Abstract

The paper addresses some new difficulties in the practice of (social, urban) critique. Technology, globalization, social complexities produce a new multilayered and multifaceted reality and a corresponding normative principle of reality that makes the exercise of critique (both as an intellectual activity, and a social practice) very burdensome and often ineffective. The prospect of a new paradigm for critical practices is seen as a difficult task in the frame of the self-critique of modernity. The democratic regime is open to learning and capability processes, stirred by critical activities, but its actual performance falls very short from what is needed to handle global problems and a thick reality, making often irrelevant and paralyzed any critical stance.