These concerns are misplaced. Critique and theory are, in the world of ideas – a world at once discursive and material – the traditions of thinking that push at limits and boundaries, that irritate, that take disciplinary orthodoxy to be a condition of possibility rather than a container in which to fit thought, that stretch across the political, the cultural, the social, the economic, the material, the epistemological, and the ethical. It remains the most vital way of thinking, as urgent now as ever.

What are the resources for revitalizing, sustaining, expanding critical and theoretical thought as it is figured at this moment of insistent and pervasive crisis? One could certainly outline a history of critique, of its various permutations and reconfigurations, going back at least to Kant. One could start in the pages of History of the Present, for instance, where the French sociologist Eric Fassin, now more than a decade ago, provided a useful, concise opposition between criticism and critique. “This is what critical thought is about,” Fassin wrote. “It is not merely about the denunciation of our opponents’ positions, which would only amount to criticism. Critique also entails questioning the imposition of the very terms of the debate” (Fassin, 267).

Adjacent to such an effort to define critique, we might also develop a kind of critical lexicon of the type Raymond Williams constructed in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). For Williams it was a necessary project, one born, very precisely, of historical change. Having returned to Cambridge after four and a half years away serving in the Army, Williams experienced a very different place, not only in the jarring shift from war back to university, but in the very language deployed in Cambridge. Williams was particularly concerned with a term whose meaning and reach was shifting: culture. It would lead him initially to write keywords as a critical lexicon to accompany his Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958), tracking the historical semantics of a set of keywords he saw as indispensable to understanding modernity. Keywords has become an indispensable work, the influence of which has yet to wane. Williams described it as “the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions in English of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society.” It has, over the past two decades and more, served as the foundation of a veritable cottage industry in academic publishing, most notably in the Keywords series published by NYU Press, which now has eleven volumes stretching from American Cultural Studies (2008) to the Health Humanities (2023). In addition to the NYU series there have been numerous others.  John Patrick Leary’s Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (2019), excavates the lexicon of twenty-first century capitalism and includes classic terms like market and new terms like “thought leader” and “wellness.” Andy Hines’s University Keywords performs a similar task, focusing on the contemporary vocabulary of the modern university. There is, too, the website Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, in which each entry “will focus on a single concept with the express intention of resituating it in the field of political discourse by addressing what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept” (https://www.politicalconcepts.org/editorial-statement/). While Williams’s foundational volume focused on essential and common terms, these newer volumes tack back and forth between the specific and the general—they are often organized around disciplinary or interdisciplinary conventions—and the expected and the unexpected—so we are as likely to see “market” or “authoritarian” as we are “synergy” or “Trumpism.”

“Critical Nodes in a Discursive Landscape” can be seen as complementary but not reducible to these other projects. It aims to build a network of nodes across this landscape that are connected in mobile and sometimes conflicting and indeterminate ways. If it includes keywords, that will be just one type of entry. Launching from the premise that critique is historically situated and is born of the tense conjuncture between critical method and objects of critique themselves, it is as likely to be organized around a familiar term from critical theory as it is to emanate from an obscure event, text, or object. The mobile and indeterminate network of nodes will then produce a shifting set of connections, terms, events, and objects that fill the landscape. “Discourse,” which by the early twenty-first century has suffered the consequences that come with overuse, nonetheless remains a key critical concept for delineating the operations of knowledge. We might put it this way. Discourse is a world of signifiers and signifieds, statements and enunciations, rules and regularities that are historically situated and determined. Discourses have specific, delimited domains and while there are perhaps an infinite number of combinations and articulations, the possible discourses at a historical moment are finite. Which is to say that discourse marks what is possible to be stated or thought, and those finite possibilities are not simply representations, but are themselves productive. 

In attending to discourse in this manner, this project will focus on expected and unexpected nodes in this discursive field. The nodes themselves might be understood as terms, concepts, events, objects where we might freeze the signifiers momentarily to see how knowledge is knotted together, to see how the meanings produced in discourse both structure and threaten our lives, to expose the strains and tensions in our epistemological scene. 

In this moment, when political and material crises are so widespread and when calls for and assumptions of transparency are everywhere, it is perhaps paradoxically more urgent than ever to map the discursive landscape of the present, with critical historical and historiographical acuity. As the project grows, the landscape will become more finely detailed, the nodes connected in new and unexpected ways, offering a critical resource for parsing the present.