No scholar has captured the spirit of the moment in such vivid and occasionally combative terms as Bruno Latour, who claimed in 2004 that critique had “run out of steam” (225). The thrust of Latour’s argument is that institutional critique, at the same time as it has been appropriated by ideologues (his example is climate change deniers), has outlived both its usefulness at resisting institutional structures and its accuracy at representing agency and power relationships in the real world. In response to Latour’s diagnosis, many theorists—particularly those in the literary media studies—have offered engaging and fruitful alternatives to (or reappraisals of) traditional critique, but in this project, I suggest that literary criticism should follow rather than lead. The most compelling and constructive alternatives to critique today are to be found in contemporary innovative poetics.