immanent critique

Last fall my philosophy teacher Joseph Orosco introduced me to the term immanent critique. There are, generally, two types of critique from philosophers: one in which the philosopher proposes an alternate view of what society could be like (usually a utopia) and then compares his, her, or hir society to that alternate society, the other (immanent critique) in which the philosopher focuses solely on society as it is and compares the values it claims to hold to what the society actually enacts. This distinction became important last quarter in my New Historicism class when someone in class asked why someone (was it Foucault? Althusser? Benjamin?) didn’t offer what he thought would be better than the way things work right now. I’m inclined to favor immanent critique, primarily because I don’t think we can know what a perfect society would look like. We might be inclined to imagine certain things, but in the end, we are too caught up in dominant ways of thinking to actually know what a society free of domination and exploitation would look like. We can certainly imagine aspects of what a better society would look like, but to actually prescribe it borders on a new totalizing system that erases various differences and ways of being.