Ricerc@Sapienza

This article sets forth a tentative genealogy of postcritique and in particular of how
some of Bruno Latour’s insights on epistemology and the methodology of social
sciences have paved the way for a postcritical approach to the study of the social. To
this end, I centre on two major breaks with critical paradigms. First, the rejection of an
understanding of knowledge as a self-referential system of classification. Second, the
dismissal of the idea that social action always occurs within a broader context. Based
on the refusal of these two tenets, the article goes on to illustrate an understanding of
theory that I call “ethnography of contingence”, one that is meant to account for the
way actors assemble the social. The article concludes by commenting on the political
edge of this approach. I advocate a conception of postcritique as an invitation to
get closer to things to make sense of the movements by which actors piece together,
maintain and innovate their own contexts.