Critical Theory

" Investigating the architecture of a problem is not about getting involved, or at least not directly, in the drafting of any particular solution, but only about identifying the routes that are historically available to solve it. Revealing, however, that there is a broader range of ways of solving things than was previously imaginable can constitute a critical project in itself. It is to open up the field of the possible within the internal bounds of an already existing historical conscience...

...During the last lecture of [his 1979] course, Foucault manages to grasp the social as a problem that has always had within its internal architecture two different ways of solving things.

...The point of reference for this reading of civil society is not a developing past, but a surprising present in the future. What is at stake is not the genealogy of a historical event in the West as much as the ‘architecture’ of an enduring political project. " (2018, pp. 76, 84)

"..to go ‘beyond the outside-inside alternative’, as Foucault (2007, 113) once put it, [I embrace] the opposite of a spatial critical analysis; namely, a temporal one. In a temporal register, critique cannot resort to a self-evident ‘outside’ to address a concern with complicity.

Foucauldian accounts usually have an immediate ‘temporal’ feel to them, since they tend to involve genealogies tracing the inglorious origins of a current regime of practice. ...in a more empirical study into citizen experiences taking place in neoliberal conditions, I develop a ‘temporal’ distinction for the critical analysis of any skeptical engagement: between a subject that becomes skeptical through her active citizenship vis-à-vis a subject that engages in active citizenship despite her skepticism. 

I situate [contemporary active citizens] along two temporal axes: an axis for the present that acts as their shared point of departure, defined by what Nancy Fraser (2008) would call their ‘post-Westphalian political space’, and an axis for the past that acts as their virtual field of possibilities, defined in terms of two different genealogies that can explain the temporality of their skepticism, one originating in Nietzsche and the other, in Rousseau. " (2022, pp. 223-227)

"The ultimate effect of those popular initiatives that, since the privatization of the welfare state and globalization of donor-driven quasi-markets, increasingly fall within the scope of ‘active citizenship’ or, more recently, ‘social entrepreneurship’ does not need to be assumed in advance. There is no reason to presume, from a [strategic] constructionist angle on the social, that these practices either correspond to an immediately evident kind of global civil society or necessarily mobilize a neoliberal form of governmentality.

...Ultimately, one could say, whether a certain practice – a given civic initiative or policy intervention – is seemingly collaborative or not, what becomes relevant through this line of critique is the way said practice would be effectively constructing society. 

...The connection between the meaning of ‘strategy’ that is being used here and that of a governmentality framework goes beyond the scope of this article, but it is briefly captured by Foucault’s response when he was asked about the relation between the state and civil society: ‘whatever scenario one takes, a power relation would be established … this relation being in itself neither good nor bad, but dangerous, so that one would have to reflect, at every level, on the way it should channel its efficacity in the best possible way’" (2018, pp. 90-91)