Doing and mediating critique: An invitation to practice companionship

Abstract

What does it mean to study security from a critical perspective? This question continues to haunt critical security studies. Conversations about normative stances, political engagement, and the role of critique are mainstays of the discipline. This article argues that these conversations tend to revolve around a too disembodied image of research, where the everyday practice of researchers is sidelined. But researchers do do research: they work materially, socially, and cognitively. They mediate between various feedback loops or fields of critique. In doing so, they actively build and exercise critique. Recognizing that fact, this article resists growing suggestions to abandon critique by, first, returning to the practice of critique through the notion of companionship. This permits us to reinvigorate our attention to the objects, persons, and phenomena through which critique gains inspiration and purpose, and that literally accompany our relationship to critique. Second, we explore what happens when our companions disagree, when critique faces controversies and (a) symmetries. Here, we support research designs of tracing credibility and establishing symmetries in order to move away from critique as denouncing positions we disagree with. Third, we discuss the relation between companionship, critique, reflexivity, and style. Here, the rhetorical practices of critical inquiry are laid out, and possibilities for its articulation in different and less silencing voices are proposed.

Engagement all the way down

“…Instead, asserts Koddenbrock (2015, 245), we need a 'totalizing strategy of critique [to be] able to tackle the capitalist social whole as such.' In contrast, STS-inspired work steers away from totalising moves; it offers a critique that is decidedly less sure of itself (Austin, Bellanova, and Kaufmann 2019).…”

“…The central challenges to which this paper speaks, are at least threefold. First, to contribute to the ongoing project of a 'critical International Relations' that moves beyond a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' (Austin 2019: 216;Austin, Bellanova, and Kaufmann 2019). Second, to reflect on the challenges of articulating academic critique in ways that have traction with communities of practice -and, reversely, to reflect on what such involvement with practice might mean for a critical project.…”

Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

“…In different ways, these articles demonstrate how taking the trouble with STS and thinking with STS enriches our methodologies and modes of critical scholarship. Two contributions in particular explicitly show how engaging with STS insights adds to ongoing debates about doing critique in critical security studies (Austin, Bellanova, and Kaufmann 2019;Berling and Bueger 2017;Koddenbrock 2014). de Goede (2020) invites us to think of the 'practice' of critique as a form of 'communing,' which for Stengers means 'participating in an ongoing, adventurous, unguaranteed, but generative process of making sense in common' (Stengers 2019, 18, cited in de Goede 2020).…”

Ontologically dirty knots: The production of numbers after the Srebrenica genocide

“…In other words, some scholars within science and technology studies argue that symmetry has given rise to post-truth (see Fuller, 2016;Latour, 2004;Sismondo, 2017). The discussion about symmetry has also found its way into the pages of this journal (Aradau and Huysmans, 2019;Austin et al, 2019). Like Aradau and Huysmans (2019), who suggest that we avoid taking sides in epistemic controversies, I have deployed a strategy of symmetry in this article by analysing each of the numbers put forward in the debate on its own terms.…”