Criticism, Counterpublic and Social Change – A Postcolonial Philosophical Appraisal

Abstract

Modern criticism emerges out of a struggle against the absolutist state and power. Criticism was seen as a re-formative apparatus, appealing to the standards of universal reason but still is typically corrective and adjusting to the new emerging conditions of the industrial capital. However, in recent times, it has ended up as a review of books by a handful of individuals, through the foregrounding of literature as the compendium of the vital concerns of intellectual, cultural and socio-political aspects of a historical epoch. As academics, for the most part, not engaging themselves with any substantive social interest, the role of the critic has become synonymous with that of the detached intellectual, along with the absence of counterpublic. But postcolonialism attempts to change the colonial/colonising structures, giving emphasis on the subjectivities but still collaborating with the varieties of suppressed identities within an overarching framework of decolonisation, attempting to collapse the frontiers between the academic institutions and the political society. However, whether postcolonialism serves the purpose of the cultural logic of late capitalism or it has the potential for mobilising the counter public against the structures of oppression still remains a question.