In this dissertation, I trace a genealogy of critique (hihyō) in millennial Japan through periodicals and cognate institutions. Key among these is Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan, 1991–2002), the preeminent magazine of theory and criticism in its time edited by the philosopher-critics Asada Akira and Karatani Kōjin. By re-embedding theory and criticism within media history, I chart how a boundary-crossing cast of thinkers and makers negotiated the crises of their present through critique. I thus argue for shifts in the uses of critique that emerge out of the crises ushering in the 1990s. This series of shifts marks out alternative critical pathways beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion and ontologies of negation.

Central to my investigation is a specific understanding of the functions of critique in a media cultural landscape where literature no longer serves as a privileged referent. Accordingly each of this dissertation’s five body chapters is situated at a different disciplinary and media-aesthetic juncture, where critique acquires its meaning in confronting salient problematics: from the spatio-temporal operations of capital, nation, and state, to ecologically attuned architecture in a networked age and the contemporary I-novel as feminist autotheory.

These chapters are further organized into three parts. Part One explores histories of critique within the mediascape of contemporary Japan. In this way, it establishes a frame of reference for shifts addressed in later sections by locating critique within a longer cultural and media-historical durée. In particular, I map out a discursive formation of critique that emerges in tandem with the early reception of structuralist thought in the 1970s and persists through the journalistic renaissance of the bubble era in the 1980s. Part Two inquires into subsequent modifications in this discursive formation that roughly coincide with the crises to which Critical Space bears witness. How, I ask, were epochal events that ushered in the turn of the millennium refracted within critique and the aesthetic genres that underpin it? Following excavations of critique in extraliterary domains, Part Three revisits the relationship between literature and critique in the tectonically shifted landscape of the 1990s. In the process, I uncover the possibilities of a more hybrid, simultaneous relationship between literature and critique enabled by a deprivileging of the literary. Additionally, in an epilogue, I consider the afterlives of critique as hitherto traced by way of one particularly significant media institution of the past decade and the subcultural questions that it raises.

The impact of my project is twofold. Staging a dialogue with current Euro-American debates on critique and its limits, as well as media and periodical studies, I aim to provide the emergent field of contemporary Japanese theory and criticism with the analytical tools appropriate to its object. Still more, I show how attention to the diffuse contours of critique, as materialized through the underexplored print mediascape of millennial Japan, reveals innovative aesthetic and theoretical contributions suffused with the force to counter still hegemonic orientalist flows. Contra such flows, I demonstrate that “Asia” is not and has never been merely an archive for “Western” theory.