Commentary on Rooney

Is critique adversarial argument?This question is difficult to answer given different perspectives on what constitutes genuinely instructive versus argumentative discourse, appreciative reading versus strategic dismantling.Undoubtedly, in any particular case such distinctions would depend upon the point of views of the reader and read, the corrector and the corrected, who might not always agree and reasonably differ as to whose communication was in or out of line.Given this ambiguity, one is tempted at the outset to modify the question into a weaker form: For whom, if anyone, could critique be considered adversarial and argumentative?The answer to the weaker question might be less ambiguous: well, if one has stakes as a power holder and is a witting or unwitting advocate of "the dominant paradigm," then critique is perceived to be a challenge, an affront, a claim to rectify historic injustices-and therefore, a power holder would dub critique adversarial and argumentative.On the other hand, those essaying a critique might claim that the felt defensiveness is simply pressure-a realization that arises when the hypocrisy of exclusionary, hierarchical, vested interest.The perception of argumentativeness is what happens when the partiality an alleged universal belief or method is exposed to proper identification.Notice the incipient standoff here.If adversarial practices are part of the dominant paradigm, indeed if argumentation itself is a strategy of force, rationalization, hierarchy and so forth, and if critique could legitimately be construed as creating pressure, confrontation, and argumentative force-by any person or group, then one might inquire as to the differentia between "the dominant paradigm" and the novel, libratory space of cooperative reasoning.As this line of reasoning goes, one might foresee an infinite regress of tu quoque's concerning who is more or less straightforwardly adversarial or cooperative than thou.The reason that the above answer to the question leads to such a regress is that the modified question misunderstands critique, holding critique, which is I think a purely negative arc of widening criticism, to the standards of a productionist view of argumentation.In a productionist world, arguments must yield true claims through proof, or rationalize beliefs by critical testing, or convince audiences through persuasion.Whether the products of critical thinking, informal logic, or rhetoric be true belief, justified conviction or deliberated action, arguments are such because reasons and claims are productively connected.Adversarial argument is a special case of this process: a kind of critical testing set within--or invited by--a certain style, for a, relationship or procedure that channels or frames oppositional thinking, writing and speaking.Critique does not fall comfortably within productionist assumptions (although it plays with some of our common expectations about reasoning).I would like to examine feminist critique per se, explicating Professor Rooney's work to show why (1991, 2002, 2003).Feminist critiques raise to awareness the pervasiveness, significance and harmfulness of the ways differences have been handled throughout time and across cultures, societies, institutions, and individuals.Specifically, critique exposes those practices which appear to float

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