Infrakritik og proximering: Om at finde den rette afstand

In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as based on a position detached from the object of critique. Our analysis shows that critique is immanent to the practices we study and already to some extent conceptualized by the practitioners. To further problematize the already ongoing critical engagements in the organizations we study, we relate our ethnographic descriptions to work done on infra critique (Verran, Willerslev). In conclusion, the relation between the notion of critique as infra-critic and scholarly critical practices is commented on. We find proximation to be a useful concept as an infra critical description of ongoing experimentation with professional identities and organizational boundaries.