"Cultures of Critique" DFG Research Training Group

The Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” is undertaking a productive revision of the prerequisites, functions and claims to validity of critique. On the one hand, new technologies and distribution channels have given rise to a welter of unexpected critical and quasi-critical practices. On the other hand, postcolonial, decolonial, and transcultural perspectives have problematized fundamental assumptions about critique rooted in the Enlightenment. What may be regarded as a valid critical act? And which agents, expectations, and criteria are involved in critique? 

Its programmatic point of departure is an analysis of critical practices — their particular forms, media, and effects. The formal and material expression of critical practices, their medial and technological determination, the social prerequisites of a critical act, as well as the functions, modes of action and purposes of critique will be described on the basis of current cases. The Research Training Group conceives critique as a praxis that is always already culturally situated, while its efficacy rides on comprehensive claims to validity and authority.  

Building on studies of concrete critical practices, the Research Training Group seeks to remap the interaction between critique and culture in the history of modernity up to the present and employ the tools of cultural studies to frame a well-founded and timely conception of critique. 

For more information, please visit the Research Training Group’s website or contact Beate Söntgen (spokesperson) or Erich Hörl (deputy spokesperson).  

Website:                                  Graduiertenkolleg „Kulturen der Kritik“
Spokesperson:                       beate.söntgen@leuphana.de
Deputy Spokesperson:          erich.hörl@leuphana.de