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Kerstin Stakemeier on "Critique" in Keywords for Marxist Art History (edited by Larne Abse Gogarty and Andrew Hemingway)

' "Get rid of the habit, which depends, fundamentally, on the abstraction of response from its real situation and circumstances." The habit that Raymond Williams proposes to break, is "criticism and authoritative judgment as apparently general and natural processes". For in its execution as judgement criticism reinstates the systemic order framing whatever it is that is criticized. To him criticism fundamentally halts material processes. It is genuinely general. Williams himself however does not work through what would follow from the materialization which he anticipates in his 1976 Keywords entry on "criticism". He articulates a scepticism of its "elevation to judgment, and to an apparently general process", whereas what criticism should encompass is a more "definite practice", a more relational commitment to matter(s).

The call for such an enhanced materialism however can ultinately not be answered by criticism itself, or, to use its less culturalist, and more systemic name, by critique.

Such definite commitment to matter(s) would result in critique loosing itself to its processes: Criticism gaining, as Williams envisions, "active and complex relations with its whole situation and context" becomes something else, it turns into commitment, into charge, it becomes a liability.

Where critique charges its own material grounds it cannot but disable its systemic legitimacy: self-critique turns into commitment, into a material process of self-expropriation. Beyond the critical singularisation and isolation of objects and subjects (read: judgement) that inevitably reinstates their systemic functionality, lie, their "situation and context": the social entanglements and tendentious affinities forming the core of their possible re-reception and the metabolisms and missed forms of usage still buried in the processes of labour that shaped them.

The subject of critique surrendering to its implication into the material processes of what in this operation ultimately ceases to be its object becomes itself charged - not only in cases of a somehow mimetic relation, but also in commitments to dissent. Whereas within critique it is ultimately its subject that is manufactured as an agent of autonomy, that subject's own resumption within a process of commitment lets it appear as a liability. A processing of autonomy turns into a process of self-externalization: the forms of one's own dependencies, one's affinities to what allows for being subjected to act as a subject, become critical (read: questionable). Autonomy becomes perceivable as a »definite praxis«, a form of (self-) subjection. '

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