Paper short abstract:

Based on failure of access to a field and a critical/textual success, the author argues that critical distance and constructive approaches are not just matters of methodical debate and exclusive choice but are variables relating to other relations, distant or proximate, accessible or inaccessible.

Paper long abstract:

This paper tells a story of an MA thesis fieldwork that did not happen. Having failed to access a bioacoustics laboratory, the student resorted to liquidate his preparations into a textual analysis of a laboratory's publication. This analysis turned out to be "critical" in spite of the "constructive" stance taken in advance. This failure enables the author to put critique and construction, and relatedly theory and practice, into spatial, historical, and intersectional relations: that of field access. What determined the lack of field access, resulting in "critical distance," was the distance of the student ethnographer from his institution, his migration background and lack of relevant networks, and unfamiliarity/distance of the laboratory's investigator with STS, among other factors.

The critical paper was critical because, from the distance at which the laboratory's text was read, it allowed itself to be read without other relations with laboratory's actors while affording what one can do with an accessible text. The author argues that being critical or being constructive are not only attitudes and disciplinary rules, neither are theory and practice separate things to be connected. Critical distance and proximity are not exclusively matters of methodical choice. Critic's "privileged position" can no longer be assumed. They involve the risk of access, which among others involves matters of credence, privilege, and security. In conclusion, critique and construction, and by implication theory (textual practice) and practice (articulations in general), become variables and indicators of distance and access, overriding the assumption that they are oppositional or contradictory.