aiming to uncover hidden agendas, repressive forces and unintended (or perhaps intended) complicities. The implication for scholarly writing under the aegis of suspicion is that one must always be deploying their critical lens: by aiming to disassemble, to deconstruct, to uncover the hidden, to trace influences, to historicize. The hermeneutic of suspicion is a mindset that is ever finding new materials to critique.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in a well-known essay that offers a reinterpretation of Ricoeur’s line of inquiry, draws upon psychoanalytic literature to gloss the hermeneutic of suspicion as “paranoia” (2004, p. 126). For her, paranoia is neither a clinical diagnosis nor a pathologizing typology, but rather a description of an approach to inquiry which deploys critique as a default, by always unmasking, always uncovering and exposing. While Ricoeur (1970) argues that this hermeneutic of suspicion has roots in Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, both Felski and Sedgwick point out that more recently this approach to scholarship has been widely adopted as the de facto methodological choice for many humanistic disciplines, to much effect. Critique has proven itself to be a powerful tool in academic writing.

But even if criticism is currently the most preferred modus operandi in the humanities, we should be clear that it is not always seen positively. Bruno Latour calls it “critical barbarity” (2004, p. 240), Holm calls it “an intellectually ugly practice” (2023, p. 119-120), while Sedgwick says it has “an unintentionally stultifying side effect” (2004, p. 124). These may initially seem to be strange assertions: why would anyone question criticism? Critical approaches are certainly widespread and widely accepted methodologies; surely by now they are well proven? Criticizing criticism may seem starkly contrarian at first reading, but this paper will argue that such an inquiry can be rooted in a re-imagining of the boundaries of our scholarship. This re-imagining can open up new perspectives for academic librarians. What follows is – by necessity – an incomplete sketch, but the goal is to situate criticism within a broader frame of reference that can inform knowledge work in libraries.

2. The Aesthetic Disposition

According to Holm, the rise of the critical disposition has been accompanied by the corresponding fading of the “aesthetic disposition”. Here, Holm is drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who identified the aesthetic disposition in his book Distinction in 1979 (2010). For Bourdieu, the aesthetic disposition is a way of demonstrating distinction; aesthetics are used as a marker of class and of privilege. This analysis of distinction-formation was very influential. Extending this idea, we can provisionally identify the aesthetic disposition at work in many libraries in North America in the 20th century. Culture as a means of distinction was almost everywhere in these 20th century libraries. To give a few examples, which unfortunately cannot be elaborated upon here due to space constraints: libraries had a widespread focus on promoting culture as “general education;” there was a common emphasis by acquisitions librarians on “canonical” works of culture; library programming in support of “culture” was widely valued; and so on. In all of this, we can see an attempt to replicate and propagate – or perhaps legitimate – a largely hegemonic 20th century North American aesthetic culture. Following Bourdieu and Holm, it is reasonable to suggest that the aesthetic disposition was thriving in 20th century libraries.

Building upon this argument – but also updating Bourdieu for a more contemporary era – Holm describes how the critical disposition has now “supplanted” (2020, p. 143) the aesthetic disposition as a marker of distinction. From his perspective, distinction today is now largely communicated through deployments of critical discourse, rather than deployments of aesthetic discourse. For Holm, the former has replaced the latter. Today, in Holm’s view, we deploy critical perspectives not only to demonstrate our sensitivity to social issues (in an obvious way), but also (in a more elided way) to demonstrate our eliteness.

While this argument has some interest, it is also flawed: specifically, there are other possibilities for the relationship between the aesthetic and critical dispositions besides “supplanting.” For example, drawing on Sedgwick, we can instead imagine the aesthetic and critical approaches as sitting beside each other in our analytical toolkit (2004). These dispositions may have originated in different contexts and at different points in time, but we do not need to follow Holm in arranging them with some kind of necessary order, where one supersedes the other. Jane Gallop (2020) makes this point explicitly. While Holm’s dispositions are useful as categories, we should reject the logic of replacement that we find in his 2020 article. To his credit, Holm walks back these sequentialist claims in his subsequent work (2023).

Beyond being wary of essentializing in our chronologies, it is also important to demonstrate an anti-essentialism about dispositions in other respects as well: Sedgwick points out that it is best to consider dispositions “not as theoretical ideologies (and certainly not as stable personality types of critics), but as changing and heterogeneous relational stances.” (2004, p. 128). It does not make sense to reify specific people or time periods as examples of specific dispositions. We can see that while Holm’s categories are analytically interesting, they need to be qualified and built out a bit further. We will do some of this work below, with an emphasis on the critical disposition in libraries.

3. The Rise of Critical Librarianship

We can of course question Holm’s assumptions, but his idea of a critical disposition is nonetheless very useful. In light of his analysis, we can better understand the recent groundswell of the critical approaches to librarianship. A substantial part of the literature of academic librarianship in the anglosphere today, both in its scholarly and more informal manifestations, is strongly critical in Holm’s sense.

To illustrate this, we can look to a recent notable example: the rise of the #critlib hashtag on Twitter (since renamed X) and elsewhere on social media in the 2010s. This hashtag, and the surrounding conversation, was most evident during the peak of what has been described as “Library Twitter” by McCulloch and Rundle (2024), a period of particularly fecund and active conversation on Twitter about librarianship. This Twitter discussion flourished and profoundly shaped librarianship for quite a number of years, before it was quite dramatically dispersed by the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022. But in its day, many librarians on Twitter helped circulate, discuss and elaborate ideas of critical librarianship, such as via the #critlib hashtag. Alongside this efflorescence of critical librarianship on social media, there was an accompanying, closely-related stream of publications adopting critical perspectives: on library blogs, such as the Twitter-centric CritLib blog, active from 2014 to 2022 (Critlib, 2022); in a dedicated Zotero group with 300+ members (#Critlib, 2024); and in disciplinary journals, such as In the Library with the Lead Pipe (2024). Early examples of critical perspectives in the scholarly library literature include Elmborg (2006) and Doherty (2007); while more recently Ferretti (2020), Gibson et al. (2021), Drabinski (2021) and others have followed in this approach.

In these examples, we see a librarianship that can be productively understood through the lens of Holm’s concept of the critical disposition. This paper argues that we need to contextualize the critical orientation that flourished in the 2010s. It also ultimately suggests that a critical approach is not a sufficient methodology for librarianship, and that the critique should serve as but one of several approaches in our toolkit. But first, to better understand critical librarianship, we should turn to competing meanings of the word “critique.”

4. Contextualizing the Critical Disposition

In a 2024 article, Kevin Schilbrack helpfully describes and historicizes the varying uses of the word “critique.” He identifies five different meanings of “critique”, and arranges them in a roughly chronological timeline:

• “Critique in the Enlightenment sense”
• “Critique in the Kantian sense”
• “Critique in the emancipatory sense”
• “Critique in the reflexive sense”
• “Critique in the postcritical sense.”

He builds this taxonomy mostly without privileging any one form of critique. Some of his categories overlap with Holm’s idea of the “critical disposition”. Schilbrack, unlike Holm’s 2020 article, is being historical without a whiff of telos. He points out that the multiple uses of critique overlap historically. Indeed, these different uses are “accretive” in Sedgwick’s sense (2004, p. 149); in other words, Schilbrack is adding to our understanding of critique, without attempting to “supplant” other concepts. It will be useful here to work through the differences between Schilbrack’s and Holm’s ideas of critique.

The critical disposition identified by Holm mostly falls into Schilbrack’s category of “critique in the emancipatory sense” (2024, p. 7). The critical literature of librarianship often draws strongly upon emancipatory critique. Frequently, in librarianship, “the languages of critique are in essence the languages of liberation” (Fenton et al., 2023, p. 285). But looking further afield, as Schilbrack does, we can see quite clearly that this is not the entirety of critique. Other possibilities exist elsewhere, but remain less explored in the English-language literature of librarianship today. For example, Dorney (2012), although writing about libraries during the heyday of Library Twitter, uses “criticism” very differently than much of the critlib literature.

As librarians, we would do well to think about the boundaries of our critiques, because not doing so is a failure to be analytical about the frames we use to examine and explain our librarianship. Alternate understandings of critique, such as those identified by Schilbrack, Felski and Sedgwick, should be considered, even if – or perhaps especially because – they are not currently at the forefront of the library literature.

5. The Workshop of Criticism

Today, the critical disposition demonstrates some fairly evident limitations. One salient problem identified by both Felski (2015b) and Latour (2004) is the repetitive scholarship generated by the critical disposition’s endless search for things to critique. This relentlessness is very much what Sedgwick means by “paranoia” (2004). Felski (2015b) and Latour (2004) argue that academics’ endless need for critical grist has created an efficient academic workshop specializing in critical takes. They argue that this has become unoriginal (Felski, 2015b, Latour, 2004). As Irina Kalinka puts it “the same story is being discovered time after time, in order to predictably arrive at the same stance against it” (2023, p. 131).

Nonetheless, there must surely be more to scholarly methods then exclusively tearing down with critique. While critical analyses can certainly be very powerful and useful, working with the assumption that critique is the only valid methodological choice runs the risk that such scholarship will become not terribly satisfying. The emancipatory goals of criticism are certainly a compelling reason for critique, but there are other possible goals that are perhaps being neglected.

To be clear, moving away from critique does not close us off from doing emancipatory work. As Felski says, rethinking critique, such as Latour does, “does not exclude the political – [work such as Latour’s] is deeply interested in conflicts, asymmetries, struggles – but its antipathy to reductionism means that political discourse cannot serve as a metalanguage into which everything can be translated.” (2015a, p. 740). In brief, there are other ways to be emancipatory, too. Although it is largely beyond the scope of this paper to make claims about what such a politics might look like, Sedgwick (2004), Latour (2004) and Kalinka (2023) all nonetheless have suggestions. As an alternate politics, Latour proposes a “stubbornly realist attitude” (2004, p. 231) in contrast to criticism. He is not arguing for a simplistic, somewhat troubling belief in the self-evident; instead, he aims to be realist about “matters of concern, not matters of fact” (2004, p. 231). Latour suggests that realism about the social and technical assemblages that surround us (Latour, 1994; Latour and Woolgar, 1986) can provide an alternative – or as a useful additive – to critique. In another example of an alternate politics, Sedgwick aims for “reparative reading,” pointing toward “the desire of a reparative impulse, [which] is additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, 2004, p.149). She suggests that this can be a more constructive counterpoint to the “paranoid” reading of the critical disposition. And lastly, as a third example of an alternative politics, Kalinka follows up along Sedgwick’s reparative lines, by characterizing the postcritical approach as a prefigurative politics, offering “an improvised gesture that, like play, has no certain outcomes … the reparative reader chooses to keep engaging with all sorts of unruly (and at times surprisingly revolutionary) potentials in a text to possibly create something new and needed” (2023, p. 142).

6. Criticism and Privilege

To move ahead constructively from here, we need to consider what critique accomplishes rhetorically and ideologically. As described earlier, Holm extends Bourdieu by arguing that deploying the critical disposition is a way to demonstrate privilege, much like the aesthetic disposition was a way to demonstrate privilege for a prior generation (Holm, 2020). Librarians are able to gather and consolidate influence through our successful deployment of critical techniques. Holm is willing to be controversial: “To argue that critical reading strategies are a disposition […] is to argue that they can work to secure social status and legitimate social stratification. Dispositions do not operate autonomously, nor do they emerge in purely idealistic contexts. Rather, they are part of a wider system of social stratification” (Holm, 2020, p. 153-154).

Such a statement is likely to be controversial in some quarters. It may come across as agonistic to those who are perhaps more invested in the critical disposition. Such a challenge represents an important test of our scholarly mettle. Do we respond to perceived attacks on our methods by doubling down, and by deploying critique (yet again) as our defense? Or do we begin to look for new approaches? I’d like to suggest that having our methods and dispositions challenged is best addressed by shifting our perspective. Holm, Felski and Sedgwick offer an opening to see the critical disposition from a different vantage point, allowing us to be clearer about its strengths and its flaws. Any plausible reconsideration of critique in librarianship should, as a baseline, recognize that the critical disposition has contributed immensely to our profession. Yet we should not close ourselves off from the possibilities of other vantage points. One promising approach to consider is a perspective that Felski calls “postcritique” (2015b).

7. Postcritique

Felski’s book The Limits of Critique offers an interesting way forward, by looking past criticism. She argues that critique is not the only methodological option; instead, she posits a position outside of critique that offers new possibilities. She refers to this (slightly reluctantly) as “postcritique.” Postcritique sees criticism as but one discursive strategy among many. This is in line with Schilbrack’s multiple meanings of critique and Holm’s multiple dispositions. Felski’s argument is that while in recent times, criticism has seemed to encompass the entirety of the humanities’ methodology, this is not inevitable or permanent. From Felski’s perspective, “For several decades [critique] has served as a default option in literary studies. [It is] no longer oppositional but obligatory; its claims to intellectual novelty or political boldness are ever harder to sustain” (2015b, p. 115-116).

While Felski’s examples come primarily from the study of literature, she nonetheless also very clearly intends to extend her theories of postcritique to other disciplines (indeed, this paper is one attempt at such an extension). For Felski, “there is more to intellectual life than the endless work of ‘digging down'” with our critical perspectives (2015b, p. 181-182). While Felski is rather unambiguous in her claims, Sedgwick offers a more qualified, nuanced perspective. Sedgwick situates the postcritical project that she outlines in Touching Feeling (2004) “beside” other theorizing in her orbit, which suggests that a postcritical disposition can be a useful peer to the aesthetic disposition and the critical disposition. As Holm says, “postcritique needs to be understood not as the rejection of critique, nor as the abdication of critical responsibility, but as a timely provocation to reconsider” (2023, p. 120). My hope is that perhaps an emerging “postcritical disposition” in librarianship can add nuance and a newfound reflexivity to our deployment of critique.

Others have suggested that postcritique (and particularly Felski’s work) caricatures critique, and doesn’t offer a convincing picture of the contributions of many of the critical perspectives in scholarship (Martin, 2022). This is a fair point, as Felski is fairly sweeping in her claims about critique, but this does not detract from the fact that she, along with Sedgwick and Latour, have staked out new theoretical ground, which makes possible new scholarly perspectives. These are now being elaborated in many interesting ways: for example, in an edited volume by Anker and Felski (2017), as well as in a special issue on postcritique in the journal Media Theory in 2023. If Felski’s argument is a caricature, it is nonetheless a theoretically potent one, establishing new tools to think with in multiple disciplines.

8. Conclusion

The goal of this paper is not to suggest a reactionary counterargument to critique. Critique has improved scholarship in the librarianship a great deal – over many years – and should not be dismissed. Yet to suggest that critique is the only possibility comes across as naive. But the goal of this paper is also not to counter with some sort of underlying, common substrate beneath the discursive positionings of various dispositions. Proposing an underlying unity across differing discourses over-simplifies, and it is reductionist in a way that fundamentally conflicts with deeply-held values of diversity in librarianship. Instead, I’d suggest that we add a higher-order diversity to our conceptual toolkit. Beyond critical approaches, let’s also consider a diversity of methodologies or of dispositions. It is perhaps obvious, but nonetheless helpful, to point out that differing approaches usefully offer differing insights. Considering critical approaches alongside aesthetic and postcritical approaches, allows us to reflect at different discursive registers, and hopefully will encourage us toward interesting and novel conclusions.

Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the literature of postcritique is that it often proposes an ethic of engagement and care, rather than of critique. As Toril Moi (2017) says of postcritique: “sometimes skepticism and suspicion will simply be less politically useful than admiration, care, love.” The suggestion here is that the vocabulary of critique is not broad enough to encompass all of our concerns. To accommodate different perspectives, it is helpful for library scholarship to be multivocal in its approaches, and to acknowledge (indeed, celebrate) our differing dispositions and strategies. No one disposition is the “correct” approach to librarianship. Instead, we can choose to ask: how can we extend our commitment to diversity to include a diversity of dispositions? To adopt a felicitous phrase from Robert McCauley, how can we aim for a broader “explanatory pluralism” (2013)?

The hegemony of the critical methods in librarianship – when it begins to exclude other dispositions and approaches – reaches a point where it is no longer sufficient for a growing, learning conversation. As Sedgwick says: “it seems to me a great loss when [the hermeneutic of suspicion] comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of […] practice among other, alternative kinds” (2004, p. 126). Or, according to Felski, who is often a bit more combative than Sedgwick: “reading critically – or what I have preferred to call reading suspiciously – should not be taken to be the ultimate horizon of thought. It has no a priori claim to philosophical rigor, political radicalism or literary sophistication” (2015b, p. 192).

Following the path begun by Bourdieu, and elaborated by Holm, Sedgwick and Felski, postcritique offers a novel avenue for librarianship to explore. The intention of this paper is not to reject the critical disposition – or the aesthetic disposition, for that matter – as they have both advanced librarianship immensely. But it is worthwhile to ask “what have we not addressed with these approaches?” A postcritical approach offers a way forward for librarianship beyond the hegemonies of the critical disposition and the aesthetic disposition. Following Sedgwick, not as a replacement, but as an additive.

Acknowledgement

I’d like to thank several of my colleagues at the Kingsborough Library who read previous versions of this text and provided helpful feedback.

References

Anker, E. S., & Felski, R. (Eds.). (2017). Critique and Postcritique. Duke University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. Routledge.

Critlib. (2022). https://critlib.org/

#Critlib. (2024). Zotero. https://www.zotero.org/groups/255376/critlib/library

Doherty, J. J. (2007). No Shhing: Giving voice to the silenced: An essay in support of critical information literacy. Library Philosophy and Practice, n/a. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/133/

Dorney, E. (2012). Zen and the Art of Constructive Criticism. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/zen-and-the-art-of-constructive-criticism/

Drabinski, E. (2021). Critical Librarianship in a Global Context. Philippine Journal of Librarianship and Information Studies, 41(2), 13–16. https://phjlis.org/index.php/phjlis/article/view/97

Elmborg, J. (2006). Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2), 192–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.12.004

Felski, R. (2015a). Latour and Literary Studies. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 130(3), 737–742. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.737

Felski, R. (2015b). The limits of critique. The University of Chicago Press.

Fenton, N., Freedman, D. (D J. ), Khiabany, G., & Williamson, M. (2023). Critiquing the Vocabularies of the Marketized University. Media Theory, 7(1), 277–298. https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/207

Ferretti, J. (2020). Building a Critical Culture: How Critical Librarianship Falls Short in the Workplace. Communications in Information Literacy, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.10

Gallop, J. (2020). Has Postcritique Run Out of Steam? Symplokē, 28(1–2), 533. https://doi.org/10.5250/symploke.28.1-2.0533

Gibson, A., Bowen, K., & Hanson, D. (2021). We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability: A critical quasi-systematic review. In the Library With the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/disability/

Holm, N. (2020). Critical capital: cultural studies, the critical disposition and critical reading as elite practice. Cultural Studies, 34(1), 143–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1549265

Holm, N. (2023). Everyone’s a Critic (So What Comes Next?). Media Theory, 7(1), 113–124. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v7i1.894

In the Library with the Lead Pipe. (2024). https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/

Kalinka, I. (2023). Reading in Dark Times: Toward a queer politics of repair. Media Theory, 7(1), 125–146. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v7i1.893

Latour, B. (1994). We have never been modern (3. print.). Harvard Univ. Press.

Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123

Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press.

Martin, C. (2022). Attempting to Make Sense of Postcritique, or, I’m Confused. Religion and Theology, 29(3–4), 344–368. https://doi.org/10.1163/15743012-bja10042

McCauley, R. (2013). Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism. In W. W. McCorkle & D. Xygalatas (Eds.), Mental culture: classical social theory and the cognitive science of religion (pp. 11–32). Acumen.

McCulloch, A., & Rundle, H. (2024). Alissa McCulloch and Library Twitter (No. 95) [Audio recording]. https://newcardigan.org/cardicast-95-alissa-mcculloch-and-library-twitter/

Moi, T. (2017). Nothing is Hidden: From confusion to clarity; or Wittgenstein on critique. In E. S. Anker & R. Felski (Eds.), Critique and Postcritique (pp. 31–49). Duke University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An essay on interpretation (D. Savage, Trans.). Yale University Press.

Schilbrack, K. (2024). Do you practice the critical study of religion? Religion, 54(4), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2024.2388436

Sedgwick, E. K. (2004). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity (2. print). Duke University Press.