RE)THINKING CRITIQUE: TRANSVERSAL AND ETHICO-AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS IN PARTAKING PRACTICES

The article examines critique in relation to current theories pursued and addressed in contemporary art and activism. The conception of a “partaking critique” seeks to conceive critique beyond universalising abstractions and totalising gestures. By reformulating critique as a partaking practice, we set ourselves in relation to the current demands and urgencies of a world that must confront the challenges of climate change, migration flows, inequalities between the global north and south, and the mistrust of democracy. We find it important that critique results not merely in a judging and condemning analysis and the division between correct and false. A “partaking critique” deals with historical conditions and traditional formulations of critique. Critique as a partaking practice is situated, local, transversal, and reparative, and thus mobilises dispositions to act in a panorama of neo-liberal mechanisms of paralysis and paranoia. 
We developed our understanding of critique based on our engagement with critical examples at the crossroads of artistic and activist practices, such as Colectivo Situaciones, which in the scope of this article can only be briefly presented. We queried, shifted and transformed the concept of critique employing discourse analysis and a close reading of critical (queer)feminist concepts of the late 1980s. The perspectives taken by Donna Haraway and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick allow us to place the focus not on negative critique but on instituent and transversal processes, and thus on rethinking the transformative potentials of ethico-aesthetic practices. 
The current socio-political and ecological challenges require a thinking that transverses and queers traditional valorisations of critique: we do not offer a universal, objective and strong theory, but instead favour categories of partiality, situatedness and responsibility. Critique as a practice of partaking is communicated not as the judgement of a critical subject, but in, through and with instituent processes as well as in materialities.


Introduction
In today's post-Fordist working world, values such as freedom, selfdetermination and self-realization -traditionally associated with the field of art and an artist-subject mostly still imagined as white and heteronormative -are equally part of the vague job profiles of start-up founders, of interns and cleaning staff in art galleries or freelance Uber Eats riders. The recourse to ideas and ideals related to educational policies and the simultaneous co-opting of emancipatory movements and ways of life for neo-liberal profit maximisation became the subject of socio-politically engaged debates in the context of contemporary art in the 2000s as well, following the publication of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999). 1 In their comprehensive sociological study of the crisis of capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello showed that "the new spirit of capitalism" had fully absorbed the critique of alienation processes of capitalist production models, which had been formulated by artists and intellectuals in the wake of May 1968. It is precisely through the integration of these demanded development opportunities, whose ambivalence Chiapello and Boltanski underscore, that contemporary capitalism has decisively gained "attractiveness": the demands for more flexibility, creativity, and self-responsibility made against the conservative, bourgeois and bureaucratic societal structures are all but exemplarily subjectified and normalised by the role model of the artist or creative producer. 2 Capitalism's since then refined ability to fully access all areas of life, something also described by authors such as Isabell Lorey, Marion von Osten or Precarias a la deriva, 3 makes it necessary, in our view, to examine in more detail the operating modes of contemporary practices of critique. Our contribution therefore focuses on theories and practices of partaking that traverse and queer the capitalist apparatus within and beyond the institutionalised art field through their transversal and ethico-aesthetic dimensions and with an intent of resistance. We are particularly interested in the transformative and critical-poetic potentials of practices and methodological approaches that differentiate and materialise the ambivalences of the mentioned "attractive" promises and desires as well as their exploitation for the purpose of capitalist self-optimisation. In the project-based organisational form of our society, in which the boundaries between gainful work, (self-)education and care work are blurred, and the demands for autonomy and allocations of responsibility have become new practices of domination and governance, we find it all the more urgent to explicate the ambivalences, differences and interdependencies of alleged emancipatory development opportunities.
Boltanski and Chiapello's analysis of society essentially follows the philosophical investigation of forms of governance and subjectification processes developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze -in conjunction with social, cultural and political mobilisations such as the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. From a contemporary perspective, one can say with a certain disillusionment that neo-liberal capitalism's control regime analysed so presciently in its beginnings by Guattari and Deleuze has become an overall economic programme that can be neither utilised in a revolutionary sense nor recalled by a political opposition. In its boundless expansion, financial-capitalist neo-liberalism permeates existences and thus takes effect as an omnipresent and internalised instrument of subjectification. In his "Postscript on the Societies of Control", Deleuze states that "man is no longer a man enclosed" in disciplining institutions but a "man in debt". 4 While Deleuze examines capitalist transformation and subjectification processes in their transitory function from the society of discipline to the society of control, Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis in La Fabrique de l'homme endetté (2011) 5 is that the economy of debt has evolved to become neo-liberal capitalism's dominant operating mode. The virulent, globally connected mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the 21 st century have now also affected those who Deleuze had still regarded as "too poor for debt, but too numerous for confinement". 6 Through the expansion of the neoliberal access to the life of even the most marginalised, they too have become "human capital", subjectified and governed by the continuous, both human and more-than-human control logics and regulation mechanisms that Lazzarato describes as the economy of debt in its negative effects. 7 The economy of debt engenders a "specific method of subjectification and control peculiar to neo-liberal societies" that he grasps as "[t]his ongoing negotiation with oneself". 8 According to Lazzarato, contemporary capitalism operates and manifests itself 4 Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). "Postscript on the Societies of Control". October, 59, 3-7, Winter, 6. 5 Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2011). La Fabrique de l'homme endetté: essai sur la condition néolibérale. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam; Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 6 Deleuze. "Postscript on the Societies of Control", 6. 7 As a neo-liberal tool, debts establish "a transversal power relation unimpeded by State boundaries, the dualisms of production (active/non-active, employed/unemployed, productive/non-productive), and the distinctions between the economy, the political, and the social. It immediately acts at the global level, affecting entire populations, calling for and contributing to the ethical construction of the indebted man." See Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2012). "The Ascendency of Debt in Neoliberalism". In The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 89-160, 89. 8 Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2015). "The Production of Subjectivity". In Stakemeier, Kerstin and Witzgall, Susanne (Eds.). Fragile Identitäten. Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes,[165][166][167][168][169][170][171][172][173][174]167. exemplarily in the imperative of the competitive entrepreneur of the self and thus the internalised and individualised injunction to become a selfresponsible economic subject. 9 This is by no means an emancipatory or self-empowering moment, though, but an overlapping of processes of "social subjection" and "machinic enslavement", of "simultaneous subjectification and de-subjectification", 10 whereby all risks and costs are continuously outsourced and ultimately taken upon by the individual. 11 The perfecting of the individual carried to extremes in neoliberalism, which neutralises critique and conflicts, is legitimised through alleged promises of freedom and brings forth new passions and pathologies: "Frustration, resentment, guilt and fear are the 'passions' of the self-relation to the neo-liberal subject, because the promises of selfrealization, of freedom and autonomy clash with a reality which systematically denies them." 12 The deterritorialisation of the individual to a dividual 13 examined by Lazzarato expands the Foucauldian concept of biopower / biopolitics by placing the focus on the "techno-semiotic production of subjectivities". 14 Neo-liberal governmentality is thus no longer exercised on subjectivity as a unit, on an indivisible individual, but on "the human and non-human vectors of subjectification which run 9 See Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 50-51: " [...] an injunction that concerns just as much the unemployed as the user of public services, the consumer, the most "modest" of workers, the poorest, Of the 'migrant.' In the debt economy, to become human capital or an entrepreneur of the self means assuming the costs as well as the risks of a flexible and financialized economy [...]." 10 Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 166. 11 See Lazzarato, "Introduction". The Making of the Indebted Man,[7][8][9][10][11]9. 12 Lazzarato,"The Production of Subjectivity",167. 13 In the English translation of Lazzarato's original French text, the term "dividual" is used in reference to Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). "Postscript on the Societies of Control". October, 59, 3-7, Winter. On the concept of the "dividuum" see, for example, Raunig, Gerald. (2015). "Dividuum face! Sexual Violence and Domination through Partition". Dividuum. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 25-36. 14 Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 169. through it, and on the somatic, biological, chemical, genetic and neuronal components which form the body". 15 Diagnoses of the times, such as the analyses of Lazzarato, Gerald Raunig, Lorey, and Paul B. Preciado, describe a dividual, or dividuum, as the result of the emergence of new subjectification processes that is paralyzed by the coercion of selfrealisation and project realisation, 16 isolated and fragmented despite the "imperative of involvement", 17 virtuoso in regard to self-regulation, 18 while simultaneously appearing as a new "hormonal, electro-chemical, mediatic and totally connected subject" 19 in the "pharmacopornographic era". 20 When fear, distrust and resentments become the dominant affects and driving forces of neo-liberal societies, this is manifested in the increase 15 Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 170. 16 Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 167. 17 Raunig, Gerald. (2015). "Every Beginning is Dividual". Dividuum. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 11-23, 16. 18 See, for example, Lorey, Isabell. (2008). "Virtuosos of freedom. On the implosion of political virtuosity and productive labour", transversal: creativity hypes, 02/2007, https://transversal.at/transversal/0207/lorey/en, 10/2008. 19 Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 173: "As Preciado points out, the Freudian archaeology of the 'I' is confronted with a new hormonal, electro-chemical, mediatic and totally connected subject." 20 Preciado, B. Paul. (2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Lazzarato himself refers to his reading of Preciado's biopolitically oriented gender analysis in Testo Junkie (2013) to explicitly position himself against an anthropocentric model of action that the author sees perpetuated in the conception of "cognitive capitalism". In the light of the new "plasticity of psychic and corporal subjectivity" (Lazzarato, "The Production of Subjectivity", 170) of the examined contemporary debt economy, the premises of "cognitive capitalism" must obviously be revised as well. See also Silvia Federici's critique of the primacy of cognitive labour or immaterial labour as conceptualised by Lazzarato that is ultimately indicative of a strong Eurocentric or Western focus on post-Fordist modes of production. See Federici, Silvia. (2015). in existing inequalities, in protectionist mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, the reinforcement of security and border dispositifs, or in identitary movements directed against subjectivities not fully complying with the arbitrarily established norm. 21 Against the backdrop of the increasingly evident, negative effects of global warming and the current global Covid-19 pandemic that we, and above all the highly indebted threshold and developing countries of the so-called Global South, will have to deal with for decades to come, the question arises as to how the viral, conspiratorial and toxic effects of hopelessness and pessimism can be transformed into a collective mobilisation of the "disposition to act ". 22 Or to formulate it with Guattari: the ecological crisis he describes in "The ecosophic object" and grasps as "a more general crisis of the social, political and existential", 23 demands "a type of revolution of mentalities whereby they cease investing in a certain kind of development [...]". 24 How can Guattari's "revolution of mentalities" be transferred to nonrevolutionary times that appear to hardly offer broad solidary alliances on the macro and party political level? So what can we achieve with micro-political steps in the horizon of dystopian everyday experiences distributed in an extremely disparate way, after establishing our own vulnerability and acknowledging new fragilities? By which strategies and tactics do we confront the multiplied aggressiveness of contemporary capitalist modes of (self-)government? How do we reach an activating opening of possibilities of action, when the anthropocentric subject 21 See Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2008). "From Knowledge to Belief, from Critique to the Production of Subjectivity". transversal: the art of critique, 2008/08, https://transversal.at/transve rsal/0808/lazzarato/en, 04/2008. 22 Lazzarato, "From Knowledge to Belief", https://transversal.at/transversal /0808/lazzarato/en. 23 Guattari, Félix. (1995). "The Ecosophic Object". Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 119-135, 119. 24 Guattari, "The Ecosophic Object", 119. models perpetuated by Western humanism can no longer be regarded as the starting point of our actions? What is required in the context of increasing social, economic and ecological inequalities is the "mobilisation of minds, sensibilities and wills", 25 in order to find and practice forms of resistant and solidary critique that counter the current dynamics of social isolation, problematise the violent inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of a globalised economy and disrupt the exploitative extractivisms of resources that stand in a colonial tradition.
The legal political appropriations and instrumentalisations of the present situation should motivate us to reflect upon modes of action, infrastructures, techniques, and strategies of solidary alliance with respect to their affective, mediatic and social effects and transformational potentials. The analysis and change in perspective of critique as a practice of partaking and ethical stance provide options to overcome traditional criteria of a negative / affirmative, or judging and dividing, critique and instead focus more strongly on its transversal, relational and partial dimensions. Our proposition is that this leads to an understanding of critique that is no longer primarily committed to an analysing-judging diagnosis. With the concept of "partaking critique", we therefore embark on an approximate and open search for practices of critique that focus on and encourage the opening of possibilities for action. A "partaking critique" seeks not to ignore its own situatedness, privileges and normative posits, but to make them productive in a morethan-human "becoming-with" 26 and to negotiate in an infrastructural, relational and material "with". This is to be undertaken with the speculative desire to rattle and thwart firmly established mentalities in the field of critique and not to reproduce the division between hopeless pessimism and self-entrepreneurial optimism, but to transform it in a responsible way.
As authors of this text, which was written in the context of the research group "Media and Participation", 27 we are faced with the pressing question of what we hope for in the described panorama when we engage with current ethico-aesthetic practices in the art field and beyond and what we ultimately seek to achieve with the conceptualisation of a "partaking critique". As Marcelo Expósito aptly noted: "In the cultural and the art field, labour now perfectly matches the 'communicative' labour paradigm that is at the centre of the post-Fordist mode of production, […]." 28 In this respect, we ourselves perpetuate the hegemonic model of a division of labour which is permeated by symbolic, economic and institutional power relations. In his text "Inside and Outside the Art Institution: Self-Valorization and Montage in Contemporary Art", Expósito describes the indistinct role model of the "artist-manager" and adds to the post-Fordist worker as entrepreneur of the self, as formulated by Lazzarato, "the ideas of the artist-entrepreneur, curator-artist and artist-'businessman'". 29 These combinations of terms can be easily expanded by replacing artist with knowledge producer, 27 Prof. Dr. Elke Bippus and M.A. Ruth Lang are member of the transdisciplinary research group "Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement" seated at the University of Konstanz. The authors wrote this article in the frame of the subproject "Participatory Critique as Transforming and Transversal With" (01/11/2018-31/05/2021, 100019E_180412) at the Zurich University of the Arts, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). 28 Expósito, Marcelo (2009). "Inside and Outside the Art Institution: Self-Valorization and Montage in Contemporary Art". In Raunig, Gerald and Ray, Gene (Eds.). Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. London: MayFlyBooks, 141-153, 143. 29 Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 143-144. academic, theorist and so forth. In our view, Expósito rightly describes the flexibility and flexibilisation of artistic and cultural labour as "profoundly ambivalent". 30 The author, who is also a visual artist, member of parliament, activist, editor, lecturer, among other things, adds: "But the process is irreversible: we have no choice but to work within this contemporary condition" 31 and "to self-valorize artistic labour". 32 However, Expósito's critical stance should not be mistaken for an anti-institutionalist gesture. Instead, he is concerned with a process of instituting, as it has also been addressed by Raunig and Nowotny. 33 We read this stance as a partaking-instituting practice of critique, which appears here as labour within and at the edges of art institutions, as a restless movement of entering and exiting, of intervening and eluding.
The practice of Expósito himself, as well as those of the avant-garde and contemporary artistic-political initiatives he gives as examples, are always inclined to articulate conflictual qualities and strain the traditional concept of the artwork. With our focus on these kinds of practices, which will appear more prominently in the second part of the text, we are also concerned with methods that we do not predominantly grasp as "a 'negation' of a traditional model". 34 As academic writers / lecturers, we thus venture onto a complex and never innocent terrain 30 Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 144. 31 Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 144. 32 Based on his own artistic-political practice, Expósito proposes getting rid of the dichotomous distinction between artistic and 'non-artistic' work. He explicitly advocates situating the valorization of "artistic labour under different forms, in different places and times, through other processes" that seek to actively subvert binary models of thought and institutionalised logics of representation. Expósito, Inside and Outside the Art Institution, 143-144. 33 See the joint publication published in German: Nowotny, Stefan. (2016). Instituierende Praxen. Bruchlinien der Institutionskritik. Vienna, Linz: transversal texts. 34 Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 143. that obliges us to repeatedly call into question criteria of legitimation and valorization, including our own, without writing and perpetuating a belittling or romanticising history of critical-poetic practices and artisticpolitical production(s). 35 What is decisive in Expósito's view -and toward which our conception of a "partaking critique" is oriented -is whether and how work pursued with artistic means "contributes to mobilising individual and collective energies, which it can do in many diverse ways and on a bigger or smaller scale". 36 With the concept of "partaking critique", we seek to sharpen the view, from a decidedly contemporary perspective, of the processes of change regarding subjectivities, sensibilities, mentalities, and potentialities under neoliberal conditions. For us, this refining and interrogative update of the concept of critique is connected with a shift of the customary logics of critique, for example, with the departure from the supposedly critical and distancing analytical gaze. We thus aim at practices of a radically local and particular critique that connects itself with conceptions such as involvement and care and is obliged to reflect upon global entanglements as well.

(Re)thinking critique as a partaking practice
With an updated perspective focusing on micro-practices, critique is to be mobilised beyond universalising abstractions and totalizing gestures in its transformative potentiality to negotiate positions with and in the present. In the horizon of this (re)thinking, critique always takes place in a situated and transversal way, which we will further elaborate in the following sections. Processes of enabling / preventing partaking and the 35 See Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 146. 36 Expósito, "Inside and Outside the Art Institution", 151. consideration of relational aspects thus become constitutive of critique.
By favouring concepts of partaking over concepts of participation, we bring to the fore and problematise processes of sharing, of collectivising, of difference, as well as questions of responsibility and involvement. This new conceptual perspective on processes of partaking confronts critique with the dilemma that an institution -from which one possibly seeks to demarcate oneself in a fundamental opposition -is also fragmented as a representative unity, and a distinctly tangible "vis-à-vis" is therefore lacking. For this reason, a "partaking critique" as we envision it implicitly leads to distortions and shifts of the repeatedly presented notion of a genuinely critical art operating as an alternative or autonomous countermovement. In the field of contemporary art, then, such a "partaking critique" does not aim at a fundamental negation of institutional critique, but at an, in our view, necessary updated reformulation. A "partaking critique" -following Raunig, Expósito and others -does not speak of an assumed outside, from which it would be possible to "think against" the institution of art. Critique as a partaking practice always articulates itself in and through relational structures of partaking, i.e. "with processes of partaking in the form of (micro)practices 37 that, to use a formulation of Deleuze and Guattari, are "molecular" and "supple", but nonetheless 37 On micropractices see: Bippus, Elke. (2015). "Adrian Pipers Funk Lessons -eine Mikropraxis transformierender Affirmation". In Everts, E. Lotte, Lang, J., Lüthy, M. and interwoven with molar and rigid segmentarities and multiplicities. 38 As already mentioned, Raunig reformulates institutional critique as a critical stance and "instituent practice". 39 With Michel Foucault's concept of governmentalisation, he abandons a "fundamental negation" and favours a manoeuvre to avoid what he describes as "a constant struggle in the plane of immanence". 40 We intend to take up these threads for our conceptualization of critique as a partaking practice and raise the question as to what makes such an avoidance manoeuvre critical. Based on this question, we propose to expand critique as a partaking practice in a (queer)feminist and differentiating way through the concepts of "reparative reading" 41 and "becoming-with". 42 "Reparative reading" as a practice of "partaking critique" In her text "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" 43 from 2003, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick analyses contemporary critical thought in its 38 In the chapter "Micropolitics and Segmentarity," Guattari and Deleuze deconstruct the binary reading of the concept of segmentarity constructed by ethnologists "to account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central State apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions." (Deleuze, Gilles;Guattari, Félix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 209) They establish that there is no dichotomy between central and segmented, and instead distinguish between rigid and supple segmentarity, between aborified and rhizomatic segmentarity (Deleuze and Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus,212). 39 Raunig, Gerald. (2006  with the concept of "reparative reading". In her view, the hermeneutics of suspicion privileges the concept of paranoia: in its "anticipatory" orientation, paranoid critique secures itself against, and even prevents, any kind of surprise. 47 Since paranoid critique relies on "exposure", it places, "in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge 44 Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 125. The text harks back to publications in 1996 and 1997. The concept of "reparative reading" originated in a fourpage introduction to the issue "Queerer than Fiction" of the periodical Studies in the Novel. 45 See Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 124. 46 See Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 124. 47 As a "strong theory," it claims to be overarching, wide-ranging and especially teachable. But precisely this makes it reductionist and allows it to derive a plethora of phenomena from just a few basic assumptions. As a theory of "negative affects," paranoid critique has "the effect of entirely blocking the potentially operative goal of seeking positive affect." (Sedgwick,"Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading",136). per se". 48 This ultimately reproduces a hierarchical division between those who know and those who don't know. Sedgwick juxtaposes the paranoid practice of reading based on a "strong theory", which she mainly interprets as analytically exposing, with the model of "reparative reading", which operates aesthetically, is driven by curiosity, seeks moments of surprising insights, aims at amelioration and includes pleasure. 49 This "reparative reading" exercises an epistemological practice that focuses on the subject of research through "close reading", for example, and develops decidedly local theories and starts from ad hoc taxonomies. 50 Sedgwick describes the positions of the ego to its objects in the process of reparative readings as "changing and heterogeneous relational stances". 51 With this relationship between ego and object, she associates practices that are "divided between the paranoid and the reparative". 52 The reparative -and this is something we would like to emphasise -does not imply healing or restitution, but rather a practice of reading that activates changes. Vacillating between contrary reading models, such as "paranoid" and "reparative readings" and their 48 Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 138. In this context, Sedgwick problematises the prime motive of exposure in a society in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence. 49 From a paranoid perspective, reparative reading is therefore denigrated as merely aesthetic and reformist. See Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 144. 50 Sedgwick formulated her critique of a paranoid reading practice in a time when queer theory experienced its first institutional formation. According to Robyn Wiegman, Sedgwick is concerned not with a replacement or negation of the paranoid practice, but with its reformulation, also in a debate with Judith Butler, the second pivotal figure in establishing queer theory at the time. Wiegman says that Sedgwick regards Butler's text Gender Trouble as "an exemplary paranoid text" that "teaches us that 'you can never be paranoid enough'". Wiegman, Robyn. (2014). The times we're in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative 'turn'. Feminist Theory 15, 1, 4-25, 10. With her text, Sedgwick refers not to the opposition or alternative of this approach, but to the "coexistence of paranoid and reparative critical practices as part of the queer theoretical project from the outset [...]". Wiegman, The times we're in, 12. 51 Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 128. 52 Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", 150. criticality, must be clearly distinguished from indecisiveness or indifference and also from a purely strategic avoidance manoeuvre. The practice of "reparative reading" is shaped in the relation to local requirements and includes them in a critical way; it aims at flexibility and thus at a reading that does not resolve contradictions, but names them, and thus opens up the possibility of critical partaking. One can learn from Sedgwick that to-and-fro movements -or, to expand it with Expósito, of entering and exiting institutions -can point out contradictions which those critiquing must necessarily deal with anew each time. In the context of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Sedgwick developed a method of analysis going beyond the field of literary studies, with which she invoked a critical practice allowing one to get involved and engage in the respective situation, so that, for example, the endangered life of those infected with HIV does not disappear behind the demand for a "strong theory". With the juxtaposition of "paranoid" and "reparative reading", she points to the dead end in which an ordering, classifying, judging or even condemning critique mostly oriented toward binary patterns has gotten stuck. She thus advocates the use of different critical reading models that do not exclude each other but coexist. Sedgwick departs from a critique that follows an either/or model and supplements it with an "and/and" as well as an "and/or" proposition. 53 Based on Sedgwick's problematisation of the traditional critical practice of a hermeneutics of suspicion, we would now like to conceive "partaking critique" following Donna Haraway as situated and partial. Our intention with this reference is not to base critique on an agreement with universal demands, not to judge in compliance with established norms and not to reduce critique to the practical exercise of reason. Haraway speaks of "situated knowledges" and points out the fundamental conditionality and perspectivity of scientific knowledge as well as an uncircumventable involvement. 54 By also making use of Haraway's criterion of partiality for a "partaking critique", we demand and imagine that such a critical practice does not assume a neutral standpoint, does not legitimise itself through the construction of objectivity, but instead takes sides and thus becomes partial and partisan. 55 Haraway's understanding of partiality, which becomes explicit in her subsequent writings, is that of a "becoming-with" 56 that responds to the requirements of a world always read as relational. A "partaking critique" is carried out in processes of  only reflects partiality but actively pursues it, 57 making it tangible and thus vulnerable. This implies that the analysis of historical contingency and the conditions of the origin of knowledge -and of critique, we addare connected to critical knowledge and scientific practices that insist on the "irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local knowledges". 58 A "partaking critique" understood as situated and partial must be grasped as fundamentally relational; it reflects the historical development of its claim as well as the conditionality of the criticising subject. In its partiality, it opens up and connects with aspects of sensuality, materiality or the political, for instance. A "partaking critique" privileged through its situatedness and partiality in the sense of Haraway is connected to a form of responsibility that cannot be reduced to responding or being responsible for others. Rather, it is about a form of action of response-ability. 59 Critique is conceived in relationality and dependency in such ways that make it necessary, in our view, to exercise reparative practices of responding that do not amount to paranoid anticipations, but instead seek and enable modalities of "becomingwith". In contrast to the model of "becoming", this "becoming-with" is conceived in a fundamental relationality and sociality. Intra-and interactions constitute "who is/are to be in/of the world" 60 through and 57 According to Katharina Thiele, this performative approach distinguishes Haraway's concept of critique "as a creative as well as co-and-further-thinking constellation of arguments." Thiele, Kathrin. (2015). "Ende der Kritik? Kritisches Denken heute". In Allerkamp, A.; Orozco, P. V. and Witt, S. (Eds.). Gegen/Stand der Kritik Zurich: diaphanes, 139-162, 141. 58 Haraway,"Situated Knowledges",579. 59 Assuming responsibility includes the "obligation to enable a response by others. in processes of response-ability: the non-intentional actions of passing on and giving back, of passing forward and passing back, could lead to one holding something "unasked-for" 61 in one's hands. When critique is now also considered as the result of human and non-human relations and in its fundamental sociality, it becomes qua practice part of the subject and object forming entanglements that constitute "who is/are to be in/of the world" 62 and are thus connected with an ethico-political dimension. Haraway gained the "becoming-with" based on the concept of "sympoiesis in ecological evolutionary developmental biology" . 63 With "self-poietics" as a responsive and relational figure, Butler and Athanasiou develop a comparable concept. 64 The two concepts challenge the construction of "both property and sovereignty". 65 They respond to this construction with the recognition of mutual social dependency, the conditionality of economic, social and ethnic circumstances, and by taking passions into account that cannot always be ascribed to conscious processes. The assumption of a fundamental sociality emphasises relations and relatedness and thus that which is commonly shared, which is conveyed in material aesthetics and in the distributions of the sensible. 66 Against this background, it becomes the basis of the political.

Critique in the horizon of a "becoming-with"
When the self in its sociality and ability to be affected does not stand for an autonomous, sovereign entity, but for a "contingent rupture", for "a possibility opened", 67 values of responsiveness and responsibility can take the place of the conception of the sovereign position of the (self-) aware self. Lorey has shown that dependency, endangerment and vulnerability do not imply a new essentialisation of the subject or a new ontology. 68 It is not about taking the fear of endangerment or vulnerability as "the starting point of the analysis of power relations" but the "lacking recognition of fundamentally endangered life". 69 In the horizon of a "becoming-with," "partaking critique" means, after what has been said, that critique cannot be conceived based on a critiquing, sovereign subject, quite the contrary. The critiquing subject is a generated and generating part of a relational world. 70 Such a relational structure of the world is determined by more-than-human and human intentional processes, i.e. through practices, depictions, materials, infrastructures, discourses, dispositifs, relational entanglements, ecologies. In summary, it can be said that from this perspective, critique cannot be reduced to the distinguishing and judging ability of a reasoning subject capable of understanding and judging in a learned way. 71 "Partaking critique" is instead affected by mediatic, material, infrastructural, or aesthetic-sensual dimensions, it responds to them and 67 Butler and Athanasiou,Dispossession,66. 68 Lorey, Isabell. (2010). "Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung und Entsetzen. Immunisierung, Normalisierung und neue Furcht erregende Subjektivierungsweisen". In Manske, A. and Pühl, A. (Eds.). Prekarisierung zwischen Anomie und Normalisierung. Geschlechtertheoretische Bestimmungen, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 48-81. 69 Lorey, "Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung", 67. 70 The concept of relationality or relational follows Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. See Butler and Athanasiou,Dispossession,2 and 66. 71 The reduction of critique to the exercise of reason is true of both philosophical and philological critique, i.e., of critique as rational cognition and critique as judgement of a given. See Bormann, Claus von;Tonelli, Giorgio;Holzhey, Helmut (1971)."Kritik. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie". Online Doi: 10.24894/HWPh.5649. affects them. Critique that partakes is at once situational and local; in the attempt to overcome the circumstances it criticises, it becomes critical work on universalising, categorising or disciplining knowledge productions.

Writing as a practice of "partaking critique"
After the perspectivisation of "partaking critique" through the method of "reparative reading" following Sedgwick, we would now like to draw on Haraway's critical epistemology to shed light on the practice theory of the Argentinian collective of authors, Colectivo Situaciones, as a practice of writing in the sense of a "partaking critique". Starting from the method of "investigación militante", we would like to use the arguments of Colectivo Situaciones to discuss the question pertaining to the ways in which critique can be articulated in a relational and intersubjective structure that repeatedly manifest itself anew and in a situational manner-without getting caught in an endless loop of self-relativisation.
This can succeed, to respond with Haraway, by consciously engaging with "risky comakings" 72 that are associated with the "becoming-with", but also accompany instituent practices. The original Argentinian, manifesto-like text was the introduction to a publication that Colectivo Situaciones wrote and edited together with the self-organised group MTD (Movimiento Trabajadores Desocupados / Movement of Unemployed Workers) of the Buenos Aires suburb of Solano. The book resulted from the dialog between Situaciones and MTD Solano, whose actors participated in the street barricades, the so-called "piquetes", to block the access roads to Buenos Aires in the wake of the uprisings in 2001 and 2002, and is based on a series of meetings, workshops and talks. See Colectivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano. (2002). La Hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes. Buenos Aires: De mano en mano. 75 The acronym H.I.J.O.S. stands for "Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio" (Descendants for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence). The human rights organization was founded in 1995 in response to the state policy of impunity during the presidency of Carlos Menem, i.e. the institutional continuation of granting amnesty to (co-)perpetrators of Argentina's last civilian-military dictatorship (1976Argentina's last civilian-military dictatorship ( -1983. 76  Against this background, the shared knowledge work of Situaciones cannot be mistaken for a bipartisan, harmonising or harmless form of partaking: the discursive and intervening accompaniment of social movements and their forms of protest that Situaciones pursued -for example, by initiating discussion formats and publishing texts -was connected by the collective to the ethical ambition of a (self-)reflexive, actively intervening practice of writing and publishing realised in a continuous and direct debate with the involved social actors. In appropriative reference to the impetus of operaistic "con-ricerca" described by Antonio Negri and others, an emancipatory investigation method of inquiry in the context of the northern Italian workers' milieu of the 1960s, 78 this thinking in writing was to always examine one's own position as well. This expresses an examining and searching desire for involving and involvedness that Situaciones compared with the transforming and never innocent experience of falling in love. According to Situaciones, the author-subject possessing authority who can objectively describe and represent their object of study is replaced by the 77  figure of the "militante de investigación" who is always in a precarious existential balance and in whose case militancy, investigation, method, subject of study, and object of study mutually depend on each other in situational and relational terms when they are engendered. 79 The inevitable consequence is that the vulnerability emerging and becoming visible in this process of "becoming-with" must also be renegotiated. It is therefore a radically local "becoming-with" that generates risks which cannot be born on an individual level. As already mentioned, in the contemporary historical horizon of the anti-globalisation movement, the critically partaking practice theory of Situaciones was also received in the

Militant involvements as "partaking critique"
The concept of a "partaking critique" developed and put up for debate in this text based on methodological approaches and artistic-activist practices, which we could only deal with in a fragmentary way here, leads to shifts in the notion of a genuinely critical art as an alternative or autonomous counter-movement. In the field of contemporary art, "partaking critique" therefore does not aim at a fundamental negation of institutional critique, but at an updating reformulation. A "partaking critique" does not speak from the position of an assumed, imagined outside, from which a "thinking against" the institution of art would be possible. It is articulated in relational structures of partaking "with" it and via "risky comakings". For critique, as pointedly formulated by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, is always partaking: "To puke on the carpet on which one stands." 81 With this statement, Creischer and Siekmann expressed the challenges they faced in their multifunctional role as artists-curators-initiators of the transatlantic exhibition and research project Ex Argentina (2003Argentina ( -2006. 82 This vivid statement also addresses the ambivalence of their localization and situatedness as 81 Creischer, Alice and Siekmann, Andreas. (2008). "Auf den Teppich kotzen, auf dem man steht. Kann künstlerische Arbeit eine Militante Untersuchung sein?", arranca! Für eine linke Strömung, Militante Untersuchung, 39, Winter 2008 The international exhibition and research project Ex Argentina (2003Argentina ( -2006  The translation of the article was made possible by the support of the Zurich University of the Arts. 85 See Lazzarato, "From Knowledge to Belief", https://transversal.at/transversal /0808/lazzarato/en. 86 Guattari, "The Ecosophic Object", 119.